Foreign Minister Joseph Wu and US Senator Cory Gardner say that responsible stakeholders in the Asia-Pacific region should “see value in Taiwan’s presence in the Pacific.”
Wu and the Republican senator from Colorado published an opinion piece Wednesday in “The Hill,” a Washington-based website that focuses on politics, policy, business, and international relations. The opinion piece is entitled “Strong US-Taiwanese ties needed to counter rising Chinese influence in the Pacific.”
In the piece, Wu and Gardner wrote that all like-minded countries should see Taiwan’s value and “push back strongly against China’s efforts to erode that presence”. That’s because doing so will “prevent the Pacific from becoming another South China Sea, militarized and dominated by China.”
They said the decision of the Solomon Islands and Kiribati to cut ties with Taiwan in September is not an isolated case. They accused China of using “outright bribery, false promises and debt-trap diplomacy” to lure Taiwan’s allies away, and cautioned that China’s recent actions have threatened Taiwan’s hard-won democracy.