Gambia forms ties with China after rejecting Taiwan

The two countries established formal diplomatic links in 1974, but China suspended relations in 1995 when Gambia resumed so-called “diplomatic” ties with Taiwan.

China and Taiwan had for years tried to poach each other’s allies, often dangling generous aid packages in front of leaders of developing nations.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Gambian counterpart Neneh MacDouall-Gaye signed a joint communique to resume diplomatic relations.

Tsai, who was elected president in January and will take office in May, has also said that in supporting defence industrial development she will support military exports, traditionally a sensitive subject in Taiwan.

Taiwan must not let this kind of incident happen again, the DPP said in a statement, referring to China’s rapprochement with Gambia, and was committed to consolidating diplomatic relations once it took power.

Earlier on Thursday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Gambia issued a joint statement, indicating that they had reestablished official relations after 21 years.

The KMT caucus, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of West Asian and African Affairs Director-General Chen Chun-shen (陳俊賢) and the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) Planning Department Director Hu Ai-ling (胡愛玲), held a news conference in Taipei saying that Taiwan’s foreign policy “is highly interrelated with its cross-strait policy”. It has pledged “not to establish any official relations or engage in any official contacts with Taiwan”, according to the text of the communique posted on the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s website.

Huang says that he is concerned about whether or not the PRC government would follow unilateralism to deal with future cross-strait relations. The signing of a diplomatic communique in Beijing on Thursday marks the latest development in the ongoing diplomatic rivalry between Taiwan and China, which claims the self-governing island democracy as its own territory with no right to diplomatic recognition.

On Friday, China’s Communist Party newspaper Global Times warned Tsai’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party against “provoking the mainland”, but said the diplomatic truce still held.

The Gambian government recognises that there is only one China, that the government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China and that Taiwan is part of China, the joint communique said.

Leo Lee underlined, however, that ties with Taiwan’s 22 allies continue to be “firm and stable” and dismissed concerns that renewal of Chinese-Gambian relations would result in a “domino effect”. “Many countries that have relations with Taiwan have expressed good will to Beijing to establish diplomatic ties, but Beijing didn’t accept their proposals to respect Ma”. Defeated Nationalist forces fled to the island in 1949 after the Chinese civil war.

Other countries with diplomatic ties with Taiwan include the tiny Pacific island states of Nauru and Palau, as well as Vatican City, Paraguay, Panama, Haiti and Nicaragua.