The government of South Africa on Friday asked the Taipei Liaison Office, Taiwan’s de facto embassy, to rename itself as a “Trade Office” and relocate from South Africa’s capital city of Pretoria.
Taiwan cried foul and accused South Africa of succumbing to pressure from China.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) warned that if South Africa “still insists on submitting to China and changing the status quo,” then Taiwan will “formulate all possible responses in order to safeguard the sovereignty and dignity of our country.”
South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) responded that relocating and rebranding the Taiwanese liaison office would provide “a true reflection of the non-political and non-diplomatic nature of the relationship between the Republic of South Africa and Taiwan.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry immediately chimed in with thanks to South Africa for making the “correct decision” to boot the Taiwanese office out of Pretoria.
Taiwan established an office in Pretoria in the 1990s, similar to those it maintains in friendly countries like the United States and Britain. The office handles a variety of trade issues, diplomatic functions, and tasks such as visa applications that would normally be processed by a full-blown embassy.
In 1997, the South African government signed an agreement with Taiwan to allow the office in Pretoria to keep operating, even though South Africa had decided to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
South Africa severed formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan in January 1998, after which the office in Pretoria became known as the Taipei Liaison Office in the Republic of South Africa. The facility has a branch office in Cape Town under a similar name. China can sometimes be mollified by naming Taiwanese facilities after Taipei, its capital city, instead of using the word “Taiwan.”
After Chinese dictator Xi Jinping attended the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in August 2023, South Africa began pressuring Taiwan to relocate its office out of Pretoria. BRICS is an economic bloc that counts China as a co-founder and South Africa as a longtime member.
Taiwanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung said on Monday that Xi once again pressured South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to relocate the Taipei Liaison Office when Ramaphosa visited the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing last month.
Lin said the MOFA has no intention of relocating its Pretoria office, which is “still in operation and will stay in the capital.”
South Africa is threatening to shutter the office if Taiwan does not agree to relocate it, while Taiwan is pointing to the 1997 agreement as a legal obligation to South Africa to let the office keep running.
Analysts told Voice of America News (VOA) on Monday that Ramaphosa might have buckled on the issue because he wants to reassure China that his shaky coalition government is still a reliable ally.
Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in the post-apartheid era in May’s elections. The ANC now holds power with a coalition of parties, some of which do not support South Africa’s close relationship with China.
One of those coalition partners, the Democratic Alliance (DA), issued a statement on Monday expressing concern with the order to relocate Taiwan’s liaison office.
“We have not been provided with any motivation that justifies a unilateral change to the terms of our bilateral framework with Taiwan,” the DA said.
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