Relations with Taiwan
8 July 2004
Lord Faulkner of Worcester rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve relations with Taiwan.
My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-chairman of the All-Party Group on Taiwan, in which capacity I have twice visited Taiwan, most recently for the inauguration ceremony following the re-election of President Chen Shui-bian on 20 May.
I start by acknowledging that there is little prospect, at present at least, of Her Majesty's Government breaking away from the collective decision taken in 1971 by the international community to grant recognition to the People's Republic of China at the expense of Taiwan.
However, we do not need to debate the "One China" policy in discussing how we can improve relations with Taiwan.Let us be clear how important to United Kingdom interests Taiwan is. Taiwan is the UK's 20th-largest export market worldwide. Our exports were worth £940 million in 2003, an increase of 6 per cent on 2002. Between January and April this year, our exports to Taiwan increased by 20.4 per cent from the same period in 2003.
It is a hugely important target market for British trade internationally. Some 70 per cent of all Taiwanese manufacturing investments in Europe are in the UK, with 175 firms from Taiwan having a presence here. Between them, they maintain more than 10,000 jobs. There are now 14,000 Taiwanese students pursuing their studies in the United Kingdom, which is almost 30 per cent of the total Taiwanese overseas student market. They make a great difference to the financial viability of many educational courses, particularly in our newer universities.
There is, I am pleased to say, strong British government support for all those links. When I was in Taipei, I heard nothing but praise for the efforts of our permanent mission—the British Trade and Cultural Office there. Taiwan's annual GDP growth rate in the past 30 years has averaged 8 per cent. One example of its manufacturing success is that it makes 70 per cent the world's personal notebook computers, turning out 32 million of them this year.
So if one is looking for tests of statehood, there is no doubt that Taiwan passes every economic test. However, another attribute of a sovereign state is a free and open democratic system of government. Taiwan does not do badly in that regard. The turnout in the recent presidential election was 80.28 per cent. Would that we could achieve a figure even approaching that in any sort of election here.
How different from what is happening not too far away in Hong Kong, where the "one-country, two-systems" agreement for its transition from British to Chinese rule is being systematically torn up by the PRC and hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets to defend freedoms which are being eroded by the government in Beijing. A diplomatic masterstroke on the part of the Beijing Government is the decision to locate 500 missiles on the south-eastern coast of the Chinese mainland, all pointing directly at targets on Taiwan. That is twice as many as there were just three years ago. That military threat would be a sufficient reason alone why Her Majesty's Government must not falter in the face of pressure from France and Germany and possibly other EU countries to lift the European Union embargo on the sale of arms to mainland China.
How else can we do more to improve relations with Taiwan? We should, for example, review the way in which we treat Taiwanese visitors to the United Kingdom, particularly high-ranking Taiwanese officials from the President downwards, who have not been granted admission to the United Kingdom even on purely private or transit visits. We should also review how we treat official representatives of the Taiwan Government working in London compared with how our officials in Taipei and Taiwanese officials in other EU capital cities are treated. I know that a number elsewhere are accorded a much better diplomatic status than their counterparts are here.
I turn to Taiwan's membership of international organisations. Its admittance to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 was a welcome and important step forward, and I congratulate the Government on supporting that. That makes it all the more disappointing that they did not support Taiwan's application for observer status at the World Health Assembly at the annual World Health Organisation meeting in Geneva in May this year.
There are two compelling reasons why Taiwan should be admitted. The first is that Taiwan has made remarkable progress in improving standards of public health, to the point where it has one of the highest levels of life expectancy in Asia. It has shared these advances with many developing nations and has given generous help to countries suffering earthquakes and other natural disasters.
The second reason is that Taiwan's exclusion from the WHO has meant that Taiwan has been denied help when it was really needed, such as when the SARS epidemic came across the Taiwan Strait and infected so many of its people last year. It reported the first SARS cases immediately, in March 2003, and begged the WHO for help. It took until 3 May before the WHO experts became involved, by which time more than 100 cases had been diagnosed and eight people had died.
The response of the People's Republic of China was that it takes care of the lives of the 23 million Taiwanese people. That would be a joke if it did not have such deadly consequences. The WHO already has observers which are entities rather than states, such as the PLO and the Holy See, and even Liechtenstein has observer status. So why cannot our Government follow the lead set by the United States and Japan which backed Taiwan's observer status in the WHO in the World Health Assembly in May this year?
Rather more encouraging was the Explanation of Vote by the EU in the WHA on 17 May, which stated:"We hope that the Secretariat, and others organising technical meetings and working groups under the WHO auspices, will show flexibility in finding mechanisms to allow Taiwanese medical and public health officials to participate in these activities".
By contrast, the support given by the WHO director-general, Dr Jong-wook Lee, for the PRC's proposal that Taiwan join the Chinese delegation, was really very unhelpful and inappropriate.
There are, I am afraid, many other examples of how the PRC and its agents attempt to block the legitimate involvement of Taiwan in important international forums. Only this Sunday, four days ago, I received a letter from Professor Barry Rider, the retiring director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. For the past 21 years, Professor Rider has run a symposium on economic crime at Jesus College Cambridge, attended by 800 participants from around the world.
One of the most important of those has been the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau in Taiwan—it is their FBI—which shares its knowledge of organised crime to the benefit of everyone who attends. This has covered economic crime, money laundering and murder investigations. It has also continued to welcome the involvement of the PRC in the symposia. In his letter to me, Professor Rider says,
"The Chinese Embassy has been very concerned about the symposium according any kind of recognition to Taiwan. Several years ago there was a great flurry of activity when the programme referred to the RoC and several senior officials from the Embassy demanded to meet with me in Cambridge and more or less threatened me. They indicated that pressure would be applied to ensure that the symposium did not remain in Cambridge and I would lose my job".
Professor Rider goes on to describe how the PRC's attitude has worsened over the past three years, and that a large delegation of Chinese officials who had intended to participate in the symposium last year has been stopped, apparently at the behest of the PRC embassy in London.
What this alarming story demonstrates, as does the PRC's resistance to Taiwan's participation in the WHO, is that political point scoring at Taiwan's expense seems to matter more to mainland China than the greater public good that comes from involving Taiwan and its experts in international organisations.
Finally, I say to my noble friend that I hope the Government will take an understanding and sympathetic approach to the democratic reforms likely to be undertaken by President Chen's new administration in Taiwan. He has repeatedly made it clear—most recently in an interview with the Washington Post on 29 March this year—that he has no intention of changing the status quo as far as cross-strait relations are concerned. His aim in this regard is to achieve a permanent, peaceful settlement. He is, however, intending to conduct major constitutional reforms in the next fours years of his second term, which aim to make Taiwan's democracy more competitive in a globalised economy, and take the government closer to the people.
It would be neither right nor appropriate for us in the West to get involved in this debate, which should involve the people of Taiwan and no one else. There is nothing in this approach which is even faintly threatening or challenging to mainland China. If the concept of an ethical foreign policy has any meaning at all, it requires democracies such as ours to stand up for the rights of other democracies which are threatened and intimidated by their neighbours.
Lords Hansard 8 July 2004