By Ben Sando and Owen Maireni Daniel Sanchez
While many may not have noticed Lin Hsin-yi (林信義), the chairman of Taiwan’s government-backed investment fund Taiwania Capital, standing on the dais at the November 2024 APEC Summit in Peru alongside world leaders such as Joe Biden, Xi Jinping (習近平), and Justin Trudeau, his presence remained remarkable for many Taiwan watchers. Lin was not attending the summit as a private stakeholder, but rather as Taiwan’s official representative to the organization – known by the full (but seemingly rather incomplete) name of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).
Students of Taiwan’s diplomacy may be further surprised to see divisions within APEC, wherein Taiwan and People’s Republic of China (PRC) delegates hold equal status with identical bureaucratic powers. The unique diplomatic opportunities bestowed by APEC have led Taiwan’s former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to describe the organization as “Taiwan’s most important international platform.” Indeed, in a world where Taipei is steadily losing official diplomatic partners, APEC stands as an organization where Taiwan is able to officially engage with foreign governments with only cosmetic restrictions (such as a requirement to participate under the title “Chinese Taipei”). Given its objective of supporting Taiwan’s internationalization, the United States should throw its weight behind APEC, and expand its budget and status to facilitate Taiwan’s multilateral diplomacy.
What is APEC?
Readers will be forgiven for not knowing what APEC is. The organization seems to hover behind a more familiar set of regional groupings like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) or the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). At its core, APEC runs like a “model UN” in which members propose and vote on small projects to enhance economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region. These projects are aimed at promoting technical capacity in areas such as environmental safety, human capital, public health, and internet technology (IT).
APEC members which refer to themselves as “economies” rather than “countries” recruit diplomatic allies to endorse their proposed projects in order to pass the minimum threshold of co-sponsorships needed for approval. Projects can last for one or several years and are accessible by all APEC economies, while the eleven developing economies in the grouping are afforded greater access. Project funding is drawn from voluntary donations by member economies and members can self-fund projects to increase the likelihood of approval.
In addition to capacity-building projects, APEC aims to foster high-level diplomatic exchanges between members. APEC stages several ministerial-level Senior Official Meetings (SOMs) and one executive-level summit each year. Taiwan is able to dispatch its economic minister to the SOMs, but its president is restricted from attending the annual summit. For this reason, Taiwan sends a delegate such as Lin Hsin-yi instead.
While the activities of APEC may strike the reader as prosaic, the organization is steadily granting Taiwan opportunities to deepen government-to-government connections with Asia-Pacific countries, even as Beijing’s pressure suffocates its diplomacy in the region.
Taiwan’s APEC accession
Taiwan’s accession to APEC in 1991 did not come easily. In a China Quarterly article, Ming-chin Monique Chu describes how lobbying by Taiwanese elites, opposition from APEC members and non-members, and mediated negotiations complicated the effort. Taiwan’s private and public sector both had an interest in APEC accession, and lobbying efforts from the Taiwanese business sector were evident before APEC’s establishment in November 1989. A notable contributor to this effort was C.F. Koo (辜振甫), a business leader and the Deputy International President of the Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) a non-governmental organization of business groups in Asia. In April 1989, Koo met with the Australian envoy to the PBEC, Richard Woolcott, to propose Taiwan’s membership in the fledgling APEC.
Woolcott pursued the idea, and in May that year, the Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans, officially expressed support for the simultaneous accession of the “three Chinas” (the Republic of China [Taiwan], the PRC, and Hong Kong). Unsurprisingly, the PRC strongly opposed Taiwan and Hong Kong joining APEC, stressing that APEC members should only be sovereign nations. However, some ASEAN members in APEC were conversely opposed to the accession of the PRC without Taiwan and Hong Kong, fearing that China’s voice would overpower them. The United States preferred to defer the complex accession question, and focused instead on preserving the non-political nature of APEC in its early stages.
Although the three Chinas were not admitted to the inaugural 1989 meeting of APEC, Taiwanese elites continued to lobby for membership. Because Taipei was part of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council that supported APEC’s formation, it received “association status” at the inaugural SOM. Koo was formally invited to APEC’s opening banquet, where he lobbied Australian prime minister Richard Hawke and the Singapore APEC representative for Taiwan’s membership. The second APEC SOM in July 1990 concluded with a breakthrough consensus that the simultaneous accession of the three Chinas to APEC should begin as soon as possible.
In a curious twist, Taiwan and the United States nominated a South Korean diplomat, Lee See-young, to mediate accession negotiations between Taipei and Beijing. At the time, South Korea maintained official diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan). Meanwhile, Beijing was eager to enhance diplomatic relations with Seoul under its first democratically-elected president, Roh Tae-woo. After nine rounds of indirect negotiations between the various capitals, Lee secured a settlement whereupon Taiwan would accede to APEC alongside the PRC in 1991. Taiwan agreed to employ the title of “Chinese Taipei,” an arrangement known as the “Olympic model.”
Taiwan’s use of APEC
After its accession in 1991, Taiwan was slow to capitalize on the opportunities provided by APEC. Alan Yen, Executive Secretary of the APEC Institute of Innovation & Education Development (IIED) – a Taiwanese research institute devoted to expanding Taiwan’s educational initiatives within APEC – relayed to these authors that Taiwan dispatched senior officials to APEC meetings but rarely proposed its own events in the years after the 1991 accession. Though Taipei overlooked opportunities to organize APEC events bringing member economy officials to Taiwan, it nonetheless initiated one of the most lauded projects in APEC history.
In 2004, Taipei proposed the APEC Digital Opportunity Center project, and began dispatching IT professionals to developing economies within APEC to promote digital connectivity. The project was extended for ten years and boosted digital connectivity in economies without strong IT infrastructures, such as Papua New Guinea. In an interview with these authors, Robert Wang, the US State Department senior official for APEC from 2012-2014, described the APEC Digital Opportunity Center as a boon for Taiwan’s diplomatic relations with APEC economies and a project Taiwan could not have executed outside of the APEC framework.
In the mid-2010s, Taipei began to recognize that APEC events, smaller projects convening delegates from member economies for multi-day discussions, could serve as excellent conduits for the promotion of people-to-people ties between Taiwan and member economies. Alan Yen has described how Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) began dedicating more funding for APEC events in the late 2010s. By the early 2020s, Taiwan was organizing more APEC-affiliated events each year than any other APEC economy (between 20 and 30).
These events draw government officials and influential private sector actors from APEC economies to Taiwan. APEC has also afforded Taipei the opportunity to press its case for inclusion in more consequential frameworks such as the CPTPP. Given that the economic officials dispatched to APEC events are generally the same as those attending CPTPP summits, APEC has offered Taiwanese officials the chance to directly press their Asia-Pacific counterparts to support Taiwan’s accession to the CPTPP.
As Taiwan began actively employing APEC for its internationalization, efforts by the PRC to suppress Taiwan grew. Yen relayed several instances when PRC representatives in APEC sought to stymie Taiwan’s participation. In 2019, the PRC intervened to remove event speakers from Taiwan at an APEC event organized by the South Korean government in Seoul. Beijing threatened to use its veto authority under APEC if the event proceeded with Taiwanese speakers. The South Korean organizers caved. Yen revealed another instance where Beijing sought to classify Taiwan under the People’s Republic of China in an APEC report on regional employment; Yen was able to overturn this move by dredging up official APEC statistics which listed the economies separately.
In the 2024 cycle of APEC, Peru was designated to host the yearly leaders’ summit. Lima maintains close relations with Beijing, and regular communication dropped off between Yen’s team and the Peruvian representatives of APEC. The PRC also pushes back on the United States’ engagement with Taiwan through APEC: for example, Robert Wang, former US State Department Senior Official for APEC, revealed that PRC officials would frequently protest his APEC-related visits to Taiwan during bilateral meetings.
How does Taiwan navigate PRC pressure under APEC?
It is tempting to assume that China’s membership of APEC renders the grouping a less-than-ideal conduit for Taiwan’s internationalization. After all, China’s proximity to Taiwan in the APEC bureaucracy may grant Beijing the power to stymie Taipei’s work. However, the funding adjudication processes for APEC blunt this kind of pressure. Under APEC, economies voluntarily donate to sub funds that support projects. Representatives from APEC economies are then assigned as judges in the sub funds to which their home country donates. Taiwan thus directs its project applications towards the sub funds to which it regularly donates. In doing so, Taiwan avoids hostile PRC judges.
According to Yen, Beijing also avoids submitting to sub-funds staffed by Taiwanese judges for the same reason. While the PRC can veto projects, it must use this ability sparingly as it reflects poorly on Beijing to repeatedly oppose beneficial projects endorsed and approved through the consensus-driven APEC structure. Most importantly, Beijing fears that Taipei will exercise its own veto power to hamper the PRC’s project proposals. This serves as a rare example where equal procedural power deters Beijing’s suppression of Taiwan.
Taiwan is well-versed in Beijing’s methods of diplomatic suppression. According to Yen of IIED, Taiwan’s ministry of foreign affairs has distributed a “bible” of case studies of Beijing’s tactics, which APEC representatives use to counter each new instance of PRC repression.
APEC: Overlooked by Washington
US State Department officials express a stated objective of promoting Taiwan’s internalization through multilateral frameworks based on capacity-building. However, they generally overlook the potential for APEC to fulfill this objective. In recent years, Washington has stood up a new multilateral framework called the Global Cooperation and Training Framework (GCTF). The organization, authorized by the US Congress, places Taiwan at the heart of a small grouping of like-minded allies and partners. Members meet irregularly in Taiwan and elsewhere and share best practices in governance issues. However, a glance at the homepage of the GCTF’s website indicates an emphasis on many of the same subject areas of APEC.
All five formal GCTF members are already in APEC. Washington must exert its diplomatic muscle to encourage new states to participate, as the organization is viewed as a direct counter to Beijing’s suppression of Taiwan. It is unlikely that any of the so-called “swing states” in the Asia-Pacific will join the GCTF, and the authors wonder why Washington seeks to reinvent the wheel regarding technical capacity-building in the Asia-Pacific. The GCTF certainly offers greater leeway to explore topics sensitive to Beijing – such as disinformation and civil defense (and referring to Taiwan by its preferred name) – yet Washington’s time and money might be better spent maximizing Taiwan’s international engagement in a climate where it must embrace unique yet potent arrangements such as APEC.
The budget of APEC is currently minuscule, and though APEC is founded on consensus among its members, Washington should work with regional allies to raise contributions to the grouping and thus grant Taiwan greater resources to internationalize itself through an organization already tailored to withstand PRC pressure.
The main point: APEC is Taiwan’s most consequential multilateral forum and tailored to withstand PRC coercion. In the past decade, Taiwan has dramatically increased its activity in the grouping and now employs APEC to bring government officials from Asia-Pacific economies to Taiwan. Meanwhile, Taiwan has learned how to blunt PRC pressure in the organization. The United States should prioritize APEC as a conduit for Taiwan’s internationalization and raise contributions to its modest budget.
