The number of countries that formally recognise the Republic of China (Taiwan) has fallen sharply from 22 in 2016 to 12 today.
China’s shift from winning embassies to targeting representative offices
After years of successfully persuading states to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, China has increasingly turned to a different lever: Taiwan’s representative offices — the quasi-embassies that sustain relations where formal recognition does not exist. The strategy reflects a strategic calculation: as Beijing finds it harder to persuade Taiwan’s remaining formal diplomatic partners to change allegiance, it has begun to press for closures, relocations or renamings of representative offices to enforce its One China principle.
Recent pressure in Pretoria, Port Moresby and beyond
The shift in pressure was visible during the Taiwanese administration of President Lai Ching-te. In 2024, South Africa demanded that Taiwan relocate its representative office from Pretoria. In July 2026, Papua New Guinea unilaterally announced the closure of Taiwan’s representative office. Taiwan continues to urge Papua New Guinea to allow its representative office to remain open, but the July 2026 announcement signals how Beijing’s influence can translate into unilateral moves against Taiwan’s informal diplomatic footholds.
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End the scramble2017 precedents: renamings and relocations
This tactic is not entirely new. As early as 2017, Beijing pressured countries including Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Ecuador and Jordan to rename or relocate Taiwan’s representative offices. Those campaigns achieved less than the efforts to convert formal diplomatic partners, but they established a pattern Beijing can replicate where it holds sway.
Fiji and the South Pacific: a narrow set of posts with regional reach
Taiwan’s representative offices in the South Pacific are particularly consequential. Apart from Australia and New Zealand, Taiwan has only two representative offices in the region: Papua New Guinea and Fiji. The Fiji office is a multi-role post: it handles diplomatic affairs with eight Pacific island countries that do not formally recognise Taiwan and also manages Taiwan’s engagement with the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. If the Papua New Guinea office closes and Beijing then pushes successfully on the Fiji office, Taiwan would face a substantial constriction of its ability to communicate directly with South Pacific governments.
What this means for Taiwan, Pacific island governments, Australia and New Zealand
- Taiwan: With formal diplomatic partners reduced and resources concentrated on those remaining embassies, Taiwan risks losing parallel channels of engagement where representative offices carry regional responsibilities. Closure of the Fiji office would greatly undermine Taiwan’s diplomatic influence across multiple Pacific island countries.
- Pacific island governments: Countries that do not formally recognise Taiwan currently rely on Taiwan’s representative offices — especially the Fiji office — for direct communication and development cooperation. Pressure on those offices reduces direct avenues for Taiwan engagement, and could shift regional diplomatic dynamics toward Beijing.
- Australia and New Zealand: These two posts will gain relative importance for Taiwan’s regional communications if other representative offices are closed. Taiwan would increasingly have to rely on its representative offices in those two capitals and on embassies elsewhere in the Pacific to maintain ties.
The underlying driver is straightforward: China’s diplomatic gains over the past decade have made persuading the last 12 formal partners to switch recognition progressively more difficult, in part because many of those relationships feature long-standing government-to-government ties, institutionalised development cooperation and broader social connections. Faced with that barrier, Beijing’s focus on representative offices is a second-order strategy to enforce the One China principle by constricting Taiwan’s informal diplomatic footprint.
The immediate record leaves a clear, concrete line of contest: Taiwan is publicly urging Papua New Guinea to keep its office open; if that office closes and Beijing presses on Fiji, Taiwan’s capacity to engage the eight Pacific island governments served from Suva and to participate directly with the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat will be severely curtailed. The coming months will test whether Taipei can preserve those remaining channels or whether China’s campaign to shrink Taiwan’s informal diplomatic space will progress from precedent cases into a sustained regional retrenchment.
