Now only 15 flags in Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry foyer represent the nations that have not yet succumbed to Beijing’s financial blandishments — targeted at governments and individual politicians — and other pressures to sever diplomatic relations with this island nation. There were 17 flags a few weeks ago.
The last time many Americans thought of the Solomon Islands (population 650,000) was the 1942-43 Battle of Guadalcanal. It is one of the two Pacific island nations whose flags have recently been removed. The other is Kiribati (population 116,000), site of the Battle of Tarawa. China’s growing dominance in the South Pacific is a defeat for an America in retreat: China might now gain access to deep-water ports in the Solomons and to a Kiribati satellite-tracking station that was closed when that nation changed its recognition from China to Taiwan in 2003.
America’s flag is not in the ministry’s foyer because diplomatic relations with Taiwan ended in 1979, to serve what has become an increasingly untenable fiction: The Beijing regime that suppresses the mainland’s 1.4 billion people is the legitimate government of China, and Taiwan, although separated by the 110-mile wide Taiwan Strait and by yawning and widening cultural differences, is somehow part of “one China.”
However, the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act obligates America to help Taiwan (the Republic of China) maintain its defenses against the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan is as inconvenient to people eager to propitiate Beijing as is America’s founding document, which says governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
