By Diplomatic Access
Lyushun Shen on Taiwan’s role in the world and the Asia-Pacific, and its relationships with China and the U.S.
For 2015, The Diplomat presents “Diplomatic Access,” a series of exclusive interviews with ambassadors from the Asia-Pacific region. By talking to these diplomats, we’ll give readers a sense of each country’s perspective on various regional economic and security trends — from TPP to the Silk Road Economic Belt; from the South China Sea disputes to the Islamic State. Check out the whole series to date here.
In this interview, His Excellency Lyushun Shen, Representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in the U.S., discusses Taiwan’s role in the world and the Asia-Pacific, and its relations with the United States and mainland China.
The Diplomat: From Taiwan’s perspective, what are the greatest threats to regional security?
Amb. Shen: From our perspective, it’s our restricted international space. Today, altogether, there are only 22 countries in the world that diplomatically recognize us, the Republic of China (ROC) – Taiwan. We’re not a UN member, nor a member of most international governmental organizations. Especially as a diplomat, this is my number one concern.
We, however, have done a lot of things to try to make it up, and the fact that the cross-Strait relationship has improved in recent years has made the enlargement of our international space somewhat easier. But there are a lot of things that remain to be achieved, and the issue has two sides. I usually say that it’s not only that we need the UN and the UN specialized agencies, but they also need us to make the UN system global. In this regard, we’re very grateful for American assistance because, in a way, when these UN agencies close their doors to Taiwan, the United States helps us to open a window.
When I was formerly posted at our mission in Geneva, more than 12 years ago around the late spring in 2003, we suffered from a very exotic epidemic disease called SARS. At that time, it was the United States that helped pass a WHO (World Health Organization) resolution so that we could go to some technical meetings to know how to deal with this previously unknown disease.
Today, the WHO, except for the annual WHA (World Health Assembly), still does not open its door widely to us. But we have also tried to assist in fighting Ebola. We went through American channels to contribute our knowledge and resources — we’re probably more experienced than some other countries, because we experienced SARS, an epidemic disease as well.
For example, we contributed, through American channels, 100,000 sets of what we call PPE – personal protective equipment – to West African countries. We couldn’t donate money directly to WHO but donated last December $1 million to the U.S. CDC Foundation for the use of Ebola prevention and control. My government and the American authorities assisted in setting up a regional Ebola prevention and control center – a training center – in Tainan, Taiwan. We hope that the spread of Ebola has stopped, but the United States and Taiwan already tried to get the region ready and prepared for fighting the disease. This regional control center in Tainan is mainly for the training of experts in Southeast Asian countries.
Just as much as we need UN agencies, they also need us. For example, the WHO already has made some improvements. Since 2009, we have been able to go to the WHA meetings every year. But as you know, the WHA – the World Health Assembly — only lasts for eight days a year. The rest of the time, we still have a lot of difficulties in participating in the organization’s professional activities.
As for other efforts to expand Taiwan’s international space, I can give you a long list of examples. The U.S. House of Representatives just adopted a resolution aimed at helping us get into INTERPOL, the international police organization. The reason is very simple: we need to get access to their resources and information, and they also need our assistance, especially because Taiwan is an international air hub. It is in neither Taiwan’s nor the rest of the world’s interest to make Taiwan a gap in the global system of crime prevention and anti-terrorism. We are grateful that the U.S. Congress is now trying to help us.
Taiwan is too big to ignore. There is also ICAO, for example – the International Civil Aviation Organization – we’re trying to knock at its door. As I said, Taiwan is an air hub. Every week, between Taiwan and the United States, there are 541 direct flights. And in the Taipei FIR, the Flight Information Region, which is the airspace under our air traffic control, every year we serve from 1.2 million up to 1.8 million flights, most of them international flights. Not being a member of ICAO, we sometimes don’t have access to even its technical information. If there’s any change in the international air traffic rules, how could we get to know those changes? How do we adjust our own operations accordingly?
So this should be an international concern – not just ours. In this regard, ICAO should be grateful to us as well because, even though without membership or observer status, we have made a lot of efforts to get the right operational manuals, trying to keep ourselves up to international standards and regulations, and so on. They, however, still refuse to include us in some technical meetings – we’re talking about technical meetings, not political meetings. Technical meetings are very important for the technicians and professionals to understand why such regulations are made. We need to synchronize with the developments in the rest of the world.
This is why we have an office in Geneva, because Geneva has more UN-specialized agencies than any other city in the world. I was chief of mission there for more than five years. But I always worried – as I sometimes told my colleagues, we don’t even know what we have missed. There are so many international meetings there to make new regulations and resolutions. As a modern country, you have to keep yourself updated with international standards all the time. But Taiwan doesn’t have that kind of access. So there’s nothing political about this.
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