Beijing Pressured Papua New Guinea Into Expelling Taiwan's Diplomats

Here is how a diplomatic squeeze works in 2026. A small nation is told, first quietly and then loudly, that a democracy's office must close. The deadlines arrive. The staff are told to pack. When the democracy refuses to accept the order, the trade that keeps its partner's economy alive begins to wither. Papua New Guinea is living that sequence now, and the people who will pay for it are not the men in the foreign ministries. They are the workers whose gas no longer has a buyer.

Taiwan's foreign ministry says Port Moresby repeatedly demanded that its representative office in the capital be shut within a set deadline, and that Beijing's political pressure lies behind the demand. China, which claims Taiwan as its territory, welcomed Papua New Guinea's decision in July to close the office. Taipei rejected that decision, and the office stayed open in the interim. Then came the economic blow. Taiwan stopped spot purchases of liquefied natural gas, and now it says it will not sign new spot contracts at all. Those purchases once accounted for one-third of Papua New Guinea's exports. Taiwan also ended technical cooperation and assistance, including medical missions and scholarship and talent programmes. Think about that. Nurses, doctors, and students in a poor Pacific nation are now the collateral damage of a diplomatic chess game they never agreed to play.

Count the diplomatic ledger too. Taiwan now has formal ties with only twelve countries on earth. In the Pacific, it has three allies: Palau, Tuvalu, and the Marshall Islands. It keeps a representative office in Fiji. Every recognition lost is not a sovereign choice made in a vacuum. It is the endpoint of a campaign of inducements and threats, and the Pacific is one of the most closely watched battlegrounds in that campaign.

We in Africa know this playbook by heart. São Tomé and Príncipe switched its recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 2016. The Gambia did the same that year. Burkina Faso followed in 2018. Eswatini remains the continent's last state recognising Taiwan. Each of those switches arrived wrapped in promises of stadiums, highways, and loans with glossy signing ceremonies. And each left behind the same uncomfortable question: when the debt comes due, who holds the leverage, and who gets to say no? Beijing does not need warships in the Pacific to win. It needs a finance minister who cannot afford to refuse. This is the New Scramble for Africa and the Pacific, and the actors may have changed since the 19th century, but the extraction logic has not. Resources flow out, influence flows in, and the citizens are left to count the cost.

Let us be precise about who is responsible. Papua New Guinea is a sovereign state, and its government has every right to choose its diplomatic partners. But sovereignty is not a blank cheque for leaders to hand over to a patron without telling their own people. Did Port Moresby's parliament debate this? Were the terms of the closure published? Were the economic consequences priced in, and who was consulted before a third of the nation's export earnings were placed at risk? If the answer is no, then the failure is domestic before it is foreign. Leaders who bend to coercion in silence betray the citizens who elected them. We say this to our own governments in Africa with the same force.

Now look at the democracy on the receiving end of this pressure. Taiwan holds competitive elections, observes peaceful transfers of power, and has built a free press that Beijing despises precisely because it works. Whatever one thinks of the island's political status, the question on the table is simpler: should a functioning democracy be punished economically for having a diplomatic office abroad? The answer, by any standard our continent claims to uphold, is no. Western capitals regularly invoke a rules-based international order and the sanctity of democratic values. Yet when Beijing applies pressure of this kind, the response is too often a statement of concern and a quiet search for another buyer. You cannot lecture the world on democracy while leaving small states to fend alone against economic coercion. Either the principle applies when it is inconvenient, or it is only a slogan.

The Pacific Islands Forum, the regional body that should protect its members from exactly this kind of intimidation, must stop treating diplomatic coercion as someone else's problem. The Forum should adopt transparency standards for bilateral agreements, so that any deal affecting a country's export revenue or diplomatic relations is published and debated in public before it is signed. Papua New Guinea and its neighbours should diversify their LNG buyers across Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, and others who will buy on commercial terms rather than political ones. Governments that want Western and Asian investment should reform their own institutions: independent courts that enforce contracts, clear property rights, and public procurement that anyone can audit. Botswana built one of Africa's most stable economies on strong institutions and disciplined resource management. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and services hub by guaranteeing the rule of law and the predictability investors crave. Neither had to sell its foreign policy to keep the lights on. The lesson is that good governance is not a luxury for rich nations. It is the cheapest insurance a poor nation can buy.

For citizens, the demands are clear. Ask your government to publish every loan agreement, every bilateral memorandum, and every diplomatic commitment that touches your economy. Ask your parliament who negotiated the Taiwan decision in Port Moresby and what the Papua New Guinean people were promised in return. Ask your own leaders in Africa whether their recognition of Beijing came with terms that the public has never read. Demand that the African Union stop treating diplomatic recognition as a bargaining chip and start defending members against coercion from any power, whether Beijing, Washington, Moscow, Ankara, or Abu Dhabi. Sovereignty is not a gift that a patron grants. It is a responsibility that a government owes to its own people, and it is only real when those people can see what is being traded away in their name.

The Pacific's gas is being used as a bargaining chip, and its nurses and students are being cut off as collateral. Africa has watched this film before, and we know how it ends unless citizens refuse to be spectators. Demand transparency now, before the next deadline arrives.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA