A closer look at the current status and future prospects of one of Taiwan’s flagship foreign policy initiatives.
The Diplomat
Date: April 23, 2019
By: Prashanth Parameswaran
Over the past few weeks, a number of activities tied to the commemoration of the 40th
Image Credit: Flickr/Presidential Office of the Republic of China
anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) on April 10 have spotlighted Taiwan’s relations with the United States as well as its role in the wider Indo-Pacific. One of the key aspects of this has been Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy (NSP) under President Tsai Ing-wen, which has sought to advance ties with select regional countries as part of the island’s wider foreign policy approach. Given the significance of the NSP for Taiwan at home and abroad, it is worth assessing where the initiative lies today as well as its prospects are looking further ahead.
As I have noted before in these pages, while previous governments in Taiwan have also sought to “look South” to diversify the country’s ties in a dynamic Asian region and to reduce dependence on mainland China, Tsai’s New Southbound Policy (NSP) – which got underway early on when she took office in May 2016 and focuses on strengthening ties with Southeast Asia along with South Asia, Australia, and New Zealand – constitutes a noteworthy advancement of efforts in this vein. The NSP seeks to advance ties between Taiwan and these countries in specific economic and people-to-people areas, including agricultural cooperation, medicine and public health, and youth exchanges.
Thus far, the NSP has begun to see some advances in terms of translating rhetoric into reality. Taiwan government statistics indicate increases in areas such as tourism, education, trade, and investment, some of which have surpassed previous targets. There has also been progress in some specific priority areas within the NSP as well, be it individual developments such as the conclusion of a Taiwan-Philippines bilateral investment agreement, which is to serve as an example for the advancement of economic ties with other target NSP countries, or the establishment of the One Country, One Center program in public health which has linked six Taiwanese hospitals with six Asian countries – Indonesia, India, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
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