Written by Charles R. Charrington.
Image Credit: Departing ship, Kaohsiung, Taiwan 2009 by AngMoKio/Wikimedia; licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.
Taiwan’s domestic politics and interactions with Continental Asia, among other topics, receive media coverage to the extent that, as co-authors of another Taiwan Insight article (Huang 2022) wrote, “…we often forget Taiwan is also a part of the Pacific.” However, recent scholarship has been “…moving beyond a land-centred perspective to embrace its deep connection with the Pacific.” The island within the Pacific Ocean basin has played a major role in shaping the trajectories of the lands south of it. The “into-and-out-of-Taiwan” theory, based on archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence, contends that Pacific Islanders of Austronesian descent had prehistoric ancestors from the mainland and later Taiwan who voyaged south in different waves. Trade between the peoples of Taiwan and those to the south, primarily Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), persisted before and throughout the European and Qing eras. Taiwanese interactions with Oceania picked up during the Japanese and Republic of China periods. The current climate in the Pacific has been marked by ongoing but shifting tides in economic and diplomatic exchanges, ecological advocacy, and militarisation of a number of atolls, islets, and islands.
Anthropological findings support the view that prehistoric Austronesian-speaking peoples from Taiwan moved into ISEA and then into Melanesia. There was some mixture, to varying degrees, with the peoples already in those lands, including Australo‑Melanesians, and, later, migrations followed to Micronesia and Polynesia. They cultivated diverse indigenous practices for thousands of years up to and beyond the arrival of the Europeans. Diseases, ecological disruption and, to a lesser degree, violence reduced their population numbers and certain cultural practices were eradicated or altered during the colonial era.
A little more than a century following the Europeans’ entry into the Pacific in the sixteenth century, segments of Taiwan were colonised in the seventeenth. Dutch Formosa (1624–1662) was in the south and Spanish Formosa (1626–1642) in the north of the island. During that time, the Dutch were charting Melanesia, and the Spanish had been running shipping through and provisioning their galleons in the Marianas. Dutch Formosa was subordinate to the Dutch East India Company’s regional headquarters in Batavia, Java, while Spanish Formosa was under the Spanish East Indies administrative jurisdiction based in Manila, Luzon. Mariners shipped a number of East Asian goods to these southerly island hubs, where they were further distributed. Following the expulsion of the Europeans from the island and the later fall of the Kingdom of Tungning (1662–1683), Qing Taiwan (1683–1895) continued to participate in the ISEA trade, which in turn was connected to Micronesia through the earlier and ongoing Spanish colonisation of the Marianas in the seventeenth century. Whaling and merchant ships, some with Pacific Islander crew members, also eventually visited Taiwan.
Taiwanese connections with Oceania expanded during Japanese rule on Taiwan (1895–1945). Haruji Matsue, who gained experience in the sugar industry on the East Asian island, went on to establish the South Seas Development Company. The company had sugar, shipping, fishing, and other operations in Oceania, particularly Micronesia and ISEA. Small numbers of Taiwanese agricultural and maritime labourers migrated to southern areas to participate in these imperial economic activities, which supported the Empire of Japan’s Southern Expansion Doctrine (Nanshin-ron). During the Pacific War (1941–1945), Hoklo and Hakka Taiwanese men, indigenous Takasago Volunteer Unit fighters, and comfort women were sent south by the Japanese Army and Navy, including to parts of Melanesia. Soldier Liu Ying-hui, attached to the Third Taiwan Special Labor Corps and 103rd Military Hospital, recalled his experiences, including the dead he saw, in Rabaul, New Britain. He stated, “We’d bury as many as 50 bodies in one big hole. We’d cover them with coconut tree branches…” Scholar Hank Nelson wrote that there were “…many brothels, from Kabaira to Kokopo, and that there were said to be 253 Formosans…” (p. 15). Unknown numbers of these Taiwanese perished or were injured on land or at sea.
Taiwanese migration, tourism, and business travel to Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Australia increased under ROC rule (1945–Present). Taiwanese shipping was promoted, and Oceania foodstuffs, including seafood, livestock products, and produce, were brought into Taiwan in higher quantities. It was during this period that a larger number of Taiwanese went to various islands to reside or to pursue education, fieldwork, company projects, and diplomatic assignments. The ROC provided economic and medical aid, agricultural assistance, scholarships, and more to the islands and their peoples. Marriages also began to occur between Taiwanese and Pacific Islanders, as well as people of other descent in the islands and back in Taiwan.
The ROC, as a member of the United Nations and a permanent member of the Security Council from 1945 to 1971, received international recognition from colonial powers in the Pacific—Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. During that period, the Americans, British, and French carried out nuclear tests in Oceania, which caused anthropological and ecological harm through radioactive contamination, forced displacement, and more. The ROC, despite being a northern neighbour in the Pacific, did not publicly condemn these tests, as it aligned with its own and its regional and western partners’ Cold War strategies. Presently, nuclear waste contamination in the region remains problematic, and there has been Taiwan–Pacific Islander advocacy against environmental injustices. Elements of the continued expansion of military-state-capitalism in the islands by Western powers and their Asian partners, at times mixed with foreign aid, remain contentious and have led to criticisms regarding the impacts particular initiatives and events have had on Pacific Islanders’ ways of life. Another eco-economy issue and source of cultural friction that persists has been the over- and illegal fishing by a number of Taiwanese vessels in and near Australasia, Polynesia, and elsewhere in the Pacific. Shark finning, dolphin killing, and human rights abuses have occurred aboard Taiwanese boats. Concerning one such violation, scholars Christina Stringer and Sallie Yea state in their Maritime Studies article:
“…on June 17, 2019, Sugiama, a 22-year-old Indonesian fisher employed on a Taiwanese distant water fishing vessel, was found dead in his bunk. Just six hours earlier, the bosun assaulted Sugiama by hitting him across his head for not working fast enough….The nearest port, Suva, Fiji, was an eight-day sail away.”
Taiwanese diplomacy, sometimes stressed by the above-mentioned fishing industry issues and to a greater degree by geopolitical disputes with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), has experienced ebbs and flows. Despite the end of ROC representation in the United Nations with General Assembly Resolution 2758 in 1971, further recognition came from Tonga (1972), Western Samoa (1972), Tuvalu (1979), Nauru (1980, 2005 resumption), the Solomon Islands (1983), the Marshall Islands (1998), Palau (1999), and Kiribati (2003). The ROC established trade or representative offices, mostly during the Cold War era, in the non-recognising, Oceania-connected countries of the United Kingdom, Fiji, Indonesia, France, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, the United States, and Papua New Guinea. Developments from these included increased cultural and economic exchange. Some of the relations have held fast, while others faltered. The withdrawal of recognition, in favour of the PRC and predominantly for economic incentives, occurred as follows: Western Samoa (1975), Tonga (1998), Kiribati and Solomon Islands (2019), and Nauru/Naoero (2002, first ending in 2024). In 2018, the Suva office was downgraded in status, and, in 2026, PNG ordered the closure of the Port Moresby office. Nonetheless, the restoration of relations with some nations is possible. While high-level diplomacy has been pursued, voices have been raised to also increase indigenous diplomacy, island-to-island exchanges, and cross-Pacific Austronesian community building.
In recent years, while a number of the old, tried-and-tested diplomatic and economic initiatives continue, the ROC has been focusing on strengthening ties with Pacific Island nations by supporting various projects regarding more sophisticated ocean monitoring and governance, maritime and inland environments, climate resilience, green energy infrastructure, and digital connectivity and advanced technology promotion and use. The ROC has also provided monetary and non-monetary backing to a number of regional organisations, including, but not limited to, the Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific, Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Development Forum, Pacific Islands Forum, Pacific Resilience Facility, Office of the Pacific Ocean Commissioner, and Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme. The ROC’s New Southbound Policy, launched in 2016 and continually augmented to the present, partially functions to increase cooperation with Oceania-linked nations. Stronger Pacific ties have many merits, but some may question whether the money to maintain them would be better spent on the porcupine military defence of Taiwan or, conversely, on enhanced cross-strait peace diplomacy.
Cooperation continues to engender positive developments, but geopolitical and neocolonial issues have cast a shadow over the normally sun-soaked islands. There has been accelerated militarisation of the Asia–Pacific region in the twenty-first century, with base development and the movement of weapons systems, equipment, and electronic machinery, a number of which are powered by Taiwan chips. With foreign national power rising in nearly every direction, Taiwan and the Pacific Islands are increasingly becoming sandwiched between yet another superpower rivalry. As history has repeatedly shown, the fate of the islands and their peoples can be changed by far-away decision-makers. However, Islander agency and resilience continue and are nearly impossible to extinguish.
Charles R. Charrington reads and writes about violence, amongst other topics, in Taiwan.