Guyana abruptly terminated an agreement with Taiwan to open an office in the South American country, hours after China asked Georgetown to “correct its mistake”.
On Thursday morning, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it had signed an agreement with Guyana to open an office in Taiwan – effectively a de facto embassy for the island that China claims as its sovereign territory, with no right to ties. diplomatic.
Later that day, Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was revoking the agreement – and that it continued to adhere to the “One China” policy.
“The government has not established diplomatic ties or relations with Taiwan and, as a result of the lack of communication of the signed agreement, it was terminated,” says the statement from Guyana.
Guyana traditionally has close ties to China.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin responded to the move by saying that Beijing hoped that Guyana would not engage in official ties with Taiwan, calling on the country to “take diligent steps to correct its mistake”.
The United States is concerned about the deepening of Chinese influence in Latin America. Guyana, a former British colony, recently started developing offshore oil reserves and is strategically located alongside conflict-ravaged Venezuela, an important Chinese ally with which Guyana has a territorial dispute.
Taiwan has formal diplomatic relations with just 14 countries, including four Caribbean nations.
That list has steadily narrowed over the years, as Beijing presses smaller countries to change their allegiance. In 2018, the Dominican Republic announced that it was cutting ties with Taipei, in an action that the Taiwanese government attributed to “dollar diplomacy”.
China’s CNOOC Ltd is part of a consortium with American oil companies Exxon Mobil Corp and Hess Corp that discovered more than 8 billion barrels of recoverable oil reserves in the Stabroek block on the coast of Guyana, transforming the country into a new one energy hotspot.