Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: ZS Khumalo/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
THE MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS was recently asked about possible plans to source workers from Eswatini. Eswatini is Taiwan’s only diplomatic ally in Africa.
In past weeks, President Lai Ching-te traveled to Eswatini. This took place in an unusual manner, in that Lai’s visit was only announced after he arrived, and he covertly traveled in the personal plane of Eswatini’s monarch, King Mswati III.
Lai had originally been scheduled to visit Eswatini for the first overseas diplomatic trip of his presidency. This visit was cancelled, however, due to Chinese pressure leading Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Seychelles to revoke overflight privileges for Lai’s plane.
Though the DPP largely framed the secret trip as a diplomatic breakthrough, or otherwise as a dramatic show of defiance to China’s bullying of Taiwan on the international stage, the KMT has sought to attack Lai over his trip. This has been largely been through framing Lai’s trip as undignifying and unseemly for a president, in having to sneak around internationally, as well as suggesting that the pressure that Taiwan faces internationally is only a product of Lai’s refusal to agree to the 1992 Consensus.
For its part, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied that Eswatini is being considered as a source of imported labor. It is claimed that emphasis has been placed on cultivating vocational talent in the manufacturing, tourism, energy, and infrastructure sectors, so that Eswatini workers can work in Taiwanese-owned businesses in the Taiwan Industrial Innovation Park that is being built in Eswatini.
Previous online claims were that Taiwan planned to import 1,000 workers from Eswatini after Lai’s trip, something that government officials denied as disinformation. This appears to have been an attempt to leverage on recent backlash to the prospect of introducing Indian migrant workers, with a wave of online racism against the idea, claiming that Indian migrants would sexually assault Taiwanese women en masse–never mind that the Lai administration scaled down the recruitment of Indian migrant workers to only 1,000 after the backlash and, likewise, there are already several thousand white-collar Indian migrant workers who live in Taiwan without incident.
Nevertheless, one notes that the prospect of recruiting migrant workers from Taiwan’s only diplomatic ally is telling about the relationship between Taiwan and its diplomatic allies. Taiwan is larger than all of its diplomatic allies, whether in terms of the size of population or economy. Many of its allies are regimes with questionable human rights records.
This includes Eswatini, which is one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies. King Mswati III rules with an iron fist, presiding over a country in which the lifespan halved under his rule, and in which the constitution is suspended, political parties are banned, and there are no elections. Pro-democracy protests in Eswatini were put down by police force, with opposition politicians thought to have been killed by state security forces. In spite of that Eswatini’s situation reminds of Taiwan’s authoritarian past and Taiwan could be a force for good in pressuring Eswatini to change. Instead, Taiwan simply contributed money to the monarchy after the protests for reconstruction.
Consequently, Taiwan has long been accused of paying off its diplomatic allies in return for recognition in what is termed “dollar diplomacy.” This often occurs through slush funds. Yet this could also occur through Eswatini sending workers to Taiwan to take up the so-called “3D” –“dirty, dangerous, and demeaning”–jobs that Taiwanese no longer want to take up. Such jobs are presently mostly taken up by Southeast Asian migrants, though opening this up to India and Eswatini would open such work up to migrants from South Asia and Africa.
It is already the case that a number of students from Eswatini who came to Taiwan for educational purposes have instead been sent to factories to work as part of what are termed internships or work-study arrangements. That many for-profit schools have, at a time of declining birthrates and shrinking enrollment, instead turned to sending individuals who came to Taiwan in pursuit of higher education to factories is reflective of how Taiwan exploits individuals from its supposed diplomatic allies. Students from such countries are among those to most commonly sent to factories in what is increasingly a growing issue at for-profit higher education institutions in Taiwan, which ballooned in number in the 2000s, but now face being shut down as student numbers continue to decline.