(TibetanReview.net, Aug22’25) – China has on Aug 21 taken exception to India’s reiteration of its policy on Taiwan which refrained from any explicit mention of Beijing’s One China policy. “Some individuals in India are attempting to undermine China’s sovereignty over Taiwan,” Mao Ning, the spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has told journalists in Beijing.
Beijing earlier claimed during the Aug 18-19 visit to New Delhi by its Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and during his meeting with India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, that New Delhi had broken its silence on the issue, saying that Taiwan had been a part of China.
This prompted India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar to issue a clarification. He spoke of having conveyed to Wang that India, like the rest of the world, had maintained a relationship with Taiwan focused on economic, technological and cultural ties and that it would continue.
He had underlined that even China cooperated with Taiwan on these domains.
However, Mao has now said, “China is surprised by India’s so-called clarification. This is inconsistent with the facts.”
“It would seem that some people in India have tried to undermine China’s sovereignty on the Taiwan question and impede the improvement of China-India relations,” China’s official globaltimes.cn Aug 12 quoted Mao as saying.
“Let me stress that there is but one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory. This is a prevailing consensus among the international community, including India. We hope India will earnestly abide by the one-China principle, properly handle sensitive issues and promote the steady development of bilateral relations,” the report quoted Mao as saying.
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New Delhi had earlier routinely reaffirmed the “One-China” policy in its joint statements with Beijing. But it stopped doing so after 2008, in response to China’s policy of issuing ‘stapled visas’ to the residents of Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, instead of normal visas pasted on passports issued by the Government of India, noted the deccanherald.com Aug 21.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had in Jul 2018 indirectly reaffirmed its adherence to the “One-China policy” and made Air India replace “Taiwan” with “Chinese Taipei” in the list of destinations on its website. Taiwan had strongly reacted, stating that the move by Air India could be seen as India “succumbing to the unreasonable and absurd pressure from China, the report said.
Beijing’s One-China policy stipulates that the international community recognize only the People’s Republic of China, which came into existence in 1949 after the communists defeated the nationalists in a civil war, as the sole government of China. It demands that countries do not recognise the existence of the Republic of China (the official name of Taiwan, where the nationalists retreated to and based the seat of their government after losing to the communists).
Despite the lack of diplomatic recognition, Taiwan in represented in India by the India-Taipei Association, which is headed by a diplomat, based in New Delhi, functioning as the country’s de facto diplomatic and consular mission. There is also the Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre (TECC) in New Delhi which similarly serves as the de facto diplomatic and consular mission of Taiwan. A TECC was also set up in Chennai in 2012, the report noted.
The report continued that Taiwan was keen to expand its quasi-diplomatic presence in India, where many of its technology companies want to set up manufacturing bases in the wake of its escalating tension with China. A new TECC was set up in Mumbai in 2024 despite protests from Beijing.