President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan landed in Eswatini this weekend on a state visit that had been delayed by several days after Taipei publicly blamed Beijing for arranging refusals of overflight clearance through multiple African airspaces. Eswatini is one of only twelve states that still maintain formal diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, and the last on the African continent. The BBC has reported the trip in similar terms. The episode sits alongside a separate Chinese diplomatic push in the region: Beijing has just scrapped tariffs on almost every African nation, with the conspicuous exception of Eswatini.
The received wisdom
The establishment reading treats the overflight row as a minor piece of diplomatic pettiness. Taiwan has only a handful of allies left; each visit by a Taiwanese president to one of them is a symbolic act; China makes it inconvenient; the plane eventually lands. In this framing the real action is in the Taiwan Strait itself — fighter incursions, coastguard encounters, the chip-export question — and the African sideshow is essentially ceremonial. The commentary tends to end with a note of patronising sympathy: Eswatini is a small absolute monarchy with a chequered human-rights record, Taipei’s choice of friends says more about Beijing’s success than Taiwan’s diplomacy, and the whole thing is best understood as a legacy arrangement slowly winding down.
A different read
The legacy-arrangement reading misses the shape of the campaign. What Beijing is doing, across multiple theatres at once, is teaching third countries that Taiwanese sovereignty is a negotiable variable. Every time an African air traffic control authority — however informally — denies transit to a Taiwanese head of state’s aircraft, the implicit claim that Taiwan’s statehood is decided in Beijing acquires a little more operational reality. The legal doctrine of effective control, developed at Westphalia and refined at Versailles, does not require a formal treaty to shift; it requires a pattern of actual compliance by third parties. Beijing has read the Westphalian playbook carefully, and is using African airspace as a training ground for a broader campaign aimed eventually at Pacific and Latin American holdouts.
The coupling of the airspace squeeze with a pan-African tariff package is the more telling move. Chinese African policy has for two decades been built on infrastructure-for-access bargains; the new tariff regime adds a second, softer instrument — trade preference — that is cheap for Beijing to dispense and politically salient in capitals from Accra to Lusaka. Eswatini’s exclusion from that package is not incidental. It is a public lesson to the remaining eleven Taipei allies about the cost of holding out. The Vatican, Paraguay, Guatemala, the Marshall Islands — each of those governments is now weighing, quite rationally, what continued recognition of Taipei actually buys them.
The American response to this pattern has been, to put it generously, uneven. The Trump administration has rightly tightened chip-export controls and quietly increased military training rotations in the Strait, but it has no coherent policy on the diplomatic recognition campaign. The Biden-era AGOA reauthorisation lapsed; the Inter-American Development Bank has been permitted to drift; the Solomon Islands switch of 2019 was, in retrospect, a turning point that Washington failed to treat as such. A serious conservative policy here would understand that the contest for Taiwan’s remaining twelve recognitions is not a sentimental exercise; it is the foundation on which the eventual question of whether the international system treats a Chinese invasion as aggression or as reunification will rest. In 1991 the world treated the Baltic states’ independence as a legal fact because a small network of non-recognitions of their Soviet absorption had been quietly maintained for fifty years. That network mattered.
The Eswatini trip, then, is not a minor piece of choreography. It is a small act of legal maintenance in an international architecture that Beijing is methodically trying to renovate.
What to watch
Three signals. First: does any African state formally apologise for the overflight denial, or does the pattern repeat at the next Taiwanese state visit? Silence will be read, correctly, as acquiescence. Second: watch Paraguay. President Santiago Peña has committed to Taipei recognition, but Mercosur politics and soybean export pressure are pulling the other way; a Paraguayan switch would be the largest since 2019. Third: the American Africa policy. If the administration uses the Eswatini episode to revive AGOA or to announce targeted infrastructure finance, the campaign can still be contested. If it does not, the map will continue to be redrawn — quietly, and largely without American participation.
— J