Distant neighbours, close friends
Did you know how closely linked Belize and Taiwan are? I didn't.
I’m not long back from a trip to Central America that saw me fall unexpectedly in love with Belize. I knew literally nothing about the place before I went, and arrived with zero expectations. And actually, I find that the element of surprise tends to help when it comes to sparking a country crush (says the allegedly knowledgeable traveller).
But I challenge anyone not to find themselves bewitched by the extraordinary palette of colours, by a culture both Mayan and Caribbean, by a frankly embarrassing surfeit of flora and fauna. To top it all off, Belize is home to some ridiculously welcoming people, top tier seafood, and very generous servings of rum punch and local beers. Plus they have a town called Teakettle, and who wouldn’t be charmed by that?
While I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Belize has to offer (and am planning a longer return visit when finances allow), during my short time in the country one thing that struck me was their international ties. Driving along the major roads you pass loads of signage boasting of development projects completed with funding from X or Y country, the majority of which had either EU or Chinese flags.
The Chinese flags stood out, because my brain went straight to the Belt & Road Initiative, but once I’d conducted a little research their appearance became all the more confusing, as Belize’s big Asian investment partner is Taiwan, with Belize being one of eleven UN member states (there are 193 in total) to recognise Taiwan, which means no diplomatic relations with Beijing.
A former British colony, and the only English-speaking country in Central America, Belize became independent in 1981. They established diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1989, following years of lobbying both government and opposition by William Quinto, a Belizean businessman of Chinese descent. When Taipei was named Belize’s fourth overseas mission, Quinto became ambassador, a role he held for the next twenty years, leaving office in 2008.
While establishing relations with Taiwan came at the cost of a nascent relationship with Beijing, it has proved to be a smart move from Belize, generating significant investment and leading to the development and improvement of critical infrastructure. Taiwan’s International Cooperation and Development Fund currently lists 31 Belize projects on its website, covering areas as diverse as healthcare, broadband connectivity, animal husbandry, and agriculture, while Taiwanese universities offer scholarships to high-achieving Belizean students each year.
The World Bank calls Belize an upper-middle income country, thanks to a per capita GDP of US$6,049, but the reality on the ground is very different. As recently as 2021, more than a third of the country was living in what the World Bank calls “multidimensional poverty”, a concept that takes into account financial poverty but also includes “[d]eprivations in nonmonetary dimensions like access to schooling and basic infrastructure, [which] compound poverty and perpetuate cycles of inequality.”
A significant chunk of the country’s non-tourist economy relies on agriculture (an area bizarrely dominated by the Mennonites, or Amish, and the subject of a future newsletter), and it is here that Taiwan hopes to be particularly influential/beneficial. This is a brilliant academic article on Belize-Taiwan relations, and should be read in full if the topic interests you. But the thumbnail is that Taiwan hopes to use its own experience of transforming an agricultural economy into a rich industrial nation to help other countries make similar shifts:
Taiwan presents itself as an example of going from a traditional agricultural society (Huang, 1993) to a country with one of the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves. As many developing countries also heavily rely on the agricultural sector, they are hoping on a similar success story. Taiwan therefore uses this comparable situation to justify the agricultural dominance in their development projects. Techniques and knowledge that were once important in Taiwan’s development are now being transferred to development countries in the form of technical assistance projects.
Geopolitically, Belize is in a weird position. Geography makes it important to maintain good relations with fellow Central American states, but history and language tie it to Britain, to the remains of the Commonwealth, to other English-speaking countries in the Caribbean. A small country, the nature and volume of its major exports are of limited interest to the United States, which has enabled Belize to essentially fly under the radar when it wants to, or to take potentially controversial stances without needing to worry about attracting US ire — there’s a sense the United States barely knows it exists.
This has given the government leeway to take ‘controversial’ international positions without impacting its receipt of foreign aid (although it only receives around US$77 million each year, most of that from Taiwan). Belize was one of the few countries to suspend ties with Israel following their bombing campaign in Gaza, a move that aligned them with their neighbours in Latin America, several of whom withdrew their ambassadors while Bolivia broke off relations altogether. Belize has had diplomatic relations with the (UN unrecognised) state of Palestine since 2014.