Just months after Oliver Liao arrived in Pretoria as Taiwan’s de facto ambassador, South Africa began a campaign to downgrade its relationship with the island — thrusting him into the epicenter of a geopolitical drama.
While South Africa decades ago broke formal ties with Taipei in favor of relations with Beijing, now the country wanted to dilute things further, a sign of how the chip hub is increasingly being squeezed on the global stage. In April last year, a formal notice arrived to move Liao’s office from the seat of government to the financial hub of Johannesburg, ending five decades of representation in South Africa’s capital.
Taiwan refused. South Africa, which counts China as its largest trading partner, responded with bureaucratic firepower on an official government website, where it changed the office’s address, wiped all mention of Liao and listed the names of other Taiwanese staff — at least one of whom was dead.
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