President Establishes Relations with China
by Rod Hughes
In a drastic foreign policy turnabout, President Oscar Arias has established diplomatic relations with mainland China, ending six decades of cordial relations with Taiwan. Costa Rica has dropped out of a group of 25 countries with diplomatic ties to the island nation.
Arias made no secret that foreign trade moved him to take the step, sure to be a controversial one in Costa Rica. Mainland China has become a major market for this country as well as an important source of imported goods.
Taiwan’s relations with Costa Rica were automatically severed–China considers Taiwan a rebellious province and there is no middle ground in a choice between the two. The island nation has cancelled its cooperation projects here, ending a long string of projects that have benefitted Costa Rica, including the new bridge on the Gulf of Nicoya.
The president’s pragmatism also raises Taiwan’s fears that other Latin American nations will follow suit.
Meanwhile, the Promotion of Foreign Trade agency announced that a trade fair featuring Chinese products will be held in August in San Jose. (If this seems amazingly speedy work, one must remember that a cooperative trade agreement has existed for years with mainland China and Chinese goods have been sold here by importers for years.) The agency also said that Costa Rican products and produce will be displayed at a trade fair in the city of Canton next October.
On Saturday, the Web site of the country’s leading daily newspaper, La Nacion, contained many letters to the editor, the overwhelming majority decrying the president’s diplomatic course change. The adverse letters cited the long friendship with Taiwan and mainland China’s poor record of human rights. One invoked a spaghetti Western title, criticizing the morality of the change “for a few dollars more.”
A few echoed the president in saying that, no matter how sad it was to break old ties, one must be logical in matters of economy and pointing out that mainland China is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets in the world.