Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen will visit St. Vincent and the Grenadines in mid-July as part of a tour of Taipei’s allies in the eastern Caribbean.
Taiwan’s Central New Agency (CNA) said on the weekend that Tsai will also visit St. Lucia and St. Kitts and Nevis.
CNA, citing Taiwan newspaper Liberty Times said that Tsai’s visit will last 10 days with nearly half of it spent in the U.S. cities.
In May, during an official visit to SVG by Taiwan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jaushieh Joseph Wu, Prime Minister of SVG, Ralph Gonsalves announced that Tsai will visit SVG soon, but gave no timeline.
“She is a fantastic woman. For a woman to become president in a country where the politics is rough and tough, the competitive politics, like Taiwan, is a remarkable story,” Gonsalves said of Tsai, who became the first woman to lead a Chinese majority nation.
“That’s an extraordinary human being who happens to be a woman. I met her, I went to visit her and I hope that she comes to visit me,” the prime minister said.
Kingstown remains among a 16 capitals, mainly small developing states in the Caribbean and the Pacific, that recognise Taiwan as a nation independent of China, which claims Taiwan as a renegade province to be reunited by force, if necessary.
Tsai will become the third president of Taiwan to visit SVG, following on visits by Chen Shui-bian in 2005 and Ma Ying-jeou in 2013.