By *Guevara Leacock
On A View from the Outside this week, Saturday Aug. 15, 2026, which is the very day on which our diplomatic relations with Taiwan turn 45, we turn our attention to the Prime Minister’s visit to Taipei, with the view being that far from abandoning Taiwan as Vincentians were warned it would, this new government is strengthening that friendship and diplomatic relationship.
Throughout the 2025 general election campaign, the Unity Labour Party (ULP) and those around it told Vincentians that a New Democratic Party (NDP) government would abandon Taiwan and build diplomatic relations with Beijing, mainland China.
It was not a passing remark. The leadership of the ULP alleged that the opposition NDP campaign itself was being financed and run, in its own words, “from the embassy of a country not too far from us in this Caribbean”.
That allegation was taken all the way to the United Nations General Assembly last September, where the party’s leadership spoke of a diplomatic mission of a rising or risen hegemon from the Far East bankrolling its opponents.
The ULP tied these allegations to the citizenship-by-investment question or what they refer to colloquially as “selling passports” alleging that China-based companies were funding the NDP’s campaign because they wanted the NDP to open a citizenship-by-investment programme and to hand them exclusive contracts to sell Vincentian passports. No public evidence was ever produced for those allegations.
On Nov. 27, 2025, the Vincentian electorate gave their answer to these allegations made by the ULP. The NDP took 14 of the 15 seats. The ULP was reduced to a single seat, that of its leader, after 24 years in office. It was the NDP’s best result since 1989.
This week, the man Vincentians were told would end diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Dr. Godwin Friday, arrived in Taipei. He was received by a military guard of honour, attended a state banquet and sat with President Lai Ching-te.
During the state banquet, Dr. Friday said publicly that St. Vincent and the Grenadines supports Taiwan’s bid to join the United Nations, its specialised agencies and Interpol. Forty-five years ago today, Milton Cato signed that relationship into being in Taipei, when St. Vincent and the Grenadines was barely two years independent. Whatever else you make of the prime minister’s visit to Taiwan this week, the prediction Vincentians were sold last year has not come to pass.
To be fair to the ULP, they were not inventing the concern out of nothing. Arnhim Eustace, former leader of the NDP, prime minister and opposition leader in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, committed the NDP to the One China policy in 2016. An NDP delegation travelled to the People’s Republic of China in 2018 allegedly to establish those relations. In October 2023, when asked directly about St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Dr Friday said the relationship was subject to review and that decisions of that kind are constantly revisited.
That vagueness was deliberate and all Vincentians understood it as such. However, by the 2025 campaign the switch was not in the NDP manifesto and Dr Friday did not commit to it on any political platform. The ULP was prosecuting a case built on the record between 2016 and 2023, not on what was being offered to voters by the NDP in 2025.
So why did the NDP decide not to end diplomatic relations with Taiwan and develop a new relationship with mainland China. We on A View from the Outside say that a possible answer is that Taiwan has very few friends left. Only 12 countries in the world still recognise Taipei, and seven of those 12 are in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Over the past 10 years Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras have all walked away from Taiwan. Every country that leaves increases the value of those who remain. That is why Prime Minister Friday is met in Taipei with a military honour guard and a state banquet. Our friendship is worth more to Taiwan today than it was 10 years ago, and Taipei knows it.
Another reason is that St. Vincent and the Grenadines does not have room for political adventures. Our public debt is running at about 113% of everything this country produces in a year. Forecasts show that if the government is not cautious, the public debt can head towards 124% if nothing changes, and debt service is swallowing roughly 40 cents out of every dollar the government collects. It would be politically incompetent to rupture a 45-year relationship to find out whether a new patron will deliver while your credit rating sits where ours does. Just ask Moodys.
So, what has this visit to Taiwan produced for St. Vincent and the Grenadines? How will you as a Vincentian benefit from this visit? There are negotiations towards an economic cooperation agreement. Mutual recognition of driving licences. A youth exchange programme and continued work on the Orange Hill plant factory, which is now selling vegetables to Vincentian hotels. At an investor roundtable, the Prime Minister offered Taiwanese investors four sectors: agriculture, tourism, the blue economy, and what the NDP calls the new economy.
Interestingly, there was no headline economic package. Nothing has been announced this week that touches the national debt figure that governs everything this administration is able to do. Perhaps Dr. Friday on his return will tell Vincentians exactly how the visit will benefit the economy of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in terms of addressing the national debt.
It is worth noting that though Taiwan is an amazing friend to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Taiwan’s support to this country has been, to a significant degree, lending rather than giving. In May 2023, Taiwan’s ambassador put contracted loans to St. Vincent and the Grenadines at around fEC$575 million. The completion of the Argyle International Airport needed a US$5 million Taiwanese loan to complete it.
The grants St. Vincent and the Grenadines receives from Taiwan are also real and they matter. St. Vincent and the Grenadines received a grant of US$3 million in February 2026 for social relief and US$200,000 after Hurricane Beryl. But a portion of the debt this government is now trying to restructure came attached with the very friendship St. Vincent and the Grenadines has with Taiwan. Forty-five years of friendship is also 45 years of credit.
The alternative, in any event, has been tested elsewhere. Honduras switched to Beijing in 2023 expecting the Chinese market to replace the Taiwanese one. Its shrimp exports to Taiwan fell by about 67% the following year, from roughly US$100 million to US$75 million.
More than 60 companies closed and in that industry some 14,000 jobs were lost. The government elected in Honduras in November 2025 is now weighing up a return to Taipei. Examples like these should be a lesson for us in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Switching allegiances is one thing but the promises of new friends are enforceable by nothing except the friend’s continuing interest. Once a country switches, their leverage is weakened if not gone.
This connects directly to what we discussed last week about Washington’s visa lists. A government already watching its people caught in an American visa freeze, and needing the Americans and the Europeans to tolerate a citizenship-by-investment programme, has very little appetite for a quarrel with Washington over Beijing. Staying with Taipei is, among other things, cheap credit with the United States and at the moment St. Vincent and the Grenadines need it.
We on A View from the Outside say that St. Vincent and the Grenadines continuing our friendship and diplomatic relations with Taipei is worth it and the NDP government ought to be commended for maintaining it.
The ULP’s central allegation was never really about Taiwan. Their mischief disguised as concern was that Chinese-linked interests wanted this country to start selling passports and were buying a government in order to make it happen. Remember that St. Vincent and the Grenadines has never had a citizenship-by-investment programme — at least not a legitimate one. We are the only independent OECS state that never went down that road, while St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada and St. Lucia all did.
That is about to change. The prime minister announced in his February 2026 budget address that a citizenship-by-investment programme would open this year. Vincentians, especially the legal profession, are eagerly awaiting the enabling legislation. The ULP’s allegations are simply not disposed of merely because the prime minister spent a pleasant week in Taipei. It will be answered by what that CBI legislation says when Vincentians finally see it.
So, in the coming days when somebody tells you that our friendship with Taiwan is only sentiment or only history, think about what 45 years has actually put on the ground in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It has enabled our young people to go abroad to study. It has put technical officers alongside our farmers, and vegetables from Orange Hill into our hotels. It provided help when Beryl left us in pieces. It has helped to build schools, health clinics and other infrastructure.
Most of us know someone or a family that holds on to a piece of land because a grandparent worked for it. We also know how difficult it is to get back land once sold. We on A View from the Outside say a friendship between countries is much the same, and that this government was right to travel to Taipei and hold on to what 45 years of friendship and diplomatic relations has built.
*Guevara Leacock is a barrister at law of Lincoln’s Inn in England and an attorney at law in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He has a keen interest in history and politics and is a social commentator.
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