In 1971, United Nations Resolution 2758 effectively ejected Taiwan from participation in United Nations institutions. Today, the island has official diplomatic relations with only 12 states, down from seventy in 1969. And yet, Taiwan conducts about USD 900 billion a year in international trade, maintains 111 representative offices in 57 countries, and receives foreign delegations at the ministerial level from every continent. The gap between formal recognition and concrete presence is staggering.
In the 1980s, the political scientist Ivo Duchacek coined the term “paradiplomacy” to describe the international interactions of entities beyond the central government. Taiwan pushes the concept to its extreme. Classic notions of paradiplomacy describe how sub-state regions—such as Catalonia, Quebec, or Flanders—engage overseas alongside the national government to which they belong. Taiwan encapsulates both at once: its cities and regions practice this sub-state paradiplomacy (Taoyuan’s partnership with Grenoble, for instance), while Taiwan as a whole—a de facto state, exercising effective sovereignty yet denied recognition—turns those same channels into a substitute for the national diplomacy it is barred from conducting.
Taiwan’s diplomatic innovation matters more than it did a decade ago. Cross-strait tensions are rising, Beijing’s diplomatic pressure is intensifying, and Taiwan fears the loss of more official diplomatic partners. In this context, understanding the infrastructure for Taiwan’s paradiplomacy is not just an academic mission—it is critical for global stakeholders seeking to pursue engagement with Taiwan in spite of Beijing’s pressure.
The TECRO/TECO Network
Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Offices (TECROs) in foreign countries do everything an embassy does—issue visas, conduct trade negotiations, arrange for scientific cooperation and cultural programming, etc.—except call themselves an embassy. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (外交部) operates such offices in 57 countries with which it lacks official diplomatic relations under the Vienna Convention. In the United States, the Taiwan Relations Act (1979) gives them a unique legal grounding. In France, the Bureau de Représentation de Taipei en France (BRTF) runs a full-scale operation in Paris, but has no formal access to the Élysée Palace or the Quai d’Orsay (which are the offices of France’s president and the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, respectively). The TECRO network also manages bilateral investment agreements and coordinates with international bodies on technical standards. In any other country, a foreign ministry would handle this.
The COVID-19 pandemic tested this framework. Shut out of the World Health Organization, Taiwan used its representative offices to distribute millions of masks worldwide. A diplomatic rebuff turned into a public relations win. Indeed, Taiwan’s representative offices are embassies in all but name. Their staff get de facto diplomatic courtesies in most host countries. The distinction is maintained for Beijing’s benefit, but it is largely cosmetic.
The scale of the TECRO network also tells us something about how much Taiwan invests in its infrastructure for paradiplomacy. Each office requires staff, building maintenance, and local administrative staff. Running 111 of them across 57 countries is not cheap. Taiwan’s MOFA budget— NTD 41.53 billion (USD 1.35 billion) in 2026—is modest by the standards of the rich world. The money goes to function, not to status.
NGOs That Act in the Place of State Functions
Taiwan also works through NGOs that are nominally independent but functionally tied to the state. The Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD, 台灣民主基金會), set up in 2003, funds democracy-promotion projects across Asia and the world, and runs visiting fellowships that bring foreign researchers into Taiwanese institutions. In many respects, it serves similar functions to the US government-supported National Endowment for Democracy. This is an example of soft power with a clear strategic purpose.
Taiwan also pursues humanitarian and health diplomacy through the International Cooperation and Development Fund (TaiwanICDF, 財團法人國際合作發展基金會), a MOFA-supervised body that runs disaster-relief, public-health and development projects across Africa, Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and Eastern Europe, often jointly with international NGOs such as Mercy Corps and World Vision.
Both TFD and Taiwan ICDF share the same ambiguous status: they are officially non-governmental, but to varying degrees support civil society engagement and diplomatic efforts that align with the goals of Taiwan’s democratic government. They work in spaces—democracy promotion, digital diplomacy, humanitarian aid—where concrete actions matter more than a given state’s degree of formal recognition.
Decentralized Cooperation: The Least Visible Layer
Taiwan maintains a third track for its paradiplomacy, and it gets far less attention. Cities, regions, and universities in Europe are building direct partnerships with Taiwanese counterparts. These ties are harder for Beijing to target and have grown quietly over the past decade.
I run Association France-Formosa—a Franco-Taiwanese cultural diplomacy organization that works through civil society networks and organizes exchanges at the local level. We conducted two MOFA-backed missions to Taiwan (in 2019 and 2025), both of which granted us direct institutional access without going through formal diplomatic channels.
In 2019, I observed how Prague’s decision to swap sister city ties with Beijing for Taipei served as a turning point—it was an example of a local actor making a geopolitical choice that its national government would not. Lithuania went even further in 2021, allowing a Taiwanese representative office to use the name ‘Taiwan” instead of the usual ‘Taipei”—a dramatic shift that drew reprisals from the PRC.
That experience taught me two things. First, Beijing’s enforcement of its diplomatic red lines reaches deep into the local political landscape in Europe—deeper than most people realize. A city partnership with Taipei is not just a cultural exchange: it is treated by Beijing as a sovereignty challenge, and responded to accordingly. Second, in spite of that episode, I remain convinced that decentralized cooperation between European cities and Taiwan is not only possible, but increasingly achievable. The political climate in Europe has shifted since 2019—Prague, Vilnius, and a growing number of European municipalities have shown that subnational actors can afford to do what national governments still hesitate to do. Populations in Europe are far more receptive to Taiwan than they were a decade ago, and the generation of local officials now coming into office has fewer inhibitions about engaging with Taipei openly.
University partnerships are another vector that flies under the radar. Joint research programs, student exchanges, dual degrees—these create institutional ties that are technically academic, but have practical political implications. In France alone, the network of Confucius Institutes now has a Taiwanese counterpart—the MOFA-funded Taiwan Center for Mandarin Learning (TCML), with two centers in France—alongside a growing number of Mandarin programs run by Taiwanese groups, Taiwan studies courses, and bilateral research agreements. These bottom-up initiatives provide a similar function to the Confucius Institutes. MOFA’s Taiwan Fellowship program, which brings foreign academics to Taipei for months at a time, is another facet of paradiplomacy—you arrive as a researcher, and later return to your home country with ample ties with the island.
There is another important channel that barely registers in the literature: sports. Taiwan cannot compete in international sports competitions under its own name. The 1981 Lausanne Agreement locked in the “Chinese Taipei” formula across all International Olympic Committee-affiliated federations. Every four years, billions of people watch the Olympics without ever seeing Taiwan identified as such. It is the most sustained, most public expression of the country’s diplomatic constraints, and it is rarely discussed in policy terms.
Club partnerships are a different matter entirely. A football club in Lyon can sign an exchange agreement with a club in Taipei—sharing coaches, sending youth players, co-organizing training camps—and the “Chinese Taipei” constraint simply does not apply. As a board member of FC Lyon–La Duchère, I have seen at close range what these kinds of ties actually produce: real relationships, built slowly, that travel under the radar. The political minefield that makes a city-to-city partnership so fraught disappears at the sports club level.
Taiwan’s own sporting federations figured this out long ago. They have competed under the “Chinese Taipei” banner for decades and used that exposure to build networks, relationships, contacts. The logic of this paradiplomacy is the same as the NGO model: depoliticization is not a concession, it is the strategy. Extending it to the sports club level—youth exchanges, joint academies, bilateral agreements between associations—is one of the least used options on the table for Taiwan’s democratic partners.
Such paradiplomacy is organized at the grassroots. That represents both a weakness (coordination is scarce) and a strength (Beijing cannot pressure one government to unravel it). The research gap is wide open: no comprehensive mapping of European-Taiwanese subnational agreements exists. Indeed, a comparison with Kosovo—another polity that depends heavily on paradiplomacy—would be worth pursuing.
Taiwan as a Performative State
In 1996, Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber argued that sovereignty is not a fixed attribute but a social construct, produced through institutional practice. Taiwan is the extreme case: sovereignty that is exercised continuously, yet recognized by almost nobody. (Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity”—identity constituted through repeated acts—aligns with this idea.) Taiwan cannot declare its sovereignty without triggering a crisis. So it performs it: trade agreements, representative offices, NGO engagement, city partnerships, and medical missions. Every one of these acts projects sovereignty without the formal label.
The 2024 inauguration of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) demonstrates the viability of this model. Delegations from over 50 countries showed up. Besides the diplomatic partners of Taiwan, none of the delegations officially represented their governments. All carried messages of support from their heads of state. The inauguration had every aspect of a sovereign state ceremony—except the word “sovereign.” That was performativity at work.
The Limits of Performed Sovereignty
Beijing’s pressure hangs over Taiwan’s paradiplomacy. The loss of the diplomatic recognition of Honduras and Nauru in 2023 and 2024, respectively, shows that Beijing is not about to let Taiwan’s gains in paradiplomacy accumulate unchecked.
But Taiwan’s model for paradiplomacy is more resilient than formal diplomacy. While Beijing can lean on a government to withdraw recognition of Taiwan, it cannot easily dismantle thousands of subnational partnerships, academic exchanges, and NGO collaborations scattered across dozens of countries. The greatest advantage of decentralized cooperation is that there is no single chokepoint to cut off. Understanding this architecture—and supporting it—is a practical question for Taiwan’s democratic partners. The channels are there for paradiplomacy. The question is whether populations around the world will make use of them.
The main point: Denied formal recognition by all but twelve states, Taiwan has built a functional substitute for diplomacy—a web of representative offices, state-aligned NGOs, and city, university, and sports-club partnerships that let it perform the functions of sovereignty without claiming the label that would provoke Beijing. Precisely because this architecture is decentralized, it has no single chokepoint for Beijing to cut, making it more resilient than formal diplomacy and a practical priority for Taiwan’s democratic partners to understand and support.
