Friends from afar

ONE of the remarkable features of Singapore’s foreign policy under Lee Kuan Yew was the country’s ability to maintain close relations with Taiwan without jeopardising relations with China. As if wishing to underscore the point, Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, made an unprecedented visit to Singapore on March 24th to pay respects to Mr Lee a day after his death. It is extremely rare for a Taiwanese president to be admitted into a country that is not one of Taiwan’s dwindling number of formal diplomatic allies—22 at the last count. Upon his arrival in Singapore, Mr Ma was treated by Mr Lee’s family as a personal friend and invited to join the family wake. Then, a few hours later, he flew back to Taiwan.

China insists that Taiwan is a renegade province with no right to conduct its own diplomacy. Since he was first elected president in 2008, Mr Ma has done nothing to rile China with freelance diplomatic moves. Until his flying visit to Singapore, he had visited no country that has diplomatic ties with China, other than stopovers in transit. Even after Mr Ma’s plane had taken off, his office would not confirm his trip, given the diplomatic sensitivities. Although couched as a personal visit, not a formal one, this is still a diplomatic coup for Taiwan.

Mr Ma did not want to push his luck. He will not attend Mr Lee’s funeral on March 29th and will therefore avoid embarrassing Chinese leaders bumping into him there. Still, his visit underscores the depth of relations between Taiwan and Singapore, says Andrew Yang, a former Taiwanese deputy defence minister. Even military ties are close. Singaporean soldiers still train in Taiwan under an agreement forged in the mid-1970s between Mr Lee and Chiang Ching-kuo, the island’s last dictator. The agreement was designed to allow soldiers from urban Singapore to conduct large military exercises in a country with a little more open space. Economic ties are also flourishing. Taiwan has signed free-trade deals with only two countries that also have diplomatic ties with China, and Singapore is one of them (the other is New Zealand).

China seems content with Singapore acting as something of a go-between with Taiwan. With Mr Lee as intermediary, in 1993 Singapore hosted the first direct talks between Taiwan and China since 1949. Mr Ma’s presidential website claims that Taiwan and its people are eternally grateful for Mr Lee’s contributions—not just to relations between Taiwan and Singapore, but also to relations across the Taiwan Strait.