Editor's note: Chen Hong, a special commentator for CGTN, is director of Asia Pacific Studies Centre, East China Normal University. The article reflects the authors' opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The 55th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting in Palau ought to be an occasion for Pacific countries to concentrate on the issues that will materially shape their collective future. Climate resilience, development finance, ocean governance, infrastructure and economic vulnerability all demand sustained attention. Instead, even before regional leaders have assembled, the meeting has been dragged into a political farce orchestrated by Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities in collusion with a handful of anti-China elements. Such maneuvering serves neither Pacific development nor regional unity. It risks eroding the very purpose and credibility of the Pacific's premier multilateral institution.

By "dispatching officials to attend the meeting," the DPP authorities have sought to present this as routine regional engagement. But the reality is far less benign. The issue is not simply whether a DPP official enters the leaders' meeting room or attends an event next door. That distinction is precisely the ambiguity the DPP is seeking to exploit.  

Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory and has no legitimate standing to participate as a state actor in an intergovernmental regional organization. Unable to secure such status through recognized institutional channels, the DPP authorities have become increasingly devious in exploiting procedural grey zones and deceptively elastic labels. "Development partner" has become one such device.

The PIF currently has 21 formally recognized Forum Dialogue Partners, including the People's Republic of China. But Taiwan is not among them. A vague designation such as "development partner" cannot be inflated into quasi-diplomatic standing, still less used to provide the DPP authorities with privileged access to political activities surrounding a regional leaders' meeting. If the Secretariat of the PIF allows such a non-formal label to serve as a vehicle for de facto political participation, it risks helping the DPP fabricate a status it neither possesses nor can legitimately acquire. That would not make the forum more inclusive. It would diminish its institutional authority and compromise its political integrity.

The calculation behind the DPP authorities' maneuver is hardly difficult to discern. Public health, renewable energy, digital technology and infrastructure cooperation provide respectable cover for a much more calculated exercise. An appearance beside a regional summit, a photograph with an official or a carefully worded reference to Taiwan as a "partner" can all be repackaged as proof of an allegedly expanding "international space."  

As the international community overwhelmingly recognizes Taiwan as part of China, symbolic visibility has acquired disproportionate political value for the DPP authorities. A peripheral event can therefore be advertised as a "diplomatic breakthrough," while an ambiguous institutional label is embellished into something approaching "international status."

This is what makes attempts to cloak the exercise in development language particularly cynical. Pacific Island countries (PICs) face genuine and urgent development challenges. Their concerns should not be appropriated as cover for the DPP authorities' separatist agenda. Nor should references to the "Pacific way" be used to obscure what is fundamentally an effort to instrumentalize a regional institution for political purposes conceived far beyond the Pacific.

The one-China principle cannot be diluted through semantic maneuvering. UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 restored the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China at the United Nations. It recognized its government's representatives as the only legitimate representatives of China to the organization. The overwhelming majority of countries have established diplomatic relations with China based on the one-China principle. Inventing new labels around regional meetings cannot conjure a second China into existence, nor can repeated summit-side appearances transform Taiwan into a sovereign state.

What is at stake, therefore, is not only the Taiwan question but the integrity of the PIF itself. The forum has long emphasized regional unity, consensus and Pacific ownership. Those principles become hollow if politically motivated exceptions can be engineered whenever a convenient label is available.  

Once a regional institution permits its procedures to be bent in the service of an external agenda, it creates an opening that others may readily exploit. The consequence would be a forum increasingly susceptible to outside interference rather than one capable of setting and defending its own regional priorities.

PICs have repeatedly made clear that they do not want their region reduced to a geopolitical chessboard. That aspiration deserves to be respected. A tiny number of PICs still maintain certain official contacts with the Taiwan authorities, but such contacts cannot confer any semblance of sovereign status upon Taiwan. Nor should they be leveraged to drag the entire forum into a controversy involving China's sovereignty and the political foundation of China's relations with the overwhelming majority of PIF members.

Development cooperation should be judged by whether it improves the lives of Pacific peoples, not by how many political photo opportunities it generates. Assistance should never become the price of political endorsement. Once economic or development programs are used to purchase diplomatic visibility or facilitate separatist posturing, the rhetoric of "partnership" becomes little more than political camouflage.

For decades, China and PICs have enjoyed a close, brotherly friendship grounded in mutual respect and practical cooperation. From infrastructure and agriculture to healthcare, education, climate response and disaster relief, that cooperation has brought tangible benefits to Pacific communities and contributed meaningfully to the region's development.  

China has consistently treated PICs as equals, respected their sovereignty and supported their pursuit of development paths suited to their own national circumstances. Such a relationship should not be disrupted by a political spectacle manufactured by the DPP authorities and abetted by a handful of opportunistic politicians.

The PIF was established to serve Pacific peoples. It should remain focused on their development, security and prosperity, uphold the one-China principle and refuse to provide a platform for separatist maneuvering. The forum belongs to the Pacific, and it must not be hijacked by forces intent on turning a regional gathering into an instrument for their own narrow political designs.

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