Provoking China again: Macedonia’s unlearnt lessons

A familiar drama has resurfaced in Skopje.

While I was still in Beijing attending the CASS academic conference on the Belt and Road Initiative, news broke that the vice-speaker of the Macedonian parliament, accompanied by two MPs, formally received a Taiwanese parliamentary delegation.

The visit came less than two weeks after the new ambassador of China presented her credentials, filling a diplomatic post that had been vacant for a year and a half.

This is not an isolated incident. Taiwan periodically reappears in Macedonian politics, despite the country’s hard-learnt lesson of 1999.

The urgent question is not what happened, but why this issue keeps returning in a system that has formally committed itself to the ‘One China’ principle.

For context: in the early 1990s, newly independent Macedonia entered the international scene with few allies. Burdened by the name dispute with Greece and lacking diplomatic weight, Skopje relied heavily on partners willing to recognise and support the fragile republic.

Among the crucial early supporters was China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which recognised Macedonia under its constitutional name. In return, Macedonia affirmed its adherence to the One China principle.

That commitment was held until 1999.

In a move still difficult to fully explain, the small coalition party Democratic Alternative, led by international law professor, Vasil Tupurkovski (also known as Cile in popular discourse), suddenly announced diplomatic recognition of Taiwan.

Neither President Kiro Gligorov nor Prime Minister Ljubcho Georgievski had been informed. The justification was a “transactional foreign policy” avant la lettre: Macedonian recognition in exchange for $1bn in Taiwanese investment. The so-called “Cile’s billion” never arrived. What did arrive was a political earthquake – and security crisis.

As expected by anyone familiar with China, Beijing severed diplomatic relations and vetoed the renewal of the UN’s preventive deployment force peacekeeping mission in Macedonia – a mission designed to prevent conflict spillover from Kosovo.

With the mission gone, Macedonia soon became a ground base for the Nato forces in 1999 and soon afterwards got engulfed in the 2001 internal armed conflict.

Eventually, Skopje had to apologise and formally reaffirm the One China principle to restore diplomatic relations, but its credibility was damaged for years.

Only in the mid-2010s did relations begin to normalise. Ironically, this happened under Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, a controversial figure, but one of the few who clearly articulated that Macedonia had national interests requiring diversified partnerships. During his tenure, bilateral cooperation expanded, coinciding with the launch of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

One of the key actors in rekindling these ties was then-foreign minister Antonio Miloshoski. Interestingly, the same person – now in the capacity of vice-speaker of Parliament – is leading the renewed flirtation with Taiwan.

As part of an academic research project on China–Macedonia relations, my colleagues and I applied the critical discourse analysis method with respect to the political discourse used by key politicians throughout the years.

In this particular case, the findings point to a pronounced inconsistency: what might be described as “diplomatic bipolarity”, where Taiwan serves not as a matter of policy but as an instrument of geopolitical signalling.

Miloshoski’s re-engagement with Taipei became evident in 2024 when he attended an interparliamentary forum there, prompting protest from the Chinese embassy.

His reply was confrontational: China, he said, had “no right to interfere” in Macedonia’s allegedly independent foreign policy. This contradicted not only long-standing commitments but also the structural realities of Macedonian diplomacy (whose greatest failures are hard to even enlist).

On 20 November, Miloshoski appeared as host of the Taiwanese delegation and the parliament announced the meeting and posted photos on social media.

Soon they were all removed. The gesture came just as China’s Embassy issued an explicit letter, warning that such actions could have consequences for bilateral relations and economic cooperation.

Instead of establishing solid relations with the newly arrived ambassador who offered a hand of friendship and cooperation, she was met with an avoidable political provocation.

It is difficult to believe that such decisions were made without approval from higher political leadership – and, ultimately, without a nod from the real power centres in the West, presumably Washington.

To this day, both the prime minister and the president remain silent, adopting an ostrich-like posture, as if their constitutional responsibilities in foreign policy can simply be outsourced.

Meanwhile, Deputy PM Aleksandar Nikolovski publicly boasted that the government had recently rejected an interest-free loan from China, choosing instead high-interest debt from the UK – a move that resembles self-inflicted damage far more than coherent strategic planning.

The recurring Taiwan episodes cannot be explained by Taipei’s agency or by any coherent Macedonian strategy. The uncomfortable truth is that Macedonia effectively has no autonomous foreign policy. Over the years – and especially since the demonstrative pledging of loyalty to Donald Trump in early 2025 -strategic choices have been shaped by external patrons.

In such a context, invoking the Taiwan issue functions as a symbolic display of alignment with US geopolitical preferences (including the rising tensions with Japan), even when it contradicts national interests. For the more charitable observers, it may look like diplomatic ignorance. For others, it is a theatre performed for foreign audiences.

China in 2025 is not China in 1999. One thing, however, has remained constant: Beijing’s red line on Taiwan. The space between diplomatic irritation and the use of a UN Security Council veto is vast – and Macedonia has experienced both ends of that spectrum.

Small states, even Nato members, gain little from adventurist signalling. They gain even less from alienating a major global actor while courting a partner with no capacity to offer meaningful support.

If the government prefers not to deepen cooperation with China, it can choose to restrain. What it cannot responsibly choose is provocation without purpose.

This leaves several unavoidable questions: what does Macedonia gain by undermining relations with the China while engaging Taiwan? Who benefits from this pattern of actions, and who pays the diplomatic cost? Is there anyone left in Macedonian leadership who understands the basic mechanics of international politics at a moment of global volatility?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are urgent ones for a small, exposed state navigating one of the most unstable and transformative periods in modern international relations.  – Globetrotter

Biljana Vankovska is a professor of political science and international relations at Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, a member of the Transnational Foundation of Peace and Future Research (TFF) in Lund, Sweden, and the most influential public intellectual in Macedonia. She is also a member of the No Cold War collective.

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