China this month rolled out a zero-tariff policy to every African country with which it maintains diplomatic ties — except Eswatini — while Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, arrived in the tiny kingdom earlier this month and faced abrupt travel disruptions that underscored a widening diplomatic squeeze.
The scale of the economic move is concrete: on May 1 Beijing eliminated tariffs on all taxable products from 53 African countries. The change removes levies that for some goods — coffee beans among them — had been at least 8 percent. Shanghai, China’s largest coffee import port, held a roundtable on May 20 about the policy and coffee industry services; Shanghai accounted for 38 percent of China’s coffee imports in 2025. China’s overall coffee imports rose from 59,100 metric tons in 2015 to 213,300 tons in 2024. “Now if Chinese buyers want to import green beans, there is no tariff,” Estifanos Daniel Wolde said.
Those economic incentives were framed this month by a diplomatic demonstration. Lai Ching-te landed in Eswatini after reported overflight permissions were revoked by Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar, and he ultimately flew aboard King Mswati III’s private aircraft after changing his travel plans. Beijing condemned Eswatini for hosting Lai, accusing the kingdom’s leaders of being “kept and fed” by Taiwan. Eswatini remains Taiwan’s last diplomatic partner in africa.
Context matters: over the past decade China has persuaded several African states to sever ties with Taiwan; Taiwan now maintains formal relations with only 12 countries worldwide. The tariff move ties commercial reward to diplomatic recognition for most of the continent — 53 states with formal ties to Beijing now face cheaper access to China’s market as a collective benefit, while Eswatini stands apart.
The diplomatic pressure has not been confined to state-to-state channels. In April, RightsCon was abruptly postponed in Zambia after organisers said they were told certain participants would need to be excluded and some topics moderated if the conference was to go ahead. Zambian officials indicated that diplomats from China had objected to the participation of Taiwanese civil society representatives. RightsCon’s agenda included digital governance, surveillance, censorship, cyber security and internet freedom, and the conference had been slated to host conversations about China’s export of digital authoritarian practices and surveillance technologies.
The sequence highlights a tension between two strands of Beijing’s influence: carrots in the form of tariff elimination and clearer market access, and sticks in the form of diplomatic pressure that reaches beyond capitals into civil society and conference agendas. The travel disruptions around Lai’s visit — revoked overflights in three Indian Ocean states and his eventual arrival aboard a royal aircraft — were a blunt demonstration of how those pressures can be applied in practice.
The data on trade are tangible and immediate. With tariffs removed on May 1 for goods from the 53 countries, exporters of agricultural and raw commodities now face lower barriers to a market that has sharply increased its import volume over the last decade. At the same time, China’s public rebuke of Eswatini and the diplomatic frictions around Lai’s trip underline that Beijing is not only buying influence through trade incentives but actively contesting the space for Taiwan’s diplomacy and civil-society links in the region.
There is a clear throughline: the economic opening to Beijing’s partners and the diplomatic pressure applied to those who do not align with it are two sides of the same strategy. Over the past decade, that strategy has already led several African states to drop ties with Taiwan. The combined weight of tariff access for 53 countries and the recent sequence of travel and conference disruptions amplifies the strain on Eswatini, which now stands alone on the continent as Taiwan’s formal ally.
Given those facts, the most consequential conclusion is straightforward: China's simultaneous expansion of trade incentives and exertion of diplomatic pressure is reshaping choices for African governments and institutions, and it has already narrowed the diplomatic space Taiwan occupies in africa. The immediate question for Eswatini is whether it can withstand that squeeze; for the rest of the continent, the new tariff regime makes economic alignment with Beijing easier at precisely the moment political alignment is being redefined.
