Sister cities, strategic gaps: Taiwan’s uneven paradiplomacy in Europe

Paradiplomacy offers Taiwan a viable way to expand engagement with Europe by navigating diplomatic constraints imposed by European states’ One-China policies. But Taiwan has yet to fully utilize the tool.

Key takeaways:

The newly formed sister-city ties between Katowice and Kaohsiung, established on 21 March 2026, are the latest development in a steady flurry of new partnerships that Polish and Taiwanese cities/towns have formed since 2025. Poznań and Gdynia also tied the knot with Kaohsiung, while Łódź pursues relations with Tainan. These developments can be understood through the lens of “paradiplomacy,” defined as the international activities of sub-state actors that may operate alongside, complement, or at times even diverge from central government foreign policy.

With the addition of the Katowice-Kaohsiung link, there are now 33 partnerships between Taiwanese municipalities and European cities, towns, or regions. On the Taiwanese side, the most active cities are Tainan (nine European partners), Kaohsiung (7), Taoyuan (6), and Taipei (6). Hsinchu, Hualien, New Taipei, Taichung, and Taitung also maintain singular ties with local or regional governments in Europe.

On the European side, Poland is the most active, with seven cities (Elblag, Gdynia, Katowice, Łódz, Poznań, Radom, and Warsaw) having partnerships with Taiwanese counterparts. This is followed by Germany, where three municipalities (Dresden, Erzgebirgskreis, and Starnberg) have as many as five ties to Taiwan. Paradiplomatic relations are also found in France (3), Latvia (3), Czechia (2), Lithuania (2), the Netherlands (2), Slovakia (2), Ukraine (2), Belgium (1), Denmark (1), Hungary (1), and Italy (1). The Nordic countries and Southern Europe remain notable gaps in Taiwan’s current paradiplomatic outreach.

For Taiwan, these paradiplomatic ties complement broader outreach efforts by creating an additional channel for international engagement amid constraints in the formal diplomatic system. They can create additional opportunities for engagement with European actors. Sister-city partnerships can facilitate cooperation with European local economies and governance networks through cooperation in areas such as innovation, the green transition, urban planning, or public health. Repeated exchanges and joint initiatives may also help normalize Taiwan’s presence as a capable partner, even if such cooperation remains politically sensitive in certain contexts.

For European partners, the benefits are more pragmatic. Engagement with Taiwanese cities provides access to smart industrial ecosystems and opportunities for investment and knowledge exchange. These partnerships are, therefore, less about symbolic recognition than about practical cooperation in areas where Taiwanese expertise overlaps with local European policy and economic priorities.

In the context of de-risking from China and diversifying supply chains, subnational ties with Taiwan provide low-cost, politically flexible entry points for broader cooperation. They allow European cities and regions to test cooperation with Taiwanese partners through delegation visits, business fora, university partnerships, and pilot projects in areas such as digital innovation, green technologies, and smart-city governance. For Polish, Czech, and German cities and regions, such engagement can also serve more concrete local interests, including integration into semiconductor, ICT, and smart-city value chains, support for industrial upgrading, and the development of links with Taiwanese firms and research institutions.

Paradiplomacy is still underused in EU-Taiwan ties

Despite recent advancements in Poland, paradiplomacy remains an underused tool in Taiwan’s approach to Europe. In Japan alone, Taiwanese municipalities have at least 34 partnerships, while they boast over 100 in the US. The reasons for a slower rollout of these partnerships across Europe are both structural and political.

Unlike in the US, where Taiwanese American community associations, advocacy groups, business networks, and student organizations have at times supported local-level Taiwan engagement, and Japan, where Taiwan-related city ties are embedded in dense civic, cultural, and municipal networks, the Taiwanese diaspora in Europe is smaller, more fragmented, and generally less connected to local political institutions. The mechanisms therefore differ across cases: in the US, diaspora and advocacy networks have played a more visible role, while in Japan, local-level ties are supported by historical familiarity, tourism, civic friendship associations, and municipal exchange infrastructure.

In Europe, Taiwanese communities are relatively small, concentrated primarily in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands. Germany hosts the largest known Taiwanese population, at approximately 8,000 people. While Taiwanese representative offices, usually geared toward broader political, economic, and diplomatic engagement, and cultural associations do play a certain role in outreach, diaspora-led lobbying at the municipal or regional level remains limited.

In this context, business, industrial, and research linkages can increasingly act as alternative drivers of paradiplomacy, compensating for the limited role of diaspora-led advocacy. This is consistent with earlier observations that paradiplomatic engagement is often rooted in functional and economic priorities rather than high politics. For example, TSMC’s planned new factory in Dresden has accelerated city-level partnerships with Taiwanese cities like Hsinchu and Kaohsiung to facilitate talent exchanges and academic cooperation. Such projects create direct incentives for local authorities to deepen cooperation in areas such as workforce development, supply chain integration, and innovation policy, giving the partnerships a clear economic anchor.

Fears of China’s retribution impact developing new ties

At the same time, officials in many European cities operate under the impression that pursuing cooperation with Taiwanese partners may lead to boycotts by Chinese tourists and other forms of Chinese retaliation, which is one reason Edinburgh pre-emptively shelved a friendship agreement with Kaohsiung in 2024. In the midst of Edinburgh preparing to approve a formal friendship arrangement (the precursor to sister-city ties) with Kaohsiung, aimed at deepening commercial, cultural, and innovation cooperation, the Chinese consul general in Edinburgh warned the council that the agreement would “bring about serious consequences” and harm bilateral relations.

At the same time, key local stakeholders, including the University of Edinburgh, the airport, and the chamber of commerce, raised concerns about potential economic fallout, citing risks such as reduced Chinese tourism, declining student inflows, and broader trade and investment repercussions. This response illustrates the extent to which economic relations with China shape local and regional development strategies, particularly in countries with greater economic exposure to the Chinese market. The proposal was ultimately withdrawn from the council agenda, further demonstrating how anticipated, even if largely imagined, economic and political costs can lead municipalities to scale down engagement with Taiwanese partners.

By contrast, other European cities, including Prague, have been more willing to absorb or dismiss such risks. In 2019, the city moved to terminate its sister-city agreement with Beijing over a dispute concerning the “One-China” clause and, in 2020, signed a new partnership with Taipei. The move triggered a series of retaliatory measures from China: Shanghai canceled its agreement with Prague, Chinese authorities blocked or discouraged Czech cultural performances and tours in China, and Chinese officials issued repeated diplomatic warnings to Czech counterparts. Despite these actions, Prague not only maintained but further deepened its engagement with Taiwan, suggesting a willingness to absorb reputational and diplomatic costs in pursuit of a values- and interest-driven partnership. Prague’s ability to sustain this position also reflected a particular local political constellation, relatively limited direct exposure to Chinese economic leverage compared with some British cities, and the symbolic role of Taiwan in Czech debates about democracy, human rights, and authoritarian influence.

A more comprehensive overview of the international ties of Taiwanese cities reveals that it is relatively common for their international partners to maintain relations with Chinese cities simultaneously. A 2020 analysis by CEIAS identified at least 71 such cases worldwide in which Taiwanese and Chinese cities share the same international partners. For instance, Warsaw maintains ties with both Taipei and Harbin, a city in Northeast China, while Slovakia’s Bratislava Self-Governing Region has relations with both Shanghai and Kaohsiung. Notably, none have faced major repercussions from Beijing over their paradiplomatic relations with Taiwanese counterparts.

Alternative approaches can pave the way

Besides formal partnerships, other forms of engagement offer a way forward for Taiwanese municipalities to engage with the world.

Every year, municipal delegations from around the world gather for the Smart City Summit & Expo in Taipei and Kaohsiung, which brings together municipal leaders, companies, and policymakers to facilitate practical cooperation in areas such as digital governance, smart infrastructure, and innovation ecosystems. Crucially, the expo attracts the attention of municipal leaders beyond the formal partners of Taiwanese cities, often serving as the first point of exposure for foreign municipal leaders to Taiwan.

Participation in this kind of expo fosters city-to-city links and often translates into follow-up projects or memoranda at the city level, as seen, for example, in the Old Town Bratislava–Taipei partnership or the aforementioned Katowice-Kaohsiung ties, both of which were negotiated and signed during the trade show.

Another possible pathway is to engage with the world through multilateral inter-city fora such as the Pact of Free Cities, although this has been far less effective so far.

The Pact was established in 2019 by four Central European capitals—Bratislava, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw—to share best practices in urban development and municipal governance, as well as to resist illiberal and populist practices of their respective central governments. Since then, the regional platform has expanded to cover municipalities across Europe, such as Berlin, Paris, Riga, and Vienna, and across North America, including Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, and Chicago. It currently boasts 45 members. In 2021, the Taiwanese cities of Taipei and Taoyuan became the Pact’s first, and so far only, members from East Asia.

However, their participation on this platform remains underutilized, and normative convergence has so far been somewhat limited. From the four outcome documents of the Pact of Free Cities’ annual Summit of Cities, Taipei co-signed one (the Bratislava Declaration in 2024), and Taoyuan did not sign any. Neither city participated in the most recent summit that was held in Bratislava in May 2026. Taipei’s lack of participation is particularly striking, given that it maintains ties to three of the Pact’s four founding cities: Warsaw, Prague, and Bratislava’s Old Town borough.

Nevertheless, Taipei framed its donation to Ukrainian relief efforts, channeled through Warsaw, as a contribution to the Pact of Free Cities. This shows that the platform can be used to connect Taiwan’s city-level diplomacy with broader solidarity initiatives, but such examples remain isolated rather than part of a sustained strategy.

Solidarity with Ukraine, and parallels between Russian aggression of the country with potential future invasion of Taiwan by China, has also sped up engagements between Taiwan and Ukraine. Even if Ukraine’s central government remains wary of official contacts so as not to spur even more Chinese support for Russia, on the subnational level relations are taking off. Taipei and Kyiv signed a cooperation memorandum in 2023, while Lviv and Kaohsiung established ties in 2025. In both cases, the security dimension of cooperation in resisting asymmetric threats from neighboring imperialist powers. Mayors of other Ukrainian cities are also soliciting Taiwanese investment as a contribution to post-war reconstruction, which will likely lead to conclusion of more formal partnerships down the line.

Looking ahead

While Taiwan is off to a relatively good start in building paradiplomatic engagement across Europe, it has yet to fully leverage it. To reach their full potential across Europe, the Taiwanese government and municipalities should focus on three sets of actions:

• Deepening and operationalizing existing partnerships: Taiwan should focus not only on expanding the number of sister-city or sister-region agreements. It should also assess which existing partnerships are active, dormant, or strategically promising, and concentrate scarce resources on those with clear potential for economic, academic, technological, or political follow-up. This could include regular partnership audits, clearer follow-up mechanisms after delegation visits, and more systematic involvement of universities, chambers of commerce, technology firms, and regional development agencies. Without such maintenance, paradiplomatic ties risk remaining symbolic rather than becoming durable channels of cooperation.
• Leveraging existing platforms: A better use of existing mechanisms is key to achieving lasting benefits from paradiplomatic relations with European cities and regions. This means that Taiwan should continue to support and strive for broader participation of European municipal stakeholders at the Smart City Summit & Expo. At the same time, both Taipei and Taoyuan should dedicate more attention and resources to their membership in the Pact of the Free Cities. Other Taiwanese cities, such as Kaohsiung, should also consider joining the framework. The membership offers opportunities to engage with a plurality of cities across Europe (and beyond), thus acting as a potential multiplier for expanding their networks of partnerships. Furthermore, given the Pact’s democracy-oriented background, membership would reinforce Taiwan’s image as a like-minded democratic partner.
• Expanding outreach where state-level diplomacy is limited: While Taiwanese cities should primarily focus on deepening existing partnerships in order to conserve scarce resources, they could also, where capacity allows, explore cooperation with cities and regions in countries where state-level diplomacy remains underdeveloped, such as Portugal, and/or where Taiwan does not maintain a representative office, such as Ukraine. Taiwan’s central government should support such outreach, as city-level ties can serve as precursors to deeper economic and academic cooperation and may also help open additional avenues for political engagement.
• Improving central-local coordination across party lines: Taiwan’s paradiplomacy in Europe would also benefit from better coordination between the central and local governments. While municipalities have their own agency and interests, ensuring broader alignment with central-level foreign policy is necessary. This, however, also requires setting aside the political divide in Taiwan, which has recently operated under hyper-partisan conditions, affecting Taiwan’s foreign and security policy. Transcending this gap is a key precursor to better use of existing partnership networks of opposition-run cities, such as Taipei, as well as more active cities run by government-linked mayors, such as Kaohsiung, ultimately contributing to the goal of expanding Taiwan’s international space through subnational channels.

This text relies on data collected for and is a follow-up to the recent CEIAS paper, Partners in need, partners indeed? Tracking Europe-Taiwan relations amidst global disruption, edited by Matej Šimalčík, Kristina Kironska, and Alfred Gerstl.