I’ve spent nearly two decades on the frontlines across the Taiwan Strait, and one thing is painfully clear: foreign interference doesn’t knock; it walks straight in, wearing a suit, quoting international law and demanding compliance.

Australia is waking up to this. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s 2025 threat assessment didn’t hold back: China is the primary driver of espionage and influence operations on Australian soil. We saw it in the prosecution of a Chinese Australian charged with monitoring faith communities. But the real threat isn’t from the ones who are caught—it’s from the hundreds who aren’t.

Taiwan has been living this for more than 20 years. We’re not a case study; we’re a proving ground. Beijing doesn’t need missiles to reshape the region. It uses law as a weapon—twisting resolutions, weaponising global systems and normalising coercion under a thin veil of protecting sovereignty.

Take United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758. Passed in 1971, it did one thing: recognise the People’s Republic of China as China’s representative at the UN. It said nothing about Taiwan. Yet Beijing has spun it into a legal fiction to bar Taipei from the World Health Organisation (WHO), International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), Interpol and a host of other bodies.

The fallout is real. When global health data skips Taiwan, pandemics gain ground. When aviation safety standards don’t reach the Taipei Flight Information Region (FIR), aviation is at risk.

In August 2022, Chinese military drills triggered unannounced airspace closures in the Taipei FIR—flouting ICAO’s seven-day notice rule. More than 900 flights were disrupted in a single week, including Qantas and Virgin Australia services. Reroutes cost millions, burned fuel and delayed passengers. This year, live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea pushed the envelope further south. One Qantas flight from Sydney to Auckland was delayed four hours because of a live-fire exercise no one saw coming.

This isn’t incidental; it’s deliberate preparation for further—and perhaps more direct—aggression.

At sea, Beijing claims the Taiwan Strait isn’t an international waterway—despite international law saying otherwise. Beneath the waves, Taiwan has had six confirmed incidents of undersea cables cut by shadowy vessels since 2023. Some fly Panamanian flags; others vanish into Chinese ports. Each outage disrupts internet access across the region, including for Australian users. Taiwan also detects 2 million to 3 million cyber intrusions daily, many state-linked.

But we fight back. Taiwan’s whole-of-society resilience isn’t a slogan; it’s the law. It’s drills. It’s tech firms training grandmothers to spot deepfakes. It’s airlines sharing safety data through backchannels because ICAO won’t let us in the room. We comply with global standards not out of courtesy but because lives depend on it.

Australia doesn’t need to start from scratch. Australia already has transparent institutions, a robust civil society, and a press that calls nonsense when it sees it. But it’s very important to connect the dots.

Supporting Taiwan’s meaningful participation in ICAO, WHO, or the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership shouldn’t be seen as a political gesture but rather as risk mitigation. It closes gaps that coercion exploits. It keeps pilots safe, supply chains intact and democracies aligned.

Taiwan and Australia aren’t treaty allies, but we are partners in the region. The Indo-Pacific stays open not because we agree on everything, but because we agree the rules must apply to everyone. Exclude one democracy, and the whole system frays.

Canberra has a choice: treat Taipei’s exclusion from international activities as Beijing’s problem or recognise it as a shared vulnerability.