WASHINGTON — She is among the most influential foreign ambassadors in Washington, but she’s technically not an ambassador. She works from a grand estate but cannot live there. Simply flying her flag could cause a diplomatic incident.
This is life in the gray zone for Taiwan’s senior diplomat in the United States, Bi-khim Hsiao, who enjoys powerful insider access but endures a peculiar outsider status.
She speaks almost daily with senior Biden administration officials and is wired into leaders of both parties in Congress. “Taiwan has one of the most effective diplomatic representations in Washington of any country,” said John Bolton, a former national security adviser in the Trump White House.
And yet because the United States does not officially recognize Taiwan as an independent country, Hsiao does not work under the graceful title of ambassador. Instead, she is the Taipei economic and cultural representative. Instead of an embassy, her office is known as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, or TECRO.
Those unwieldy phrases are an outgrowth of America’s 1979 “one China policy,” under which the United States agreed to shift its recognition from Taipei, Taiwan, to Beijing as the legitimate government of China and promised not to formally recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation. China considers Taiwan an illegal breakaway province.
The result is one of Washington’s more contorted diplomatic customs, and one that increasingly amounts to a fiction as Beijing’s growing threats of forcibly reclaiming Taiwan drive Washington and Taipei closer politically, economically and militarily.
Chinese officials watch closely for any deviations from the policy, studying the nature and location of interactions between U.S. and Taiwanese officials to see whether America might be treating Taiwan more like an independent country.
In an interview at Taiwan’s Twin Oaks estate, a sumptuous compound in the heart of Washington, Hsiao acknowledged her difficult balancing act. In a play on the “wolf warrior” label for China’s new breed of aggressive diplomats, she called herself a “cat warrior.”
“Cats can tread on tightropes and, you know, balance themselves in very nimble and flexible ways,” she said.
Hsiao has a quiet, reserved manner, but Beijing sees her as a dangerous agitator. When then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a high-profile trip to Taipei in August, China accused Hsiao of engineering the visit, which prompted Chinese military exercises and pushed U.S.-China tensions to dangerous new extremes.
A Chinese government spokesperson condemned her as “a pawn of the foreign anti-China forces” who was “pushing Taiwan compatriots into a dangerous abyss,” according to Beijing’s China Daily newspaper.
Even as it draws closer to Taiwan, the United States treats its relationship with Taiwan’s representatives carefully. The State Department issues special red-and-blue license plates to diplomats in Washington, but the ones Hsiao and her colleagues are granted carry slightly different markings, omitting the word “diplomat.” When Taiwanese officials visit Washington, Biden administration officials meet them not at the White House or State Department, but at the Rosslyn, Virginia, offices of something called the American Institute in Taiwan — an organization created, funded and staffed by the U.S. government to serve as a middleman. Official letters between the two governments are also passed through the institute.
The U.S. government also prevents Hsiao from living at Twin Oaks, the 18-acre Washington estate that served as the Taiwanese ambassador’s official residence until the United States, following President Richard Nixon’s historic outreach to Beijing, ended official ties with Taipei. Now it, too, operates under a murky status, with Hsiao hosting formal events usually devoid of official national symbols. When a predecessor raised Taiwan’s flag there in 2015, a State Department spokesperson publicly rebuked the act.
Such concerns might seem to pale in comparison with the major arms sales the Biden administration has approved for Taiwan. In December, President Joe Biden signed a defense spending bill that authorized up to $10 billion in military aid for Taiwan over the next five years. But earlier last year, the White House pressed Congress to drop Senate-approved language modifying TECRO’s name to the Taiwan Representative Office. The difference was enough to prompt a formal protest from China’s Embassy in Washington.
At the center of it all is Hsiao, 51. Raised in Taiwan by an American mother and a Taiwanese father who was a Presbyterian minister, Hsiao moved to Montclair, New Jersey, in her teens and attended Oberlin College before earning a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University.
She draws much of her influence from her close relationship with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, who represents Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party and for whom Hsiao once served as spokesperson. In addition, Hsiao counts Bolton and Biden’s top National Security Council official for Asia, Kurt Campbell, as decadeslong friends.
For years, U.S. officials prohibited Hsiao’s predecessors from visiting the White House and the State Department. Such guidelines have relaxed over time, and she now pays regular, if discreet, visits to the West Wing and Foggy Bottom.
She is an undisguised regular on Capitol Hill, as when she sat next to Kevin McCarthy, then the House Republican leader, last summer for a livestreamed discussion by his caucus’s China Task Force. “She really does have the confidence of people here in Washington,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert with the German Marshall Fund who has also known Hsiao for many years.
Seated in an elegant reception hall at Twin Oaks, with a grand piano and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a rolling lawn, Hsiao described her position as “legally unofficial.”
For that, she blames Beijing. “The Taiwanese resent not only being bullied, but we resent being told that we cannot have any friends,” she said.