Santiago Abascal’s party writes to the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Policy and asks for an explanation of what Pedro Sánchez allegedly said to Xi Jinping about Taiwan.
Taipei’s representative office in Spain has publicly thanked him.
In the background, four trips to Beijing in four years and a diplomatic line that embarrasses part of Europe.

A post on X that made noise

There are times when a single post does what months of parliamentary questions have failed to do: bring an uncomfortable issue to the centre of European political contention.

The Spain-China-Taiwan triangle is the most recent proof of this.

It became starkly so when the official Vox Europa account, on X, published a letter addressed to Kaja Kallas, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, asking for an explanation of the statements Pedro Sánchez’s government allegedly made in Beijing on the Taiwan issue and, above all, demanding that the Spanish president give a transparent account of his repeated trips to China.

The tone of the letter is what one might expect from Santiago Abascal’s party: direct, accusatory, built to make opinion rather than to get a technical response from Brussels.

Yet, the issue raised is real, concrete, and far from marginal.
A few days after the publication of the post,Taipei’s Economic and Cultural Office in Spain – the de facto diplomatic representation of the Republic of China, active in Madrid since 1973 in the absence of official relations – publicly thanked Abascal’s party for bringing the issue to the attention of the European institutions. A thank you that, from a party that is usually cautious in tone, says a lot about Taipei’s level of concern in recent times.

What Beijing claims Sánchez said

The crux of the matter arose on 15 April, during the meeting between the president of the Spanish government and Xi Jinping in the Gran Salón del Pueblo, at the end of Sánchez’s fourth trip to China in four years. In front of the cameras, the two leaders exchanged the customary messages about the rejection of the ‘law of the jungle’ and the common desire to be ‘on the right side of history’. So far, ‘simple’ diplomacy.

The problem came a few hours later, when the official Xinhua news agency released a statement attributing to Sánchez a sentence not uttered at the press conference: ‘Spain firmly adheres to the principle of one China’. The difference, for those who chew on Asian diplomacy, is enormous. The ‘one-China policy’ – a formula used by the European Union, Spain itself, and almost all Western countries – recognises Beijing as the only legitimate government of the People’s Republic but does not pronounce on Taiwan’s sovereignty. The ‘one-China principle’ is something else: it implies that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory and that its eventual ‘reunification’ is legitimate. A change of a few millimetres of language, but with huge geopolitical consequences.

Moncloa, to date, has neither frontally denied nor confirmed this. It has merely referred back to the official position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which continues to speak of ‘policy’ and not ‘principle’. But the communication damage, especially in Taipei, is already done.

Four trips in four years: Sánchez’s Chinese obsession

To best understand Vox’s irritation and Taiwan’s genuine interest in raising the issue, one needs to step back and count. Sánchez went to Beijing in March 2023, when he attended the Boao Forum and met Xi in the 50th anniversary year of diplomatic relations between the two countries. He returned in September 2024, at the height of the trade war between Brussels and Beijing over electric cars, and on that occasion broke the European front by offering Chinese carmakers the possibility of opening plants in Spain. A month later, the Spanish government went from supporting EU duties to abstaining after Beijing opened an investigation into European pork – of which Spain is the leading exporter.

The third trip, in April 2025, took place with Donald Trump having just returned to the White House: the US president had already accused Sánchez of behaving like a ‘member of the BRICS’, linking it to Spain’s reluctance to increase defence spending in the NATO context. And finally, in April 2026, the fourth trip: the most politically charged of all, in the midst of the Middle East crisis and with a Sánchez who claimed the visit as ‘one more step’ in relations with China. For twenty years Spain has presented itself as ‘China’s best friend in Europe’ – a formula coined under previous governments – but with Sánchez that posture has become organic strategy, not just rhetoric.

The numbers partly explain the choice. In 2025 Spain imported goods worth more than 50 billion euros from China, exporting less than 8 billion euros: a crushed trade balance, but compensated for by the arrival of Chinese investments, especially in the electric car and green hydrogen sectors. During his last visit, Sánchez signed a memorandum with Envision Energy for the construction of an industrial park in Spain. The calculation is simple: for Madrid, China is the compensation valve for a ‘tired’ Europe and an unpredictable America.

Taiwan and Spain, a silent relationship

In all this, how does Taiwan stand in its relations with Spain?
In a structural cone of shadow that does not, however, equate to non-existence.

Madrid broke off diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1973, but has maintained substantial channels through the Oficina Económica y Cultural de Taipei, a non-diplomatic representation based at Calle Rosario Pino that functions as a de facto embassy. In recent years, trade between the two countries has grown especially in the fields of semiconductors, green technologies and industrial components: Taiwan is one of the world’s main suppliers of chips, and the European technological transition needs Taipei as much as, if not more than, Beijing.

The delicate point is precisely this. While the European Commission, through Kallas herself, has repeatedly affirmed that the EU ‘opposes any unilateral attempt to alter the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, even by force or coercion’, and has referred to European and Indo-Pacific security as ‘inseparable’, the Spanish trajectory seems to be moving on a parallel track. Not openly on course with Brussels, but certainly softer towards Beijing than the European consensus. Hence the questions that Vox asks Kallas to formally pose to the Spanish government: what has really been said to Xi? And how much weight, in these choices, do short-term economic interests weigh against the Union’s strategic coherence?

The political calculation of Vox

Last but not least, a detail to be considered is that Vox’s letter originates in a patriotic right-wing party that for months has been riding every useful opportunity to wear down Sánchez, from migration policies to judicial investigations involving his family and close associates. Placing the Taiwan issue in this framework is a transparent tactical choice: it serves to shift the front abroad, where the government is most exposed, and it serves to build international credentials – especially after Vox’s open rapprochement with the Trump administration.

As a matter of fact, the merits of the matter remain intact even without the motivation. That Vox Europa’s post set a mechanism in motion is demonstrated by the thanks of the Taiwanese office in Madrid: a diplomatic entity, by definition, does not side with a political party except when it believes its country’s interest is at stake. The signal, from Taipei, is that Sánchez has pulled far too much strings. And that someone is finally saying it out loud.