Reflections | Taiwan’s warning to not drink mainland China’s ‘poison to quench your thirst’ – the story of the phrase recently directed at Honduras
- After Honduras said it would establish formal relations with China, Taipei warned ‘not to drink poison to quench your thirst, and fall into China’s debt trap’
- The phrase comes from a 2,000-year-old Chinese idiom about a child prodigy who saved his uncle from prison
The Central American nation of Honduras dropped a diplomatic bombshell recently, when its president, Xiomara Castro, announced that she had instructed the country’s foreign ministry to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.
Honduras is one of only 14 countries in the world that recognises Taiwan, and under Beijing’s one-China principle, Honduras must sever its ties with Taiwan to establish official relations with China.
In an interview, the Honduran foreign minister said that the decision to switch diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China was informed not by ideology but the “economic benefits” that it would bring to his country.
In response, the authorities in Taiwan warned the debt-ridden Honduran government “not to drink poison to quench your thirst, and fall into China’s debt trap”.
The literal translation of the Chinese idiom that was used is “to drink the zhen to quench one’s thirst”, where the zhen is a mythical bird whose diet of poisonous vipers infused its whole body with deadly venom.