Despite Covid-19 Success, Taiwan Still Struggles for International Legitimacy

taiwan’s examplary handling of the public-health crisis deepens the complexities of cross-strait relations as Beijing tries to repair the damage of the pandemic to its reputation.

The irony of Beijing’s unrelenting refusal to sanction any international support for Taiwan’s presence in multilateral institutions such as the World Health Organization is that Taipei has emerged from the pandemic as a model of how to handle such a public health crisis, writes James Baron.

That has only deepened the complexities of cross-strait relations at a time when Beijing itself is trying to repair the damage of the pandemic to its reputation.

TWO RECURRING THEMES in Western media analysis of the covid-19 pandemic have been the inherent untrustworthiness of china and the near unparalleled success of taiwan in tackling the disease. strangely, few commentators have expressly connected these strands.

the West, we are repeatedly told, is finally “waking up” to the mendacity of the chinese communist Party (ccp) and the dangers it poses. Yet if Western countries are just beginning to wipe the sleep from their eyes, taiwan has been up and ready to go since daybreak. No one understands the ccp better than taipei. simply put, taiwan operates on the premise that its crossstrait counterparts are inherently untrustworthy. this was a key factor in the rapidity and comprehensiveness with which taiwan President tsai Ing-wen’s administration responded to reports of a strange new virus in late december.

cruel experience has shown that Beijing has no qualms about jeopardizing the lives of its own citizens, let alone those of a country it brands a renegade province. that the rest of the world was unaware that this lack of compunction extended to its own population can hardly be put at taiwan’s doorstep. Over the last two-plus decades, taipei has repeatedly broadcast examples of the threat that the ccp poses to health and safety on an international level. Politically motivated as

these admonishments have often been, they have also coincided with altruistic principles.

the system of integrated rapid-response agencies behind taiwan’s successful handling of covid19 emerged — at least partly — in response to Bejing’s attempts to prevent taiwan attaining observer status at the WHO’S annual World Health Assembly (WHA), beginning in the late 1990s.

An early example of the tangible effects of these obstructions was the 1998 enterovirus outbreak in taiwan that killed 78 people (91 percent of whom were children under the age of five). taiwanese officials criticized the World Health Organization (WHO) for preventing timely international cooperation. the sars crisis of 2002 to 2004, which claimed 73 lives in taiwan (a mortality rate of 10.7 percent, when underlying health conditions are discounted) was a starker case in point. taipei decried a two-month coverup by china and a parallel delay by the WHO — at Beijing’s behest — in providing assistance. Worse: the two-man team that was eventually dispatched was constrained by a purely observational remit. An attempt by the taiwanese to effect that most basic of chinese courtesies — a name card exchange — was rebuffed and, according to a contemporaneous New York Times report, WHO officials snubbed all but designated healthcare professionals.

the Politics of Exclusion

the sars outbreak presented a huge challenge for an inexperienced government. the democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration of chen shui-bian had built its name in opposition to the authoritarian Nationalist (Kuomintang, or KMT) government during the martial law period. the status of an unjustly persecuted victim came naturally. It is unsurprising, then, that one element of the dpp’s campaign to gain WHA admission was to emphasize the unfairness of its ostracism from the world’s leading health policy-setting body, particularly as it resonated with the domestic audience.

“the chen administration, in order to improve its prospects of re-election in 2004, deliberately utilized the threat posed by the sars pandemic to appeal to taiwanese identity,” writes Björn Alexander lindemann in a 2014 case study of taiwan’s WHO bid. “the mobilization of the taiwanese population during the sars crisis indeed benefitted the DPP government in the 2004 elections [as] public discourse shifted... to the consequences of sars and the threat that china posed to taiwan’s security in the run-up to the presidential elections. People were left with the impression that the island had been left on its own and were thus susceptible to the government’s efforts to appeal to taiwanese identity and nationalist sentiments.”

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However, there was always more than one prong to the dpp’s approach, and arguments for taipei’s participation on functional grounds were advanced in tandem with appeals of a more emotive nature. sometimes the line between the two was blurred. One example from the sars period was the resurgence of the virus at taipei’s Hoping Hospital. Having contained the initial outbreak relatively well, in April 2002, the authorities suffered a setback.

“the sars outbreak in the Hoping Hospital in taipei painfully demonstrated the risk posed by the lack of essential real-time information from the WHO, because taiwan realized too late that the sars case definitions published on the WHO web page were lagging behind the latest developments,” writes lindemann, referring to department of Health (DOH) data.2 lindemann quotes former Minister of Health Hsiao Mei-ling as stating that “doctors in the hospital did not identify the first sars case immediately, because not all the criteria for the identification of sars that