CHINA’S TAIWANESE NEIGHBOURS SKEPTICAL OF THE DICTATORSHIP
Canada should have taken a lesson from the island nation and followed the example
“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” — Albert Einstein
During a recent phone call with a friend who was born and raised in Taiwan and whose parents still live there, we discussed how well the tiny Asian nation off the coast of China has done during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Its economy and schools were never shut down and life goes on essentially like before, except with vigilance against the novel coronavirus. Is it because it’s an island, I wondered?
“That helps,” my friend said. “But the biggest reason is because us Taiwanese are skeptical of everything the Chinese communist government says. We assume that every official piece of information that comes out of Beijing is a lie.”
That skepticism of China’s government has served Taiwan very well. When Canada was defending China during press conferences and boasting about how progressive and caring we were to not shut down our borders to foreign nationals travelling from hot spots, Taiwan was boarding every incoming foreign flight, taking passengers’ temperatures and forcing sick people into mandated quarantine.
Taiwan — an independent democracy that China claims belongs to it — has had only seven COVID deaths in a population of 23.8 million people or a rate of 0.3 deaths per million. As a result of their distrust of the basic dictatorship of China, its economy has not been decimated and public debt has not increased astronomically, like much of the rest of the democratic world.
South Korea, with a population of 51.2 million people has recorded 264 deaths, or five deaths per million, and Singapore has had just 23 deaths from its population of almost six million people, or four deaths per million.
Meanwhile, Canada has had more than 6,240 deaths from a population of 37.7 million or a ratio of 166 deaths per million people — an abysmal record for such a vast country, but directly proportionate to the amount of esteem and unquestioning faith Canadian officials have erroneously placed in China’s communist government.
Sadly, the World Health Organization has led the way with not only blind belief in China but humiliating sycophancy towards it, which includes echoing the People’s Republic of China’s official talking points and praising President Xi Jinping even after it became clear he was withholding information about the virus that originated in Wuhan, China.
Canadian government officials appear to be doing the same thing — namely federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu and Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam. Both have embarrassingly parroted China’s propaganda rather than make decisions based on the best science and information coming out of Taiwan. Using Taiwanese information would have upset China’s totalitarian government — which on Friday threatened to take over Taiwan entirely, similar to its plans with Hong Kong.
On Wednesday, Premier Jason Kenney announced stronger measures to ensure that travellers arriving at the Calgary or Edmonton international airports will not reverse the progress Alberta has made at flattening the COVID-19 curve as our economy starts to reopen. Those measures include all travellers being required to pass through a thermal temperature screen and provide a detailed self-isolation plan after clearing customs and COVID-19 screening by the Canada Border Services Agency.
“Canada should have followed the example of some other jurisdictions like Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea,” Kenney said Wednesday in answer to a reporter’s question.
“Perhaps because of their proximity to China, they knew to be skeptical about frankly the coverup about the nature of the disease when the Chinese government was claiming that there wasn’t really a serious influenza while they were closing the borders of Wuhan to the rest of China. They were allowing Wuhanese travellers to fly to the rest of the world,” said Kenney.
“They seemed much less careful about global health than their own domestic population’s health. And they were even, of course, denying that there was any evidence of human-to-human transmission while arresting and detaining and suppressing scientific whistle blowers who were trying to bring that information to the attention of both the Chinese and international communities,” added Kenney.
“So, in that period — we’re talking here December, January — a number of the neighbouring Asian countries, they knew something was happening that was deeply problematic and so they suspended arrivals from the hot spot, in the case of Taiwan, at least.”
According to The Lancet, China knew as early as Dec. 6 that the novel coronavirus spread human-to-human, hid that information and arrested doctors who talked or wrote about it.
On Jan. 29, Tam refused to require quarantine measures on travellers from hot spots, worrying that might “stigmatize” China. She then praised China for its response to the virus. By this time, it was well known that China had been withholding information about the virus.
Fast forward to April 4.
Hajdu chastised a journalist who asked whether the WHO’S data could be trusted if China’s information was inaccurate. It was a legitimate question, but Hajdu tried to shame the reporter for “feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet.”
Surely Canada’s federal government has learned by now not to trust China and the WHO, right? Wrong.
On Monday, International Development Minister Karina Gould told the CBC host of Power & Politics, Vassy Kapelos, that she didn’t think it was the WHO’S role to be more questioning of China.
Our federal government doesn’t seem to have learned that some healthy skepticism of totalitarian authorities is, well, healthy. The sooner the whole world learns to follow the lead of Taiwan and assume that China’s reflex response to anything even remotely embarrassing to the state is to lie, the safer we’ll all be.