In the meeting between Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
As members of the Foundation of Medical Professionals Alliance, a non-governmental organization (NGO) spearheading the advocacy of Taiwan's WHO entry bid, we firmly oppose Taiwan's WHO participation being based unrealistically on China's "consent and help." The reasons are three-fold:
First, if we were willing to make concessions to join the WHO with China's "consent," we could have long since become a member. According to chapter three of the WHO's constitution, there can be three types of WHO participants: member, associate member and observer.
Full membership is open to members of the UN. Associate membership is open to colonial or self-governing territories. As for observership, there is no standard criteria -- observers can be a sovereign nation, a quasi-sovereign nation or an NGO.
From Beijing's perspective, Taiwan is a province of China; therefore, Taiwan can be admitted to the WHO only if China files an associate membership application on Taiwan's behalf, or if individual Taiwanese medical professionals join China's WHO delegation. But this would relegate Taiwan to the position of being a colony of China.
Even the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region under China's "one country, two systems" policy is no more than an associate member, so if Taiwan accepts China's conditions, its status will be degraded to that of Hong Kong.
Taiwan, after all, has a full-fledged governmental health department, which has the ability to exercise public power. It is not an NGO. And even if Taiwan were to enter the WHO as an NGO, its troubles would be far from over, as China may continue to raise obstacles and undermine Taiwan's status as a sovereign nation in cases where public power is used to intervene in international health issues.
Second, health statistics for each side of the Taiwan Strait are quite different. Taiwan and China have been separated for more than a century, and there are tremendous cross-strait divergences.
China's overall health system performance ranks 144th among 191 WHO member states. Therefore, joining the Chinese delegation to the WHO would not satisfy Taiwanese people's healthcare needs. Not to mention that in tackling an outbreak, there would surely be no time for Taiwan to wait for Beijing to release WHO information -- which has to pass through several layers of bureaucracy.
Third, yielding to China's conditions to facilitate Taiwan's WHO bid would be no different than endorsing China's lies at the WHO over the past years. Since Taiwan's initial advocacy in promoting its WHO participation, China has stood by the falsehood that it is helping Taiwan in many medical fields. We want to ask, when did China earmark any of its healthcare funds for Taiwan? Which of Taiwan's health research projects was funded by China?
In sum, Taiwan's WHO entry bid must not become a tool of cross-strait political rivalry. Rather, it should be the basic right of the 23 million Taiwanese people. If Taiwan joins the WHO on the premise of China's consent, Taiwan's healthcare contributions and achievements will all be taken by China as its own.
Wu Shuh-min is president of the Foundation of Medical Professionals Alliance.
TRANSLATED BY LIN YA-TI
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