As Juliet mused in Shakespeare’s tale: “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy … What’s in a name?”
However, offstage or on, names matter, as has been hammered home over the past week as Taiwanese found themselves caught up in a widening global paranoia about Chinese travelers amid the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak, with what their nation is called proving to be their own worst enemy.
Given that the UN, its agencies and many nations consider Taiwan just a province of China, it should have come as no surprise that several nations barred flights to and from Taiwan as part of their efforts to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Thailand, Singapore and South Korea have more confirmed cases of the coronavirus than Taiwan, and the UK on Thursday said that its first national with a confirmed case of the coronavirus had arrived from Singapore, so the absurdity of blocking Taiwan just because of its nomenclature is clear.
Meanwhile, bureaucrats at the WHO continue to damage the organization’s credibility by pandering to Beijing and with their inability to call a rose a rose, or in this case, identify Taiwan as “Taiwan,” and separate from China.
Over the past two weeks, the WHO Novel Coronavirus Situation Report has gone from listing the number of coronavirus cases in Taiwan on the tables of confirmed cases reported by cities, provinces and regions in China as “Taiwan, China,” to “Taipei municipality” to “Taipei” to “Taipei and environs,” while the actual number of local cases was incorrect in one report.
Yet the WHO this week complained that it is not getting accurate data about the number of coronavirus cases from its members, warning that this is hampering efforts to combat the outbreak.
If the WHO wants accurate data, then, as the US and Japanese ambassadors to the UN in Geneva, Andrew Bremberg and Ken Okaniwa, told a meeting of the WHO executive board on Thursday, it needs to talk directly to Taiwan.
Bremberg said it was a “technical imperative that WHO present visible public health data on Taiwan as an affected area and engage directly with Taiwan public health authorities on actions,” while Okaniwa said: “We should not make a geographical vacuum by creating a situation where a specific region cannot join WHO even as an observer.”
Chinese delegate Qi Dahai (齊大海) responded by dismissing concerns for the well-being of Taiwanese — and the rest of the world — as a “hyping-up of the so-called Taiwan issue” and a “waste of our time.”
Qi’s claim that there has been ample cooperation and that the “Chinese central government can say it is very sincere in protecting the health and well-being of Taiwan compatriots” was shown for the lie it is by Beijing’s handling of a charter flight from Wuhan.
Not only did Beijing ignore the list of passengers provided by the Taiwanese government and refuse to allow Taiwanese health personnel to evaluate passengers before they boarded the plane, its Taiwan Affairs Office blamed Taipei for “ignoring the Taiwan compatriots’ interests.”
Dismissing the need for Taiwanese to be included in global health efforts as “hyping up” is callous in the extreme, but no surprise for a regime that has proven to be so deadly to its own people.
It is too bad that there are not more global leaders such as former Norwegian prime minister and WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland, who as head of the WHO during the 2003 SARS outbreak saw it as her responsibility to work with Taiwan to help prevent the spread of that coronavirus.
As the former physician told this newspaper in April 2018: “I was not afraid to make tough decisions on behalf of the WHO. I am not afraid generally.”
As Beijing seeks to weaponize the name “Taiwan,” the world needs more people like Brundtland in positions of authority.
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