Taiwan must not rely on China’s so-called goodwill for its WHO bid, officials, academics and social advocates said yesterday in Taipei, urging president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to avoid looking for a compromise with Beijing before moving on important issues such as public health.
At a forum held by the Foundation of Medical Professionals Alliance in Taiwan on the challenges the country will face this year in its attempt to join the world health body, panelists panned Ma’s policy of “cross-strait affairs first, foreign affairs second” as “detrimental” to healthcare in the nation.
“In an international setting, Taiwan and China should enjoy equal footing when engaging in negotiations. However, if the negotiations are held behind closed doors, Taiwan will undoubtedly be negotiating at a disadvantage,” said Jiang Huang-zhi (姜皇池), associate professor of law at National Taiwan University.
He said negotiations with China should be conducted on an open international platform to ensure that the nation’s rights were not being compromised.
Even following Ma’s election victory, China would still bar the nation’s WHO bid unless Taiwan was willing to relent by becoming part of the Chinese delegation or be an “associate member” to China, Jiang said.
Since the Taiwanese people would never agree to the options offered by China, the issue would continue to remain unresolved, he said.
In 2005, China signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the WHO to restrict Taiwan’s involvement in the health body. In the MOU, China agreed Taiwanese medical experts could enjoy “meaningful participation” in WHO-related events.
However, the Department of Health said the nation’s access to those events had not seen any significant improvement since the MOU.
“This is why we are saying meaningful participation is meaningless unless Taiwan can become an observer at the World Health Assembly (WHA),” said Lin Yong-le (林永樂), head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of International Organization.
The WHA is the decision-making body of the WHO and it meets annually to discuss pertinent issues. Since 1997, Taiwan has sought to become an assembly observer, but all attempts have been rejected by Beijing.
Department of Health Deputy Director-General Chen Tzay-jinn (陳再晉) said Beijing has repeatedly failed to make good on its pledge to pass WHO information on to Taiwan in a timely fashion, as indicated in the MOU.
For example, in the case of the recent entrovirus outbreak in China, although the story hit the international media in the middle of last month, China did not officially notify Taiwan of the fatal disease outbreak until four days ago, he said.
Foundation president Wu Shu-ming (吳樹民), who has been championing Taiwan’s WHO membership since 1996, urged Ma to work closely with lobbying groups and heed their suggestions.
“We are able to provide him with valuable suggestions since we have been working on it for over a decade,” he said.
The inspection equipment and data transmission system for new robotic dogs that Taipei is planning to use for sidewalk patrols were developed by a Taiwanese company, the city’s New Construction Office said today, dismissing concerns that the China-made robots could pose a security risk. The city is bringing in smart robotic dogs to help with sidewalk inspections, Taipei Deputy Mayor Lee Ssu-chuan (李四川) said on Facebook. Equipped with a panoramic surveillance system, the robots would be able to automatically flag problems and easily navigate narrow sidewalks, making inspections faster and more accurate, Lee said. By collecting more accurate data, they would help Taipei
TAKING STOCK: The USMC is rebuilding a once-abandoned airfield in Palau to support large-scale ground operations as China’s missile range grows, Naval News reported The US Marine Corps (USMC) is considering new sites for stockpiling equipment in the West Pacific to harden military supply chains and enhance mobility across the Indo-Pacific region, US-based Naval News reported on Saturday. The proposed sites in Palau — one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — and Australia would enable a “rapid standup of stored equipment within a year” of the program’s approval, the report said, citing documents published by the USMC last month. In Palau, the service is rebuilding a formerly abandoned World War II-era airfield and establishing ancillary structures to support large-scale ground operations “as China’s missile range and magazine
STATS: Taiwan’s average life expectancy of 80.77 years was lower than that of Japan, Singapore and South Korea, but higher than in China, Malaysia and Indonesia Taiwan’s average life expectancy last year increased to 80.77 years, but was still not back to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic peak of 81.32 years in 2020, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. The average life expectancy last year increased the 0.54 years from 2023, the ministry said in a statement. For men and women, the average life expectancy last year was 77.42 years and 84.30 years respectively, up 0.48 years and 0.56 years from the previous year. Taiwan’s average life expectancy peaked at 81.32 years in 2020, as the nation was relatively unaffected by the pandemic that year. The metric
A 72-year-old man in Kaohsiung was sentenced to 40 days in jail after he was found having sex with a 67-year-old woman under a slide in a public park on Sunday afternoon. At 3pm on Sunday, a mother surnamed Liang (梁) was with her child at a neighborhood park when they found the man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and woman, surnamed Huang (黃), underneath the slide. Liang took her child away from the scene, took photographs of the two and called the police, who arrived and arrested the couple. During questioning, Tsai told police that he had met Huang that day and offered to