Online registration for this year’s World Health Assembly (WHA) has ended and Taiwan did not receive an invitation to the global summit. The health rights of Taiwanese are being held hostage by China’s aggression.
The WHO constitution vows to ensure that people around the world have access to the highest standards of healthcare. Taiwan has long made considerable contributions in terms of material assistance, vaccination programs and expertise in disease prevention and health security around the world, and its health system is widely acknowledged as excellent.
Taiwan has also played a major role through its efforts in Africa and throughout the world in providing medical treatment without borders.
It is an exemplar of global health and provider of medical treatment.
The only party not willing to recognize this is China.
Taiwanese will never forget how during the SARS epidemic in 2003 Chinese representative to the WHA Wu Yi (吳儀) insisted that Taiwan had no need to enter the WHO, or how China’s permanent representative to the UN, Sha Zukang (沙祖康), said to Taiwanese reporters: “Who cares about what you have to say?”
When China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) said “no one China principle, no WHA,” Taiwanese were left under no illusion about how unreasonable Beijing was going to be.
Taiwan and Hong Kong had been left unprepared during the initial SARS outbreak — as had the rest of the world — because China tried to keep its cases under wraps. As more cases were reported, fear spread among the public, and the government and healthcare professionals were left to fight it head-on. Many people, including nurses, perished as a result.
Beijing has repeatedly tried to capitalize on the situation by blocking direct communication of vital information from the WHO to Taiwan, insisting that all information and assistance go through China. At the same time, China has told the international community that there are excellent cross-strait medical exchanges and that it will provide Taiwan with any assistance it needs.
This led the US secretary of health and human services to criticize China for blocking Taiwan’s participation in the WHO, saying that medical treatment should have no borders.
China’s insistence on political interference in matters of healthcare and preventing Taiwan from participation in governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as political and humanitarian organizations, has essentially isolated Taiwan, and the international community has started to lose patience with Beijing’s unreasonable stance.
Nobody would say that cross-strait relations have gone smoothly since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office last year, but room for goodwill remains on both sides.
The WHA is an important indicator of goodwill, and Tsai has been giving interviews to the international media and taking to Twitter to explain the importance of Taiwan’s participation in the WHA in the hopes of getting an invitation.
She understands cross-strait relations and belongs to the practical arm of the Democratic Progressive Party. China wants Tsai to complete her “test paper” on cross-strait relations, but if it also wants to act in a manner befitting a major nation, it will need to complete its own test paper on the WHA.
Beijing needs to understand Taiwanese resolve when it comes to access to healthcare and not underestimate the gravity of the situation. If it fails this test, it will drive Tsai and Taiwanese to extremes.
Neither the government nor ordinary Taiwanese will give up on this issue, and Beijing really does not want to have this driving a wedge between the two sides, pushing Taiwan away.
In a stark reminder of China’s persistent territorial overreach, Pema Wangjom Thongdok, a woman from Arunachal Pradesh holding an Indian passport, was detained for 18 hours at Shanghai Pudong Airport on Nov. 24 last year. Chinese immigration officials allegedly informed her that her passport was “invalid” because she was “Chinese,” refusing to recognize her Indian citizenship and claiming Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. Officials had insisted that Thongdok, an Indian-origin UK resident traveling for a conference, was not Indian despite her valid documents. India lodged a strong diplomatic protest, summoning the Chinese charge d’affaires in Delhi and demanding
The wrap-up press event on Feb. 1 for the new local period suspense film Murder of the Century (世紀血案), adapted from the true story of the Lin family murders (林家血案) in 1980, has sparked waves of condemnation in the past week, as well as a boycott. The film is based on the shocking, unsolved murders that occurred at then-imprisoned provincial councilor and democracy advocate Lin I-hsiung’s (林義雄) residence on Feb. 28, 1980, while Lin was detained for his participation in the Formosa Incident, in which police and protesters clashed during a pro-democracy rally in Kaohsiung organized by Formosa Magazine on Dec.
Watching news footage of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with their counterparts across the Taiwan Strait, I could not help but feel a profound sense of temporal displacement. As a member of the generation born after the lifting of martial law and raised under modern civic education, I truly want to ask the KMT: “Do you not see who the true villain is?” In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party used a bloody civil war to drive the KMT into exile in Taiwan. In the decades that followed, it has sought to completely erase the existence
With the Year of the Snake reaching its conclusion on Monday next week, now is an opportune moment to reflect on the past year — a year marked by institutional strain and national resilience. For Taiwan, the Year of the Snake was a composite of political friction, economic momentum, social unease and strategic consolidation. In the political sphere, it was defined less by legislative productivity and more by partisan confrontation. The mass recall movement sought to remove 31 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators following the passage of controversial bills that expanded legislative powers and imposed sweeping budget cuts. While the effort
RSS