Former minister of health and welfare Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) on Friday last week said that he had lost the last iota of respect he once had for Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) over the government’s banning Chinese children of Taiwanese-Chinese couples over the age of two from returning to Taiwan amid the COVID-19 pandemic unless they have Republic of China passports.
Yaung made the remark during a public hearing on allowing Chinese students and Chinese children of such couples to return to Taiwan.
His words were in the same vein as the accusations former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) leveled at President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in February, when Ma said that the ban contravened the spirit of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Citing the convention, Yaung said that the right of a child to live with their parents must be protected regardless of nationality, religion or social status.
Ma’s initial criticism could be regarded as picking low-hanging fruit, as the issue of ensuring the welfare of vulnerable minors who are apparently beholden to the dictates of the state is an emotional one.
This does not mean that there is no validity to Ma or Yaung’s criticisms. However, deciding on who can enter the nation at this stage of the pandemic is a complex process, and requires a clearly defined policy to cover a wide range of individual circumstances.
The government has won plaudits for keeping the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths in the nation low.
However, this cannot lead to complacency. It is crucial to remember how tenuous the situation is.
One only need look at Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, where cases have spiked, following a lull in infections, during which time the federal government seemed to have won an impressive victory over the virus.
Singapore, too, was forced to reimpose its “circuit-breaker” lockdowns. It had gotten its initial outbreak under control, even before the WHO had declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.
The Singaporean government attempted to control a subsequent outbreak among migrant workers living in densely populated dorms by implementing stringent limits to the workers’ freedom of movement, but the novel coronavirus still spread into the wider community, to devastating effect.
If the government takes its eyes off the ball even for a minute, or makes concessions to certain groups, however morally persuasive the argument for doing so may be, it risks a spike in infections, which might be difficult to get under control.
Numbers in this context are not mere metrics: They equate to lives.
When it comes to the issue of allowing the children of cross-strait marriages into Taiwan, the government seems to be “damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t.”
Whether one feels Tsai and Chen have made the right call depends on where one places the fulcrum between the rights of the group of children in question and the health of the public as a whole. People would only discern their error if it leads to a disaster.
However, Yaung’s reiteration of the rights of the child being unrelated to their nationality — as opposed to that of one parent — does ring true. The reason Chen gave on July 15 for making the age of two the cut-off point was that “there remains a large likelihood that the child will become Taiwanese,” as nationality can still be decided at that point.
These children do not decide whether they will adopt Taiwanese or Chinese nationality. This aspect of the policy seems like punishing the child for the decisions of their parents, based on arbitrary — and political — reasoning. The government should revisit that point.
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