During a Lunar New Year’s Day visit to Xingtian Temple in Taipei on Feb. 12, former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) told reporters that, in his opinion, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) should no longer refer to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan pneumonia” (“武漢肺炎”).
He also opined: “If China offers [Taiwan] a [COVID-19] vaccine, the government should not decline the offer out of hand.”
Members of Taiwan’s pan-green camp immediately gave Ma a verbal dressing down for his double standards and apparent tone deafness, given the hostile and intemperate language Chinese officials regularly employ toward Taiwan.
Indulging an enemy is asking for trouble, they said.
In stark contrast, the pan-blue camp doubled down on Ma’s statements, including arch-Sinophile and pro-unification fanatic Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), who accused Tsai of using “discriminatory language.”
The KMT has clearly decided to push the narrative that the phrase “Wuhan pneumonia” should be shoved down the memory hole.
“Wuhan pneumonia” first began to be used as early as last year when a mysterious new coronavirus — which causes contagious diseases like SARS — began to spread from the central Chinese city.
Almost immediately, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda machine sprang into action to eliminate use of the term.
In February last year, the WHO’s leadership group — which has close ties to Beijing — named it “Coronavirus disease 2019,” or COVID-19 for short.
It is important to remember that in China and in international media at the time, the terms “Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan disease” were in common use.
Several days before the WHO officially designated the disease COVID-19, Chinese officials and state media appeared to anticipate the move, and started to refer to the disease using the term.
In Chinese this actually translates as: “new coronavirus pneumonia” (“新型冠狀病毒肺炎”).
Following the discovery of coronaviruses last century, a series of novel coronaviruses began to appear, of which the 2002 to 2004 SARS outbreak is but one example.
Therefore, calling COVID-19 “new coronavirus pneumonia,” as Beijing (as well as Ma, Jaw, Chiang, et al.) would like, is not helpful in differentiating it from other coronaviruses, past, present or future.
Using George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-four as an instruction manual, Chinese state-run media organizations began to systematically tamper with old online news reports, changing references to “Wuhan pneumonia” to “an unidentified coronavirus-related pneumonia.”
At the same time, Beijing demanded that the outside world cease using the term “Wuhan pneumonia,” ostensibly because it was stigmatizing the city of Wuhan and its residents.
In reality Beijing was laying the groundwork for China’s propaganda machine to push its wholly fallacious thesis that the virus spread from multiple countries to evade blame by its own citizens and the outside world for allowing the epidemic to metastasize into a global pandemic.
In the academic and public health arenas, using places to name a disease is a well-established practice that helps differentiate between them. Such names are also much easier to remember than a scientific term.
There is nothing discriminatory about it. For instance, Ebola was named because the infectious disease originated in a village near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Zika virus was first isolated in the Ziika Forest of Uganda.
Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Japanese encephalitis, German measles and African swine fever all provide a historical marker to their origins so people do not forget painful lessons.
The reason that many countries happened upon the same names — “Wuhan pneumonia” or “Wuhan virus” — is because Wuhan is where the virus is believed to have originated. It was also the first city in the world to go into lockdown. There is no discriminatory connotation to the name.
Wuhan-based Chinese writer Fang Fang (方方) kept a diary during the lockdown of the city.
She wrote: “The pain suffered by the people of Wuhan cannot be alleviated by shouting a few slogans.”
In the diary, she also recorded the death of a former classmate.
“Today, my high-school classmates are all grieving the loss of our beloved classmate,” she wrote. “We have always been a positive and upbeat group, but after this, everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet: ‘Those responsible for this tsunami of human suffering must be taken up against the wall and shot.’”
The diary has allowed the outside world a rare glimpse into the tragic suffering of Wuhan’s residents and documents how the authorities initially attempted to cover up the virus, but ended up losing control.
Fang Fang, a well-known writer and former chairwoman of the Hubei Province Writers’ Association, is a well-established figure within China’s officially sanctioned cultural system.
However, after she published her diary with its criticisms of the local authorities’ response to the virus, she was silenced.
Her suppression shone a light on the CCP regime’s guilty conscience and its fear of being found out. The party’s prohibition of the term “Wuhan pneumonia” speaks to the same sense of culpability and terror of being exposed.
After initially covering up the existence of a new, deadly virus that was ripping through Wuhan’s population, the CCP imposed a cruel lockdown, effectively sealing off the city from the outside world. This is the real injustice: the discriminatory treatment of Wuhan’s residents by their own government.
Having created the disaster, the CCP then used its propaganda machine to bury historical truths, obfuscate and deliberately muddy the waters.
Ma’s role in this sordid affair is equally worthy of contempt. By demanding that people stop using the phrase “Wuhan pneumonia,” he is an accomplice to the crime.
Many pan-blue camp politicians have pointed to an executive order signed by US President Joe Biden that prohibits US federal government institutions from using the phrase “China virus” and other discriminatory terms.
However, this is deliberately misleading and a false comparison.
Biden’s executive order is intended to address and put an end to instances of prejudice and racial discrimination within the US toward Asian Americans.
It is Beijing and the WHO’s collusion that caused a pandemic that continues to devastate the globe that has made China a target. Deliberately confusing cause and effect is, of course, a specialty of the KMT and the CCP — it runs in the family.
However, it does not stop there. Taiwan’s pro-China politicians not only want to expunge the term “Wuhan pneumonia” from common parlance, they are also bad-mouthing the government’s procurement of vaccines from countries with advanced biomedical industries and demanding that China’s vaccines, which have questionable safety records, be accepted.
Their blind promotion of Beijing’s “vaccine diplomacy” is designed to do one thing: force Taiwan into Beijing’s suffocating embrace.
In the past year, Taiwan has strained every sinew to effectively keep the virus under control within its borders, and in doing so it has received global acclaim. The key to Taiwan’s success was the government’s high level of vigilance the instant it received intelligence of the Wuhan outbreak.
Taiwanese officials immediately informed the WHO in writing and deployed epidemic prevention measures to get ahead of the situation.
The emergence of the term “Wuhan pneumonia” is based on a naming convention developed over more than a century of epidemiological study and research. It provides continuity with the bitter memories of past outbreaks.
Furthermore, using “Wuhan” in the name connects the virus to the origin of the outbreak, and provides a salutary lesson in the importance of openness, transparency and speed in dealing with an epidemic.
The CCP would rather that people disassociate this link, expunge Wuhan from their memories and in doing so allow the party to shirk responsibility for the global carnage that it unleashed.
People must resist the siren calls of those who falsely and cynically invoke anti-racist dogma and avoid being tricked into dancing to Beijing’s tune.
People must keep posing the question: In whose interest is it to delete the term “Wuhan pneumonia”?
Translated by Edward Jones
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