China on Tuesday said it has stopped issuing short-term visas for Japanese and South Koreans, in its first retaliatory measure against countries that introduced COVID-19-related restrictions on travelers from China. More than a dozen countries, including Taiwan, introduced such curbs after China last month lifted its “zero COVID-19” policy, and stopped reporting daily case totals for the disease amid a nationwide surge triggered by the abrupt change in disease prevention policy. On Sunday last week, it also opened its border for outbound travelers
Japan and South Korea require arrivals from China, regardless of nationality, to take pre-departure and on-arrival COVID-19 tests. The EU on Wednesday last week “strongly encouraged” its 27 members to implement similar testing requirements, sequence the DNA of samples of SARS-CoV-2 taken from arrivals from China and test wastewater from planes for the virus. Health officials in countries that have introduced testing requirements said they aim to obtain data on China’s COVID-19 situation and monitor potential new variants of the virus, as China does not share such information with the international community. The WHO has repeatedly urged Beijing to share reliable information on its cases, hospitalizations, deaths and real-time genomic sequencing, saying China is still “heavily underreporting” deaths from the disease.
Although reports said that hospitals in China are being overwhelmed, a tally on the Web site of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention yesterday showed that only 37 virus-related deaths had been recorded since the policy change on Dec. 8 last year. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) on Tuesday said Japan and South Korea imposed entry restrictions “in disregard of science, facts and their actual epidemic situation,” calling the rules “discriminatory” against his country. “China firmly rejects this and will take reciprocal measures,” he said. Wang also said that “China’s COVID response policies are science-based, effective and consistent with China’s national realities,” which are guided “by a people-first and life-first philosophy.” China’s measures can “stand the test of history,” he said, urging other states to “make sure their COVID response measures are fact-based, science-based and proportionate.” The pandemic “should not be used as a pretext for political manipulation,” he said.
Despite China claiming that its COVID-19 response is “science-based,” while the measures imposed by other countries are “politically motivated,” its disease prevention policies since the pandemic began in early 2020 suggest that they were guided by political considerations. The international community distrusts China’s official reporting on its COVID-19 situation, and its latest actions do little to change that.
In January 2020, China misled the WHO into believing there is no human-to-human transmission of the then-newly found virus in Wuhan, even though it was to impose a lockdown on the city a week later. It also clamped down on whistle-blowers and hindered an international probe into the origin of COVID-19.
Over the past three years, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has taken pride in the strict enforcement of pandemic policies, for the most part including “zero COVID-19” and its digital surveillance, lockdowns, mass testing and quarantines. Beijing has claimed that its success in suppressing the virus was due to the superiority of “Chinese efficiency,” even as other countries began “living with the virus” after the Omicron variant proved to be hard to contain, but caused less severe illness than previous variants.
Beijing’s policy change left people unprepared for the forthcoming wave of infections. Driven by political calculations, China rejects international vaccines that offer more protection against the virus than its domestic ones, as well as antivirals such as Paxlovid, putting its people at greater risk, especially the elderly who need more protection during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs