One often forgotten area of responsibility for national governments is ensuring the safety of their citizens abroad. Every now and then, we are re-minded of this requirement when natural catastrophes or war send governments scrambling to evacuate their nationals by the boatload, as we saw during Israel's war against Lebanon last year or whenever a credible terrorist threat is made against Western embassies in the Middle East.
How governments respond to threats against the security of their expatriates is largely informed by the threat and risk assessments formulated by various agencies involved in the process.
Those assessments, however, will only be as good as the information on which they are based and in a fluid environment such as the one in which we live today, where goods, information and people transit at unprecedented speed, how agencies obtain the necessary information is largely predicated on effective networks of communication.
Last week news emerged of a 10-day delay in the sharing of information with Taiwan. Beijing delayed sharing information from the International Food Safety Authorities Network -- a branch of the WHO -- with Taipei about contaminated baby corn from Thailand last month. Such a delay raises serious doubts about the body's ability to relay information.
Whether the delay was the result of politics or sheer ineptitude on Beijing's part remains to be determined, but regardless of the reason, this gap represents a threat not only to the security of Taiwanese but of all the expatriates who live in Taiwan.
If, as seems increasingly likely, Taiwan loses its direct access to WHO information and must instead rely on Beijing to obtain it (as Beijing would have it), governments will need to find ways to ensure adequate protection for their own citizens.
No matter the reason for last month's mishap on the contaminated baby corn, foreign governments must do what is necessary to avoid a repeat.
Given China's abysmal track record, such as the SARS outbreak in 2003 or the handful of contaminated food scandals this year, we can expect further gaps from Beijing in the timely and responsible feeding of information to the health network.
Furthermore, as a result of the unresolved crisis in the Taiwan Strait, any new arrangement between the WHO and Beijing that elbows Taipei out of the information loop can only give Beijing an additional weapon with which to pressure Taiwan, one that threatens an entire population.
It could withhold crucial information -- or threaten to do so -- on health matters for political considerations and hold 23 million Taiwanese and tens of thousands of expatriates hostage in the process to achieve political objectives.
Irrespective of their position on the Taiwan Strait conflict, national governments cannot allow Beijing to threaten the safety of their own citizens, neither through incompetence nor for more nefarious reasons like political blackmail.
Failure to build the necessary pressure on Beijing and the WHO to ensure that a situation like the one that occurred last month does not recur would ultimately be a failure by those governments to meet their obligations to their citizens abroad.
It is one thing for Washington, London, Ottawa or Berlin to look the other way when Beijing tramples the rights of Taiwanese, a blind spot that can be explained by self-interest and political realism. But to do so when the very safety of their own citizens is compromised by Beijing is a question of an altogether different nature and one for which foreign nationals should hold their governments accountable.
J. Michael Cole is a writer based in Taipei.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS