The “Wuhan pneumonia” outbreak has become a pandemic, but many countries have yet to come to grips with the worsening severity of this medical crisis. Historian Robert Peckham has studied how the ecology of deadly diseases has changed from the late 19th century until today and, in his 2016 book titled Epidemics in Modern Asia highlights the intrinsic link between global connectivity and emerging infections. The frequency of outbreaks — from SARS in 2003 to swine flu in 2009 and today’s COVID-19 — and their rapid rate of transmission owe much to globalization. Better and cheaper transportation and communications technology have empowered international aviation, shipping and railroad networks, contributing to mobility — both people and commodities — and popularizing tourism. Yet, the institutional drivers and mechanisms propelling globalization have made the world “flat” — to borrow from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman — and spread the pandemic in a short period. In reaping the material benefits of globalization, people often overlook the invisible risk of emerging infections, which can spread across continents, affecting people in vulnerable conditions and destabilizing economies worldwide. Many nations have invoked the vocabulary of war to characterize their struggle against the coronavirus, the archenemy of humankind. As the first epicenter of the pandemic, China mobilized all of its medical and bureaucratic resources to confront what President Xi Jinping (習近平) called a “people’s war” against COVID-19, echoing mass health movements and social programs of the Mao Zedong (毛澤東) era. The mighty Chinese Communist Party state relied on its longstanding system of urban and rural neighborhood surveillance to restrict mobility. Local party cadres and police officers set up roadblocks on major roads and at public squares, guarding the entrances to government offices, medical facilities, schools and apartment buildings. These officials continually checked temperatures, disinfected residences and stopped outsiders from entering their territory. This combination
On Sunday, the WHO secretariat issued a statement saying: “The question of Taiwanese membership in WHO is up to WHO member states, not WHO staff.” The statement also mentioned that the WHO has been working closely with Taiwan on the COVID-19 pandemic through the establishment of the Taiwanese International Health Regulations Point of Contact, the Taiwanese Field Epidemiology Training Program and the participation of two Taiwanese public healthcare experts in the Global Research and Innovation Forum, organized by the global body in February. According to the WHO’s constitution, the secretariat indeed has no right to decide the membership of any country, but as the WHO is the leader of global health, it has a responsibility to take a neutral and professional stance toward Tawain to facilitate its full participation in the world body. The statement is encouraging in that the WHO distinguishes between Taiwan and China, as Taiwanese membership has nothing to do with Chinese membership. As UN Resolution 2758 and Resolution WHA25.1 state, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the only legal government of China, but they do not claim that Taiwan should be represented by the PRC under the UN system. Although the WHO secretariat is not entitled to make decisions on Taiwanese membership, it does have a responsibility to provide an opportunity for a fair discussion of this issue. In the the case of East Germany in 1968, West Germany, who was already a WHO member, used the Hallstein Doctrine to ensure that it had the exclusive right to represent the entire German nation. Consequently, when then-WHO director-general Marcolino Gomes Candau received a membership application from East Germany, he took two actions: First, he put the application on the World Health Assembly’s (WHA) agenda for discussion with the WHO constitution and related rules of procedure as a reference for all member states. Second,
Former premier Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村) — who died on Monday at the age of 100 — always gave people the impression of being a “military strongman.” When his son Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) was elected Taipei mayor at the end of 2006, he excitedly told his father, who had served as the chief of the general staff: “Chief, I just took the hill.” Apart from his public image as a military leader, it seems that he was also chief of staff at home. Born in 1919, Hau spent most of his life in the military. Upon graduating from the Republic of China Military Academy, better known as the Whampoa Military Academy, he began his military career as an artillery officer in 1937 and retired as a four-star general. After a military career spanning 53 years, he hung up his uniform and put on his suit, turning from an officer into a civilian. In 1990, he was appointed premier. He had held a commander’s role for many years, and had served as a top military and political aide to then-president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), which is perhaps why he always acted sternly and resolutely. Hau served as commander-in-chief of the army for three-and-a-half years before serving as chief of the general staff for eight years. Serving as a military leader for nearly 12 years gave him great decisionmaking power in the armed forces during the latter part of Chiang’s presidency. Due to differences in their viewpoints on military and political issues, Hau and Chiang’s successor, Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), turned from close friends to mortal enemies, with their factions haunting the internal workings of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). In 1993, Hau tendered his resignation as premier under internal pressure from Lee and external pressure from the opposition camp. With his connections inside the party, he was elected one of the KMT’s
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Gail LeBoeuf makes an unlikely climate justice campaigner. Although the 67-year-old resident of Gramercy, a small town in southern Louisiana by the banks of the Mississippi River, has been fighting against local pollution for the past few years, she spent most of her career working at an area plastics manufacturer. “These plants just kept popping up, one after another, built by these billionaires who decided they just want to make money — so they come into these little river parishes and sweep everyone else aside,” she said. On a marshy roadside, facing a sea of sugarcane fields, she pointed toward the horizon, where the latest polluting plant in this heavily polluted region of the US — known locally as Cancer Alley — is due to be built. Named the Sunshine Project, the planned plastics manufacturing complex, a project of the Taiwan-based Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) through its subsidiary FG LA LLC, has become a focal point in the fight against industrial pollution in Saint James parish and the surrounding region. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality in January granted the Sunshine Project a final set of permits, allowing construction of the complex’s 14 separate plants to begin. Saint James parish neighbors Saint John the Baptist parish, home to the most toxic air in the US. Local campaigners such as LeBoeuf have been saying for years that the cocktail of new pollutants — including the cancer-causing compounds ethylene oxide, styrene and benzene — creates an intolerable risk to local health. In District 5 of Saint James parish — 26,700 hectares of land — there are eight industrial plants operating, and the new project is to occupy 931 of those hectares. The Sunshine Project would not only be a major contributor to local toxic pollution, but would also be a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. The department has
The world’s news headlines have been horrifying: Vital equipment is in short supply, forcing doctors to make battlefield decisions about who lives and who dies; long lines of sick people wait in vain for a test or a hospital bed; empty businesses, stores, bars and restaurants are bringing local economies the world over to a grinding halt; and there has been a grim accounting of which countries are hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the US surging ahead of China, home to the original outbreak. In Europe, the pandemic has hit especially hard in Italy, which has been on national lockdown since March 9 in an attempt to slow the spread of the coronavirus. As of yesterday, Italy had reported 115,242 confirmed cases of COVID-19. At least 13,915 Italians, mostly in the northern Lombardy region, had so far died of the coronavirus. Milan, the regional capital, is more than a mainstay of Italy’s economy. The once bustling city is inextricably linked to the European project and is a crucial driver of the European economy as a whole. Yet, as the death toll rises and the region sees transmission rates higher than anywhere else on the continent, the EU and its member states have been slow to step up in any meaningful way and show solidarity with their ailing neighbor. Instead, EU member states have closed borders and turned inward. Italy’s plight was made worse by the border closures, which cut off much-needed supplies and medical equipment. Governments have engaged in petty squabbles, appearing more concerned about their own economic advantage. Representatives of some northern European countries have appeared to challenge Italy’s economic decisions, and seem to care more about knowing how Italy plans to pay back debts than they do about the death toll and economic downturn. At a time when the continent, and indeed the
Burger King Taiwan on Wednesday last week posted an update on Facebook advertising a new “Wuhan pneumonia” (武漢肺炎) home delivery meal, catering to customers hankering for a Whopper, but who wished to avoid visiting one of its outlets. “Wuhan pneumonia” is the term commonly used in Taiwan to describe COVID-19. Beijing has been waging an extensive propaganda campaign against the use of the words “Wuhan” or “China” in reference to the novel coronavirus, calling it racist and discriminatory. Meanwhile, Chinese officials have claimed that the coronavirus might have originated in the US. The intention is obvious: to distract attention from the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up and epic mismanagement of the outbreak. Burger King China on Sunday posted an apology on Sina Weibo (it could not post on Facebook as the social media site is blocked in China). “Burger King Taiwan Region used the phrase ‘Wuhan pneumonia’ in a post on Facebook. Although Burger King China and Burger King Taiwan Region are separate companies, we would like to express our anger at the inappropriate language,” it said. Burger King Taiwan then decided to remove its post and substituted any previous mention of “Wuhan pneumonia” with “novel coronavirus.” Furious Taiwanese immediately plastered the page with a torrent of invective. The BBC on Thursday last week published a report that quoted the mother of a British woman who was quarantined in Taiwan. The mother claimed that her daughter was being kept “in prison-like conditions” in a “filthy” room with no hot water and nowhere to wash her clothes. Taiwanese expressed their anger on social media and it was not long before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was pressed into action. The ministry sent the BBC a lengthy rebuttal, which was added to the report on the BBC News Web site. Several hours later, photographs showing a spotless room and a wide, airy balcony also
Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force Shaanxi KJ-500 airborne early-warning aircraft and Shenyang J-11 fighters on March 16 conducted a nighttime exercise in the waters southwest of Taiwan and, in doing so, came close to the nation’s air defense identification zone. Three days later, the PLA Navy’s fleet for Gulf of Aden escort mission sailed north in the Pacific off Taiwan’s east coast via the Miyako Strait on its way home. Meanwhile, the US carried out freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea and assembled the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group with the Expeditionary Strike Group to conduct drills in the region, including EP-3E Aries reconnaissance aircraft flying near southern China and Hong Kong several times. The clouds of war seem to be gathering over the waters extending from the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea. Situated in the eye of the storm, Taiwan needs to pay serious attention to China’s and the US’ muscle-flexing, and try to understand if these actions are pre-war mobilizations or just normal training operations. The US military is conducting freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea to show that China’s territorial claims in the region contravene the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Such naval displays of force are routine and a continuous deployment aimed at achieving political goals, so it is not a question of pre-war mobilization. The Roosevelt strike group and the expeditionary strike group led by the USS America, an amphibious assault carrier, were only conducting a high-intensity anti-airborne and sea-control joint-force exercise under a multithreat scenario. In October last year, the USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group and the USS Boxer amphibious ready group also met in the South China Sea to carry out similar exercises, so there is no need to make a fuss over it. However, the US
Barely a month ago, China was in the grip of COVID-19. Thousands of new infections were confirmed every day. Hospitals were overwhelmed. People were dying by the hundreds and they could not leave their homes. The draconian lockdown seems to have worked — China’s outbreak appears to be under control — but China’s leaders are apparently ignoring the outbreak’s most essential lessons. A review of their handling of the crisis bears this out. Upon learning of a new coronavirus that had emerged in Hubei Province’s Wuhan, local authorities’ first instinct was to suppress the information. Police reprimanded whistle-blowers such as the Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang (李文亮), who subsequently died of the disease. (Wuhan police have apologized to Li’s family.) This should have motivated Chinese leaders to weigh the costs of censorship and reconsider the appointment of unqualified party members to key public health positions. The head of the Hubei Provincial Health Commission, dismissed during the crisis, had no medical training or experience in public health. Moreover, some other nations, especially Taiwan and Singapore, managed to contain the coronavirus without incurring the high costs that China did when it placed at least 760 million people under varying degrees of residential lockdown. China’s leaders should be looking to these nations for lessons on a smarter crisis response. However, far from learning from past mistakes, China’s leaders are trying to cover them up. As virtually the entire global economy effectively shuts down to contain the China-born virus and deaths in Italy — the pandemic’s new epicenter — exceed 13,000, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shifted its propaganda machine into high gear, as it aims to change the narrative of the crisis. At home, this has meant touting the CCP’s leadership in mobilizing the nation to “win the war” against the coronavirus. It has also meant encouraging the spread on Chinese
Italy, Spain, France, the UK and the US are all depending on social distancing to fight COVID-19 and have fallen into terrible situations, with mounting positive cases and many deaths. Social distancing might flatten the curve, so that the peak is not so high that hospitals are overwhelmed with patients, the problem is that the pandemic could extend further into the future, hurt the economy more and become unbearable for society. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Singapore have controlled the spread of COVID-19, and the main reason is that most Asians wear masks. It can be illustrated as follows: If someone contracts the coronavirus and wears a mask when they go out, the chance of spreading the virus would be greatly reduced to about 20 percent. When others wear masks, their chance of catching the virus would also be about 20 percent. The probability of transmitting the disease becomes 4 percent, even if the masks have only 80 percent efficiency. With fewer people contracting the disease, health departments would be able to implement tracking and isolation solutions. Unfortunately, in Western culture, people only wear masks when someone is sick, but many contracting the coronavirus show no symptoms and when they do feel sick, they do not wear a mask so that they do not attract strange looks, and also because they are not accustomed to wearing one. The coronavirus comes from someone’s nose or mouth, and then enters someone else’s nose or mouth; therefore, masks can do a good job of blocking transmission. Hands can also easily touch coronavirus droplets, and wearing a mask prevents people from touching their nose and mouth. Under US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, people should only wear masks if a health professional recommends it, but not everybody has to wear one. The true reason is that the US does not have enough masks
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Diplomats returning from overseas postings do not usually receive special attention at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a vast government bureaucracy with thousands of staff, but when Zhao Lijian (趙立堅), a diplomat known for his pugnacious social media presence, finished a posting in Pakistan in August last year, he received an enthusiastic welcome in Beijing. A group of young admirers at the ministry gathered at his office to cheer his return, two people familiar with the matter said. That admiration was fueled in part by a Twitter spat he had engaged in a month earlier with Susan Rice, who was national security adviser to former US president Barack Obama. Each accused the other of being “ignorant” and a “disgrace.” Now a ministry spokesman, Zhao has come to represent a new generation of diplomatic hawks in China, challenging the restraint that long characterized the country’s engagement with the world, said a dozen current and former ministry officials and government researchers who spoke with Reuters. Their emergence has caused a rift with the old foreign policy establishment, amid worries that increasingly assertive rhetoric could put the country on a dangerous collision course with powers like the US, they said. The shift followed instructions that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) issued diplomats in a memo last year, calling on them to show more “fighting spirit,” two people with direct knowledge of the matter said. “This is the first time since 1949 that the ‘new hawks’ have the power to reshape China’s diplomatic policy,” said Qin Xiaoying (秦曉鷹), a former director of the Chinese Communist Party international propaganda department and a researcher at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies in Beijing. Driving the shift is the widespread feeling among many Chinese that the US wants to contain the nation’s rise. Aggressive pushback by diplomats on issues that provoke
Capitalism is facing at least three major crises. A pandemic-induced health crisis has rapidly ignited an economic crisis with yet unknown consequences for financial stability, and all of this is playing out against the backdrop of a climate crisis that cannot be addressed by “business as usual.” Until just two months ago, the news media were full of frightening images of overwhelmed firefighters, not overwhelmed healthcare providers. This triple crisis has revealed several problems with how we do capitalism, all of which must be solved at the same time that we address the immediate health emergency. Otherwise, we will simply be solving problems in one place, while creating new ones elsewhere. That is what happened with the 2008 financial crisis. Policymakers flooded the world with liquidity without directing it toward good investment opportunities. As a result, the money ended up back in a financial sector that was (and remains) unfit for purpose. The COVID-19 crisis is exposing still more flaws in our economic structures, not least the increasing precarious nature of work, owing to the rise of the gig economy and a decades-long deterioration of workers’ bargaining power. Telecommuting simply is not an option for most workers, and although governments are extending some assistance to workers with regular contracts, the self-employed may find themselves left high and dry. Worse, governments are now extending loans to businesses at a time when private debt is already historically high. In the US, total household debt just before the current crisis was US$14.15 trillion, which is US$1.5 trillion higher than it was in 2008 (in nominal terms), and lest we forget, it was high private debt that caused the global financial crisis. Unfortunately, over the past decade, many countries have pursued austerity, as if public debt were the problem. The result has been to erode the very public-sector institutions that we need to
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) on Sunday posted a video on Facebook to tout his determination to reform the party, dressed as renowned military strategist Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮) of China’s Three Kingdoms Period, but armed with a tablet computer and manipulating digital data projected in front of him. It was part of Chiang’s attempts to overhaul the party’s image, to appeal — albeit in a clumsy and patronizing way — to a younger generation of voters, who he believes are instrumental to transforming how the party is seen by the electorate. In another Facebook post, Chiang said that the KMT used to be very young, and that it does not necessarily need to be associated with old people and outdated ideas. It is true that the KMT used to be very young, but it was not young in Zhuge’s day. It would not exist for another 17 centuries after he died. The association, of course, was an attempt to tie the party to a recognizable motif representing traditional Chinese culture. Chiang is clearly signaling this linkage. Do not expect a change to the party’s name or its connections with China under his watch. The juxtaposition of the tablet computer was obvious enough. Chiang wants more input from younger party members, but if he gets it, he would have to act on it. It cannot result only in superficial changes to the party’s image. If he hopes to achieve substantial change with help from a younger generation, and not elicit a backlash from the party’s old guard, he needs the kind of strategic genius that Zhuge himself would have envied. He is also going to have to move quickly. He won the chairmanship in a by-election after former chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) fell on his sword to take responsibility for the party’s defeats in the
Chinese government data obtained by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post show that the first known case of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, can be traced back to Nov. 17 last year, and that at least 381 people had caught the disease by Jan. 1, which does not match officially released figures. These revelations prove that accusations that Chinese authorities concealed the outbreak are not baseless. After the outbreak in Wuhan, COVID-19 quickly spread across China. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) realized that it could no longer conceal the disease, it decided to seal off Wuhan and the whole of Hubei Province. About 5 million residents reportedly left the city when they heard about the outbreak, and this is the main factor that caused the virus to spread within China. Unfortunately, the leaders of the WHO, who seem to have been bought off and co-opted by China, repeatedly lauded the measures Beijing took to contain the outbreak, saying that it was not serious and that people should not worry. Taking the WHO at its word, numerous countries did not take necessary preventive measures. This allowed the disease to spread and become a global pandemic. The world has been thrown into panic, with factories, shops and markets closed down. Work and school have been suspended in many parts of the world. Towns and cities have been closed off, and many countries have sealed their borders. The COVID-19 outbreak has grown into one of the worst disasters the world has ever seen. Shockingly, the CCP, for unspoken political motives, concealed the truth about the outbreak, while the WHO prioritized keeping the world in the dark. Now that the outbreak has evolved into such a huge disaster, they are trying to push the blame onto others. China has gone so far as to use spurious arguments to falsely claim that the
“In war: resolution; In defeat: defiance; In victory: magnanimity; In peace: goodwill,” — former British prime minister Winston Churchill. US President Donald Trump says the US is fighting a war on “an invisible enemy — the war is against the virus.” He sees himself as “a wartime president,” implicitly invoking images of former US presidents Franklin Roosevelt during World War II or George W. Bush after Sept. 11, 2001. War is an apt description of the national mobilization effort being waged in the US against the coronavirus pandemic by the president, governors, local officials and public health community. However, the outbreak has shown that the US and the Western world are under attack by an adversary that is quite visible. The People’s Republic of China, with reckless disregard for the consequences, initially refused to take the necessary actions to halt the outbreak of COVID-19. The unresolved question is whether the global spread of the virus resulted exclusively from the Chinese Communist Party’s incompetence, stubborn bureaucratic rigidity and inclination to evade the truth, qualities it has displayed in previous epidemics. Further intelligence work might reveal a possible connection to other contemporaneous facts. China’s Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, also is the location of at least two Chinese government biomedical research laboratories. One was established by Charles Lieber, an American who heads Harvard University’s chemistry and chemical biology department. He funded the project with a US grant, and was indicted by the US Department of Justice for hiding his China connections. At the same time, two Chinese academics were arrested in Boston, one for violating US law by not disclosing her involvement with the Chinese government, and the other for stealing 21 vials of biological materials and attempting to smuggle them to China. Even if those criminal deceptions and thefts of intellectual property are purely coincidental and unrelated to the
The COVID-19 pandemic is spreading all over the world, sowing fear and throwing societies into disorder. However, this crisis has not stopped China from dispatching groups of warplanes to fly around the edge of Taiwan’s airspace and carry out “targeted” military exercises. Despite the aggressive nature of these incidents, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Sz-huai (吳斯懷) said the fly-bys should not be considered provocative if the planes only fly around Taiwan’s airspace and do not intrude into it. Rather than reconsidering these remarks, the retired general has continued to make arguments along the same lines. He said that the government should consider whether it really needs to tell the public about every incident involving the Chinese military, instead of keeping quiet to avoid causing unnecessary anxiety. Wu’s comments show that he lacks a sense of crisis about national security and is not well-versed in military strategy in the Asia-Pacific region. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been investing more and more each year in its military exercises simulating an invasion of Taiwan. This shows that China’s ambition to launch a military attack on Taiwan has never changed. In October 2016, Chinese diplomat and former UN deputy secretary-general Sha Zukang (沙祖康) stated that if Taiwanese authorities declared independence, the PLA would land on Taiwan the moment they did so, and that China would finish the job at any cost. At the 2018 annual conference of China’s daily Global Times, retired PLA lieutenant general Wang Hongguang (王洪光), who until his retirement in December 2012 was deputy commander of the Nanjing Military Region, said that war could break out across the Taiwan Strait around this year, and that if it did, the PLA could take over Taiwan within 100 hours. President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) government has adopted new policies regarding China’s buildup of its navy and air force, its repeated excursions
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Everything is connected. It is hard to imagine right now that, just weeks ago, the truism of ecological politics was treated as hippy nonsense by mainstream politics. Announcing the statutory review of the commonwealth’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act in October last year, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government pitched it as an opportunity to weaken the laws of former Australian prime minister John Howard’s era even further and make it easier still for environmentally destructive projects to be approved. Regardless of clear statements from scientists and strong advocacy by campaign groups, it looked like it would get away with it because, back then, everyone was still living in the age of disconnection, when the environment and the economy could be seen as separate things, in competition with each other. Then the Australian summer arrived, delivering one after the other two massive wake-up calls. In the age of consequences, with the climate crisis and a deadly pandemic bearing down on the globe, it is impossible to pretend that everyone is separate from one another and from the natural world. A pandemic, more than almost any other phenomenon, shows that all lives are inextricably intertwined, now and forever. It brings into sharp focus the impossibility of trying to keep economics, health, environment, education and social justice as separate questions with separate answers. It heightens awareness of everyone’s vital need, as social beings, to stay connected to each other as much as possible while keeping a physical distance. It shows how the “efficient,” on-demand world that capitalism has constructed is so incredibly fragile that a series of shocks can bring it to the point of collapse. With the rules of neoliberal economics being broken by governments the world over, it demonstrates that massive policy interventions, shifting the entire structure of the global economy, are
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