Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) on Tuesday acknowledged the generosity of Japan and the US for donating COVID-19 vaccines, but added that this could in no way be considered a political achievement of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) or the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
He said the donations were due to the government’s “policy mistakes” and the loss of more than 500 lives, so that “friendly nations saw the breach in Taiwan’s [COVID-19] situation and sent the vaccines quickly.”
Tsai’s popularity ratings have plunged since the start of the outbreak, helped by the KMT resorting to the creation of a vaccine panic and politicizing the situation, but Chiang’s comments betray a certain amount of frustration that his party’s attempts to score political points from the outbreak have not been as successful as he would have hoped.
Falling daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 and the vaccine donations offer glimmers of hope to a fearful public, and might lessen the political impact of the outbreak on the government’s popularity.
However, it is Chiang’s flawed logic and disingenuous words that need exploring.
Whether Chiang likes it or not, the KMT is not running the nation, the DPP is, and some credit must go to the government, and officials such as Representative to Japan Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and Representative to the US Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴), for securing the vaccine donations.
Instead, Chiang attributed the generosity to friendly relations, while ignoring his own party’s claims that the Tsai administration has been a little too friendly to the US and Japan.
The KMT has been trying to stymie the government’s policy of opening up to US pork imports and imports of Japanese products from areas near the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant to improve ties between the nations.
It was the Tsai government that donated medical equipment to the US, Japan, the EU and other nations during the first wave of the pandemic, when they had severe shortfalls. Perhaps this had something to do with the accumulated goodwill that led to the vaccine donations.
Chiang has also criticized the government for waiting for donations of vaccines to arrive, instead of purchasing vaccines by itself.
Perhaps he has not heard of the legal wrangle between the UK and the EU over delivery of AstraZeneca vaccines earlier this year, or China’s interventions to prevent Taiwan from signing a contract with BioNTech?
The government has ordered 10 million AstraZeneca shots and so far only received 117,000; it has ordered 4.76 million shots from the COVAX program and only received 600,000; it has ordered just over 5 million shots from Moderna and received 390,000.
That is just under 20 million shots ordered and 1.1 million received, far less than the 3.74 million shots donated by Japan and the US, with a promise of another 20,000 from Lithuania.
The loss of 599 lives to COVID-19 is a terrible thing, but if Chiang wants Taiwanese to believe that this is the reason foreign governments are donating vaccines, when the virus is raging throughout the world and is causing colossal numbers of deaths, including within their own nations, and when Taiwan is considered a wealthy nation, he is either pretending to be ignorant or actually is.
Chiang should concede that the main reason for the vaccine donations was geopolitical — the US, Japan and the EU are looking at the political divisions in Taiwan that China can leverage to weaken its military, intelligence and psychological defenses. Which brings the discussion back to Chiang and the KMT.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS