Policy Alert #210 | June 3, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated cross-strait relations between Beijing and Taipei and catapulted it to global attention. China claims Taiwan as its territory and has blocked the island’s participation as an autonomous actor in international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO). Although Taiwan was allowed to attend the WHO’s annual World Health Assembly (WHA) as an observer from 2009 to 2016 under President Ma Ying-jeou, it has not been allowed to attend during President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration, which the Chinese government views as too independence-leaning. Despite a coalition of governments led by the United States, including the European Union, Japan, and fourteen of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies expressing support for Taiwan’s inclusion in the 2020 Assembly, it was not allowed to participate as an observer due to Chinese pressure. Tensions between WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the Tsai administration had been souring, beginning with charges that inquiries from Taipei for verification about the virus’s potential for person-to-person spread were allegedly ignored by WHO officials in January. Relations spiraled downwards in April, when Tedros accused Taiwan of coordinating a campaign of harassment against him, which the Tsai administration denied. Yet Taiwan’s resounding success in stopping its own outbreak–with a reported total of 443 confirmed infections and seven deaths at publishing–and donations provided through its “Taiwan Can Help” program have only continued to keep Taiwan in the spotlight and called into question China’s intransigence in the midst of the pandemic.

In this third installment of RPI’s Revisiting the World Order under a Pandemic Series, we provide an overview of perspectives from China, Taiwan, and the international community on how the pandemic is affecting cross-strait relations and how that dynamic is affecting the two sides’ place in the international community. For more insight on this topic, we encourage our readers to watch the video from the COVID-19 and Taiwan’s International Space Reimagined webinar hosted by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the East Asia National Resource Center.

 

Views from Taiwan

• In The National Interest, Vincent Yi-hsiang Chao, the Director of the Political Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, challenged WHO officials’ claim that the organization’s secretariat is legally incapable of granting observer status for the WHA on its own: “[I]t can be argued that the failure to invite Taiwan is also a political, rather than a legal, determination. […] Given Tedros’s public call for countries to avoid politicizing public health pandemics, the very same standards should arguably apply to the WHO.”
• In an op-ed for the Taiwan News, which supports the Pan-Green Coalition that includes the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, Holmes Liao, senior advisor at Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan News, interpreted China’s international charm offensive as domestically-oriented:  “[T]he aim of China’s global propaganda is not to convince the world that the communist regime governs a peace-loving country with a legitimate foreign policy, political value, and an attractive culture. [..T]he supposedly external global propaganda is aimed at an internal audience.” 
• Kelvin Chen, a staff writer for the Taiwan News, juxtaposed international frustration with China’s handling of the virus and the quality of its donations to other countries with Taiwan’s smaller, but more successful efforts: “The island nation has striven for transparency this whole time, holding daily press coronavirus conferences and sharing its epidemic strategy. Furthermore, the nation has demonstrated that an effective virus response does not need to be authoritarian, contrary to what China wants the world to believe. Taiwan has proven to the world that it is a reliable and compassionate ally”.
• The Taiwan News featured interviews with Industry, Science, and Technology International Strategy Center director Ray Yang and Taiwan Institute of Economic Research economist Darson Chiu on the opportunities for Taiwan if other states begin diversifying their supply chains away from a reliance on China. 
• In The Diplomat, Jeremy Huai-Che Chiang, non-resident research associate with the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation, analyzed the pandemic’s effects on Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy (NSP): “[T]he continued deteriorating of cross-strait ties will only further strengthen this Southbound trend, forcing domestic stakeholders to increasingly forgo hopes for a return to the warm ties with China seen in the [former President] Ma Ying-jeou era. This will lessen domestic resistance (and passiveness) and increase complementarity in some sectors toward Tsai’s NSP prescriptions.”

 

Views from China

• Zhu Songling, professor at the Institute of Taiwan Studies at Beijing Union University, claimed that the Tsai administration’s efforts at the WHO were an effort to curry favor with the US: “Using the outbreak and the meeting of the World Health Assembly, the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, Tsai has displayed only hostility toward the mainland in order to seek the US’ favor. Which makes her real motive clear: helping Washington to contain Beijing even at the cost of sacrificing cross-Straits relations and risking the island residents’ well-being.”
• Tang Yonghong, deputy director of the Taiwan Research Center at Xiamen University, accused the Tsai administration and the US of “using the coronavirus outbreak as a ploy to target the mainland” in an op-ed for the China Daily: “For the US, China’s continuous rise－combined with the fear that China may surpass its power－and the intertwining of the two sides’ interests due to globalization, prompted it to identify Beijing as its top strategic competitor. [..T]he US has been exploiting all possible means to curb China’s rise, including by blaming it for the outbreak and playing the ‘Taiwan card’.” In a second op-ed, Tang also claimed that the Tsai administration is attempting to mislead Taiwan’s residents at home: “the Taiwan authorities are seeking to take advantage of the epidemic and to exploit Taiwan residents’ worries to play their political tricks, hyping the falsehood that Taiwan is a global anti-epidemic loophole.”
• In an op-ed for the state-supported China Daily, Li Zhenguang, professor at the Institute of Taiwan Studies at Beijing Union University characterized the discord at the World Health Organization as symptomatic of the US’s decline: “This is an era of multilateralism; the days when the US arbitrarily manipulated global organizations to maintain its hegemony are gone. According to the UN Charter, the UN and its affiliated bodies are built to serve all countries and people rather than one single country and its people. And the US, despite its muscle power and allies, has not been able to change this fact nor has it succeeded in preventing many developing countries to uphold fairness and justice in international relations or in resolving regional and global disputes.”
• Cary Huang, a China affairs columnist and former Beijing bureau chief for the independent South China Morning Post, argued in an op-ed for The Post that Taiwan has “emerg[ed] stronger from the pandemic,” given the increased domestic support of Tsai’s administration, economic growth despite the pandemic’s disruptions to the global economy, and a prominent and positive position in the international community as a result of its successes in battling its own outbreak and donations abroad.

 

Views from Outside Experts

• In an op-ed for the Taipei Times, John Lim, a former associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History, argued that Taiwan came out on top of the spat between WHO Director General Tedros and the Tsai administration: “It turned into a ‘battle of unequals’ initiated by Tedros, but his display lacked meticulous tactical thinking and effective strategic adjustments. Taiwan used this to its advantage by highlighting the effects of its epidemic prevention efforts and successes. It also allowed Taiwan to promote its ‘Taiwan can help’ strategy, which has given the nation more visibility internationally than it has experienced in decades, while also focusing global attention on its outstanding epidemic prevention efforts.”
• Joseph Tse-hei Lee, executive director of the Global Asia Institute and professor of history at Pace University, wrote in an op-ed for the Taipei Times that China’s increasingly “combative diplomacy has set off too many firestorms and galvanized opinions critical of Xi at home and abroad. It is bound to dissipate China’s hard-earned standing and reputation in the global community.”
• In his analysis for the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Insight magazine, T.Y. Wang, chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University and co-editor of the Journal of Asian and African Studies, explained that China’s perceived missteps in two global health emergencies only helps Taiwan’s image: “As Beijing is perceived as a culprit for both the 2003 SARS epidemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan finds itself in an improved international standing that may be beneficial to its bid for membership in the WHO.” 
• In Foreign Policy, Joshua Eisenman, associate professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, and Sean King, senior vice president at Park Strategies, a business advisory firm that represented Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2012, interpreted China’s increasingly hostile rhetoric toward Taiwan as symptomatic of painting itself into a corner: “The rigidity of China’s rhetoric toward Taiwan, its primary core interest, has almost obligated Beijing to adopt aggressive policies that continue to undermine its own stated policy objectives.”
• Bonnie S. Glaser, senior advisor for Asia and director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Matthew P. Funiaole, senior fellow with the China Power Project and senior fellow for data analysis at the CSIS iDeas Lab, suggested in Foreign Policy that despite the heated rhetoric, the risk of a cross-strait conflict remain low: “The Chinese Communist Party undoubtedly feels insecure in the face of global criticism of its lack of transparency during the early days of the outbreak and its efforts to quash investigation into the origins of COVID-19. […] While there is no denying there has been an increase in Chinese pressure against Taiwan since the beginning of the pandemic, there is also no known evidence to suggest that Xi has fundamentally altered his strategic calculus.”
• In an op-ed for the business-focused Economic Times, Former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal urged the Indian government to side with Taiwan: “India should also support the restoration of Taiwan’s participation as an observer in the forthcoming World Health Assembly on the basis of Taiwan sharing valuable information about its success in controlling the virus. […] China cannot claim others support its territorial integrity while it violates theirs with impunity, be it in the South China Sea or in the Himalayas. If China succeeded in thwarting the US, European, Japanese and Australian move to support an independent virus enquiry and on Taiwan’s participation, it would garner a major diplomatic victory that will shift the power balance further in its favour, which is not in India’s interest.”
• In Foreign Affairs, Jason Lanier, Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft, and E. Glen Weyl, founder and chair of the RadicalxChange Foundation and Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist at Microsoft, argued that Taiwan’s successful marriage of technology and civic engagement highlighted the similarity behind China and the US’s bumbled initial responses to the pandemic: “It is possible that the AI prowess of China and the United States in fact stood in their way. Both have a technocratic, top-down vision of the future of AI, in which a small digital elite, concentrated in a few tech hubs and largely separated from the concerns of the rest of the population, produces tools meant to be used by the rest of the population.”
• Jo Kim, a contributor to The Diplomat, argued that China is doing itself no favors in trying to quash Taiwan’s public relations blitz: “Ironically, Beijing’s maladroit diplomacy and propaganda are contributing to Taiwan’s success in undercutting the mainland’s PR offensive.”

 

RPI acknowledges support from the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York for its activities.