Taiwan scares Beijing
The flag of the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.
Good for the Biden administration for inviting Taiwan to the "Summit for Democracy" it has organized for Dec. 9-10, angering, of course, the Chinese dictatorship, which hates having the island democracy as a model that might tempt the dictatorship’s subjects in Mainland China. Bejing claims ownership of Taiwan.
But no, Taiwan has not “always been part of China,’’ contrary to Mainland claims. Hit this link for some history.
The summit is part of Biden’s effort to pull together the world’s democracies and semi-democracies (the latter including the U.S., where democracy is under siege by rising fascism) to push back against increasing aggression by autocracies led by China and Russia after the damage done by dictator-suck-up Donald Trump.
Taiwan, by the way, has many business investments in New England, especially in high technology, and vice versa, as well as many cultural activities. And since 1996, Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, has been a sister city of Boston.
Hit this link for more information.
Chen Shih-chung: COVID-19 shows importance of Taiwan being admitted to WHO
WHO emblem
Our friends in the Taiwan representative office in Boston forwarded this to us.
— Robert Whitcomb
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there have more than 40 million cases and more than one million deaths around the world. The virus has had an enormous impact on global politics, employment, economics, trade and financial systems, and significantly impacted the global efforts to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
Thanks to the united efforts of its entire people, Taiwan has responded to the threats posed by this pandemic through four principles: prudent action, rapid response, advance deployment and openness and transparency. Adopting such strategies as the operation of specialized command systems, the implementation of meticulous border-control measures, the production and distribution of adequate supplies of medical resources, the employment of home quarantine and isolation measures and related care services, the application of IT systems, the publishing of transparent and open information, and the execution of precise screening and testing, we have been fortunate enough to contain the virus. As of Oct. 7, Taiwan had had just 523 confirmed cases and seven deaths; meanwhile, life and work have continued much as normal for the majority of its people.
The global outbreak of COVID-19 has reminded the world that infectious diseases know no borders and do not discriminate along political, ethnic, religious or cultural lines. Nations should work together to address the threat of emerging diseases. For this reason, once Taiwan had stabilized its containment of the virus and ensured that people had sufficient access to medical resources, we began to share our experience and exchange information on containing COVID-19 with global public-health professionals and scholars through COVID-19-related forums, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group’s (APEC) High-Level Meeting on Health and the Economy, the Global Cooperation Training Framework, and other virtual bilateral meetings. As of June 2020, Taiwan had held nearly 80 online conferences, sharing the Taiwan Model with experts from governments, hospitals, universities and think tanks in 32 countries.
Taiwan’s donations of medical equipment and anti-pandemic supplies to countries in need also continue. By June, we had donated 51 million surgical masks, 1.16 million N95 masks, 600,000 isolation gowns, and 35,000 forehead thermometers to more than 80 countries.
To ensure access to vaccines, Taiwan has joined the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (COVAX) co-led by GAVI — the Vaccine Alliance — and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. And our government is actively assisting domestic manufacturers in hopes of accelerating the development and production of successful vaccines, bringing them to market as quickly as possible and putting an end to this pandemic.
To prepare for a possible next wave of the pandemic as well as the approaching flu season, Taiwan is maintaining its strategies of encouraging citizens to wear face masks and maintain social distancing, and strengthening border quarantine measures, community-based prevention and medical preparedness. Furthermore, we are actively collaborating with domestic and international partners to obtain vaccines and develop optimal treatments and accurate diagnostic tools, jointly safeguarding global public-health security.
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that Taiwan is an integral part of the global public-health network and that Taiwan Model can help other countries combat the pandemic. To recover better, WHO needs Taiwan. We urge WHO and related parties to acknowledge Taiwan’s longstanding contributions to global public health, disease prevention, and the human right to health, and to firmly support Taiwan’s inclusion in WHO. Taiwan’s comprehensive participation in WHO meetings, mechanisms and activities would allow us to work with the rest of the world in realizing the fundamental human right to health as stipulated in the WHO Constitution and the vision of leaving no one behind enshrined in the UN SDGs.
Chen Shih-chung is minister for health and welfare for Taiwan (Republic of China)
Llewellyn King: Group seeks cross-industry, multinational innovation in the COVID-19 battle
A medical laboratory run by the Graduate Institute of Cancer Biology of China Medical University (Taiwan)
— Photo by P5693852
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A study envisioning how societies might address the complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic, undertaken by more than 70 leaders in innovation from around the world, is out.
It is the largest, nongovernmental study on the virus, and it paints a picture of a world recalibrated by it — with a heavy dependence on data in making people safer.
The study titled “Never Normal: A Call to Action to Address the New Realities Posed by COVID-19” is a clear-eyed look at the global future from the social pressure of prolonged separation — especially for young people — to stress in the food chain. The authorship is largely scientific and has been drawn from those who are charged with innovation in their work.
These authors, who plan to refine their suggestions and continue their work indefinitely, are banded together as the Cross-Industry Study Group. The group, whose members come from 12 countries (from the United States to Chile to Spain), owes its existence to one man: Omar Hatamleh, a scientist with NASA in Houston.
Hatamleh has been a chief innovation officer at the space agency. For the last four years, he has organized a conference on cross-industry innovation.
These conferences were very different than most industry conferences: They did not discuss money or policy. Instead, they concentrated on innovation in everything, from the future of buildings to how science is contributing to the creation of new video games, and how innovation is applied at the tech giants such as Google and Facebook.
They celebrated, as does Hatamleh, exaptation — using an invention for one thing for an unrelated thing, like a medicine for cancer being used for Parkinson’s disease.
Hatamleh, the prime mover of the “Never Normal” study, and his deputy in the group, Dimitris Bountolos, a Chilean innovation consultant and former airline executive, drew on the creative talent from these conferences to gather the cross-industry group members and execute the study.
The group met remotely — and will continue to meet — in an intense three-week period during which they developed thousands of suggestions and explored as many ideas.
Gradually, they reduced these to two pertinent sections: one that delineates the challenges and the other that identifies the scientific way forward, with an emphasis on data and transparency.
“Never Normal” predicts a W-shaped future where there are waves of COVID-19, reflecting governments’ policies and social reaction. It also says the structures for resolution need to be created by governments and shared between them, so that freedom of movement can be restored, and governments do not poach technology and supplies from each other.
The study says the best hope is that a proven vaccine comes in 12 to 24 months. It sees a great diminution in recreation — theaters and sports — as we know it. It predicts a digital future with intense social surveillance. It offers no panaceas, no silver bullets.
The study is emphatic about sanitation and looks at everything from new air-filtration technology for buildings to monitoring sewage to assess patterns of infection. The sewage does not need to have active virus particles to tell its tale, to show patterns, and to identify trends in infection.
The study sees a future where tracking is vital, using things like smart watches and sensors that are becoming ubiquitous with 5G telephone systems.
In one place, the study suggests that coughing can be identified by sensors and can direct authorities to potentially infected people who have not yet sought treatments. The study calls this “catching the cough.”
The study points to “air sterilization” as another innovative weapon in the COVID-19 fight.
The study states, “There are new nanotechnology-based on laser-induced graphene water filters that eliminate viruses and bacteria in water. This new concept engineered for air filtration could be used in air filters in heating, ventilation and air conditioning or integrated into face masks for a self-sterilizing effect.”
This technology, it says, has the potential to be combined with state-of-the-art air filtration such as HEPA filters.
Part of the significance of “Never Normal” is that it looks at the scientific contribution to stabilizing the world through a lens other than a purely medical one.
Its message: We need all the science we can get.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Ready for a pandemic?
Warning signs at DeGaulle Airport, the Paris region’s primary airport
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Back in 2003 I flew to Taiwan (one of my favorite nations) during the epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome— the SARS virus that started, as do so many viruses, in very crowded China. Inconveniently, I was coming out of a bad cold, with bronchitis, and was doing my fair share of coughing on the plane, most of whose passengers were wearing face masks (even without a public-health threat like SARS, many East Asians wear face masks as a matter of course). My coughing clearly distressed my fellow passengers; some moved to vacant seats further away from me.
So I feared that I’d be stopped at the Taipei airport and quarantined for 10 days. Luckily, my guide (who told me “no worries!”) for the series of meetings I had planned for my week on the island, managed to get me through -- or was it around? -- the passport and other controls, and the week went well as my cough subsided. I didn’t have SARS, and the epidemic was eventually stopped after some weeks.
The experience impressed on me how fast epidemics can spread in a time of international jet travel, ever-bigger cities (especially in the Developing World) and, particularly in much of Asia, because of the close proximity of hundreds of millions of people to domesticated and wild animals that can carry dangerous viruses that can rapidly mutate and threaten humans. Still, there’s hope that the decline in the number of rural (and not so rural) Chinese keeping pigs, poultry and other animals in their backyards as the country becomes more urbanized might reduce the spread of dangerous viruses. And of course medicine marches on.
But it seems inevitable that a true worldwide virus pandemic will eventually kill millions.
How ready are we? The World Health Organization, part of the United Nations, needs more resources to plan for and coordinate the battle against epidemics. (By the way, Taiwan is not a member of the WHO; it only has “observer’’ status because China, throwing its weight around in its claim that it owns the island democracy, keeps it out.)
The U.N. hosts assorted hypocrisies, idiocies and corruptions. But real and threatened epidemics is just one huge reason why we need it.
And the Trump administration, which doesn’t particularly like international coordination, has shut down an office charged with responding to global pandemic threats, curtailed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s foreign-disease-outbreak-prevention efforts and ended a surveillance program set up to detect new viral threats. Perhaps it will reconsider in an election year.
At PCFR, Taiwan diplomat to look at East Asian scene
Dragon boat in the annual Taiwan Dragon Boat Festival on the Blackstone River.
Taiwan Diplomat to Discuss East Asian Trade and Security Issues
The last dinner of the current season of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (founded in 1928) is scheduled for Tuesday, June 4, here at The Hope Club. The new season will open in September.
Please consult its Web site -- thepcfr.org -- and/or send queries to pcfremail@gmail.com for more information about the PCFR, including on how to join.
On June 4, Douglas Hsu, a senior diplomat who currently oversees Taiwan’s interests in New England as director general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Boston, will speak about current political and economic conditions in that nation (one of Rhode Island’s largest export markets), China’s military and other threats to Taiwan and the East Asian scene in general.
(Taiwan sponsors the annual Dragon Boat races on the Blackstone River and indeed just gave six of them to the City of Pawtucket!)
Mr. Hsu, who previously served two stints in Washington, may have some perspectives on the China-U.S. trade war. His work in Washington included being Taiwan’s liaison with Congress. (Meanwhile, a reminder that the official name of Taiwan is the Republic of China.)
Mr. Hsu has served in multiple positions in Taiwan’s Department of North American Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, beginning as a desk officer in 1998. He was the department’s Deputy Director-General from 2016 to 2018, when he assigned to Boston.
The director general (effectively the consul general for New England) earned a B.A. and M.A. in International Relations from National Cheng-Chi University and has participated in the Diplomats Training Program at Oxford University (1998) and the Senior Executive Fellows Program at Harvard University (2009).
Royals and broken Brexit; Flooding north; Battles in Brazil; Taiwan & China
At the PCFR: The Royals Close Up; Why They Flee Honduras; Brazil’s New Boss; Trading With and Tension in Taiwan
Herewith some upcoming talks at the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com), which are held at the Hope Club. Please consult thepcfr.org for information on how to join the organization and other information about the organization.
On Thursday, March 14, comes Miguel Head, now a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. He spent the past decade as a senior adviser to the British Royal Family. He joined the Royal Household as Press Secretary to Prince William and Prince Harry before being appointed in 2012 as their youngest ever Chief of Staff.
Previously, Mr. Head was Chief Press Officer at the UK Ministry of Defense, and worked for the Liberal Democrat party in the European Parliament. While at the Shorenstein Center, Mr. Head is doing research into how social inequalities in Britain are fomenting the politics of division (which helped lead to the Brexit vote) and how non-political leadership, working collaboratively with traditional and digital media, can play a role in bringing disparate communities together. At the PCFR, he’ll talk about those things as well comment on the past and current role of the Royal Family, and, indeed, life with the Royals.
xxx
At the April 4 PCFR dinner, James Nealon, the former U.S. ambassador to Honduras, will talk about Central America in general and Honduras in particular, with a focus on the conditions leading so many people there to try to flee to the United States – and what the U.S. can and should do about it.
A career Foreign Service officer, Nealon held posts in Canada, Uruguay, Hungary, Spain, and Chile before assuming his post as Ambassador to Honduras in August 2014; Nealon also served as the deputy of John F. Kelly, while Kelly was in charge of the United States Southern Command.
After leaving his ambassadorship in 2017, Nealon was appointed assistant secretary for international engagement at the Department of Homeland Security by Kelly in July. During his time as assistant secretary, Nealon supported a policy of deploying Homeland Security agents abroad. He resigned his post on Feb. 8, 2018, due to his disagreements with the immigration policy of Donald Trump, and, specifically, the withdrawal of temporary protected status for Hondurans.
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Then, on April 10, the speaker will be Prof. James Green, who will talk about the political and economic forces that have led to the election of Brazil’s new right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro – and hazard some guesses on what might happen next.
Professor Green is the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Latin American History, director of Brown’s Brazil Initiative, Distinguished Visiting Professor (Professor Amit) at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, and the Executive Director of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), which is now housed at the Watson Institute at Brown.
Green served as the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University from 2005 to 2008. He was president of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) from 2002 until 2004, and president of the New England Council on Latin American Studies (NECLAS) in 2008 and 2009.
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The PCFR hopes to announce a May speaker soon
On June 4, Douglas Hsu, a senior Taiwanese diplomat who currently oversees that nation’s interests in New England, will speak to us about Chinese military and other threats against Taiwan, and other matters, including doing business in Taiwan. That country, by the way, is among Rhode Island’s largest export markets.
At PCFR: The Royals; Fleeing Central America; Brazil's new strongman; Threatening Taiwan
"A Good Riddance" cartoon from Punch, Vol. 152, 27 June 1917, commenting on King George V’s order to relinquish all German titles held by members of his family.
Mark your calendars for some exciting upcoming talks at the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com). Consult thepcfr.org for information on how to join the organization and other information about our organization.
Our speaker on Thursday, March 14, will be Miguel Head, now a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. He spent the past decade as a senior adviser to the British Royal Family. He joined the Royal Household as Press Secretary to Prince William and Prince Harry before being appointed in 2012 as their youngest ever Chief of Staff.
Previously, Mr. Head was Chief Press Officer at the UK Ministry of Defense, and worked for the Liberal Democrat party in the European Parliament. While at the Shorenstein Center, Mr. Head is doing research into how social inequalities in Britain are fomenting the politics of division (which helped lead to the Brexit vote) and how non-political leadership, working collaboratively with traditional and digital media, can play a role in bringing disparate communities together. At the PCFR, he’ll talk about those things as well comment on the past and current role of the Royal Family, and, indeed, life with the Royals.
xxx
At the April 4 Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org) dinner, James Nealon, the former U.S. ambassador to Honduras, will talk about Central America in general and Honduras in particular, with a focus on the conditions leading so many people there to try to flee to the United States – and what the U.S. can and should do about it.
A career Foreign Service officer, Nealon held posts in Canada, Uruguay, Hungary, Spain, and Chile before assuming his post as Ambassador to Honduras in August 2014; Nealon also served as the deputy of John F. Kelly, while Kelly was in charge of the United States Southern Command.
After leaving his ambassadorship in 2017, Nealon was appointed assistant secretary for international engagement at the Department of Homeland Security by Kelly in July. During his time as assistant secretary, Nealon supported a policy of deploying Homeland Security agents abroad. He resigned his post on Feb. 8, 2018, due to his disagreements with the immigration policy of Donald Trump, and, specifically, the withdrawal of temporary protected status for Hondurans.
xxx
Then, on April 10, the speaker will be Prof. James Green, who will talk about the political and economic forces that have led to the election of Brazil’s new right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro – and hazard some guesses on what might happen next.
Professor Green is the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Latin American History, director of Brown’s Brazil Initiative, Distinguished Visiting Professor (Professor Amit) at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, and the Executive Director of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), which is now housed at the Watson Institute at Brown.
Green served as the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University from 2005 to 2008. He was president of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) from 2002 until 2004, and president of the New England Council on Latin American Studies (NECLAS) in 2008 and 2009.
Additional speakers for the season will be announced soon. They will include a June event on Taiwan’s tense relations with expansionist China.
Chris Powell: U.S. shouldn't have betrayed its principles and Free China
Republic of China (Taiwan) flag.
President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who was first his national-security adviser and then his secretary of state, are supposed to have been foreign-policy geniuses, most notably for their approach in 1971 and 1972 to what we then called Red China. The Nixon-Kissinger idea was to further separate the government in Beijing from its great fellow Communist ally, the Soviet Union, and induce both countries to diminish their support for North Vietnam's war against South Vietnam, where the United States was doing most of the fighting.
Recognizing Red China should have been no big deal ordinarily, for the primary criterion for recognizing governments is not their politics or decency but simply whether they rule distinct territory. But as a Republican U.S. representative and senator, Nixon had been an instigator of the great red scare of the early 1950s and had blamed the Democratic administration of Harry Truman for losing China to communism. So Nixon's reversing his posture on China was almost as sensational as the sudden alliance of Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union in August 1939. Nixon got away with it because most people agreed with the new policy, and so his old red-baiting was forgotten.
But as things turned out China and the Soviet Union did not curtail their support for the Communist side in the Vietnam War, and the U.S. side was defeated two years after Nixon visited China and just after he resigned the presidency to avoid impeachment. Opening China to trade with the United States, normalization boosted China's development and led to the decline of much of U.S. industry.
It also caused the United States to betray its longstanding ally, the Republic of China -- the losing side in the Chinese Civil War, which had moved to the island of Taiwan. The Republic of China was expelled from the United Nations and its diplomatic relations with the United States were demoted from formal to informal, though Taiwan also governed and continues to govern distinct territory.
Now the United States and its Asian allies are being threatened by North Korea as it develops nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. North Korea's neighbors and sponsors, China and Russia, resist cutting off the troublesome country. China is becoming an imperial power (like the United States itself) and is creating islands in the South China Sea to gain control over international navigation there. China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and at China's insistence Taiwan is being denied even observer status in international organizations and is losing diplomatic recognition from other countries.
So what does the United States have today to show for the supposed Nixon-Kissinger genius in Asian policy? Not much.
Yes, Communist Vietnam, which defeated the U.S.-backed side in Vietnam's civil war, is increasingly friendly to the United States. But this is despite the Nixon-Kissinger policies, not because of them. That is, like other countries nearby, Vietnam feels threatened by China and on the whole the Vietnamese and the Chinese long have detested other.
Meanwhile Taiwan, whose demotion throughout the world was triggered by the United States' bid to woo mainland China, has become a vigorous and prosperous democracy that might better be called Free China. The brave little country strives quietly to maintain its sovereignty in anticipation of the eventual dissolution of the totalitarian regime that threatens it.
So it seems that the United States would have done better to stay true to its principles and loyal to Free China, whose simple example may be the best hope for democracy on the mainland.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Promises, promises
In 1997 the Communist dictatorship in Bejing promised the people of Hong Kong that they'd have local autonomy, including electing their own officials, after the British colony was forced to rejoin China. In 1994, Russia, then a corrupt democracy and now a corrupt dictatorship, promised not to use force or threaten to use force against Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons.
We know how both these promises worked out. You can bet that no country is going to give up its nuclear weapons. any time soon. And Taiwan is even more unlikely than before to join China on the basis of the promise that Beijing would allow the people of Taiwan their own democracy.
Dictators think promises are a joke.