Fifty years of hurt: Taiwan struggles for Geneva role
Taiwan’s 87-year-old public health diplomat has been campaigning to regain membership of the WHO for decades. Yet even after the island’s stellar response to the global Covid pandemic, opposition from China means the struggle may only get harder.
As Wu Yung Tung packed his bags, he was filled with excitement. A fresh graduate from medical school in southern Taiwan, Wu was preparing to make the most of an exciting opportunity: A six-month medical residency in Japan.
Arranged by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1970, it was part of a wide range of benefits that then-member Taiwan enjoyed.
“At that time, I really felt the WHO was very nice,” Wu says, sat in the board room of the Taiwanese Medical Association (TMA) in central Taipei dressed in a navy suit. But shortly after his return to Taipei, he explains, circumstances changed.
The government, one of the WHO’s founders, had managed to retain its membership even after retreating to Taiwan in the wake of the Communist victory in China’s civil war in 1949. That ended when Taipei was kicked out in 1972 and opportunities for medical professionals such as Wu were quickly suspended.
Although Wu has had a stellar career, winning awards from the Taiwanese Ministry of Health for his contributions to medical diplomacy, and eventually becoming an advisor to the Taiwanese president, throughout his career he has been blocked from engaging with the WHO in the way that senior medical professionals do.
Taiwan has never regained its position at the Geneva-based public health body, replaced by China, which claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island. Now, even as the Covid-19 pandemic drives home the urgency of global cooperation and sharing of expertise, Taipei’s efforts to re-enter the WHO are running into a diplomatic brick wall.
“China sees Taiwan not as a separate state, but as a province of China,” says Wen-Ti Sung, non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a US-based thinktank. “They want to make sure Taiwan has little-to-no opportunity for any meaningful transnational representation.”
That hasn’t stopped Wu, a former president of the TMA, dedicating more than two decades of his life to spearheading the “rejoin campaign”.
He continues to regularly visit Geneva as one of Taiwan’s ambassadors-at-large to promote that goal. He was last in Geneva in May during the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s decision-making body.
“For the public, for the government, not being an observer or a member is unfair,” Wu tells SWI swissinfo.ch. “If you lose this kind of chance, you don’t get knowledge, cooperation.”
Initial impact
In Wu’s youth, Taiwan still relied on medical support from the WHO.
“Taiwan’s economic and government system hadn’t yet reached a certain standard, so having this help from the WHO… really helped a lot,” he says, citing issues ranging from tuberculosis to family planning.
Expulsion hurt Taiwan’s ability to engage with an increasingly international public health community. Programmes were cancelled and opportunities for a generation of health practitioners to engage with other international experts were curbed.
Controversy over Taiwan’s exclusion flared up most recently as the world grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Government officials at the time accused the WHO of denying them access to information, endangering people’s safety.
Both the WHO and China pushed back, with Beijing saying that Taiwan was given the access and help it needed.
Neither the WHO nor China replied to requests for comment.
Officials in Taipei further protested that Covid-19 cases in Taiwan and China weren’t counted separately, initially giving the impression that Taiwan cases were higher than the reality.
‘Taiwan can help’
Taipei says the WHO is missing out on its expertise, including a Covid-19 response praised by professionals around the world. Taiwan suffered fewer deaths per 100,000 people than neighbouring South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, while also avoiding island-wide lockdowns.
Taiwan’s healthcare system ranks as among the best in the world and was placed third on Bloomberg’s 2020 Health Care Efficiency Index thanks in part to the island’s pandemic policies.
The government has adopted the slogan “Taiwan Can Help” to highlight what it is able to bring as a leader in public health.
During the pandemic, Wu was involved in a Ministry of Health and Welfare forum bringing overseas officials together online to publicise the prevention and control efforts – and argue for a return to the WHO. Even being an island is useful in testing different pandemic containment strategies, he says.
“Taiwan is a very good representative of public health,” Wu says. “For public health studies, it’s very good, very isolated.”
Not just Covid-19 but the earlier SARS outbreak around 2003 built expertise in dealing with such emergencies, he argues.
“We know how to organise in the future; how to face this kind of unknown pandemic,” says Wu, who headed the Taiwanese Medical Association, a public non-profit aimed at bringing together local physicians, during the SARS pandemic.
“Just 30 years ago we needed the WHO to help us. Now we have grown up,” he says. “We can give and take. We can contribute, and we can also gain valuable information and news from them.”
The next step
Yet Taiwan’s aspirations for recognition face serious problems.
China has in recent years succeeded in persuading some of Taipei’s few remaining diplomatic allies, such as the island of Nauru in Micronesia, to give up recognition of the government.
The island has responded with unconventional efforts to engage the medical community, including driving a van decorated with its famous bubble teaExternal link and semiconductors around Geneva streets to promote its cause. Wu has helped organise symposiums alongside the WHO’s annual assembly, hoping to highlight the island’s public health expertise and convince other nations.
The current situation is a setback from the period from 2009 to 2016 when China allowed Taiwan to attend the WHA as an observer.
That status, which doesn’t require recognition as a sovereign nation, coincided with the Taiwan presidency being held by the Kuomintang political party. In 2016, the loss of the presidential election by the party, viewed by Beijing as more China-friendly than the opposition, led to observer status again being blocked.
“China wants to nip it in the bud,” says Sung at the Atlantic Council, explaining that even observer status is now viewed by Beijing as a gateway that could lead to greater Taiwanese presence in Geneva.
Further disappointments are likely.
“Observership or membership in these international organisations requires the consent from a lot of the existing member states,” Sung says. “Given that these member states are often friendly with China and do not want to risk rubbing Beijing the wrong way, Taiwan has a difficult time procuring support.”
Last month, a proposal for Taiwan’s inclusion in the WHO’s annual assembly was rejected by member states.
Still, Wu remains optimistic. “Initially we started to use the medical professionals to influence the governments. Now, I think most countries already know Taiwan is important,” he says. “The societal and international environment is incredibly complicated. But we need to break through in this way.”
Edited by Antony Barrett/vm
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