When times get tough, you learn who your friends are.
Take the United States’ relationships with Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. The island nation sports a population roughly the size of Australia’s, about 24 million; just across the Taiwan Strait, what we used to call “Red China” holds the world’s largest number of people.
Like the United States, Taiwan has a democratically elected government that recognizes basic human rights such as freedom of speech. What do the Taiwanese want from us? They’re hoping for a military ally, one capable of deterring the free-speech-squelching, democracy-detesting Chinese communist state from making war on them.
In this pandemic, already nearly 24,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and over half a million have tested positive for the virus that appears to have originated in Wuhan, China. Worldwide, nearly 2 million souls have contracted it and, by the time you read this, more than 120,000 of them will have perished.
Excluded from the World Health Organization (WHO) at China’s insistence, Taiwanese medical professionals nevertheless managed to warn the international community on December 31, reports the Financial Times, that “its doctors had heard from mainland [Chinese] colleagues that medical staff were getting ill — a sign of human-to-human transmission.”
Yet, on January 14, the WHO tweeted that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Six days later China publicly informed the world that this virus could be spread from human contact.
“A study published in March indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did,” notes Axios, “the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread limited.”
Thanks for the warning, Taiwan. Thanks for nothing, China.*
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Taiwan has also generously provided N95 face masks to the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, even while facing continued military provocations from China.
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