Taiwan: The Island of Can
When a shock to the system unfolds in a regime like China’s, it seems that nothing can be done internally to contain it. The rest of the world is hit hard, and it is left to everyone to scramble to clean up the mess.
For a country constantly under threat from such a system, and so near, it’s amazing how Taiwan can not only withstand shocks, but it can find solutions to them.
To write about this, I had to give some context, because while Taiwan can be understood on its own, it is an even more powerful story when you consider what it’s up against.
Taiwan is a nation of underdogs. It is a rebel island. It is all of those things that during moments of calm seem super annoying to the insecure, but in times of crises inspire the rest of the world to rise and get better.
That’s something you can never steal from Taiwan, and if I catch any virus in Asia while I am here, I hope it’s that one!
Onward, Taiwan, the Island of Can.
This morning, my wife left our Hong Kong apartment wearing a blue surgical mask she bought in Japan. My parasympathetic nervous system sent a shiver of referred vulnerability up my spine as I looked at the thin sheath of paper shielding her face.
I am not only worried about her catching a virulent strain of coronavirus from an unsuspecting citizen. I also worry about what else may effect her health or sanity in a city that has devolved into panic.
For weeks, as the Wuhan coronavirus popped up in every province in China; as passengers on flights who didn’t even display symptoms came down with fever after attending conferences and reunions all over the world; as countries like Singapore, Italy, and the US and Japan, announced bold quarantine measures for ANYONE who had visited China, the administration in Hong Kong, a Pandora’s Island, did nothing to safeguard its population.
They kept the borders open. They promised surgical masks that have never come.
Chief Executive Carrie Lam told people that wearing masks wasn’t even necessary and that nearly 10,000 health care workers, who unionized in three days and then demonstrated for protection and adoption of safety guidelines, were, in her words, “cynically causing disruption” and being manipulative.
In a city like that, where is the beacon of hope?
I would suggest it’s the island a few hundred kilometers off the mainland, known for being an underdog and a nest of rebels.
And good-hearted, open-minded rebels they be.
Meanwhile, On The Island of Can…
In Taiwan, the government is doing everything to protect the island, its culture, and possibly the global civilization.
Where Hong Kong has found itself incapable of sourcing basic supplies, leading to hoarding and panic buying during a health crisis, Taiwan’s industry leaders have stepped up their game. [You may remember that in a fit of pique and ego during the pro-autonomy demonstrations in Hong Kong, China BANNED masks from being sent to Hong Kong. It still has not reversed this decision.]
Taiwan has imposed a travel ban on anyone living or visiting China, Hong Kong or Macau over the past 2 weeks.
Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s biggest manufacturer of iPhones, has agreed to start production on masks for the people of Taiwan. It has begun to do so immediately to make them available to anyone in need.
With the presentation of a health insurance card, you can pick up masks three days per week on odd and even days, while everyone can buy some on Sunday, for a very affordable price. Compare that to black market prices in Hong Kong that are in the hundreds of dollars for small boxes of masks.
Taiwan seems to do this kind of thing particularly well. From a tech angle, messages and web sites announcements have been broadcast since the early days, almost a few per day, keeping the population informed.
Whatever began in Wuhan will not end in Wuhan. Everyone acted too late in Wuhan. The government fumbled basic public health protocols. Provincial officials lied for years about wild animal trade, which is the likely bridging point for a species barrier jump that created the Wuhan coronavirus.
The only thing that can be done now is to enact preparedness plans and stay informed, and that is something that Taiwan, a nation managed by politicians and community leaders, rather than administrators and technocrats, can do.
The selfishness and myopia of protocol can be put aside, and the smooth forces of unity and infrastructure can keep things stable.
Pandora’s Island, Under a Mainland Government
On a typical Saturday, I would normally go out with my wife. We might each buy a take-away tea and coffee, and go to the bank, or buy some food for the house, or watch a matinee.
But not today. Not in this city. I haven’t left the house for four days.
We are rationing masks, which we bought in Japan and brought back here, because there are none to be had in Hong Kong.
Months of political demonstrations in Hong Kong caused China authorities to ban the sale of masks to Hong Kong, fearful that people would be using them to commit dangerous acts against the government without exposing their identities. So rampant was the paranoia.
Nobody could have foreseen what this punishment might create. The butterfly effect that started with trying to circumvent the democratic legislation process by ramming forward an extradition bill, refusing to withdraw it, and then blaming the protesters for causing havoc (while it was obvious the police and the government had started the crisis), led to an inability, it seems, to cope with a public health emergency.
Unintended Consequences
This obedience to and the existence of a co-dependent relationship with China’s government has only further deepened here and meant that the government, in a spot of crisis of its own, has chosen to listen only to the rationale and instructions of the mainland, rather than the experts right in front of them, medical workers on the frontlines.
As a whole, the political body seems to be refusing to back down from earlier decisions it made preventing civil disobedience and enabling the purchase of health care masks, and it won’t make any moves again, it seems, unless given permission by the Central authorities.
A spot of political bother, one might think. What could it possibly have to do with me? To see why this logical is dangerous and globally relevant, you need to look still further into what has been developing in China.
The current Hong Kong rationale is, though it is sad to say, no different than a mirroring of a series of political circumstances that caused the Wuhan outbreak to happen and spread unabated for over a month.
It’s important to focus on a few really important events.
Hong Kong’s response, and Wuhan’s inability to respond or continue to respond, is a stark order of magnitude different in behavior than what Taiwan is doing as a beacon of safety and common sense.
Wuhan Coronavirus On Its Way: The Recent History
Officials in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, fearful of losing reputation points during preparations for annual Communist Party meetings, not only lied about the health problems emerging from a seafood and wild game market. They went a full step further and hunted down caregivers who had tried to warn the public of the impending emergency.
They scolded and detained eight doctors who tried to warn the health community about “a new SARS” that had shown up in clinics.
In fact, one doctor has become something of a martyr in this.
In his attempt to warn the health community, Dr. Li Wenliang sent messages to a private chat group on WeChat. Officials intercepted these messages and the doctor was detained and punished by local police, who accused him of spreading lies and disrupting public order.
There was no disease out in the public similar to SARS, they urged him to admit. “Stop spreading lies,” they demanded. Whether they knew there was or was not matters little. It was clear that even if they didn’t know, here was a professional who had experience in spotting this coronavirus family.
Should they not have listened to him? Do you notice a pattern? The Hong Kong government refused to listen to 6,600 health workers who protested for five days. Refused. It’s unclear why. Could it have something to do with recent news that for two weeks, Beijing authorities have ignored requests by the World Health Organization to offer aid?
The Disease Unfolds
When it became clear that China could no longer hide what was clearly developing in Wuhan and possibly showing up in other cities, he was finally called back in, let go with a warning, and returned to work.
He soon after became infected by one of the thousands of patients that had begun cramming into local hospitals, overwhelming the system.
He died a few days later.
Adding insult to death, it gets worse.
Perhaps fearful of what could befall provincial authorities, and perhaps dreading that rising public anger would become even more frenetic, unnamed authorities reading reports on Weibo and WeChat of his death demanded that his dead body be put back on life support, so that they could “correct” the view that he had died.
They could not keep up the charade.
Millions of messages began to be spread on social accounts demanding an explanation, and they finally had to admit that he had died early in the morning of the day that news was leaked.
Back in Hong Kong…
This is the ideology and practice that has now infected Hong Kong. It has gotten to the point that my family has no choice but to take temporary leave. The world community can no longer trust that Hong Kong is following public safety protocol, or working with the best interests of its people in mind.
At any moment in the next month, we risk being trapped here by a government’s decision to ban entrance if this is our origin point, if we don’t become temporary refugees now.
We will head to Okinawa.
That is the simplest way we can think of for us to return eventually to Taiwan for me to work without fear of infection or bureaucratic idiocy.
Postscript: Arriving On the Island of Can
Eventually we will make it there.
There is a moment when you descend into a city from cruise altitude, when you think, “We are here.”
It’s not the moment you hit the runway.
It’s somewhere around 4,500 feet or 2,000 feet, when faces begin to form, and eyes look up at you through the windows of buildings and cars.
You glimpse an old woman on a bike, pulling a cart of paper or groceries behind her under her immense floppy hat. A slight shawl of a fog is wrapped around the streetlights. It is morning, or dusk. The light has a magic to it.
You see a city, or a people, without fully experiencing it yet, the existence of a way of life. The world merges with your view of the world in the slow motion of something big traveling so incredibly fast that it seems to come into view in slow motion.
In Taiwan, even as you gliding down at 183 mph in the lumbering albatross of an aircraft, you see the grace of a place shaped by its own history, and its special brand of confidence.
Taiwan has what Hong Kong will struggle for years to acquire — a self-assuredness with dealing with problems that are inherent to life.
Taiwan is a true model in the region of a culture, not just a government, that knows it must make decisions for itself, and knows that these decisions might form the basis of life for others, even perfect strangers.
I could not have known six months or seven months ago that I would one day work in Taiwan. I do remember that at some point last year, I felt something in the air. The “je nais c’est qua” of the zeitgeist was telling me Hong Kong had changed. I told my wife, “We need to think about leaving here.”
That’s incredibly hard to do. We have a home in Hong Kong. We live here. We are bound by family relations and people we care about deeply. But the winds have shifted.
Complications that make life nearly unbearable, can be the catalyst for change that can make life better. IN some places you can leverage this and help others. In other places, you are on your own. Hong Kong has always been a place where you are on your own. It matters most when things are not working. Decisions have to be made.
Taiwan seems to make decisions faster and better than anyone, in an original, creative and respectful way. And they don’t do it selfishly. I know my friends there believe this is true. I see it in the way the act. I have learned a lot from my friends in Taiwan.
They live a mantra…
We are creative. We are confident. We are able.
Their answer to life’s questions in times of trouble is always this simple: “We can.”
A Postscript to the Postscript: About Hero Doctors
In the absence of logical decision-making, and struggling under the myopic mindset of authority in China, there are the doctors. A word needs to be said about them.
Without these people, we would be overwhelmed. They are literally fighting with their lives and their bodies to form a protective barrier for the world. Their vigilance and almost superhuman resilience needs to be commended.
We commend them!
The saying that filled the streets of Hong Kong during the protests and is now almost unbelievably being shared widely in China after the death of the whistleblower doctor begins to resonate.
“Heroes don’t fall from the sky. They’re just ordinary people who stepped forward.”
RIP
