Photo by Marcin Jerzewski, European Values
What is happening?
Between May 19-27, Geneva is hosting the 78th World Health Assembly (WHA), one of the world’s most important fora for strengthening global pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. While 194 member states will be in attendance, one voice will remain muted. The voice of Taiwan. Despite its meaningful contributions to the global public health regime, including its significant public health expertise, democratic governance, and advanced technology, Taiwan will be excluded from WHA for the ninth consecutive time. The country held an observer status in the body between 2009 and 2016. Yet, amid China’s growing belligerence and use of lawfare to constrain Taiwan’s international space, including malign distortion of the UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, it has not been invited back.
What is the broader picture?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan demonstrated exceptional resilience of its public health regime and also supported countries around the world, including in Europe, in their crisis responses. This includes the successful #TaiwanCanHelp campaign, which included rapid assistance to the European Union in providing sorely-needed PPE and a donation of mask production lines to the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, Taiwan’s contributions to global public health efforts did not start with the pandemic. The Little Island That Could has also been a leader in efforts to combat malaria, including a highly successful campaign to eradicate the disease in São Tomé and Príncipe that helped reduce the incidence of malaria in the country from 50 percent in 2003 to 1.01 percent in 2015. Yet, the African nation terminated diplomatic relations with Taipei to establish ties with Beijing in 2016.
Chinese efforts to block Taiwan’s bid to observe the work of the WHA are linked to a broader campaign of legal warfare – or lawfare – which Beijing wages to limit Taiwan’s international space. It is a part of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) “Three Warfares” (三種戰爭), a non-kinetic doctrine of concurrent psychological, public opinion, and legal warfare which seeks to create an information advantage for China. Crucially, the deployment of political warfare aims to help China shape how the global public thinks and talks about the “Taiwan issue.” The distortion of the UN Resolution 2758 is a critical tool for Beijing in this effort.
The resolution contains 155 words, yet “Taiwan” is not among them. Passed in 1971, the document transferred China’s seat at the United Nations from the “representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” to the People’s Republic of China. It does not address the issue of Taiwan’s sovereignty, nor does it proscribe the island nation’s participation in international organizations. Yet, Beijing distorts the meaning of the resolution and equates it with its unilateral one-China principle, which misleadingly characterizes Taiwan as a province of China, unable to participate in international formats in any way. During last year’s 77th WHA, the representative of Cuba explicitly cited UN Resolution 2758 to justify Havana’s opposition to Taiwan’s participation in the works of the body. In the previous year, the representative of Pakistan also issued a similar statement.
Why is it important?
While much of the world is only viewing the COVID-19 pandemic through a rear-view mirror, it irrefutably demonstrated vulnerabilities in our public health, economic, and social systems. Additionally, it highlighted the nexus of public health and national security, from foreign disinformation about pandemic responses seeking to destabilize public trust in democratic institutions to cyberattacks on critical health infrastructure, such as the ransomware attack on the University Hospital in Brno in 2020. Consequently, while China seeks to instrumentalize global public health institutions to achieve its own political goals, including legal and political asphyxiation of Taiwan under the aegis of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation (中華民族偉大復興), supporting Taiwan’s meaningful participation in bodies such as the WHA is a matter of interests, rather than just values, of democratic countries.
