Taiwan’s de facto U.N. ambassador speaks out on the early warning that could have alerted the world to COVID-19.
Taiwan’s de facto U.N. ambassador speaks out on the early warning that could have alerted the world to COVID-19.
O ne of Taiwan’s top diplomats charged in an interview with National Review that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic could have been significantly blunted had the world community listened to his country’s warnings from the start.
But the World Health Organization did not. And James Lee argues that his country’s exclusion from the U.N. system — something China has fought to intensify in recent years — played a role.
“Taiwan is the first country warning the WHO about the risk of the COVID virus. Regrettably our reported information did not share in the IHR — International Health Regulations — intranet system,” said James Lee, the director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York and Taiwan’s de facto U.N. ambassador.
Taiwan’s early warnings have been documented before, fueling questions about whether the WHO was overly deferential to China to the detriment of its core mission. In short, Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control revealed in early 2020 that it had sent a message to the WHO on December 31, 2019, describing human-to-human transmission of an “atypical pneumonia”; that message was never posted to the organization’s system.
Lee frames this failure bluntly.
“We would have not lost millions of lives if our warning had been posted in the systems immediately,” he told NR during an interview at his Midtown Manhattan office earlier this month. (Click here for more from that interview.)
Lee made the claim at the start of Taiwan’s annual U.N. campaign and ahead of the U.N. General Assembly’s opening debate next week.
Taiwan is not a member of the U.N. and therefore not a member of the WHO, a U.N. agency. That’s not by choice. The country was effectively expelled from the U.N. in 1971, as the U.N. General Assembly approved a measure — Resolution 2758 — dictating that the People’s Republic of China would occupy the seat of “China,” which Taiwan had held until that vote.
Since then, only the PRC has had representation at the body, which Lee and other Taiwanese officials describe as a grave injustice and a misinterpretation of the resolution. Taiwan’s 23 million people have never been ruled by the PRC’s Chinese Communist Party, which claims Taiwan as its sovereign territory. And starting in 1993, successive Taiwanese administrations have pushed every year for some degree of greater involvement in the U.N. system.
Taiwan’s participation in WHO meetings “remains severely restricted,” according to Lee. Between 2009 and 2020, Taiwan applied to attend WHO technical meetings 199 times but was invited to attend only 69 times, he said. That coincided with a period in which Beijing agreed to allow Taiwan to engage with the WHO as an observer — a thaw that ended in 2017, after the election of President Tsai Ing-wen, who is seen by Chinese officials as antagonistic to Beijing.
The pandemic has made painfully clear how Chinese efforts to isolate Taiwan from the U.N. have hurt the cause of global public health, and it’s reasonable to suspect that China’s pressure to sideline the country affected the WHO’s treatment of its early COVID warning.
Taiwan also wants to share its homegrown vaccines with the world but is prevented from doing so by China’s stranglehold on U.N. institutions. In August, Taiwan’s health ministry issued emergency authorization to a vaccine produced by the country’s Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp. But Lee points out a problem: “Taiwan’s FDA has not yet been recognized by the WHO as a so-called NRA — National Regulatory Authority.” In other words, Medigen has been barred from even being considered for WHO approval. “As a result, Taiwan cannot provide the vaccine to other countries or to COVAX. That is a loss for the international community, a pity as well.”
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation — it has official ties with only 15 countries in the world, down from 17 two years ago — deepens as Chinese influence over the U.N. secretariat and agencies has grown. One-fifth of the U.N.’s 15 specialized agencies are currently led by Chinese nationals; in 2019, over 1,300 Chinese nationals were employed by the U.N. system.
Lee is careful to say that he’s not pointing fingers for this state of affairs, a reticence likely inspired by the fact that he needs the U.N. secretariat’s cooperation to end his country’s exclusion. But he outlines the secretariat’s “erroneous or biased interpretation” of Resolution 2758 and the ensuing “inappropriate or discriminatory exclusion of Taiwan passport holders and Taiwan nationals from accessing U.N. premises.”
At root is the difference between Beijing’s professed “One China Principle,” under which it claims to rule over Taiwan, and the “One China Policy” held by the United States and other Western countries. According to the latter, those governments only acknowledge that Beijing makes such a claim; that’s different from endorsing it.
Beijing has employed a legal sleight of hand, persuading the U.N.’s bureaucracy to implement Resolution 2758 as if it were an official recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan. Lee contends that it just allowed the PRC to take the “China” seat — a matter of credentials and not, as the U.N. secretariat seems to understand it, legal recognition of Chinese claims. And that half-century-long trick might just be China’s top diplomatic triumph at Turtle Bay.
The Trump administration made strides to counter China’s gains within the U.N. system. In 2020, Mark Lambert, a career Foreign Service officer, was named a special envoy for countering malign influence at the U.N., and Trump-era U.N. ambassadors Nikki Haley and Kelly Craft each made Chinese influence at international organizations a focus. Craft’s successor, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, pledged during her own confirmation hearing to counter Chinese influence, charging that “China is working across the U.N. system to drive an authoritarian agenda.”
Still, the problem persists. Lee pointed to rampant corruption in those corners of the organization dominated by Chinese nationals. At the International Telecommunications Union: “They’ve crafted 5G regulations biased to Huawei. Everyone knows that.” At the International Civil Aviation Organization: “[It] covered up a Chinese hacker stealing sensitive data from the institution.” He pointed out that both of these scandals occurred when CCP officials ran the organizations (ICAO’s former Chinese head was recently succeeded by a Colombian national) and that China is ramping up a “proactive, aggressive” bid to take the powerful department that oversees peacekeeping operations.
“Chinese leadership roles in the U.N. system keep promoting Beijing’s interests and sometime whitewash its bad behavior instead of strengthening the liberal values such as accountability, transparency, and the rule of law,” Lee lamented, while adding, “I see that there’s growing awareness, so hopefully that awareness will turn into action to prevent further influence from malign behavior.”
The message of this month’s U.N. campaign is to convince the world that Taiwan can help — with the international pandemic response, the implementation of economic-development goals, and other key priorities for the organization. More quietly, Taiwan hopes to help democracies understand and root out China’s malign influence as well.
The pandemic revealed the extent of Beijing’s dominance over the U.N. and the warped system that sidelined Taiwan when the international community needed its insight most. Taiwan wants back in, and the world should welcome it.