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TAIPEI: Only Taiwan’s democratically elected government can represent its people on the world stage, not China, the island’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday (May 5), calling on the World Health Organization ( WHO) to “remove” control of China during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Taiwan’s exclusion from WHO membership, due to China’s objections, has angered Taipei, which says its exclusion has created an obvious gap in the global fight against the coronavirus. China considers the island one of its provinces.
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Taiwan has been pushing to attend, as an observer, this month’s meeting of the WHO decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), although government and diplomatic sources say China will block the move.
Steven Solomon, the WHO’s chief legal official, said on Monday that WHO recognized the People’s Republic of China as the “sole legitimate representative of China”, in accordance with UN policy since 1971, and that the issue of Taiwan’s assistance was an issue for the 194 WHO member states.
Speaking in Taipei, Taiwan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou said that the 1971 decision, under which Beijing assumed China’s position at the UN in Taipei, only solved the problem of who represented China. , not the Taiwan issue, and did not give China the power to represent Taiwan internationally.
“Only the democratically elected Taiwanese government can represent Taiwan’s 23 million people in the international community,” he told reporters.
The WHO should “relinquish control of the Chinese government” and allow Taiwan to fully participate in the fight against the virus, Ou said.
“Don’t let China’s inappropriate political interference become an obstacle to preventing the world’s united fight against the virus.”
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Taiwan attended the World Health Assembly as an observer from 2009 to 2016 when relations between Taipei and Beijing heated up.
But China blocked further participation after the election of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, whom China considers to be separatist, charges it rejects.
The United States has strongly supported Taiwan’s participation in the WHA as an observer, another flaw in ties between Washington and Beijing that has already been overshadowed by criticism from the Trump administration of how China and the WHO have handled the outbreak.
China says that Taiwan is adequately represented by Beijing and that Taiwan can only participate in WHO under the Beijing One China policy, in which Taiwan would have to accept that it is part of China, something the Tsai government will not do.
Taiwan has reported far fewer cases of the new coronavirus than many of its neighbors, due to early and effective detection and prevention work.
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