Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) sacking on Thursday of two top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Hubei, as the province and nation struggle to come to grips with the COVID-19 outbreak, overshadowed another crucial personnel move, one that could have repercussions for Taiwan.

Xi replaced the party secretaries for Hubei and its capital, Wuhan, just one day after telling an emergency meeting of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee that “all regions and departments performed their duties actively and conscientiously” in the war against the outbreak.

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in Hubei Province, the epicenter of the outbreak, yesterday surged to nearly 60,000 after the Chinese National Health Commission revised its diagnostic methods to test for the virus.

With an unknown number of undiagnosed people quarantined in their homes and millions of migrant workers in the process of returning to cities following the end of the extended Lunar New Year holiday, reports earlier this week of a decline in the number of new cases in China might prove to be a false dawn.