Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

ANALYSIS: Move to participate in WHO could have harmed sovereignty

Taipei Times

The controversial participation of Taiwan in the WHO is more complicated than the designation “Taiwan, China,” over which the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have traded fire, analysts said.

Despite being harshly criticized for a recently leaked procedure concerning the implementation of the International Health Regulations (IHR) — a set of WHO global health rules — with the instruction the refer to the nation as “Taiwan, Province of China,” the government has vehemently defended its WHO strategy.

The government has raised two key arguments in its defense.

Two-fifths say sovereignty eroded: poll

Taipei Times

While 47.3 percent of the public think cross-strait exchanges over the past three years have not negatively impacted Taiwan’s sovereignty, 40 percent believe that there has been a severe erosion of sovereignty following the cross-strait exchanges initiated by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration since 2008, according to a survey released by the Taiwan Brain Trust yesterday.

Think tank chief executive Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) said that the survey was conducted on Friday and Saturday last week, before the recent revelation of an internal WHO memo dated September last year that showed the body instructed members to refer to Taiwan as a “Province of China.”

Ma deceived public about international space: FAPA

Taipei Times

The Washington-based Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) says that the disclosure of an internal WHO memo instructing its agencies to refer to Taiwan as a province of China has sent “shockwaves” through the overseas Taiwanese community.

“The episode shows that the [President] Ma [Ying-jeou (馬英九)] administration has been deceptive and given the Taiwanese public an unwarranted rosy picture of the situation,” FAPA president Bob Yang (楊英育) said.

Dated Sept. 14 last year, the memo says that procedures used by the WHO to facilitate relations with Taiwan were subject to Chinese approval and that Taiwan “as a province of China, cannot be party to the International Health Regulations (IHR).”

Kevin Rudd and his China fallacies

Jerome Keating

There are times in listening to world leaders that one wonders whether they are being simplistic, blind, naive or even duplicitous in their assessment of the world and its economy.

A recent case in point was when Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd visited Washington, chatted with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and then spoke at the Brookings Institution. In his speech, Rudd stressed the importance of bringing China into international institutions. Rudd’s reason, of course, was that the world economy depended on it. This bears deeper examination.

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