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Comment by mamborambo | Hacker News Reader

An important side story is that CCP's active political interference of Taiwan's participation in World Health Organisation and other international coordination effort in the past few years, can affect Taiwan's ability to contain any pandemic from spreading.

And since there is estimated 200,000 Taiwan nationals living across the strait, their mobility especially during the Spring festival can become a huge conduit for spreading infection from China into Taiwan.

It is high time that the UN commits to a resolution to insulate shared global issues (hygiene and environment) from politics, and stop China from playing with fire again and again.

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There has been critics in Asia on that the ex-Director General (2006-2017) of WHO, Margaret Chan, who was sponsored by China for the position, had been building up influence in the organization for China during her term so WHO would work in China's favour. Its effect is showing this time in how WHO handled this incident. Instead of taking a lead and look into the whether China had handled the pandemic properly upon its onset, WHO just parrot China's official stance, in fear of offending China.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Chan

From 2009 to 2016, Taiwan participated in the World Health Assembly under the name "Chinese Taipei", which has been a formula similar to its Olympics team that is known to be workable if health is the concern. Of course when the political winds changed, Taiwan no longer wanted to participate under this name, but you can't say with a straight face that CPC is solely at fault here. Taiwan wants to play politics just as much.

Regardless, this has no bearing on containing pandemics. Taiwan sends a panel to the WHA anyway, just not under a country flag. Nice propagandistic farce that works for the domestic audience on both sides.

> It is high time that the UN commits to a resolution to insulate shared global issues (hygiene and environment) from politics, and stop China from playing with fire again and again.

To play devil's advocate, let's say China continues with her "eff you, no" foreign policy. Now what? The UN has limited powers to enforce such a resolution. What limited powers it has depend on cooperation by member nations, typically including a majority of the security council permanent members. None of those countries want to upset current relations with China, so the UN can't really coerce China to do anything.

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