The story of the fightback against China in 2020 starts in Taiwan
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This was the year when China launched a crippling global pandemic, dodged the blame, claimed the credit and took a giant step towards its goal of world domination. But at the end of August almost unnoticed to the rest of the world, a small country launched a defiant fightback.
The Covid-19 virus has infected nearly 80 million people, killed more than 1.7 million and destroyed the happiness, health and lives of countless more. What needs stating is that it could potentially have been stopped in its tracks, were it not for the sloth, secrecy and paranoia of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese authorities formally notified the World Health Organisation on January 3 that a “severe pneumonia of unknown aetiology” – a mysterious new respiratory disease – had been discovered. Weeks before that, officials in Taiwan had received worrying reports of a new illness. They sent a top doctor, Professor Chuang Yin-ching, to investigate.
Based on his alarming findings, Taiwan – a democratic, law-governed country that mainland China refuses to recognise as a nation-state – acted swiftly, imposing track-and-trace rules that have given it a stunningly successful record in combating the plague of 2020. With one-third of Britain’s population, it has recorded only seven deaths this year – a thousandth of our grim total. For most of its 23 million citizens, life has continued as usual; a state of blissful normality of which we in Britain can only dream.
Inside Communist China it was another story. Officials said there were only a few dozen confirmed cases of the coronavirus and denied reports of human-to-human transmission. Even as the numbers in hotspot city Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, mushroomed, a large annual legislative meeting went ahead as did a now-infamous pre-Chinese new year dinner, attended by 40,000 families.
The authorities not only botched their response and lied about the outbreak, they punished medical workers and journalists who tried to investigate too. The video-maker Zhang Zhan, for example, was arrested and charged with spreading fake news and “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” – a catch-all charge typically used to intimidate critics of the regime.
The 37-year-old has reportedly been force-fed and tortured in prison. Amnesty International is campaigning for her release. But at least her case is public. Others have simply disappeared.
None of the international criticism bothers Chinese officials. To understand their mentality, try watching Wolf Warrior 2, the 2017 action film featuring a Chinese Rambo rampaging across Africa. The unabashedly imperialist message would make any modern British director flinch: China is morally and psychologically superior. Be grateful, or else.
“Wolf Warrior” is now the semi-official term for the Chinese approach to diplomacy. Gone are the days of polite jargon-laden cliches. Chinese envoys are paid to be rude. When, in 2019, Sweden dared to award a literary prize to jailed Chinese-born Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai – an outspoken critic of the Chinese authorities – the reaction was splenetic. The Chinese ambassador in Stockholm said: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns.”
Friends get other things, too. China’s “mask diplomacy” – in which it rushed shipments of medical supplies to hard-hit countries such as Italy – bolstered its influence, just as Western institutions such as the European Union and NATO seemed to be flailing. Now vaccine diplomacy is underlining the new world order and – having taken huge strides with two potential vaccines undergoing trials – China is the emerging global superpower, on track to its goal of being the world’s most powerful country by 2049.
The story of the fightback against China in 2020 starts in Taiwan – a defiantly anti-communist bastion since nationalist forces fled there following the communist takeover in 1949.
Despite its stellar public health record, it is not allowed to be even an observer member of the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO. No Western country dare have diplomatic relations with Taiwan – the only exception in Europe is the Holy See.
Here in Britain, the anxiety about offending the thin-skinned Beijing bureaucracy extends even to the supposedly apolitical Lord Mayor’s Show, the annual shindig that (usually) takes place in the City of London in November. Its organisers have, without explanation, banned Taiwan from taking part. A central principle of Wolf Warrior diplomacy is that anything involving China’s interests, anywhere in the world, is a legitimate subject for pressure.
The fightback against China’s Wolf Warrior diplomacy started in an unlikely quarter: the Czech Republic. The mayor of Prague, Zdeněk Hřib, studied medicine in Taiwan. When the Chinese authorities tried some low-level bullying earlier this year, asking him to confirm that the city complied with the “One China” policy – which mandates a boycott of Taiwan – he refused. They made threats. All cultural ties with the city would be broken, including an upcoming tour to China by the Prague Symphony Orchestra. No problem, said the mayor. We will go to Taiwan instead. And they did.
That spark of resistance fanned into a blaze, culminating on August 30 with a stunning piece of diplomatic theatre. A 90-strong Czech delegation, headed by Miloš Vystrčil, the country’s third most-senior elected official, arrived in Taiwan – with the explicit purpose of breaking the mainland’s taboo.
It was a powerful message, after a year in which China had all but escaped international pressure, even as it was considered responsible for Covid’s rapid and unchecked escalation.
It was a privilege to host @Vystrcil_Milos & members of the #CzechRepublic delegation today. Your visit is a testament to #Taiwan & #Czechia's courage & persistence in pursuit of justice, freedom & democracy. These values guide our contributions to the world. pic.twitter.com/VLdCrxcnD3
— 蔡英文 Tsai Ing-wen (@iingwen) September 3, 2020
The Czech trip to Taiwan was a bombshell – and, for me, the day everything changed for China in 2020. Foreign delegations are mostly unofficial and stick strictly to non-contentious topics. Not this time. Mr Vystrčil gave a barnstorming speech in the Taiwanese parliament, declaring, in the style of John F Kennedy in Berlin, “I am Taiwanese”.
Thunderous complaints echoed from Beijing and from the embassy in Prague. My Czech friends were braced for serious reprisals. Cyber-attacks on government computers was one possibility they feared. Or worse.
Yet China huffed, puffed – and went quiet. A few trivial punishments ensued: cancelling a small commercial contract for pianos being the most notable.
This was important. It shows the great weakness in the Chinese approach. It rests largely on bluff. And it is self-defeatingly ambitious. You can intimidate some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. And if you make that your goal, you are heading for a fall.
The fictional “Wolf Warrior” succeeds because he is alert and decisive, while his foes are complacent and disorganised. But the countries of the free world are not a bunch of decadent mercenaries. When we work together our responses are, potentially, far more creative and resilient than anything that the Chinese Communist Party can manage.
As Britain emerges from the woes of this year, we need to learn both humility and national self-confidence.
Our disastrous handling of the pandemic underlines how much we have to learn from countries like Taiwan that preserved not only public but economic well-being. But we should also borrow some backbone from the Czechs and confront the Chinese Communist Party’s brittle, arrogant attempt to dictate what we may say, do and think in our own country.
A good place to start might be the Lord Mayor’s Show – cancelled this year because of the virus. I hear the organisers are rethinking the ban on Taiwan for 2021. China will be furious. Our response should be: “So what?”
Read more from A Day to Remember in a Year Like No Other
Robin Shattock: The day I found myself in a global race to find a cure for coronavirus
Michael Dobbs: The day Dominic Cummings shattered a nation’s trust by going for a drive
Andrew Lloyd Webber: The day the lights went out on my beloved West End
David Goodhart: The day Covid shook my faith in television news
For more great essays on the year that was 2020, click here
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