China defends WHO and calls Taiwan ‘venomous’ in row over racist abuse towards Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Taiwan says it has been shut out of key timely information throughout the crisis because China – which claims it as part of its territory – won’t let it become a WHO member state

China has defended the World Health Organisation and its chief in a row with Taiwan over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Taiwan, which is not a member of the UN’s health agency because of Beijing’s objections, has accused the WHO of leaving it to tackle the spread of Covid-19 without access to crucial and timely information.

The argument took an ugly turn this week after the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he had faced months of “racist slurs” online that originated in Taiwan, as well as death threats, adding: “I don’t give a damn.”

China said Taiwan was “venomously” attacking the agency and trying to use the pandemic to advance its agenda of seeking independence. China claims Taiwan as part of its sovereign territory, though the island is practically run by its own democratically elected government.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said in a statement that: “The [Taiwanese] DPP authorities are unscrupulously using the virus to seek independence, venomously attacking the WHO and its responsible people, conniving with the green internet army to wantonly spread racist comments. We strongly condemn this.” Green is the colour of the DPP – Taiwan’s ruling party.

On Thursday and Friday, messages started to emerge on social media purporting to be from Taiwanese people expressing remorse for the abuse of Tedros and the WHO. Most had similar wording, along the lines of: “As a Taiwanese, I feel extremely ashamed that we attacked Tedros in such a malicious way. I apologise to Tedros on behalf of the Taiwanese and beg for his forgiveness.”

In a statement, Taiwan’s justice ministry said the posts actually appeared to be a coordinated campaign from the mainland, designed to drive a wedge further between the WHO and Taiwan.

At a briefing, the ministry’s investigations team said the posts were suspicious because of the similarity of their wording, and the fact that they mainly feature the simplified Chinese characters more common to the mainland.

“There is a concern it is a deliberate operation by overseas forces,” the ministry said. “Falsely claiming to be Taiwanese, and openly admitting to racist attacks on WHO director general Tedros and begging forgiveness, seriously damages our country’s international reputation.”

Also on Friday, Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, issued a “strong protest” against Tedros’s suggestion that the abuse he had been receiving came from Taiwan.

“Taiwan always objects to discrimination in any form,” she wrote on her official Facebook page. “We know how it feels to be discriminated against and isolated more than anyone else as we have been excluded from global organisations for years.

“So I’d like to invite Tedros to visit Taiwan, to see how Taiwanese commit to devote to international society despite being discriminated and isolated.”

Taiwan is not the only country to have criticised the WHO over its handling of the coronavirus crisis. Donald Trump threatened this week to withdraw US funding from the agency, calling its approach “China-centric”.

“They’ve been wrong about a lot of things,” he told a daily briefing, where he suggested the WHO was influenced by Beijing in downplaying the severity of the outbreak when it first began. “They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known and they should have known and they probably did know,” Mr Trump said.

Other countries, like India, have diverged from WHO recommendations in a number of ways, formulating their own strategies for dealing with the virus. While Tedros said “test, test, test” was the best policy, India instead aggressively shut down first international travel and then movement within the country, while testing remained at minimal levels.

Recently, it has started rolling out mandatory use of face masks, and ramped up production of the untested malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. One Indian national described the country as “politely sidestepp[ing]” WHO advice on key aspects of virus management.

In Taiwan, some internet users have used the WHO row to draw attention back to the positive ways it is seen as having responded to the coronavirus pandemic.

Thanks to an early and effective prevention strategy – Taiwan was one of the places to start screening passengers from Wuhan in January – the island has reported just 382 cases of the virus to date, and on Friday confirmed its sixth death, an elderly patient with underlying health conditions.

Under the English hashtag #ThisAttackComesFromTaiwan, Twitter users wrote about all the good things that come from the island, including its democratic system and being the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage.

And using the hashtag alongside pictures of medical supplies being offloaded from an aircraft, foreign minister Joseph Wu tweeted: “Our assistance to allies in Central America has arrived safely. The people of Taiwan are proud to help friends in time of need.”