TAIWAN ELECTION 2024 AND A GLANCE AT HISTORY
In the Taiwanese Presidential election, the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Dr Lai Ching-te, also known internationally as William Lai, won the Presidential election and will take office on May 20, 2024. DPP’s Ms. Hsiao Bi-khim, former Taiwanese envoy to the US, will become the Vice-President of Taiwan.
Going back in history, in year 2002, at the World Health Assembly (W.H.A.), Geneva, the annual gathering of Health Ministers from around the world with their entourages, when the DPP held the Presidency (and Ms. Hsiao then was a Presidential advisor), I was in the W.H.A. Hall as impassioned Health Minister after Minister from countries allied with Taiwan spoke in favor of Taiwan being given Observer Status, just as the Vatican and the International Red Cross, are. But the objection from a P-5 Member was sufficient for the then-Director General to deny those requests. Taiwan itself was a full Member of the W.H.O. until 1972 when it was expelled from the Organization. So much for “multilateralism”.
WHY MINILATERALISM
The definition of insanity being the repetition of the very same steps, again and again, with the expectation of a different result, makes one wonder if the mandarins in Taipei will at least now explore other options – for instance, minilateralism—where a small group of nations collaborate to tackle problems jointly or pursue mutual goals. With a dwindling number of formal allies such as Saint Kitts and Nevis, Taiwan is well positioned to take forward minilateralism as an appropriately innovative system for the 21st Century. The best example of minilateralism is the Quad, committed to a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific”. In recent months, the Quad appears to have lost some of its steam—perhaps the addition of Taiwan, in some creatively constructive manner, will invigorate it. Quad members the US, Japan and India are broadly supportive of Taiwan.
TAIWANESE EXCELLENCE IN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING
The most tangible example of Taiwanese excellence is ingrained in the “fabless” semiconductor manufacturing that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) founder Dr Morris Chang pioneered. Having been a senior executive at Texas Instruments and seen even in the 1980s that semiconductor manufacturing productivity was much higher in Japan than in the US, because of staff qualifications and lower turnover then in Japan, Chang concluded that the future of semiconductor manufacturing would shift to Asia, which it indeed has. While heading the Taiwanese government-sponsored non-profit R&D entity Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Chang founded TSMC in 1987 and it soon became among the most profitable semiconductor manufacturing companies, making Morris Chang himself a billionaire – Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.5 Billion. Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm are prominent customers of TSMC and their engineers design the semiconductor chips that then get contract-manufactured at TSMC. Part of the chip design work is also done in Bengaluru. The semiconductor manufacturing industry in Taiwan is the most sophisticated in the world, and they guard their intellectual property zealously. Indeed, the currently most advanced 2 nanometer chips are test-produced by TSMC solely in Taiwanese factories. Korea’s Samsung is also reportedly in the race to produce 2 nanometer chips. Taiwan’s TSMC and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) are the two largest contract semiconductor manufacturers in the world. Through sheer ingenuity, Taiwan made itself the center of worldwide advanced semiconductor chips manufacturing.
One millimeter being 1 million nanometers, the 2 nanometer chip will be less broad than a single strand of DNA. The average virus is about 14 nanometers in diameter. Thus, the precision engineering involved in manufacturing it requires extraordinary expertise, as well as materials and equipment of the highest standards. There are billions of components assembled on a chip the size of a fingernail. Those staggering developments have made “Moore’s Law” outdated that once proclaimed that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.
Taiwan-born Jensen Huang, CEO of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chip maker Nvidia, in a recent speech at Columbia University, stated that it costs $5 Billion in engineering resources to design a high-end chip and $500 million in payments to TSMC to contract-manufacture it.
Originally founded as a video game chip manufacturer, Nvidia rapidly graduated to become the most valuable Artificial Intelligence (AI) chip company and has market capitalization of US$1.3 trillion. Jensen Huang joked that it was a company founded 30 years ago at “Denny’s”, a modest, casual American dining establishment where he then worked part-time while at Stanford University.
TSMC is also building two major plants in Arizona for advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the coming years, taking advantage of the new, large funding available through the US Chips and Science Act, to ensure a more secure supply chain for semiconductors and to enable tighter integration with key US customers.
A MAGNIFICENT NATURAL EXPERIMENT: MULTILATERAL-LESS TAIWAN V MULTILATERAL-DOMINATED COUNTRIES
Just a generation ago, Taiwan was an impoverished nation. My Harvard University colleague David Bell, who had been President Kennedy’s Budget Director and later head of USAID in the Johnson Administration, told me how annoyed Taiwanese government officials were when he had to tell them in the 1960s that the US was discontinuing foreign assistance to Taiwan. Still later, when the world largely turned its multilateral back on Taiwan, it persevered and has become among the greatest success stories globally, even being a model on combining land reforms with growth.
Thus. we have had a perfect natural experiment of Taiwan having been shunned by the multilateral system but developed spectacularly, and the multilaterals having mixed results with countries they have been “managing”. Among the first to congratulate Dr Lai was Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, Chair of the US Congressional Subcommittee that appropriates funds for international financial institutions. Rather than automatically acceding to yet another Capital Increase, he ought to first hold hearings on innovations in development banks, for instance, how the $6 billion in non-income-tax-paying staff accounts of the World Bank and IMF staff could be put to better use in the interest of urgently needed reconstruction in Ukraine and Gaza. World Bank President Mr. Ajay Banga, a former credit card company CEO, and IMF Managing Director Ms. Kristalina Georgieva can be invited to testify, informally or formally.
A TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION
President-elect Dr Lai, the current Vice President of Taiwan and a former Premier of Taiwan, is a medical doctor and a fellow alumnus of the Harvard University School of Public Health (HSPH). Until COVID-19, most people had not heard of the specialty of public health. Indeed, even today, an immunologist and a geneticist (both who lack formal training in epidemiology, biostatistics, health economics, and other core public health subjects) who held high ranks in a major R&D financing body and therefore, along with W.H.O. were central in taking vast decisions for the globe, are claiming that their concerns about “public health” made them take some of the most drastic measures in human history, with little or no data – or manufactured estimates, that have since been proven to be grossly erroneous. Others with no relevant expertise or experience, nonetheless, took other dramatic decisions that in hindsight are hard to believe. The past years have been the first time in W.H.O.’s history that a non-medical person has headed it. The core of public health is to manage health crises in populations as compared to the single patient that a clinician manages. In the case of COVID, those extraordinary steps, such as denying the value of natural immunity which kept Novak Djokovic from multiple major tennis titles even as the clock ticks to his retirement, or denying the value of all therapeutics and relying solely on inadequately tested Covid mRNA vaccines (that have subsequently been shown to be causative of myocarditis, and excess cardiovascular-cause mortality), are all categorical reasons to have a “truth and reconciliation commission” to learn from every failure and success in handling COVID, perhaps the most egregious having been mass lockdowns of entire nations that had never before been implemented, that did far greater harm to national economies and poor people than they did to the pandemic (or the laptop class). The goal here is not to cast aspersions on anyone but to have genuine, non-political learning in the hope that the catastrophic mistakes during COVID will not be repeated. Taiwan had significant early successes in the fight against COVID, and Taiwanese epidemiologists knew that it originated in Wuhan, even in December 2019.
The World Health Organization has been under global scrutiny ever since its 11 January 2020 tweet “W.H.O. does not recommend any specific health measures for travelers to and from Wuhan, China”. Then, W.H.O. went so far as to tweet on 14 January 2020 “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”. This, after Taiwan informed W.H.O. as early as 31 December 2019 that human-to-human transmission was underway, since Taiwanese doctors maintain informal collegial ties with Chinese doctors. The “spin” from W.H.O. is that the multilateral does not even currently give Taiwan observer status (that it had previously), and therefore could not have taken cognizance to alert the world. Also this, despite the reality in today’s social media world that even Supreme Courts take note of information suo moto submitted online. Finally, China’s official confirmation of person-to-person transmission came as late as 20 January 2020. This is not the first time that WHO has been accused of tardiness; it has been heavily criticized for its handling of the Ebola epidemic in 2015, which killed more than 10,000 people in Africa, and still others.
TAIWAN AND UNIVERSAL HEALTH COVERAGE
One potential area for Taiwan to have a leadership role is the “Health for All by the Year 2000” Alma Ata Declaration, that was deftly and nimbly converted at the turn of the century (when it was clear that nothing even remotely close would be accomplished) to “Health for All in the 21st Century” and its current avatar “Universal Health Coverage”. I was the designated faculty adjutant when the then-recently retired W.H.O. Director General Dr Halfdan Mahler spent a week at HSPH as a visiting Fellow in 1988. It was Dr Mahler, more than anyone, who shaped the landmark Alma Ata Declaration 1978 that set the goal of Health for All by the Year 2000. Yet it struck me that there never was any clear understanding of how to accomplish such a lofty goal: a) no clear objectives b) no articulated priorities c) no explicit strategy to achieve the objectives and d) no credible calculation of the resources essential to achieve the goal and how they would be mobilized. Taiwan, that has universal health coverage, can take the lead on digital health-driven universal health coverage for many countries that need assistance.
ACADEMIC SCRUTINY OF THE ‘ONE-CHINA POLICY’
The legal status of Taiwan is itself intriguing and the “One-China Policy” may not really withstand detailed academic scrutiny. The Ch’ing (Qing) Dynasty of China formally ceded Taiwan (then Formosa) to Japan “in perpetuity” as stated in the Treaty of Shimonoseki after the 1895 Japan-China war. Count Mutsu Munemitsu from Wakayama Prefecture, then the Foreign Minister of Japan, served as plenipotentiary at the peace conference in Shimonoseki after the First Sino-Japanese War. John W. Foster, who had been US Secretary of State for 6 months, served as a legal consultant to the Imperial Ch’ing Government in writing the Treaty, and he is more famous as the maternal grandfather of Cold War 1.0 US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles after whom is named the Washington D.C. Dulles International Airport.
Following the end of World War II in 1945, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, on behalf of the Allies, took charge of Taiwan and it has remained separate from China even after Chiang and his army fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao took over the whole of Mainland China in 1949. Thus, there has never been any political link between the People’s Republic of China (Communist China) and Taiwan (Republic of China). Yet, in W.H.O. and U.N. circles, Taiwan is declared as a province of China’s. Nevertheless, trade, investment and tourism ties boomed in the past decades between China and Taiwan. It is time for a thorough public analysis of how the “One-China” policy came about, what its anomalies and ramifications are perhaps led by retiring President Tsai Ing-wen with contributors from around the world.
I remember the euphoria with which the “One Country, Two Systems” rhetoric of PRC was greeted in July 1997 when Hong Kong was handed over from the UK to PRC — the World Bank and IMF even held the Annual Meeting in Hong Kong in September 1997. The “assurances” were announced with great fanfare to last for 50 years till 2047, but those assurances were abandoned in just half the time, by 2022, and there has not been a whimper of protest from any quarter that had expressed the euphoria!
While this column is not to cover possible violent confrontation risks, military observers have opined that Taiwan possesses sufficient missiles firepower to devastate the entire east coast of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and that the precious Taiwanese foundries that manufacture the most sophisticated soon to be 2 nanometer semiconductor chips might in turn get devastated in the kinetic conflict and therefore it will be pyrrhic. Hence, war should be regarded as unthinkable.
TAIWAN’S LEGISLATIVE YUAN, AND FORESIGHT
In the 2024 Taiwan parliamentary election, no party won an absolute majority. The Kuomintang (KMT) won 52 seats, the DPP won 51 seats, there are 2 KMT-leaning independents, and 8 won from the small Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). Thus, the TPP led by former Taipei Mayor Mr. Ko Wen-je holds the cards in the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s Parliament), as the DPP will need its support to advance government legislation.
Non-serious haggling by some Members of the Legislative Yuan over relatively small sums of money and engaging in physical altercations in Parliament make a mockery of the very notion of “democracy” when existential risks to Taiwan are rising. Taiwan needs as many friends and allies, formal, informal and in any color and shape as it can build, and with extreme urgency. This is hardly the time for squabbling over deficit-financing to achieve great and grave objectives that give it a raison d’être and that Taiwan can undertake to prove to the world that Taiwan belongs forever. It is undoubtedly complicated because of the strident declarations of PRC President Xi Jinping, and the designation of Mr. Wang Huning, Member of the highest-ranking Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, considered to be the top PRC strategist, as point person on Taiwan. VP-elect Ms. Hsiao Bi-khim, born in Kobe, Japan to a Taiwanese father and American mother, a fellow alumna of Columbia University, with a wealth of relationships in the US and other democracies, was Vice President of Liberal International, and herself a former elected Legislator in the Legislative Yuan, is eminently qualified to help President-elect Dr Lai and Taiwan to navigate those choppy waters.
CONCLUSION
In many “democracies” as soon as the election is over, the mandarins take over and “school” the elected ones as to “what is possible and a long list of the impossible”. One hopes that Dr Lai and Ms. Hsiao, having benefited from the most prestigious educational institutions and having slogged it out in lengthy individual study, group study, research work, case study, laboratory, etc sessions with many frenetic and stressful jobs thereafter, will see it fit to explore beyond the bureaucracy as to what is in fact achievable. The world wishes them “Godspeed”.
Dr Sunil Chacko holds degrees in medicine (Kerala), public health (Harvard) and an MBA (Columbia). He was Assistant Director of Harvard University’s Intl. Commission on Health Research, served in the Executive Office of the World Bank Group, and has been a faculty member in the US, Canada, Japan and India.