Since Wednesday, the country of Taiwan had recorded 100 cases of Covid-19, a remarkably low number offered the island’s distance to China. Some 2.71 million mainland Chinese checked out Taiwan in 2019 and as just recently as January there were a dozen big salami flights in between Wuhan and Taipei every week. However despite its apparent vulnerabilities, Taiwan has actually handled, so far, to keep well ahead of the contagious curve through a mix of early action, prevalent screening, contact tracing, extensive screening, and the adroit usage of innovation.
As millions of people in the United States shelter in place while girding themselves for the double whammy of an accelerating outbreak and a vicious economic recession, it is natural enough to look at Taiwan’s example and wonder why we didn’t we do what they did, or, more pertinently, could we have done what they did? But a common style in the current press protection of Taiwan’s (and Singapore’s) efforts to contain Covid-19 has actually included a constant cautionary note. With specific attention to the technically intrusive surveillance-state elements of Taiwan’s response– significantly, its real-time integration of national health care databases with customizeds and travel records and its use of federal government issued cellular phone to remotely monitor quarantine orders– we keep seeing the culturally ingrained presumption that East Asian-style state social control just won’t fly in the good old, lone wolf, government-wary, freedom-loving United States.
The New York City Times: People in “places like Singapore … are more ready to accept federal government orders.” Fortune: “There seems to be more of a desire to position the neighborhood and society needs over specific liberty.” Even WIRED: “These nations all have social structures and traditions that might make this type of surveillance and manage a little much easier than in the don’t- tread-on-me United States.”
Here, as soon as again, increasing from the mausoleum like a zombie-infected terra-cotta warrior, we see the classic “Confucian values” (or “Asian worths”) argument that has actually traditionally been deployed to describe whatever from the economic success of East Asian countries, the prevalence of authoritarian single political party guideline in Asia, and even, most just recently, China’s supposed edge in AI research
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So, yeah, congratulations to Taiwan for keeping its individuals safe, however here in America we’re going to do what we constantly do in a crisis– line up at a gun-store and accuse the opposing political celebration of acting in bad faith. Not for us, those Asian values.
However the fact is that Taiwan, one of Asia’s many lively and lively democracies, is a horrible example to cite as a cultural other populated by submissive peons. A closer lo
