Fifty years of hurt: Taiwan struggles for Geneva role

Taiwan’s 87-year-old public health diplomat has been campaigning to regain membership of the WHO for decades. Yet even after the island’s stellar response to the global Covid pandemic, opposition from China means the struggle may only get harder. As Wu Yung Tung packed his bags, he was filled with excitement. A fresh graduate from medical school in southern Taiwan, Wu was preparing to make the most of an exciting opportunity: A six-month medical residency in Japan. Arranged by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1970, it was part of a wide range of benefits that then-member Taiwan enjoyed. “At that time, I really felt the WHO was very nice,” Wu says, sat in the board room of the Taiwanese Medical Association (TMA) in central Taipei dressed in a navy suit. But shortly after his return to Taipei, he explains, circumstances changed. The government, one of the WHO’s founders, had managed to retain its membership even after retreating to Taiwan in the wake of the Communist victory in ...