James Chater

Taiwan’s pandemic restrictions have been so successful that the country has had fewer than 1,000 cases with just nine deaths. Like other Asian countries, Taiwan achieved this feat through strict border closures and rigorous track and tracing. And yet Taiwan’s government knows that a Covid jab is the only way to avoid prolonged international isolation — without it, relaxing border controls could see the island nation consumed by a wave of infections that, so far, it has been able to avoid. But getting hold of vaccines has been a difficult job. Taiwan is yet to secure enough doses for all of the citizens it wants to vaccinate. For the doses it has secured, a detailed time frame for their rollout is yet to be published.

At 6.20 p.m. on Friday evening, Scarborough Beach, an oceanside suburb of Perth, looked like it always does: families picnicked on grassy dunes overlooking the Indian Ocean, queues were forming outside bars lining the shore, and inside restaurants, groups chatted casually over cold beers. Given the bustle, it’s hard to believe a city-wide lockdown ended only 20 minutes earlier, triggered on the Sunday before after Western Australia recorded its first domestically transmitted case of coronavirus in ten months. The country’s pandemic strategy would look alien to many in Europe, which has been more akin to New Zealand’s or Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan.

When Alex Azar, the US health secretary, arrived in Taipei on Sunday, he became the highest-ranking US official to visit Taiwan since the United States began diplomatic recognition of Beijing in 1979. In both Washington and Taipei, the significance of the visit has been rightly emphasised. Still, the visit has not been met with unequivocal praise in Taiwan. After all, while visits of this nature are undoubtedly important, they risk generating instability in cross-Strait relations. Could a closer relationship with the US spell trouble for Taiwan? In one editorial published in Taiwan’s United Daily News on Monday morning, the trip was described as 'a new wave of attack in the fight between the United States and China for leading global status'.

After a landslide victory in January’s election, Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen was re-inaugurated on Wednesday at a scaled-down ceremony in Taipei. As ever, Taiwan’s relationship with China was the central issue of the election. This year, though, a greater sense of urgency surrounded the vote, primarily because of the instability in Hong Kong.  Now, polling day feels like it belongs to a distant past, taking place amid rumblings of a new virus infecting residents of Wuhan across the Taiwan Strait. Although Taiwan has rightly received much praise for its response to coronavirus, the past few months have not been without significant difficulties.

Since the first outbreak of coronavirus, Taiwan has been seen as an unlikely source of stability. Over 400,000 Taiwanese live and work on the Chinese mainland and, due to diplomatic tensions with Beijing, Taiwan is not a member of the World Health Organisation. Despite this, as infections began to rise in Japan and then exploded in South Korea, Taiwan’s daily increase of cases never surpassed five. The Taiwanese government’s robust response to illness, which has paralysed so many other parts of the world, garnered much international praise. But a fresh spike in cases has put Taiwan on the back foot. On Sunday, six new infections were confirmed, the highest number in a single day to date.