Global Health Lessons from Taiwan: From Japanese Taiwan to SARS and COVID-19 (April 6, 2021 Taiwan Forum)

The Boston University Center for the Study of Asia is pleased to present its next lecture in the
Taiwan Forum Public Lecture Series

Global Health Lessons from Taiwan:
From Japanese Taiwan to SARS and COVID-19

Wayne Soon

(Department of History, Vassar College)

Tuesday, April 6, 2021 from 5-6 pm ET

Global Health Lessons from Taiwan: From Japanese Taiwan to SARS and COVID-19

This presentation contextualizes Taiwan’s successful fight against COVID-19 in its longer history of combating pandemics during the Japanese colonial period and the post-martial-law era. The talk argues that Taiwan resolved 2003 SARS-era central-municipal governments’ feuds, the lack of personal protective equipment, and World Health Organization’s (WHO) neglect to fight COVID-19 successfully. It makes the case that Taiwan fought SARS and COVID as a democracy by showing how the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities’ antipandemic measures faced intense opposition by the Chinese Nationalist Party and later the Taiwan People’s Party. Despite tensions with China and the WHO, my talk shows the DPP counterintuitively drew on cross-strait connections and WHO norms to fight COVID-19. In sum, a historical approach to understand Taiwan’s fight against COVID-19 can shed light on unexpected global health connections and continuities in Taiwan’s public health measures.

About the Speaker:

Wayne Soon (PhD Princeton) is Assistant Professor of History at Vassar College. He researches on how international ideas and practices of medicine, institution-building, and diaspora have shaped Chinese East Asia’s interaction with its people and the world in the twentieth century. His book, Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford University Press, 2020), tells the global health histories of China and Taiwan through the lens of diasporic Chinese medical personnel, who were central in introducing new practices of military medicine, blood banking, mobile medicine, and mass medical training to China and Taiwan.

Support for the BUCSA Taiwan Forum series is provided by the
Taipei Economic and Cultural Office Boston Education Division,
and the Taiwan Ministry of Education