Four Sets of Standards for the Gov’t to Dispatch Charter Flights for Ferrying Countrymen Home

 Four Sets of Standards for the Gov’t to Dispatch Charter Flights for Ferrying Countrymen Home

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

March 4, 2020

 Translation of an Excerpt

To cope with the scenarios in which our countrymen encounter unclear epidemic situations abroad, our government has employed four sets of different standards and modes. The first is the "Eastern Airlines Mode" for the first charter flight ferrying Taiwanese home from Wuhan; the second is the "Yokohama Mode" used to ferry home Taiwanese passengers onboard the "Diamond Princess" cruise ship; the third is the "regular flight mode” used by the youngster suffering from hemophilia and the patient that “tested positive after first being tested negative” for COVID-19; the fourth is the "Istanbul mode" used for ferrying home our tour group to Israel. In every mode, it depended on the different emergencies our people encountered overseas, leading the government to adopt expedient measures to cope with it. The purpose was to quickly ferry home our countrymen who were stranded overseas, sometimes it was impossible to care about the cost of repatriation, and sometimes it was impossible to completely eliminate the risks.

In as much as the various different modes of transportation all originated from humanitarian caring for our countrymen, then, wouldn’t it be cold and indifferent on the part of the government to leave nearly a thousand countrymen stranded in Wuhan because of political factors? At first, the government accused the other side of the Strait of failing to observe the principle of "underprivileged placed first", the subtext seemingly being how much we cared about humanitarianism and the underprivileged. However, later the high echelons changed the versions four times about constricting the definition of "Mainland spouses and their children", obviously not considering women and children as priorities. Later, they again changed their version, saying that in ferrying our countrymen home, we must consider our own "capacity” at home; at that time, the domestic confirmed cases did not exceed ten. If Taiwan felt overburdened by accommodating nearly a dozen or so patients, could we still brag about the medical care system being superb? Especially, these countrymen in Hubei find themselves in an epidemic area, and not patients; why does the government especially discriminate against them?

From the Eastern Airlines Mode, the Yokohama mode, to the Istanbul mode, and even the regular flight mode, the four sets of standards of the Tsai government have plainly emerged in the end. For the Taiwanese who have been left behind in Wuhan, Hubei for a month, those who have survived have used their lives to prove their "innocence"; how long will the Tsai government drag on by using cold-blooded sophistry?

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