Designated Regular Flights from Shanghai Add Troubles for Taiwanese Stranded in Hubei, Only the Gov’t Needs Face-Saving

Designated Regular Flights from Shanghai Add Troubles for Taiwanese Stranded in Hubei, Only the Gov’t Needs Face-Saving

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

March 31, 2020

 Translation of an Excerpt

Following 76 days in shut-down cities countering the pandemic, all cities in Hubei Province, with the exception of Wuhan, announced the lifting of the shut-down orders one by one. For this reason, the Tsai government decided to no longer engage in consultations with the other side of the Strait, asking Taiwanese stranded in Hubei to individually find ways to go to Shanghai, taking China Airlines regular flights home, dubbed "designated regular flights". Chen Shih-chung, director of the Epidemic Command Center, explained that this was the Cabinet’s arrangement based on the angle of the state. However, for the government to ask citizens to traverse a thousand miles in the epidemic areas to take flights, what on earth do these people owe the country necessitating them to use the safety of their lives to satisfy the "angle of the state"?

Just for the purpose of satisfying the "angle of the state", many Taiwanese braced inclement weather and road conditions, using chartered vehicles to travel more than a dozen hours to the Pudong Airport in Shanghai. These risks made at least 150 students, young kids and six pregnant women decline to go, having to remain in Hubei waiting for charter flights. Premier Su loudly lambasted China, yet he himself could not serve his own countrymen; wasn't he feeling diffident?

The home-coming road for Taiwanese stranded in Hubei has met with a number of deliberate obstacles, but in facing the epidemic situations in Europe and the United States, the government adopted completely different, relaxed standards, showing that the government was full of political biases in countering the pandemic. Although designated regular flights made the trips, they, nevertheless, could not cover up the government's indifferent cruelty towards the people and its impractical cross-Strait policies, as well as its bewildered posturing with China and the West.

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