Chinese New Year in the Shadow of a New Coronavirus

As students at a Taiwanese-affiliated institution, we at ICLP are having a week-long holiday from Thursday to Wednesday for the Chinese New Year. Taipei has been in a festive mood, with lanterns, firecrackers, and couplets, all red, adorning numerous buildings (but especially supermarkets).
We were told that Taipei would empty during the holidays, with people returning home to celebrate with their families. It was an accurate prognosis. Especially on Friday, on New Year’s Eve, most stores were closed, the streets were empty, and the few people traversing them were by and large unchaperoned foreigners.

The festive season, however, has coincided with an increasingly serious epidemic that originated in Wuhan, and has led to the quarantine of not only that city, but several more, resulting in around twenty million people being cut off from the outside world. Whatever the success this measure may have had in curtailing the spread of the disease, several patients have already been hospitalised in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and several other countries.

The situation on the ground betrays a sense of nervousness, acutely reinforced by memories of the SARS epidemic of 2002-3. Our school has been handing out facemasks, and my apartment building has introduced a hand sanitiser dispenser outside the elevators. I have seen more and more people in the streets wearing facemasks as well.

All the more infuriating, then, are the strange political and mediatic wars taking the spotlight in times of crisis. When one searches the internet for updates on the virus, one is more likely to find an article about China blocking Taiwan from participating in a crucial WHO conference, apparently as a sick and perverted punishment for its autonomy (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/22/china-health-coronavirus-wuhan-virus-spreads-taiwan-no-say-who/).

On the other side of the strait, Taiwanese news agencies seem to have been fantasising about how this epidemic might bring down the Chinese government (https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3862583) and have been directing their energy towards squabbles over a US agency portraying Taiwan as part of China on maps (https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3863276).

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