Back to the future: lessons of a SARS hysteria for the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, Taiwan has been universally praised for its policy actions in preventing its initial outbreak there from Wuhan and for its strict measures in containing its communal spread locally. Memory of the SARS crisis played a major role, but people in Taiwan forget that SARS was initially considered a problem confined mostly to Hong Kong. Taiwanese did not seem urgently aware, until infections multiplied locally. Taiwan’s health authorities eventually adopted a draconian quarantine policy, but mainly as a political tactic to contain the widespread panic, as though the dam had suddenly burst. In retrospect, the extremity and internal contradictions of the policy are remarkable, but they are instructive. The initial reaction of unprepared governments, most notably in the US, during COVID-19 mirrors this same ineptitude. Enabling hysteria and resorting to scapegoating were in turn diversions to cover up their inability to prevent a crisis. In the US, racism emerged, China and the WHO were blamed, people were even urged not to wear masks to avoid a run on short supplies. This is the tip of the political iceberg, if one adds tightened immigration and economic effects on the U.S. elections.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• SARS
• Taiwan
• US
• culture of public health policy
• politics of distraction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 See Zhang Ziwu’s (2020) retrospective of SARS.

2 News first appeared on the evening of 21 May in newspapers and on TV, followed by investigative reporting on the following day. The China Times devoted much higher attention to this case than the other major newspapers.

3 See the article by Lin Zhizheng and Jiang Zhaojing (2003, p. A3).

4 Lin and Jiang (2003, p. A3).

5 Quoted in Cai Huizhen and Huang Minyi (2003, p. A3).

6 Cai and Huang (2003, p. A3).

7 The following composite narrative is based on news reports that were published on 22 May in The China Times and United Daily News. Reporters relied on information from anonymous sources at Academia Sinica.

8 From Li Mingyang (2003, p. A5).

9 In Wu Dianrong and Chen Zhixian (2003, p. A3).

10 See Lin et al. (2003, p. A3).

11 From Lin Zhizheng and Jiang Zhaojing (2003, p. A3).

12 In Cao Mingcong (2003, p. A5).

13 The above incidents were extensively covered by most local newspapers in Taiwan.

14 Public awareness of the scandal erupting at Heping Hospital was amplified by news coverage of investigative reporters at Hong Kong’s Next Magazine (Yizhou kan), who exposed numerous sloppy practices at the hospital.

15 The only essay sympathetic to Chen was an editorial in the English language Taiwan News, on 9 June 2003.

16 From Sach’s (2020) opinion piece in CNN on 26 May.

17 See “Timeline: Trump's Coronavirus Response | NowThis” (2020), reproduced on youtube.

18 A Public Broadcasting Service Frontline documentary on 21 April 2020 entitled “Coronavirus Pandemic” contrasted policy differences between the two Washingtons (the state and federal government in DC) that reflected conflicts at the state and national level.

19 See the article by Nur Ibrahim (2020), which documents his later flip-flop.

20 In a position paper, Timothy W. Luke (2020) construes the politics of fear differently.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Allen Chun

Allen Chun is Research Fellow Emeritus in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. From August 2019, he has been Chair Professor in the Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. His interests involve cultural theory, nation-state formation, transnationalism and identity, and his research has focused mostly on Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. His recent books include Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (SUNY, 2017) and On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification (Berghahn, 2019).