Covid: An Alternative Reality From Another Tea-Drinking Island Nation

Part 4. Cry Freedom, or, ‘Look, What You Don’t Understand…’

Funny thing, freedom, innit? We can all agree that its opposite is a bad thing. In my years as a journalist, and as a lifelong news junkie, I can’t think of any demonstrations, rallies or protests involving people explicitly fighting for tyranny, and the right not to protest (though I’ve seen a few where this was implicit). So, we can all agree that Liberty is Good Thing.

Black-and-white turns a bit grey, however, when we’re forced to trade off one kind of liberty against another, which is always. As teenagers, having just left childhood’s certainties behind, we’re taught that absolute freedom doesn’t exist. Our individual right to free speech turns out not to be entirely sacrosanct, as, in certain extreme circumstances, this freedom can be trumped by our duty to the common good. The usual example, for some reason, is that while you are at liberty to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre when there is no fire, you can expect to be locked up for endangering everyone there from dying in a stampede. Even if there is no stampede.

But this lesson never really seems to stick. Discussion of liberty is commonly expressed in absolute, rather than relative, terms, and more than ever right now. For over a year, our public ding-dongs seem all to have been related, directly or indirectly, to what we see as inevitable trade-offs between our individual rights and collective duties in relation to our public health response to the coronavirus pandemic. As 2019 entered its final days, and Brexit as a live political issue died with it, on the other side of the Eurasian continent, Coronavirus was born.

It’s like a Christian/Buddhist mashup, involving December births and re-incarnation, because our Brexit identity politics seem to have transferred almost seamlessly to our current battle lines. Like historical re-enactment buffs, Brexiters and Remainers appear to have shrugged off their English Civil War costumes, changed into their WW2 kit, and carried on battling away as Mask-sceptics and Mask-advocates, for some reason largely staying on the same sides. Unfortunately, the last year has taught us that whatever philosophical, jurisprudential, or moral high ground we might command against the Sars-Cov-2 virus, the virus itself appear entirely indifferent. This has meant a steady erosion, red line by red line, of the ramparts of liberty we erected around us when it became apparent that ignoring the virus was not a sustainable strategy.

There is one last redoubt, however, still occupied by a rag-tag group of freedom fanatics, from once-respected chief justices to former ERG stalwarts, to click-bait rent-a-gobs. It should come as no surprise that the final straw Covidiots clutch for, the last flag they’re so courageously willing to let the poor and vulnerable die for, is Liberty. You still hear them, defending our voluntary mass manslaughter, declaiming ‘We can never accept [insert one of the 124 Points here] because we love freedom too much’.

This is of course not just a British phenomenon — all Western democracies are engaged in interminable, and increasingly tedious, ‘debates’, in which our duty to ‘battle the virus’ is framed in opposition to our love of liberty. Only true tyrants, after all, would question such fundamental human rights as going to the pub, not wearing a mask, or flying somewhere nice and hot.

Taiwan, my poster-nation of pandemic response, hasn’t been entirely immune to public opposition. It does have a tiny and largely ignored minority, which has managed to find something to object to, while the rest of the country goes about its everyday life, unencumbered by anything more than the masks routinely worn everywhere in public. There’s very little of the Q-Anon/5G/vaccine microchip variety, as one of the 124 Points was to crack down on the dissemination of such fantasy — and Taiwan has come up with a brilliant method. Relax, knee-jerk Libertarians, it doesn’t involve taking rights, it involves taking the piss.

Taiwan’s ‘Humour Over Rumour’ (幽默超过谣言) campaign, though officially sanctioned, is largely crowdsourced, and beautifully simple. A network of alert citizens flags any misinformation the moment they see it. That sets the clock ticking for the chuckle-merchants, some are stand-up comedians hired by the state (Daily Mail headline suggestions in the comments below please), but it’s open to anyone to have a go. Professionals or amateurs, they share the same deadline — within two hours of the new Fake News gobbet being registered, they aim to have come up with a viral (‘anti-viral’ may be more accurate) takedown. The more creative the better, so long as it:

a) calls out the disinformation including, where known, its source (often China)

b) tells the truth

c) appeals to our funny bones more than the original appeals to our bile.

Many feature the official government ‘spokesdog’, a Shiba Inu called Zongchai, seen here giving some public safety information.

Still, of course, some misinformation does seeps through, and there are also some authentic libertarians objecting on more conventional grounds to the intrusions on privacy required by effective monitoring of quarantine. The government acknowledges this sacrifice of privacy, but insists it truly will be a temporary emergency measure.

When I say this tiny minority are ignored, I don’t mean censored, as their protests are not only permitted, but covered on domestic media, even if coverage generally appears in what we in the TV news world used to call the ‘And Finally…’ spot at the end of the bulletins, that are usually delivered with a smirk and often involve dogs on skateboards. I’d intended to include a photo of such a demonstration, but after fifteen minutes of typing various combinations of ‘Taiwan’ ‘anti-Covid’ ‘protest’ ‘demonstration’ into Google images, all I’ve been shown is loads of photos of loads of Taiwanese protesting loads about loads of issues, from China’s meddling in its elections, to solidarity with Hong Kong protestors, to its exclusion from the World Health Organisation, but not a single shot of anyone protesting about Covid measures. Which rather makes my point for me.

Look, apologies if I’m over-egging this spelling out of my fact-checking (I even did it literally back in Part 2, with the twenty nineteen thing). I genuinely would love you to get back to me with some obvious elephant that I’ve missed, because I too share your scepticism about any mass public support for sudden governmental restriction of freedoms.

I’m reminded of my experience making a documentary back in 2005 about the astonishing numbers of onshore wind turbines being erected all over the hillsides of Galicia, NW Spain. Accustomed to the explosive knee-jerk NIMBYism triggered in Britain by the merest mention of a single wind turbine (unless of course it’s an old, and inefficient, and called a windmill, in which case equal volumes of outrage are directed against anyone philistine enough to even suggest failing to restore it), I sought out the local Spanish equivalents. After multiple fruitless enquires about how to contact these phantom anti-turbine campaigners, a kind soul at a local council sympathetically introduced me to one individual farmer who was a bit grumpy about the rent the power company was paying him to operate their turbines on his land. He was so wishy-washy he didn’t even make the final cut.

Back to Taiwan — I’m finding some of this stuff hard to believe too. I can’t honestly say I’ve done enough first-hand Chinese language research to categorically characterize this minority of Taiwanese protestors as anything other than narcissistic attention-seekers, Cassandras doomed to see their truths ignored, ultra-principled libertarians, or a mix of these and other types. It’s just that I’m getting that Galician feeling again, and am genuinely yet to come across anything online, or even anecdotally from my daughter, extended family, or Asian-dwelling friends and contacts that has suggested I’m missing anything.

What I do observe from the online news photos and videos is that Taiwan’s protests seem free of heavy police presence or surveillance, physical harassment or even verbal threats. From what I’ve seen, the protestors even all wear masks. Can it be that there’s somewhere in the world where masks are not a badge of political affiliation?

Maybe its a Dick Turpin Thing, and they’re terrified at revealing their faces to the powers-that-be? Hard to say, as literally everyone else is wearing masks too. Maybe it’s just an Occam’s Razor Thing, and the simplest explanation is the most likely — they just want to protect themselves and their families, maybe even avoid infecting others.

Or am I missing a deeper cultural issue, a Confucian Thing? Could even hothead dissidents like these harbour a fear of not conforming? Possibly, but I’d say unlikely, as they’re already brave enough to be fringe-issue protestors, and besides, it turns out that these days Taiwan is pretty relaxed about what most people perceive as Confucian values.

For example, back in October 2019, my wife and I were delighted to get a live video call from our younger daughter. She’d only just arrived in Taipei for her gap year adventure, spoke little Chinese and was yet to make many friends, so at that point such calls were a daily treat for us. Usually she was calling to point her phone camera at a convenience store shelf, for us to check that an item was vegetarian, as her Chinese character recognition at that stage didn’t stretch to instant noodle flavours. But this occasion immediately looked and sounded different.

We struggled to see her beaming face as she jostled through the crowd, and could barely make out her shouting above the applause, whooping, and music, but it soon became apparent there was no noodly emergency. She was just calling to share her pleasure at stumbling across a really fun Pride Parade. She found nothing particularly remarkable about it other than it was a great party atmosphere, but my wife and I both assumed she’d got the wrong end of some stick, partly because she’d only been studying Mandarin a for a couple of weeks by this stage, but mainly because it hardly chimed with our images of Taiwan. My wife grew up there until the age of fourteen, under the martial law that had been in place since 1949. When I first visited Taiwan in 1986, on a summer scholarship, it was still ruled by reactionary generals, and a year away from having martial law revoked and replaced by elections.

After hanging up with our daughter, we checked online, and realized we’d done her a grave injustice. A Chinese Pride Parade is not the kind of thing even an 18-year-old non-Chinese speaker is likely to misinterpret, it turns out, and the spectacular images we saw on the internet left just as little to the imagination as those from Sydney or New York Gay Pride marches. We were the ones who were out of touch — our daughter just happened to have had the good fortune to run into Taiwan’s inaugural Pride Parade, celebrating the fact that Taiwan had just become the first Asian country to legalize gay marriage. So that Confucian thing? Not so much.

Incidentally, I’ve just spend a few minutes trying to confirm online whether Audrey Tang, personifying another progressive first as Taiwan’s first transgender cabinet minister, was present at the Parade. If I could confirm she was present, I thought it would not only appear to be a nice extra detail evidencing Taiwan’s remarkably rapid transition from martial law to exuberant democracy, but also an elegant way of planting a little bombshell before detonating it in a few paragraphs’ time. But eventually I realized that if she was actually present or no doesn’t really matter one way or the other. As I’m slowly shaking off the journalistic strait-jacket I’ve worn for the last thirty years, and started enjoying the freedom in the shoulders provided by the looser fit of whatever metaphorical writing outerwear I’m now trying on, I’m clocking that such facts aren’t always so important.

But back to the pandemic protesters. For Taiwan’s competitive and often raucous free media, it’s protests like these, along with those rare instances of non-compliance, that grab headlines. I haven’t discovered anything remotely resembling our endless front page culture wars over lockdowns, masks, pub closing times, holidays, schools, universities etc. I suppose there’s a valid debate to be had about privacy, but mobile mast triangulation has been used by our police to catch rapists and murderers for years now, and is in any case a drop in the ocean of data we all merrily pump over to our Silicon Valley overlords every second of the day. And if this pandemic isn’t an emergency that permits a little stretching of principles for the common good, what is?

I confess I’ve run out of objections. Given what Mr. Rolf and I witnessed on our walk in lockdown Salisbury this morning, Taiwan is looking an awful lot more like paradise than a police state.

But surely Britain hasn’t been completely useless? A year after Taiwan started imposing blanket border bans, we are, now, seriously thinking about getting very cross with arriving passengers from certain countries if they don’t fill our location forms properly. I dimly remember being quite convinced when, in the early stoushes about what to do at our airports, aviation experts and politicians regretfully explained that shutting down our airports was unfortunately just not possible for a global hub like Britain. I recall at the time wondering if a Brexit-tinged whiff lingered about this argument, but that stench has been so ubiquitous since 2016 it’s hard to tell.

It did, however, remind me of an image that’s stayed with me over the past decade. Remember that innocent time when the global aviation industry was interrupted for a few days by an invisible cloud of Icelandic volcanic ash, rather than indefinitely by an invisible virus? At the very moment on the morning of April 15 2010, when Europe’s panicked airport authorities decided they had to empty the skies of planes, I was standing in a check-in queue at Lisbon airport with my wife and daughters, heading home from holiday. I won’t go into detail about the ensuing hours of chaos and milling around, but just mention a tableau that struck me on that anarchic day. Picture a red-faced businessman in an expensive suit. He’s looming over a First-Class check-in counter, gesticulating forcefully and raising his voice at the poor uniformed woman the other side of the desk, uttering the unforgettable words ‘Look, what you clearly don’t understand is that I absolutely have to be in New York at 4pm tomorrow!’. I often wonder at what point it dawned on him that that fragile clockwork that kept his world ticking had ground to a halt, and there was nothing his Platinum Class Frequent Flyer cards could do to get it moving again.

So this is what flitted through my mind when listening to those aviation officials last year,

explaining that such border-tightening was just not possible for major international hubs like Heathrow and Gatwick. As it turned out, all their efforts to keep their fragile mechanism going were moot anyway, as they were all empty within a few weeks.

Heathrow’s recent crackdown, now looks not so much like post-equine elopement DIY, but more like barricading the gaping stable door with a toothpick while surrounded by wild herds of spluttering, stampeding horses, inside and out.In Part 5, I’ll take a closer look at our fellow tea-drinking islanders at the other end of the Eurasian Continent, and how they managed to bolt the stable door before the horse had ever stirred.

Part 5 tomorrow.

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