By Meow Liao*; translated by Huang Liang-Wei
Mr. Chen was happy. He was supposed to be happy, and so he mustered every ounce of joy he could. After all, he had waited for this moment for so long.
It was around 7 in the evening on the 8th of September 2020. For the first time in eight long, agonizing months, he was about to be reunited with his wife and son. This is the first time in their lives that they had been apart for this long. In his loneliness, all he could do was dream about the scene that was about to unfold in front of him.
But now, under the bright lights and sweeping canopy of the Taoyuan International Airport, Mr. Chen didn’t know what he was feeling. He was excited, sure, and relieved that his family would be together again. But he was also feeling sad, an exhausted helplessness that it had come to this.
And he was indignant, almost angry, at the forces that had worked to pull his family apart.
Their separation was not voluntary. Mr. Chen, 58, is Taiwanese; his wife is a Chinese national. In early 2020, when the novel coronavirus first reared its ugly head, derailing the Chinese New Year festivities, this tiny distinction would blow up, spiral out of control, and bring out the worst in his countrymen.
“Upon seeing each other, despite not saying it out loud, deep down, we all knew there was something weird going on,” Mr. Chen said. “Too much has happened throughout the eight months. Our lives will never be the same.”
April 2020. The Taoyuan International Airport grows empty as both passengers and airlines cancel flights between Taiwan and China following reports of a new infectious respiratory disease. Since Taiwan first imposed travel restrictions against the mainland, the relationship between the two countries have soured, and in the ensuing communication breakdown, has torn families apart.
Status woes
Early on in his career, Mr. Chen was located in Beijing, where he first met his wife. Their relationship blossomed, culminated in marriage, and soon after, they were welcoming their first child into their lives.
Because he would still be working in the mainland, Mr. Chen decided it was wise to let his children settle there, too, at least for the time being. They could all move back to Taiwan and earn its citizenship in the future, when his job no longer held the strings of his address.
Two years ago, the opportunity finally presented itself. Mr. Chen’s eldest was about to start junior school in Taiwan, and he thought it would be good for them to also start working toward their nationality. But given the fraught political climate on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, the rules for obtaining this status grew complex.
For instance, according to the Nationality Act of the Republic of China (ROC), children with at least one parent who is or was an ROC national would be given the same nationality at birth. But in practice, Taiwan puts a stronger emphasis on household registration.
Nationals without such a registration are subject to immigration controls upon entry and cannot vote in elections, among other restrictions. Dual household registrations are also forbidden on both sides: To qualify for the status in Taiwan, one must give up the same status on the mainland.
There is also the question of age. In the case of Mr. Chen, his child would have acquired a Taiwan national identification card immediately after the application, but only before the age of 12. Under the law, children older than 12 would need to reside in Taiwan for at least two years to be eligible to apply for an ID card.
It had never occurred to Mr. Chen that the coronavirus pandemic would explode right in the middle of his child’s application for Taiwanese citizenship, plunging their family into a national controversy, and separating them from each other for months.
Frustrating and painful
On February 6, 2020, Taiwan was among the first countries in the world to introduce travel restrictions against mainland China, in a bid to stem the growing tide of what would eventually become the COVID-19 pandemic. Their decree was broad: any Chinese national from any mainland province or city was prohibited from entering Taiwan.
As misfortune would have it, Mr. Chen’s wife and son were in the mainland, visiting relatives for Chinese New Year. They wouldn’t be able to make it back before border controls would tighten, but Mr. Chen wasn’t worried too much. He reckoned that because his child’s citizenship application was well underway – and since they were a family, after all – the Taiwan government would allow them to re-enter the country.
At the time, Mr. Chen had no idea how wrong he was, and how frustrating and painful his naivete would become.
In July 2020, half a year after borders were closed to mainland China, Mr. Chen could only watch in helpless fury as businessmen from Europe and the United States, where the outbreaks were obviously worse than that in China, were being allowed into Taiwan, while his child remained shut out.
He petitioned and protested, desperately lodging complaints at various government agencies in hopes of having border controls eased earlier, or at least establish programs that allowed children to repatriate back to Taiwan.
Not only were his efforts in vain, but they also became the fodder for incendiary public opinion. He would frequently read hate comments online or hear them repeated on broadcast:
“Don’t let them come back.”
“Taiwan’s medical capacity is insufficient.”
“Who told you to let your children get the Chinese citizenship?”
“You want to come back to use Taiwan’s health insurance again, don’t you?”
These blind-sided Mr. Chen in the most painful way. He used to think Taiwan was a free, democratic, and human rights-oriented society. The pandemic has made him see his country in a different, more sobering light.
An initiative launched by the Taiwanese government early last year to bring its people stuck in mainland China back in Taiwan, albeit on a case-by-case basis, was met with a public outcry.
Evasive and inconsistent
In all fairness, it’s not as if the Taiwanese government has never considered its citizens stuck in the mainland. In February 2020, they launched a project to try and bring these people back, but on a case-by-case basis. The immigration agency would review each case to decide on its validity and, once accepted, the applicant would be repatriated.
This project, however, was quickly shot down by a barrage of public criticism. Within 24 hours, the government walked back on its policy and instead imposed the strictest possible entry criteria for mainlanders. People flown in from China need to undergo a COVID-19 RT-PCR test and enter the central quarantine. People flying in from elsewhere, however, have the option of home quarantine.
A common justification given by the government for the strict travel restrictions is Taiwan’s purported insufficient medical capacity to deal with a sudden surge in COVID-19 cases. And yet, according to July 2020 data provided by Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Centers, the country could perform 7,166 tests every day, and had 1,100 beds in negative-pressure isolation, corresponding to a per-capita ratio of 40 such beds per million people.
According to the Mainland Affairs Council, around 2,000 children under 12 years old were stuck in the same nationality status limbo as Mr. Chen’s child; of them, over 500 were aged 2 to 6 years. Even if, in the worst-case scenario, all of them were to test positive for COVID-19, the numbers show that Taiwan’s capacity could nevertheless absorb the impact.
Despite this, the government’s rhetoric has been evasive and inconsistent, as have its policies. For what reasons, for instance, can businessmen from Europe and the United States enter Taiwan despite their poorly controlled pandemics, while mainlanders in China, where the outbreak has slowed down, are still treated under the strictest regulations?
100 miles
Perhaps pandemic control is one reason, but the tense political situation spanning the Taiwan Strait also needs to be accounted for.
The mainland government has always asserted that Taiwan was part of their territory, invoking the 1992 Consensus, or the One China Principle. Taiwan, on the other hand, has grown increasingly defiant. Since January 16, 2016, when now-president Tsai Ing-Wen was sworn into office, her party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has never openly acknowledged the Consensus.
This has been seen as an unfriendly gesture by China’s government, and the communication channels between the two have fallen silent. In turn, it has grown difficult to carry out cross-Strait policies effectively and the state of affairs has instead degenerated into mutual clamoring.
The situation continues to be aggravated. In early 2020, the Chinese Liberation Army conducted military drills in the waters near Taiwan, leading to an atmosphere of fear and animosity among the Taiwanese. Seeing the mainland put Hong Kong under a chokehold has only fanned the flames of hostility further.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, such an angry social milieu has warped Taiwan’s policy-making. Once the China factor comes into play, it becomes easy to forego open dialogue, to lose sight of human rights, and for democracy to give way to populist tendencies.
On the map, the Taiwan Strait is just over 100 miles wide. But the two countries it separates grow impossibly distant, leaving families like Mr. Chen’s to drown in the murky in-between. ●
*Meow Liao is a pseudonym. She is a journalist who covers human rights, focusing on the LGBT movement in China and Taiwanese independence. She is withholding her true identity for security reasons.
