Illinois State University Professor and Chair of Politics and Government Dr. T.Y. Wang guest-edited a special issue titled “Challenges of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Experiences from East Asian Countries,” which appeared in the Journal of Asian and African Studies.
In the introduction to the special issue, Wang indicates that due to various factors, including partisanship, American society has endured unequal suffering that the pandemic has brought. Surprisingly, South Korea and Taiwan have been able to keep the number of coronavirus infections in their respective countries relatively low, with few fatalities since the beginning of the pandemic. Both countries are in close proximity to and have active economic activities with the Chinese mainland, where the deadly virus originated. Governments in Seoul and Taipei managed to overcome a slow start to vaccination but reached full vaccination rates of about 80% by the end of 2021. Thus, when the number of infections started to surge in early 2022 due to the spread of new variants, there was no spike in death count. Both governments’ abilities to contain the virus have long been noted and praised by Western media. With this backdrop, what lessons can the world take from South Korea and Taiwan? The special issue includes five papers to address this question.
It is concluded that the governments of South Korea and Taiwan have learned from their prior experiences, during the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-Cov) crisis, respectively. The contrast between the two East Asian countries and China and the United States is instructive. As health experts warn that lethal viruses may again emerge in the future, the experiences of South Korea and Taiwan demonstrate that effective actions to combat a pandemic require coordinated responses among various government agencies as well as competent political leadership.
