Madoka Fukuda examines what happened when Taiwan’s early and successful efforts to control the spread of Covid-19 got caught up in international politics. For more than seven decades, the People’s Republic of China has regarded Taiwan as a renegade province, and since 1972 it has gradually won international recognition of its claim to be the only representative of China in the UN and other international organizations. Fukuda shows how the dispute blocked Taiwan from sharing information on its strategies for dealing with the pandemic in public international forums. However, at the same time, links between Taiwan and its democratic allies have been strengthened as the Taiwan model has shown how states can control the pandemic without compromising democratic principles.
Madoka Fukuda
Madoka Fukuda is a professor of international politics and China studies at the Department of Global Politics, Faculty of Law, Hosei University. She is also a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University in 2020–2021. Fukuda specializes in the People’s Republic of China’s diplomatic strategies and Cross-Strait relations in the postwar years. She published her first book, The PRC’s Diplomacy and Taiwan: The Origin of the “One-China” Principle (Keio University Press, 2013), and was awarded the 25th special prize for Asia-Pacific studies in Japan. Her most recent publication in English is “The Japan-Taiwan Relationship Under the Tsai Ing-wen Administration,” in Taiwan's Political Re-Alignment and Diplomatic Challenges (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Fukuda received her PhD and MA in media and governance from Keio University. Previously, she attended a doctoral course of the Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies, National Cheng-Chi University, as a Taiwan scholarship student.