No chicanery can disguise the fact one-China is immutable actuality: China Daily editorial

Once again, in a bid to legitimize its position that Taiwan be viewed as being de facto independent, and thereby forego the need to calamitously declare independence, the secessionist-minded administration on the island has tried to politicize what it decries as its exclusion from global bodies.

For the fifth year in a row it has orchestrated the proposal that the island be allowed to participate in the meeting of the World Health Assembly, the highest decision-making body of the World Health Organization, as an observer. And for the fifth year in succession, the proposal — which goes against the purpose and principles of the UN Charter, and is in violation of the WHO's Constitution and the WHA's rules of procedure — has rightly been rejected.

The decision, as Chen Xu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations Office at Geneva, said in a statement, is in line with Resolution 2758 of United Nations General Assembly and Resolution 25.1 of the World Health Assembly. The former recognizes the People's Republic of China as "the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations", and the latter recognizes the representatives of the PRC government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the World Health Organization. It was only because the previous administration on the island recognized and upheld the one-China principle that the central government made arrangements for the island to participate in the assembly as an observer.

The Taiwan authority's attempt to join the WHA has not been made with the welfare of the people on the island in mind, but in a bid for political gains.

It is just the latest instance of the Tsai Ing-wen administration's efforts to reinforce the impression that the island is de facto independent by pushing it onto the world stage by means of the United Nations health body. It has repeatedly and frequently claimed that it is not getting information on the COVID-19 pandemic because it does not have direct access to the WHO.

Yet according to the agreement reached between China and the WHO, there is an International Health Regulations Contact Point on the island, so that it can obtain timely information on global public health emergencies released by the WHO and report its public health emergency situation to the WHO. Also, since the outbreak of the pandemic, the central government has sent 260 notifications on COVID-19 to the island's health authorities. And health experts from the island have participated in 16 WHO technical activities and the WHO Secretariat has briefed health experts in the Taiwan region several times on pandemic information.

Moreover, health experts on the island do not lack channels and platforms to share response and control practices with their counterparts elsewhere.

The so-called international epidemic prevention gap is a fabrication of the Democratic Progressive Party authorities, who need to realize, no matter what ruses they employ, they cannot alter the status of the island. Indeed, rather than reinforcing the impression of the island's de facto independence, such efforts only confirm that the island is inviolably a part of China.