Archive for the ‘Taiwan’ Category
a bonobo world: the thirty percent rule

the parliamentary glass ceiling?
Canto: We talked about the thirty percent rule before. So where did it come from and what does it signify?
Jacinta: Well that’s very much worth exploring, because if it’s true that a 30% ‘infiltration’ of women into various social organisations – such as business corporations, governments, political parties, law firms, military organisations, NGOs, whatever – improves the efficacy of those organisations, then what about a 40% infiltration – or 60%, or 80%?
Canto: Or total control? The ‘males as pets or playthings’ argument comes up again.
Jacinta: So yes, before we go there – and I do think it’s a fun place to go – let’s look at the origins of the 30% rule, or the 30% aspiration, or whatever. The UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995 was considered, by some, as a major step forward, at least theoretically. It developed, and I quote, ‘strategic objectives and actions for the advancement of women and the achievement of gender equality in 12 critical areas of concern’, one of which was ‘women in power and decision-making’. In that section, I found this passage:
Despite the widespread movement towards democratization in most countries, women are largely underrepresented at most levels of government, especially in ministerial and other executive bodies, and have made little progress in attaining political power in legislative bodies or in achieving the target endorsed by the Economic and Social Council of having 30 per cent women in positions at decision-making levels by 1995. Globally, only 10 per cent of the members of legislative bodies and a lower percentage of ministerial positions are now held by women. Indeed, some countries, including those that are undergoing fundamental political, economic and social changes, have seen a significant decrease in the number of women represented in legislative bodies.
The section went on to expand on the need for female decision-making input in ‘art, culture, sports, the media, education, religion and the law’…
Canto: So this 30% target goes back even before the Beijing Conference. Fat chance of achieving it by 1995!
Jacinta: It’s a bit ironic that this conference was held in China, where women are supposed to hold up half the sky. You could hardly find a nation more male-dominated in its leadership. They’ve virtually outlawed feminism there, as yet another decadent western thing.
Canto: So, looking at this document, it includes an action plan for governments, political parties and others, including women’s organisations, NGOs and even the UN itself, but it doesn’t present any argument for this 30% target. Presumably they feel the argument is self-evident.
Jacinta: Interestingly, in the UN section, they’ve made the demands upon themselves even more stringent: ‘monitor progress towards achieving the Secretary-General’s target of having women hold 50 per cent of managerial and decision-making positions by the year 2000’.
Canto: Haha, I wonder how that went? No wonder many people don’t take the UN seriously.
Jacinta: Well, maybe there’s nothing wrong in aiming high. Aiming low certainly won’t get you there. Anyway, there’s a 2015 update on women in power and decision-making, which finds slight improvements in political power positions, very unevenly distributed among nations, and there are problems with obtaining data in other decision-making fields. In short, creeping progress in empowerment.
Canto: What’s interesting, though, is the argument that having a higher percentage of women in decision-making is a good thing due to basic fairness – women being 51% of the population – but because women are somehow better.
Jacinta: Well I haven’t found that argument in the UN documents (though I haven’t looked too thoroughly), but I must say it’s an argument that I like to put to anyone who’ll listen, even though I’m not too sure I believe in it myself. And when I do, I get a fair amount of pushback, as the Yanks say, from men and women.
Canto: Well I do believe in it, because bonobos. They’re an example of a female-dominated culture of advanced apes, after all. And they’re sexy, if somewhat more hirsute than I’d prefer.
Jacinta: Yes – I’m not quite sure why I’m not so sure. I think maybe it’s just the blowback I get – though it’s often anecdotal, some story about some lousy female boss. A recent article in Forbes (authored by a male) has this to say:
Over the past decades, scientific studies have consistently shown that on most of the key traits that make leaders more effective, women tend to outperform men. For example, humility, self-awareness, self-control, moral sensitivity, social skills, emotional intelligence, kindness, a prosocial and moral orientation, are all more likely to be found in women than men.
Check the links for evidence. He goes on to list the ‘dark side personality traits’ which are more common in men: aggression (often unprovoked), narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism – see the recent global financial crisis, the current pandemic and white collar crime…
Canto: And they’re the cause of most road fatalities and injuries, by a factor of almost 2 to 1, on a per capita basis. Mostly due to the 17-25 age group, crazy aggression and risk-taking, like elephants in musth.
Jacinta: Yes, and I’ve met men who seriously think women shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Moslem men actually, presumably brainwashed. And no doubt intent on brainwashing their kids. Anyway good on the UN for pushing this issue, and surely the success of women leaders in Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand, Finland and elsewhere, and the absolutely disastrous leadership of so many men during this pandemic – much of it yet to be properly investigated and assessed – will spur us on to more rapid change in the leadership field.
References and links
https://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/intergovernmental-support/world-conferences-on-women
https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/decision.htm
covid19: sensible testing, mostly
Canto: So we’re looking at medcram coronavirus update 98 now, and it’s a fascinating one entitled ‘Rapid COVID 19 Antigen Testing at Home – A Possible Breakthrough’, though it comes with the clear proviso – this would require co-ordinated political action, and that won’t happen in the USA, not just under Trump, but at any time.
Jacinta: Well, but especially under Trump. But the issue is one of trying to get much more testing done, with far less emphasis on the sensitivity of the test, because rapid-fire, fast turnaround testing is far more useful than expensive, hard-to-evaluate slow-turnaround testing, which puts a premium on sensitivity. But before we get to all that, Dr Seheult looks at a paper on viral loads vis-à-vis covid19 patients. They looked at nasal and throat swabs, and then checked the Ct values over time.
Canto: The Ct values are a measure of viral load and it works inversely – a 3.32 reduction in Ct value means a ten-fold-increase in viral load.
Jacinta: Yes, so a low Ct value means a high viral load, and of course viral replication works exponentially, at least during the early infection period, so your viral load can be massively different from one day to the next – think about that for testing, and delayed results.
Canto: A Ct value of 40 is close to undetectable, depending of course on the sensitivity of the test. And the value can go down as low as 5, all approximately of course. The course of the virus is generally, exponential growth, then a tapering off of the growth rate, reaching a peak, then a descent to finally a remnant population of largely disabled viral scraps, with of course mortality intervening along the way in the worst cases.
Jacinta: Far from the majority of cases, thankfully. So the ‘gold standard’ test is the reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rt-PCR) test – also called real-time PCR, I’ve just found out. It’s relatively expensive at around $US100, with turnaround times – and this might depend on demand and other factors – of between 3 and 9 days. There aren’t enough of these tests to go round, but they are very sensitive, detecting the virus reliably from a Ct value of about 35, or maybe even 40 (for argument’s sake, Seheult says). But there are other, cheaper, less sensitive tests, called paper tests, that can be rolled out more easily to the general public. The paper is coated with monoclonal antibodies that can detect antigens – substances that evoke an immune response. These paper tests cost at most a couple of dollars each, and would be sensitive to a viral load measured at a Ct value of around 32. These figures aren’t exact but this would make the test around 50-55% sensitive.
Canto: But there’s this issue called the ‘threshold of transmissibility’, which is important in all this, and a virologist, Dr Michael Mina, shown speaking on this update, explains:
So people who are transmitting probably have Ct values that are below 30 and the vast majority probably have them below 25 or so.
As Seheult explains, people may be testing positive at that range above 30 (i.e. low viral load) but not transmitting the virus. This is especially so if they’re on the downward trajectory, as described above, and what the rt-PCR test (or assay) is detecting are those remaining viral fragments. And as Dr Mina points out, it’s the downward trajectory that’s being picked up for the most part, because the initial upward trajectory is exponential. Here’s what he says:
A lot of people are saying, ‘we need the really sensitive tests to be able to detect people early on in their infection’, but almost all the time that people spend with this virus near the limit of detection of PCR is on the tail end of their infection. This is a virus that, once it hits PCR positivity levels, it’s growing well in its exponential phase and it’s probably a matter of hours, not days, before it passes the threshold to be detected on some of these slightly lower sensitivity assays. And then it may persist for weeks or possibly months even in some cases at very low RNA levels. So it’s after people are well beyond their transmissible period that we’re actually seeing the loss in sensitivity of these assays. It’s very rare that you actually detect somebody with a Ct value 0f 39 in that window on their way up, because they’re only sitting there for a few hours before they get down to a 33, so if you’re missing Ct values of 39… it’s really not that important..
Jacinta: Not that important, but the point Dr Mina is making is really important – if the threshold of transmissibility is at 33 or below vis-à-vis Ct values, then a high-sensitivity test may even be a barrier to focussing on getting at the most transmissible subjects.
Canto: Yes, especially when you have an alternative test that can be applied much more regularly with a quick turnaround – results on these paper tests take ten minutes! And being cheap, you can test as often as you feel you need to. If you’re positive, you quarantine yourself for a while, keep testing, find yourself negative, wait for a few more days, considering the low sensitivity of the test, keep testing in case there’s a recurrence, and when it’s still ok after a few days you can resume your life, go back to work or school, whatever, being pretty sure you’re past the infectious phase.
Jacinta: Yes, as Dr Mina says, 9 out of 10 people go undiagnosed with the virus in the USA, according to the CDC – indicating the inadequacy of testing. And he goes on to say, of the other one out of ten, those that are caught, are mostly post-infectious, at the ‘tail end’. The point is that, because of the woeful lack of testing and the long turnarounds, they’re catching far fewer of the transmissible cases, the ones they want and need to catch, than the pitiful few that they actually find testing positive.
Canto: The bottom line being that if they tested with a far less sensitive, but cheap and readily available quick-result assay, they would capture far more of the transmissible cases, and save lives.
Jacinta: Dr Mina and many colleagues have written a paper on this, entitled ‘test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for covid19 surveillance’, and he points out that with this approach they would drive down the ‘r effective’ – the reproduction number – which is the number of people who can be infected by a carrier at any specific time – to well below 1. So if you were to give a significantly high proportion of people in in the worst affected areas these types of tests, you could bring the numbers down very rapidly, and this would eliminate the need for contact tracing. It would have an effect on schools, workplaces and so forth – because if you’re given one of these long-turnaround tests and your results eight days later turn out negative, that may be because you had just contracted the virus when the test was taken, but it didn’t show on the test – so you go back to school and infect people. With regular testing this problem would be eliminated. Hate to belabour the point, but – people are dying.
Canto: It seems the CDC put a high priority on sensitivity, and so rejected these cheap paper tests, neglecting the obvious problem of turnaround more or less completely. The low sensitivity tests usually miss the subjects that are beyond infectivity. If they were on the upward trajectory they would likely be caught by the next test. It’s this upward trajectory that is the infective period. You would think regulatory organisations like the FDA or the CDC would twig to this, but not so much in the Trump era, when non-scientists are put in charge. Yet another failing of the individualist, anti-collaborative, egotistical destruction of all government agencies…
Jacinta: Or just the unwieldiness, the lack of finesse, of lumbering bureaucracies. Or a mix of both.
Canto: Anyway, as things deepen and darken in the USA, we might have to skip a number of updates to keep up with the chaos, the failures, the resistance and everything else. It isn’t a great time to be living in the USA, but as outsiders we’re kind of ghoulishly fascinated by the mess they’re making of this pandemic, and much else besides.
Jacinta: But also genuinely sympathetic to those who are trying to make thing work in the teeth of all the craziness.
Canto: Today, September 16, marks the day that 200,000+ deaths from covid19 have been recorded next to the name of the USA, according to Worldometer’s stats. Taiwan, a country that is separated from the so-called ‘China virus’ only by the narrow Formosa strait, has suffered only seven deaths in the nine months that this virus has raged. It has a population of about 24 million, slightly less than that of Australia, into which we find ourselves thrown. Australia has had 824 deaths thus far, and we’re regarded as something of a model!
Jacinta: Yes, several cheers for Tsai Ing-wen and for female leadership, sans egotism. And a special thanks to Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister – but she’s actually real, and a life-saver. We need more of her.

Audrey Tang
the politics of Covid-19: the China problem

So far we have no treatment for Covid-19, and can only use non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to stop or slow its spread. Evidence from Wuhan has conclusively shown that stringent NPIs have been effective in this regard. Not only did the case rate fall sharply from early February (after rising sharply from December to the end of January), but the proportion of critical cases was substantially reduced over the whole period. While recent very low numbers reported from China are creating an understandable skepticism due to the Chinese government’s tight grip on information, experts generally agree that the Wuhan data is reliable.
Reducing the rate of transmission is the goal of NPIs. Once the transmission rate (Rt) is reduced to less than 1.0, cases will reduce, and this will show in the statistics (while taking account of an incubation period of roughly 5 days and laboratory confirmation). Analysis in this JAMA article of the Wuhan measures, which became increasing stringent over a two-month interval, and which analysts divided into five consecutive periods, suggests that the period 3 measures (strict travel restrictions, including automobile travel, and home quarantine) were the likely determining factors in Rt reduction. This analysis, however, conveniently chimes with the fact that the more severe period 4 and 5 restrictions, involving heavily policed physical distancing measures, central quarantining, and door-to-door, individual-to-individual screening, would not go down well in an open society. I don’t want to cast doubt on the article, but this is China we’re talking about, and there are all sorts of political sensitivities in dealing with this heavy-handed economic giant.
I’ve long been thinking about this, but a Sydney Morning Herald article I found on my twitter feed (I virtually never tweet but it’s a useful resource) has prompted me to explore a bit more. It’s about Taiwan.
Taiwan’s experience re Covid-19 is worth comparing to Australia’s as their overall population is the same as ours. For a while I’ve been perhaps complacently touting Australia’s success in keeping the numbers down – we’re now the world’s 29th in number of cases, compared to 18th a couple of weeks ago. But Taiwan shits on us in this respect – 388 cases compared to our 6313, 6 deaths compared to our 61. It ranks 98th out of the countries and regions on Worldometer’s list.
The SMH article is essentially an interview with Professor Su Ih-Jen, the infectious diseases expert responsible for Taiwan’s response to Covid-19. He explains that this response, probably the most successful of any country, is all about Taiwan’s mistrust of China. The relationship between the two countries is about as bad as it can get, with China using its power internationally to stifle Taiwan’s voice in international forums such as the World Health Organisation. China has never recognised Taiwan’s nationhood, and is seen as an ever-present danger by the Taiwanese. So when word spread about the outbreak in Wuhan in December, Taiwanese experts assumed the worst and acted quickly, imposing quarantines and travel bans from China. The country had learned lessons from the first SARS outbreak, also from China, and substantially increased their numbers of ventilators and hospital beds. And have spent the past 17 years literally rehearsing for this new outbreak.
So while Taiwan’s success can’t be measured in any precise way in terms of its relationship to China, it has undoubtedly been a major factor. It’s worth considering in terms of other states influenced by the CCP. Hong Kong, for example, has a population of some 7.5 million, with obviously a very high population density. That’s somewhere between a third and a quarter of Australia’s population, yet it has less than a sixth of our confirmed cases – and we would be one of the most successful countries in containing the outbreak, by any measure. I hardly need to go into Hong Kong’s somewhat perilous relationship to China, but it’s worth comparing Hong Kong, with its 4 deaths so far, to New York State, the USA’s most hard-hit region, which has suffered over 10,000 deaths. That state has about 2.5 times the population of Hong Kong. It’s of course possible that there’s been suppression of data in Hong Kong, but it’s more likely that its preparedness, given its proximity to and intense suspicion of its powerful neighbour, provides a better understanding of its success.
A more complex case is that of South Korea. Having recently read a potted history of Korea, I’m now an expert haha. Korea, like Japan, has been massively influenced historically by Chinese culture, and generally recognises its debt. Of course there have been tensions, and battles, between the two nations, but they have generally been in uneasy alliance for centuries. Koreans adopted a variant of Chinese writing for their language, until the Hangul alphabetic script became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. China is South Korea’s largest trading partner by far. It’s one of few countries that can boast a surplus in its trade with the economic giant. Tourism both to and from China has always been very popular, though the South Korean government introduced measures to reduce the flow of Chinese tourism in 2017. In the early days of Covid-19 reporting, South Korea was often mentioned as one of the most, if not the most, affected/infected nations outside of China. That has since changed dramatically, with the country receiving sometimes grudging, and certainly qualified, praise for its response. It developed effective testing kits in a matter of days, and is now exporting them to the world. Its rapid mobilisation of all government departments, its widespread testing of asymptomatic subjects, its quarantine measures, have been generally seen as exemplary. It seems South Korea has also learned from the SARS outbreak in 2003, though its late recognition of the dangers has sadly cost lives. Could this be because it was too trusting of China’s first muted reports of the virus? And couldn’t it be said that South Korea’s eventual forceful response, regarded as overly intrusive by some westerners, owed something to that of its largest trading partner?
So neighbourhood politics have definitely played a role in how the response to Covid-19 has played out in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, though the details are necessarily fuzzy. It’s also surely the case that complacency, even exceptionalism, in those regions far from what has been deemed the epicentre, has been very costly. In those regions, alertness about, and full preparedness for, the dangers of viral pandemics in general, setting aside China, should be the major lesson.
References
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2764656
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china-hong-kong-sar/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
A brief history of Korea, by Michael Seth, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_South_Korea
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/20/south-korea-rapid-intrusive-measures-covid-19
Supporting Hong Kong 3: it’s all about freedom

As I begin to write this, I’ve learned that Hong Kong developments and tensions are playing out here in Adelaide too, as well as elsewhere in Australia. Supporters of Hong Kong’s independence and its freedoms have turned out in unexpected numbers, but they’ve met with violent pro-Chinese opposition, chanting ‘Hong Kong belongs to China’, a slogan that, of course, misses the point completely. Hong Kong would be delighted to belong to China if the mainland people enjoyed the freedoms that Hong Kongers have become accustomed to over the years, but that ain’t gonna happen in the foreseeable.
In preparation for this piece I’ve been reading the fulsome Wikipedia article, Human rights in China, and it truly makes the heart sick. I’ve already written about the Uyghur people of the Xinjiang ‘frontier’ (as many as a million of them are in prison), as well as the bullying, and worse, of (pretty mild) feminist activists by the Thugburo, but there’s also virtually no freedom of the press or the internet, limited freedom of movement within China (especially for the poor), regular repression of ethnic minorities (there are over a hundred of them), selective repression of religions (the Falun Gong have been bizarrely targeted, and organ-harvested), imprisonment and torture of political dissidents, application of fake and damaging ‘psychiatric’ treatments to non-conformists, and wide-ranging use of execution – China still executes more of its own citizens than the rest of the world combined (though global rates are thankfully falling, and Iran executes more on a per capita basis).
Of course, as far as Hong Kong is concerned, the one human rights ‘event’ that dominates all others is the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, as tanks are currently taking up positions around Hong Kong. So one has to wonder, considering this grim history, and considering that the controversial extradition bill which set off the protests has been shelved, why Hong Kongers are courting disaster in this way. One reason must surely be the initial success of the movement re extradition. Another is likely to be safety in numbers (illusory or not). Hong Kong is no Tiananmen, it’s far far bigger. Even so, if the PRC acts decisively and brutally, can anybody see the international community responding to save the people of Hong Kong? It’s more likely there will be a great deal of impotent outrage, and a weak round of sanctions before hastening back to business as usual.
And yet. Another huge difference between 2019 and 1989, of course, is the democratisation of recording technology. It’s another difference that has doubtless emboldened Hong Kongers. It’s also playing massively on the minds of a government that has taken media control to an extreme never before seen in human history. The PRC has made a habit of demonising ‘western values’ in recent decades, and it knows full well that a frontal attack on Hong Kong will demolish their claims to moral superiority overnight. Smart Hong Kongers also know this – so it’s a fascinating, frightening stand-off situation. I’ve had a number of Hong Kong students over the years, and many of them are still in Australia pursuing further studies. I can’t imagine what they’re going through at this point.
The hope we should all be holding to is for a peaceful resolution, but there are questions as to who should be negotiating for each side – and particularly for the people of Hong Kong. The protesters have made five ‘formal demands’:
- the complete withdrawal of the proposed extradition bill
- the removal of the use of “riot” concerning the protests
- the release of arrested protesters
- an inquiry into alleged police brutality, and
- genuine universal suffrage
All of these demands seem reasonable, prima facie, unless of course there were protesters guilty of brutal acts etc, but in any case it’s highly unlikely that the Grand Poohbahs of the Chinese State would demean themselves by negotiating with mere protesters, especially after labelling them as ‘terrorists’ according to Thugburo convention. Leading protesters are also reluctant to identify themselves, as they know they’ll be immediately targeted by the PRC government. That leaves the Hong Kong administration, and its Chief, Carrie Lam. It’s interesting, and perhaps surprising, that protesters didn’t include her resignation as one of their official demands – though many are unofficially demanding it, and it’s implicit in the universal suffrage demand. She has apparently warned recently that Hong Kong may be on a ‘path of no return’, a comment as frightening as it is vague. Certainly such warnings don’t seem to be working; student demos are being supported by general strikes, and specific actions by lawyers, civil servants, hospital workers and others. Most of these actions have been peaceful, but there have been violent incidents, and the role of the Hong Kong police in suppressing/exacerbating such incidents is crucial, and concerning. Police tactics have become more aggressive, but they don’t seem to be dampening the determination of the protesters, who’ve had enough of increasing PRC interference in Hong Kong affairs. They’ve also developed smart tactics, such as ‘being water’, flowing from place to place, continuous and uniform, without leaders or followers. This and other tactics were born from years of experience of failed and partially successful protest movements of the past. Perceived and documented police brutality has also been harnessed for the cause, as in the photo of a women hit in the eye, apparently by a police ‘bean-bag round’ a non-lethal form of ammunition. Women throughout Hong Kong and Taiwan are now sporting ‘bloodied’ eye-bandages in solidarity.


Unsurprisingly, those of us who’ve been around for a while are hardly sanguine about how this will end, and our greatest hope is that the PRC will see that the cost of engaging in what would certainly be a bloodbath, carried out in front of the world, would be greater than any economic or other foreseeable long-term benefit for a nation whose economy is already the envy of most nations. The Hong Kong and Taiwan protests are undoubtedly a smack in the eye to PRC pride, as, inter alia, they expose the lie about ‘Asian values’ the PRC is keen to promote in its battle with ‘the west’. I suspect that what will happen in the near future is a war of attrition, with the Chinese hoping that some sort of over-reach by the protesters will justify anti-terrorist ‘action’. The noises from the international community thus far haven’t by any means convinced me that the PRC won’t get away with mass slaughter when the time comes.