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https://time.com/6083748/taiwan-vaccines-terry-gou-foxconn/

Will Foxconn Billionaire Terry Gou’s COVID-19 Vaccine Deal Bring
Taiwan Closer to China?
富士康富豪郭台銘的新冠疫苗交易會讓台灣更傾中嗎？

作者：Natalie Tso/台北
2021 年 7 月 26 日

For 18 months, Taiwan was a model of COVID-19 prevention and
President Tsai Ing-wen reaped the political benefits. Her approval rating
surged to a record 73% in May 2020. Then, a year later, the island’s first
major outbreak hit and it became clear that its COVID-19 defense was
lacking one major component: vaccines.


As infections surged this May, Taiwan had just over 300,000 COVID-19
vaccines for its 23.5 million people. The government had ordered 20
million doses from overseas, but supplies were just trickling in.


Tsai, who has forged a close relationship with the U.S. and favors a more
distant approach to China, blamed the shortage on interference from Beijing
after a deal to buy vaccines directly from Germany manufacturer BioNTech
fell apart in January. But finger-pointing didn’t stop her popularity from
plunging as many Taiwanese people agonized over the lack of jabs. A poll
in June showed her approval rating had dropped to just 43%.


It’s against this backdrop that 70-year-old billionaire Terry Gou became
Taiwan’s vaccine hero. Gou, whose company Foxconn is Apple’s
largest supplier, spearheaded a series of deals this month with Chinese
state-owned Fosun Pharma—a pharmaceutical giant that holds the
distribution rights for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines for China, including
Taiwan. (Pfizer is the agent for the rest of the world.) The deals will bring
15 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to Taiwan, with the first
batches expected to arrive in September.

本身是世界其他地區的經銷。) 這些交易將為台灣帶來 1500 萬劑輝

瑞-BNT 疫苗，第一批預計將於 9 月抵達台灣。

“Our government was too complacent with buying vaccines because we
hardly had an outbreak,” Taipei resident Akane Lee says. “Gou’s
vaccine purchase is like sending rain in a drought.”


Gou enjoys close ties to Beijing and ran unsuccessfully in Taiwan’s 2019

presidential primary election for the opposition Kuomintang (KMT). His
platform argued for the cultivation of a stronger relationship between the
democratic self-ruled island and Mainland China, which views Taiwan as a
breakaway province that must be brought back under its control—by force
if necessary.


That the deal came via a businessman with billions of dollars in business
interests in the mainland, and months after Tsai’s government failed to
buy the same vaccines, indicates that Beijing put its finger on the scale,
political observers say.


“I think [the Chinese government] encouraged Fosun Pharma to make
concessions so the vaccines could be shipped directly from Germany,”
says political scientist Spencer Yang of Taiwan’s Chinese Culture
University. “The Beijing government might want to use this deal to
humiliate the Tsai government.”
台灣中國文化大學的政治學者Spencer Yang (譯註：推文說是楊泰順


But the vaccine deal was fraught with political obstacles from the
beginning. In May, when a COVID-19 outbreak started by cargo pilots
spiraled into hundreds of daily cases and island-wide restrictions, Gou
volunteered to buy five million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines for
Taiwan—but the government took nearly a month to allow him to begin the
process.


Why would Tsai hesitate to let a local billionaire foot the bill for its most
desired import? “If Gou hadn’t run for president two years ago, it
wouldn’t have been a problem,” says political scientist Arthur Ding of
National Chengchi University. “But Gou gave the Tsai administration
tremendous pressure. Tsai had to give in.”


When the Tsai government granted permission for Gou to purchase
vaccines, it also gave the go-ahead to Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Company (TSMC)—the world-leading microchip maker,
which has closer ties to the government—to pursue a vaccine deal. TIME
asked the Health Ministry to comment on the recent vaccine deals, but it
declined.


On July 12, Gou’s Foxconn and TSCM announced a $350 million deal for
five million Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines each with Fosun Pharma. The
following week, the Tzu Chi Foundation, Taiwan’s largest charity,
followed with a deal for another five million doses. The KMT has also
offered to buy five million more, but Tsai has closed that door, saying no
more doses were needed.
7月 12 日，郭台銘旗下的富士康和TSCM宣布與復星醫藥分別以3.5


Gou, who declined to speak to TIME for this story, said on social media
that the deal went through without influence from Beijing: “The mainland
did not meddle or interfere in the vaccine procurement process,” he posted
on Facebook.


Beijing’s Global Times quoted a mainland official as saying, “The
signing of the vaccine purchase deal proved that previous rumors of the
mainland preventing the island of Taiwan from accessing vaccines are
unfounded.”
北京的《環球時報》引述大陸官員的話稱，「此次疫苗採購交易的
簽署，證明在此之前大陸阻止台灣取得疫苗的傳言毫無根據。」

The private purchase of vaccines has highlighted recent public discontent
with Tsai and her party. When Tsai announced on her Facebook page that
the deal resulted from “the hard work of the government and private
sector,” most people left scathing comments. “Has our government
fallen asleep? They can’t even buy vaccines. They need to use the private
sector to do so,” one user said.


The Global Times, too, was quick to criticize Tsai’s “self-aggrandizing
attitude,” while highlighting that it was not her government that
completed the vaccine deal.
《環球時報》也迅速批評蔡英文「自我誇耀的態度」，同時強調完
成疫苗交易的不是她領導的政府。

Meanwhile, people have flooded Gou’s Facebook page with expressions
of gratitude: “Thank you CEO Gou!” said one user. “Your initiative
and goodwill led to TSMC and Tzu Chi following suit, and the saving of
15 million lives in Taiwan.”


Deal undercuts Taiwan’s other vaccine sources
外購交易降低台灣其他疫苗來源的重要性

Part of the reason for Taiwan’s vaccine shortage was that Tsai’s
government banked on producing its own vaccines, and said at least one of
two jabs under development would be available by July. “Tsai promoting
them so eagerly and so early definitely hurt her popularity,” says Ding.


Taiwan’s drug regulator authorized the use of the first domestic
COVID-19 vaccine, from Medigen Vaccine Biologics, on July 19.
However, instead of using large-scale Phase III trials to test its efficacy,
regulators accepted “immuno-bridging” studies that measured antibody
response levels in people who had gotten the Medigen shots.
台灣藥品監管單位於 7 月 19 日核准使用來自高端 (Medigen) 的國內


Officials say Taiwan is the first place to use such methods in regulatory
authorization, but the methodology has proved somewhat controversial.
Only 20% of people said they were willing to get jabbed with Taiwanese
vaccines in a recent My Formosa survey, and 82% said the vaccines should
go through Phase III trials before getting approved.
官員表示台灣是第一個在監管授權下使用這種方法的地方，但這種
方法已證明有所爭議。在最近的《美麗島電子報》民調中，只有
20%的人表示願意接種台灣疫苗，而 82% 受訪者表示，疫苗在獲得
核准之前應該通過三期試驗。

Luckily for Tsai, six million vaccine doses began arriving from the U.S.
and Japan in June, allowing Taiwan to start its mass inoculation campaign.
Currently, more than 24% of Taiwanese people have received one dose. “
When people in Taiwan were desperate for vaccines, the donations by the
U.S. and Japan really bailed Tsai out,” Ding says.


For Gou, this could be a political beginning
對郭台銘而言，這可能是政治生涯開端

The Gou-led purchase of 15 million doses from BioNTech—enough to
vaccinate nearly one-third of the island’s population—means that Taiwan
will now have much less need for either additional donations from allies or
its own domestically developed vaccines. But the deal has sparked some
skepticism in Taiwan.

“It’s fine for Gou to buy vaccines but he didn’t have to buy BioNTech,
” says Vivian Yu, a legal counsel who specializes in cross-Strait
commercial ties. “There’s always a political risk of going through
Shanghai’s Fosun Pharma.”
專門研究兩岸商業關係的法律顧問Vivian Yu表示：「郭台銘買疫苗
沒問題，但他不一定要買BNT。」「透過上海復星醫藥總有政治風
險。」

Tensions with Beijing have been at their highest in years. Taiwan sees
Chinese warplanes fly into the island’s Air Defense Identification Zone
(ADIZ) on a regular basis, with a record high of 28 warplanes encroaching
on one day in June.


Has Beijing earned new loyalty during Taiwan’s vaccine woes? Ding
believes China gained ground—but to a larger extent, Tsai and her
pro-West Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lost it. A Taiwanese Public
Opinion Foundation poll released in July indicates that in the past three
months, Tsai’s ruling DPP lost 15% of its supporters.
北京是否在台灣疫苗危機期間贏得了台灣人民的新認同度 (忠誠度)？丁認為


However, the defectors haven’t switched to the more China-friendly
KMT. Most people, 48%, are non-partisan and some now support smaller
parties, like the new Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) led by Taipei Mayor
Ko Wen-je, who takes a more pragmatic tone with Beijing than Tsai. After
losing the presidential primary for the KMT, Gou called for supporting
candidates from the TPP and other small parties in the 2020 election.
然而，轉向者並沒有轉向對中國更友善的國民黨。大多數人 (48%)


Gou has earned a place in Taiwanese hearts for his determination to
provide Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, a brand that has topped local surveys of
the jabs people favor. There is also no doubting his philanthropic
credentials. He donated over $635 million to build a state-of-the-art cancer
research and treatment center in memory of his first wife and brother, who
both died of cancer. When he remarried in 2008, he and his new wife
pledged to give 90% of his $6 billion fortune to charity.
郭台銘憑藉供應輝瑞-BNT疫苗的決心，在台灣人心目中贏得了一


Will such generosity translate into enough support for another presidential run?
這次慷慨行徑是否會轉化為對另一次總統競選的足夠支持力？

“The next presidential election is three years from now, so it’s far too
early to call,” says Lev Nachman, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard
University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. “But I don’t think
he will quietly bow out from politics. His public involvement in securing
vaccines, his general presence in the KMT and TPP, show future political
ambitions from Terry Gou.”
哈佛大學費正清中國研究中心的博士後研究員列夫· 納赫曼 (譯註：
上次說「不買任何中國疫苗，對符合DPP的選舉利益」) 表示：「下屆總統選舉


And while Beijing’s earlier vaccine overtures to Taiwan were rejected, by
staying out of the BioNTech vaccine deal with Fosun (at least publicly), it
may have achieved some political aims in Taiwan. “To some extent,
China has won points,” says Yang at Chinese Culture University, “but
Chinese planes remind us that Beijing is still hostile towards Taiwan.”

北京仍然對台灣懷有敵意。」

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