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Asia & Pacific

‘One China’ dispute means one big headache for Taiwan in coronavirus crisis

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February 4, 2020 at 4:30 a.m. EST
Men wearing face masks on Monday walk past a building in Taipei that will reportedly serve as a quarantine center for Taiwanese citizens evacuated from Wuhan. (David Chang/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

HONG KONG — For nearly two weeks, Taiwanese officials appealed to their counterparts in Beijing to let them evacuate their people from the Chinese city at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. They say they were met with silence.

“We were probably among the first to send that request that we wanted to take our people back and lift them out of Wuhan,” said Chen Ming-chi, a deputy minister at Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council. “It sort of got ignored.”