: Will Foxconn Billionaire Terry Gou’s COVID-19 Vaccine Deal Bring Taiwan Closer to China? #WorldNEWS For 18 months, Taiwan was a model of COVID-19 prevention and President Tsai Ing-wen reaped the

Will Foxconn Billionaire Terry Gou’s COVID-19 Vaccine Deal Bring Taiwan Closer to China? #WorldNEWS
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 islands 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 didnt 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%.
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Its against this backdrop that 70-year-old billionaire Terry Gou became Taiwans vaccine hero. Gou, whose company Foxconn is Apples 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.
“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. ”
The politics of sending COVID-19 vaccines to Taiwan

Ceng Shou Yi–NurPhoto/Getty ImagesTaiwan President Tsai Ing-wen speaks at the presidential office following a surge of domestic COVID-19 cases in Taipei, Taiwan, on 13 May 2021.
Gou enjoys close ties to Beijing and ran unsuccessfully in Taiwans 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 Tsais 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.