Singapore’s Ho Ching thanks ‘friends in Taiwan’ after quibble over masks donation
- Ho, who is married to the Lion City’s Prime Minister Lee, sparked heated online discussions after commenting on masks donated from Taiwan
- The self-ruled island’s foreign ministry has acknowledged its ban on exporting masks had previously caused disruptions to Singapore
In a Facebook post on Saturday, Ho – chief executive of Singapore’s state investment firm Temasek Holdings – shared an article from the English-language Taiwan News about the donation of masks with the caption “Errrr”, an interjection used in text messaging to denote sarcasm from the writer.
A comment by Singapore’s Speaker of Parliament Tan Chuan-Jin earlier on Monday – since deleted – suggested there may have been some frustration in the city state over Taipei’s move to impose a blanket ban on mask exports in the earlier months of the pandemic. That policy affected the export to Singapore of masks that ST Engineering, the country’s state-linked defence firm, produces in Taiwan.
On Sunday, with heated online discussions still ongoing, the Taiwanese foreign ministry waded into the matter. In a statement, it underlined that the government’s donation of masks to Singapore was well received.