President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has been featured, among other world leaders, in a cover story in the latest edition of Le Point, a French weekly political and news magazine based in Paris.

Headlined "Who will dominate the world?" the four-part article published Thursday delved into a number of issues, ranging from analysis of the post-COVID-19 era in Europe, the United States and Asia, to the future of liberal democracies around the world and the technology war.

Most notably, the last section of the article subtitled "How did Taiwan do it?" also touched on how Tsai successfully helped steer Taiwan away from a possible crisis, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Civic consciousness defeats the coronavirus...seems like living on another planet in Taipei," the writer Nicolas Baverez said.

In the article, which included a photo of Tsai and a caption that read "President Tsai relied on the people's cooperation to combat the virus," Baverez highlighted how contact tracing, information transparency, mandatory mask wearing and public confidence in the government played huge roles in the way Taiwan handled the crisis.

At a time when Taiwan was already taking measures such as mandatory quarantine and isolation against the coronavirus, the French Constitutional Council up until May 11 did not even consider COVID-19 a serious illness, he wrote.

On the subject of mask wearing, Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy, a researcher at 9Dashline and a former political advisor to the European Parliament, is cited in the report as saying that wearing a face mask is simply not habitual among westerners.

According to Ferenczy, people's initial objections to mask wearing also boiled down to their mistrust of the government, an issue that is largely non-existent in Taiwan.

In other aspects, "if you look at the countries that have been successful at fighting COVID-19 -- Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand -- they all have a disease command center that has been set up specifically to handle the epidemic," she was quoted as saying in the report.

Ferenczy said, however, that despite Taiwan's success in dealing with the pandemic, it is unlikely to make significant gains in its efforts to strengthen its relations with the United States and Europe, amid China's growing aggression.

"European countries currently retain too many economic interests with Beijing," she said, adding that although Taiwan possesses the technological expertise, as it has demonstrated during this current pandemic, "on the political level, Europe will hesitate."

"The solution is to approach Taiwan discreetly," she said.

Nicolas Baverez, an economist and historian, is a columnist for the weekly magazine Le Point and the daily newspaper Le Figaro.