The use of working holidays
I am writing in reference to working holidays which have been much discussed recently.
Over the past few years I have taught Japanese language and culture to a number of young Taiwanese men who were preparing to go to Japan for a working holiday.
All these men were working as chefs at a Japanese restaurant in Taiwan, but hoped to improve their skills and sense of service by working in a more sophisticated working environment in Japan. None of these men had graduated from college.
In fact, some of them were junior-high school graduates from very modest backgrounds.
They were happy in their current jobs, but wanted very much to broaden their horizon and skills in a country more developed than Taiwan.
In some cases, they were willing to pay for a referral fee (of up to one month’s salary) to find employment in a fine dining establishment — something that is very difficult even for skilled Japanese restaurant workers without the right connections.
I think the Working Holiday is a fine idea for these ambitious people.
How else would somebody with just a junior-high school diploma be able to learn new skills, earn money, travel and make friends outside of their small circle in Taiwan?
Some of my students have come back from their year in Japan, and they tell me about the incredibly long hours and hard work during their time abroad.
They also tell me about some of the unfortunate things that happened, perhaps due to the language barrier or cultural misunderstandings.
However, they all came back with a new sense of pride and felt that they had achieved something valuable and not easily translatable into purely monetary terms.
I applaud these young men, and hope that the program could be expanded to many others from all backgrounds.
In addition, I think it might be useful to conduct an exit interview after participants of working holidays come back to Taiwan, because although the stories are anecdotal, they could be useful for the development of the working holiday program to give an insight in to what participants truly thought of and gained from the program.
Vickie Wu
Taipei
In November last year, a man struck a woman with a steel bar and killed her outside a hospital in China’s Fujian Province. Later, he justified his actions to the police by saying that he attacked her because she was small and alone, and he was venting his anger after a dispute with a colleague. To the casual observer, it could be seen as another case of an angry man gone mad for a moment, but on closer inspection, it reflects the sad side of a society long brutalized by violent political struggles triggered by crude Leninism and Maoism. Starting
If social media interaction is any yardstick, India remained one of the top countries for Taiwan last year. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has on several occasions expressed enthusiasm to strengthen cooperation with India, one of the 18 target nations in her administration’s New Southbound Policy. The past year was instrumental in fostering Taiwan-India ties and will be remembered for accelerated momentum in bilateral relations. However, most of it has been confined to civil society circles. Even though Taiwan launched its southbound policy in 2016, the potential of Taiwan-India engagement remains underutilized. It is crucial to identify what is obstructing greater momentum
In terms of the economic outlook for the semiconductor industry, Taiwan has outperformed the rest of the world for three consecutive years. This is quite rare. In addition, Taiwan has been playing an important role in the US-China technology dispute, and both want Taiwan on their side, reflecting the remaking of the nation’s semiconductor industry. Under the leadership of — above all — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the industry as a whole has shifted from a focus on capacity to a focus on quality, as companies now have to be able to provide integration of hardware and software, as well as
US President Joe Biden’s foreign policy on China and the Indo-Pacific region will have huge repercussions for Taiwan. The US Department of State in the final weeks of former US president Donald Trump’s term took several actions clearly aimed to push Biden’s foreign policy to build on Trump’s achievements. Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s announcement on the final day of the Trump administration that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was committing “genocide and crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang was welcome, but comes far too late. The recent dropping of “self-imposed” restrictions on meetings between Taiwanese and US officials was