Sustainable development is key to improving a nation's competitiveness, Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) said yesterday.
"The old way of competition is out while the new way of competition is in," he told a roomful of government officials attending a 90-minute lecture entitled "A Nation's Competitiveness and the Sustainable Development of Mankind" held at the Civil Service Development Institute in Taipei City yesterday morning.
The old way of competition, according to Lee, is the furthering of a nation's competitiveness by using natural resources without considering the impact on the planet.
The new way of competition, he said, refers to enhancing a nation's competitiveness with sustainable development in mind.
In striving for competitiveness, Taiwan should not blindly follow the footsteps of Western countries, which care more about short-term commercial interests than the future of the country, Lee said.
"Taiwan needs to find its own way and lead the rest of the world," he said. "I know the road is long and bumpy, but I hope the world will become one big family by the end of the century. I know I won't be around by that time but I do hope someone would fax the news to me."
Lee said that the direction the world is heading is wrong. Among the world's many problems, he said, is overpopulation.
"Overpopulation results in the deprivation of natural resources and the harming of the ecosystem," Lee said.
Citing his own experience, Lee said that when he went to the US in 1962 to pursue a doctorate he was surprised to see how Americans wasted napkins.
"When I returned to Taiwan 30 years later in 1994, I saw Taiwanese people had already picked up the bad habit," he said.
Lee also linked recent natural disasters in Taiwan to the greenhouse effect.
"When Typhoon Nari hit the island last year, authorities said that it brought the heaviest amount of rainfall in a century. But they said the same thing when Typhoon Xangsane swept through Taiwan in 2000," he said. "Just before the government tried to figure out a way to take care of the flooding problem, droughts hit this year."
The Academia Sinica president also shared what he saw as a link between Typhoon Nari and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, that being the energy policies of Taiwan and the US.
"The Sept. 11 incident results from the US support of Middle Eastern countries, which in return provide the US with cheap oil," he said. "Typhoon Nari has a lot to do with the nation's overdependence on gasoline, which generates carbon dioxide that contributes to the greenhouse effect."
Disaster prevention is why the government needs to focus on the development of science and technology, which does not harm the environment as much as traditional industries, Lee said.
Lee also praised Premier Yu Shyi-kun, who he said had promoted sustainable development.
"I'm glad to see the premier recognizes the importance of sustainable development and makes efforts to realize it," he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater