The National Science Council initiated a conference yesterday in which scientific advisers to the council will discuss a growing brain drain crisis that is threatening Taiwan’s economic and technological development.
National Science Council Minister Cyrus Chu (朱敬一) said participants at the council’s two-day conference on developing science and technology will brainstorm on stopping the brain drain and also on how to better link academic research with the private sector.
Part of the problem, Chu said, is that many of the foreigners working in Taiwan are not highly skilled.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Of the 450,000 foreign nationals who came to Taiwan to work last year, 400,000 were hired as blue-collar workers.
Most of the remaining white-collar workers were language teachers or involved in jobs that did not require technical skills or specialized knowledge, he said.
The conservative nature of Taiwanese society has also held up efforts to attract foreign professionals to work in Taiwan, he added, noting that few foreigners serve in decisionmaking positions in local companies.
At the same time, China’s aggressive efforts to recruit Taiwanese talent by offering high salaries is eroding Taiwan’s homegrown talent pool, Chu said.
On the eve of the conference, Chu raised the alarm over the brain drain, warning that Taiwan would “perish miserably” if it continued doing nothing to stop the country’s erosion of talent, according to local media reports.
The official said Taiwan has entered a “talent-gap era,” with fewer Taiwanese students going abroad for advanced studies and increasing difficulties in keeping talent at home or attracting top professionals from abroad, the Chinese-language United Daily News reported.
The Industrial Technology Research Institute, Taiwan’s top technology research agency, has already lost several senior executives to similar research organizations in China because it was unable to match China’s lucrative salary and benefits offers, Chu said.
To stop the drain, the minister said Taiwan should define “talent” and “workers” separately, and he suggested that caps on senior officials’ salaries at national research institutes should be lifted.
The government would use the conclusions from the conference as a reference when devising science and technology development strategies, the council said.
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
China might accelerate its strategic actions toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and across the first island chain, after the US officially entered a military conflict with Iran, as Beijing would perceive Washington as incapable of fighting a two-front war, a military expert said yesterday. The US’ ongoing conflict with Iran is not merely an act of retaliation or a “delaying tactic,” but a strategic military campaign aimed at dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional order in the Middle East, said National Defense University distinguished adjunct lecturer Holmes Liao (廖宏祥), former McDonnell Douglas Aerospace representative in Taiwan. If
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires
RSS