As the executors of a nation’s civil power, civil servants are the foundation of a nation’s competitiveness and their duty is to serve the country first, and not themselves, former vice president Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) told a forum at the Examination Yuan yesterday.
Commenting on his five decades of public service, Siew said he was proud of his one and only career.
Execution is the key that differentiates a government and civil servants are the hands that implement government policies, Siew said.
Photo: CNA, courtesy of the Examination Yuan
Civil servants and those planning to go into public service should know what the job entails, Siew said. That is the only way they can do their job properly and gradually become a “professional” in execution and in making a career of it, he added.
Moreover, for civil servants to become dedicated to their jobs, it is important that they develop a sense of duty and feel that it is their vocation, he said.
Siew said that in his five decades of serving the people and the government, he felt that his duty was to make the nation richer and for people to benefit from this wealth.
What is even more important is that public servants realize that they should not count themselves among the beneficiaries of this wealth, Siew said.
Civil servants should never be avaricious and seek to benefit themselves and they must always remain neutral and impartial, he said.
These are the most basic qualities of a civil servant, Siew said, adding that people who wanted to make money should be in business, not civil service.
Citing his own experience, Siew said he started his career at the bottom of the ladder.
He said he had once taken the day off for his wedding, but the date had coincided with a four-day visit of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit of Thailand to Taiwan.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs mobilized the entire Department of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and I felt duty-bound to come in to work, even though I was getting married that day,” Siew said.
He said he only made it to the wedding after a colleague dragged him away from the office for the ceremony.
‘I returned to the office as soon as the feast and ceremony were over,” Siew said.
He cited another incident, when he was sent to Kuala Lumpur to greet a visitor from Taiwan.
“I suffered from gastrointestinal hemorrhage mid-way and was coughing up blood, but I didn’t go to the doctor until I had dropped off the person,” the former vice president said.
“I don’t really stand out and am not an exception; I just work harder than others,” Siew said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods