The government has recently reinforced its ban on job banks helping companies to recruit Taiwanese staff to work in China and told them to delete any such vacancies from their listings.
From the short-term national security perspective, I completely support the ban, given the close connection between talent flow and national security.
However, this ban can only cure the symptom. The only way to cure the cause is to think harder about why talented Taiwanese can be poached by China.
People can accuse China of twisting the arms of Taiwanese with crude offers of big money.
However, on the other hand, why are Chinese companies willing to pay salaries at least twice as high as their Taiwanese competitors for the same employees, while Taiwanese firms think they pay their employees too much?
A friend of mine told me something about his experience of negotiating salaries with Taiwanese and Chinese companies. In summary, although China does have a tendency to grab employees by offering high salaries, this is aimed not only at Taiwanese, but to grab talent from around the world.
In contrast, when Taiwanese companies talk about salaries, they often start by saying: “You know, the situation here in Taiwan is a bit different from China, so salaries here can hardly compare with over there.”
The salaries they offer are usually less than half of those in China, or even only one-third. How, then, can Taiwan expect to retain talent, let alone attract talent from all over the world?
The problem is clearly a matter of salaries. According to news reports, most of the vacancies deleted from job bank listings were in preschool education.
This shows that the outflow of talent from Taiwan does not only affect the technology sector.
Brain drain is an unfortunate result of Taiwan’s long-standing practice of keeping salaries low. Talented people might go over to China, or they might go off to Japan, South Korea, the US or Europe.
This is a long-term national security problem, and the solution is definitely not to restrict the publication of recruitment ads.
When salary earners feel that their talent is out of proportion to their salary, this discrepancy becomes a loophole through which China can influence Taiwan’s national security.
Yang Li-jing is a freelancer.
Translated by Julian Clegg
On Sunday, 13 new urgent care centers (UCC) officially began operations across the six special municipalities. The purpose of the centers — which are open from 8am to midnight on Sundays and national holidays — is to reduce congestion in hospital emergency rooms, especially during the nine-day Lunar New Year holiday next year. It remains to be seen how effective these centers would be. For one, it is difficult for people to judge for themselves whether their condition warrants visiting a major hospital or a UCC — long-term public education and health promotions are necessary. Second, many emergency departments acknowledge
US President Donald Trump’s seemingly throwaway “Taiwan is Taiwan” statement has been appearing in headlines all over the media. Although it appears to have been made in passing, the comment nevertheless reveals something about Trump’s views and his understanding of Taiwan’s situation. In line with the Taiwan Relations Act, the US and Taiwan enjoy unofficial, but close economic, cultural and national defense ties. They lack official diplomatic relations, but maintain a partnership based on shared democratic values and strategic alignment. Excluding China, Taiwan maintains a level of diplomatic relations, official or otherwise, with many nations worldwide. It can be said that
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
RSS