Chen champions world environment body

Speaking in a videoconference May 29, ROC President Chen Shui-bian urged the international community, especially the free democratic camp led by the United States, Japan and E.U. member states, not to overlook China's irrational demands and unreasonable behavior simply because of its size and power.

Chen's contribution to the conference, titled "Democratic Taiwan: Challenges and Prospects" and organised by the U.S.-based National Press Club, was filmed inside the Office of the President in Taipei and broadcast live.

Citing the 2007 edition of the annual report titled "Military Power of the People's Republic of China," Chen noted the aims of China's military modernisation surpassed its needs to resolve a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, suggesting that China was upsetting the military balance not just in the strait but also throughout East Asia. China was marching toward becoming a global military hegemonic power, Chen noted.

"Appeasement breeds aggression," Chen stressed. The world community should actively guide China toward political democratisation and join forces to build a more democratic, freer and safer world, he added.

Noting that people were confronted by challenges such as water shortages, global warming and abnormal climate changes, Chen said that Taiwan would shoulder its responsibilities and obligations as a member of the international community, and find a new equilibrium, where economic development was in balance with environmental protection.

As such, Chen added, Taiwan was willing to work with countries worldwide that shared similar visions to propose and promote creation of a World Environmental Organisation. "By setting up an institution that integrates the strengths of different nations to co-manage these issues on a global level," he stressed, "together we can deal with challenges of the global ecological environment."

Chen's speech was followed by a panel discussion, during which the president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, said the United States had provided leadership for Taiwan to be integrated into regional and global trade liberalisation. The United States would not see Taiwan's economic interests being marginalised, as this was not in American interests. Finding a way to involve Taiwan in regional, multilateral, bilateral and global trade liberalisation was critically important, he added.

Chen replied that, while Taiwan and the United States were currently negotiating the signing of a trade and investment framework agreement, only achievement of a Taiwan-U.S. free trade agreement would suit the best interests of both countries.

Chen's remarks were followed by a Q&A session. Japan's Kyodo News asked whether the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games would offer a good chance for Taiwan to resume talks with Beijing, or would Taiwan boycott the competition. Chen explained that Taiwan would never boycott the sporting event and hoped it would be successful.

Nevertheless, Chen added, Taiwan would not allow China to belittle Taiwan during its hosting of the Olympic Games. Since one of the main spirits behind organising the Olympic Games was the promotion of peace, Chen said, if China wanted to honor the Olympic spirit of peace, it should remove the almost 1,000 tactical guided missiles aimed at Taiwan, abandon the preparations it had made to attack Taiwan and abolish the Anti-Secession Law, enacted in March 2005 to provide the Beijing authorities with legal basis for using military force against Taiwan.

Exports behind economic growth

Taiwan's economy posted a year-on-year growth of 4.15 percent over the first quarter of 2007, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics under the Executive Yuan said. Forecasting continued growth of exports in the coming months, the agency predicted a 4.38-percent increase over the whole year.

The Q1 economic growth was attributed to a strong increase in external trade, reported the DGBAS. Taiwan's trade surplus posted US$6.6 billion during the period, twice the figure forecast at the beginning of the year.

The DGBAS predicted Taiwan's external trade in the second half of 2007 would continue to grow in accordance with economic growth among Taiwan's major trading partners, which included China, Japan and other East Asian countries. The nation's exports and imports in 2007 were expected to grow by 6.8 percent and 5.4 percent compared with 2006, and to raise the trade surplus to US$25.6 billion this year, up from US$20.4 billion last year.

Domestic consumption, another contributor to economic growth, would see steady increase despite the continuing influence of credit- and cash-card debts since 2005, the DGBAS predicted. Card problems had resulted in a decrease of around US$260 million in domestic banks' interest earnings in the first quarter of 2007.

This loss would be offset by positive developments in Taiwan's workforce and bourse, however. The unemployment rate declined from 3.9 percent in 2006 to 3.8 percent in April, with the number of people in work up by 2.0 percent from 12 months ago and an additional 134,000 jobs available.

Meanwhile, the Taipei Stock Exchange Corp.'s capitalisation-weighted index posted an average of 7,992 points in April--an increase of 1,051 points compared with April 2006--and crossed the 8,200-point benchmark May 23. The growing workforce and stock-market profits were expected to produce a "wealth effect" that would stimulate domestic consumption in accordance with increased assets. The DGBAS predicted private consumption would grow by 3.0 percent this year.

Private-sector investment, however, would post only minor growth compared to consumption. The DGBAS forecast sluggish investments due to completion of the high-speed rail line and decreased investment in the optoelectronics sector. This limited investment could be offset by semiconductor companies' expansion of production capacity and advancement of process technologies. Private sector investment still posted a 1.7-percent increase this year, according to the DGBAS.

The combined growth of private consumption and investment would be the major contributor to economic growth this year. Although the forecast was down slightly from last year's 4.68 percent, it derived primarily from domestic demand, rather than from overseas demand as last year.

The DGBAS also predicted that the nation's Consumer Price Index would rise by 1.46 percent in 2007, and that GNP would post US$386 billion this year. GNP per capita and GDP per capita would be US$16,907 and US$16,442, up 2.64 percent and 2.57 percent on last year.

ROC health minister attended APEC forum, discussed global epidemics prevention

ROC Health Minister Hou Sheng-mou shared Taiwan's experience in containing the spread of HIV and expressed hope for further cooperation with other countries in avian-flu prevention at the Health Ministers' Meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, held in Sydney, Australia June 6 to 8.

Important issues that were discussed at the second APEC Health Ministers' Meeting included the global nature of pandemic influenza and other virulent diseases, with an emphasis on how an outbreak could be prevented through regional and global cooperation. During the meeting, Hou, who led a Taiwanese delegation to the conference, spoke about how Taiwan dealt with the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome, which killed 774 people around the world between November 2002 and July 2003. He stressed the importance of proper hospital management in avoiding epidemics.

In terms of a possible outbreak of avian flu, Hou appealed to member economies to strengthen inspection of international passengers' carry-on luggage at the time of departure to avert the spread of the disease. He also suggested that an international exercise be held this year to hone the emergency and disaster-response skills of APEC countries, as a similar avian-flu prevention drill had been conducted in 2006 where Taiwan, Australia and other member states participated.

Another topic for discussion was the socio-economic impact of HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region. Hou reported during the June 8 panel that Taiwan implemented a "harm reduction program" aimed at curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS and reducing the risk of infection.

The project, which involved establishing needle and syringe exchanges, using methadone as replacement therapy and offering free health consultations, has helped to lower the growth of new HIV/AIDS cases in Taiwan. Hou acknowledged the assistance of experts from the United States, Australia and Hong Kong in the meeting.

"The number of HIV/AIDS cases started to rise sharply in 2003, and new cases doubled between 2004 and 2005," Hou said. Taiwan began to conduct the HRP on a trial basis in December 2005, and the number of new HIV/AIDS infected cases actually decreased for the first time in 2006.

Hou added that the DOH had incorporated and coordinated efforts by the National Bureau of Controlled Drugs under the DOH and local drug-control centers throughout the country in executing the program, discovering that sharing needles during intravenous drug use was the major channel for the disease to spread in Taiwan. "We feel compelled to offer our successful experience in this regard."

In 2006, the growth of new HIV/AIDS cases declined for the first time in 20 years. There were 2,942 more cases, while in 2005, there had been 3,399. As of early 2007, there was a total of around 13,000 reported cases of HIV infection, according to DOH statistics. Since the HRP's inception, 5,256 drug users received the replacement therapy, and 65,000 clean needles were given out each week.

In places such as Taoyuan County, Tainan City and Tainan County, where there was a relatively higher rate of HRP implementation, far fewer new HIV/AIDS cases were reported. This was the opposite in places where there was a weaker HRP presence. Statistics for the Tainan area indicated an inverse relationship between the implementation rate and the crime rate.

Meanwhile, Hou reiterated Taiwan's role in the global effort of pandemic disease preparedness, stressing that Taiwan has become more active in international rescue actions and pandemic control projects.

Worldwide medical care launched for slice of US$200 billion market

To make Taiwan's medical services more accessible to overseas visitors, the Executive Yuan resolved May 30 to establish a special office in July as part of a three-year program to promote international marketing of medical care. This would cater to the growing demand by patients looking for medical treatments outside of their home countries and was expected to create a market in Taiwan worth up to US$200 million over three years.

The office will be launched by the Department of Health with assistance from the Council for Economic Planning and Development--both Cabinet-level agencies--and, initially, will aim at promoting special medical services. Taiwan's medical specialties included liver transplants, craniofacial operations, cardiovascular surgeries, assisted reproduction and joint replacement, the CEPD said in the CNA report. Traditional medicine and health examinations were also expected to figure highly.

The program would target Chinese people around the world and customers in Southeast Asian countries. Taiwan's medical services would be especially attractive to white-collar workers in China, said the DOH in the CNA report.

Taiwan's medical care was competitive with those of other Asian countries, such as South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand, due to its lower prices, efficiency and consistent quality, the DOH claimed, adding that both Singapore and Thailand had integrated tourism and medical treatment over recent years. Singapore attracted around 400,000 overseas medical visits in 2005, while Thailand drew around 860,000 visits the same year, a 16-percent increase since 2003, the CEPD Web site reported.

The global market for international medical services was worth around US$200 billion to US$300 billion in 2005, the DOH said.

Government agencies faced a variety of problems before the program was launched, however. These included shortages of English-speaking medical staff and marketing channels, poor cooperation between related sectors and the need for changes to current regulations, the DOH indicated.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was set to issue visas providing stays of more than half a year to overseas visitors receiving medical treatments in Taiwan. Similar visas for family members taking care of the patients were also being considered, the DOH said June 5.

Internationalisation of Taiwan's medical care represented development of a new industry, the Taiwan Hospital Association Chairman Wu Der-lang y 26. Wu added that the industry must focus on the goal of creating a niche market to make profits. This would be achieved using medical services with the greatest number of potential customers, advanced medical skills, low human resources costs and short recovery times.

International medical care had become a global industry for people in Europe and North America, who faced higher costs and longer queues for services than their counterparts in Asia. Also predicted is that the increasing numbers of people from rising economies such as China and India would receive medical treatments while traveling overseas, thus creating even bigger markets for the sector.

As a secondary theme of the program, medical tours would also be promoted by encouraging hospitals to provide non-invasive treatments to overseas tourists while they travel in Taiwan. "It is easy to integrate skin treatments such as removal of facial spots into tourism," according to the CEO of the International Medical Service section of National Taiwan University Hospital.

The CEPD cited a 2006 DOH survey showing that 23 hospitals and medical centers in Taiwan showed great interest in participating in the medical-tour program. Some hospitals would launch treatments in accordance with their fields of specialty, the DOH said June 5.

International marketing of medical services would attract investments of around US$200 million from the private sector and create 3,500 jobs between 2007 and 2009, the CEPD predicted in the CNA report. The industry was expected to generate an annual market value of around US$1.5 billion by 2015, representing around 0.5 percent of the nation's GDP.

Business in brief

Taiwan had the highest inclination for saving among 24 countries surveyed in a global report issued by the Taiwan branch of U.K.-based insurance group Aviva PLC. The report showed that 81 percent of Taiwanese people said they would rather spend less money in order to make savings. This was much higher than the world average of 48 percent and China's 15 percent. The report also showed that most Taiwanese saved money for life after retirement. Forty-seven percent of the 1,009 local respondents claimed that regular savings or investments were the most practical way to maintain a good life after retirement, with 53 percent of Taiwanese people saying they regularly saved money for their retirement. Local people were less interested in long-term savings, however, with more than 80 percent of people saying their savings were accessible within 10 years, thereby maintaining the fluidity of their money. Aviva Taiwan CEO Christopher Knight said in the report that the high savings rate in Taiwan was very attractive to foreign financial businesses.

Taiwan's mangoes could now be exported to Australia, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Australia announced in a June 18 Web site press release. This was a result of three years of negotiations between Taiwan's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine and the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Services, said the release, adding that Australian officials had visited plantation areas in Taiwan in May to examine related facilities and procedures, after which AQIS agreed to the fruit's import from Taiwan. That the two countries are situated in different hemispheres would allow Australian consumers to purchase the tropical fruit in winter, said TECO. The representative office added that it would seek the export of other agricultural products such as lychees and starfruit to Australia.

YouTube's Chen visited homeland, discussed Web2.0

Steve Chen, Taiwan-born co-founder of the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube, made a weeklong visit to his home country starting June 7. His itinerary included meeting his Taiwanese business partners and a June 9 forum at which he spoke to representatives of the domestic information-and-communications-technology sector.

At the forum, Chen said he launched YouTube with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim in 2005 just after Internet development had been threatened by the "bubble" scares of 1999 to 2003. They founded YouTube in the hope that users could easily share audio-visual content with others, using either Microsoft or Macintosh software, he said. "YouTube started with a very simple idea: just helping people to do something they are not able to do, especially when they are facing a lot of difficulties online," Chen explained.

Founded just two years ago when Chen was 27 years old, YouTube is now one of the most popular sites for users to upload their own videos and share those of others around the world. With its services expanded to mobile devices, blogs and e-mail, the site attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every day.

Search-engine giant Google Inc. purchased YouTube for US$1.65 billion in October 2006, and visits to the site exceeded 10 million per day over the six months following acquisition, Chen said.

Chen discussed the concept of Web2.0 with other participants at the forum. This refers to the current era in which Internet content comes largely from users themselves. YouTube was a successful example of Web2.0 since it invited users to be content providers and form a Web community.

Chen replied that, although he found it hard to define Web2.0 precisely, he saw "personalisation" as a major trend and stressed "user-first" as the company's philosophy. He and Hurley decided to sell YouTube Inc. to Google, having been impressed by Google's ability to provide technical support, he said, and by the match between its core value and that of YouTube, that was, to generate an infinite number of users and content that people wanted. Chen continued to serve as YouTube chief technology officer after the acquisition and was listed in the May 14, 2007 issue of Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Chen mentioned at the forum that the Mandarin version of the video-sharing site would come soon. "We want YouTube to look like a local site to promote the local community, and not look like a U.S. site to international users," Chen elaborated.

His most recent visit to Taiwan was aimed at acquiring a better understanding of the Asian and Taiwan markets, so that his company could provide localised services, Chen said, adding that his top concern was improving people's lives with technology.

Meanwhile, Chen said the company was considering setting up new Web servers in Asia, and Taiwan was one of the location choices, according to the UDN report. This intended to address the problem of waiting time for users outside the United States--who represented more than half of the site's visitors--to download videos from YouTube, said the report.

Retired covert operatives teach kung fu to the next generation

Climbing a six-story building without equipment may sound like a scene from the "Spider-Man" films. Breaking a marble tablet with a bare hand and shooting a chopstick through a plywood board might have come from an old kung fu movie. Getting run over by a jeep--and surviving--would seem to be an impossible mission. These stunts, however, were actually performed on March 17, 1967 in a demonstration for the high officials of the Military Intelligence Bureau under the Ministry of National Defense.

"The showcase was held to display the skills of Taiwan's covert operatives," Lee Da-chiu, the retired captain of the 91 Action Team, said May 19. The group no longer exists, but several of its members have kept its spirit alive by teaching the kung fu they had learned from their training.

In the 1960s, a strike force of young people was assembled and trained to help achieve the Kuomintang government's ultimate goal of recovering China, Lee said. The squad was named the 91 Action Team because the bureau believed that nine out of 10 members dispatched overseas would be killed and only one would survive. They had already been presumed dead from the day they joined the bureau. "When we finished our training, we were asked to have two photos of ourselves taken," Lee said. "The 20-inch one was meant to be used in our funeral services and the 2-inch one would be used for our name tablet at the martyr shrine within the bureau."

Chang Long-tan, a former member of the team, explained that the first recruits were actually from juvenile detention centers around Taiwan, and many were only 16 to 18 years old. "Every one of them had some kind of criminal record and most of them grew up in the military community," said Chang. "The bureau thought that it was an opportunity for them to be reborn."

The training program was unimaginably Spartan, according to Chang. Recruits were schooled in demolitions, weaponry and clandestine communications. They learned how to conduct amphibious warfare as frogmen and were conditioned to survive in high mountains and jungles. Trainees had to take courses in Chinese literature and English as well, because the bureau was equipping them with a junior-college education, Chang explained.

Throughout their training, cadets had to wear a vest weighed down with 30 kilograms of shredded iron and leg pads that weighed another 30 kilograms. They had to stand, sit and even sleep wearing the vest and the pads. At six in the early morning, Lee would have cadets climb Yangmingshan with the vest on. "That was just to warm up," said Chang.

The real test was to climb to the top of a three-story building without any mountaineering equipment. To prepare them to get to the top, Devil Lee would have the cadets hold two bricks between their forearms and palms in order to build up their strength. More bricks kept being added, as they got stronger. By the time a recruit could hold eight or more bricks, he would be ordered to climb a building by pinning both arms around the corner of the structure, Chang explained.

Lee Feng-san, another ex-cadet, said May 12 that the most unique course was qigong training. Qigong is a form of traditional Chinese martial arts believed to be helpful in protecting the body from blows and strengthening blood circulation. Developing such a high threshold to pain was helpful for the operatives when they landed in close quarters combat situations.

Two years after retiring from active service in 1987, Lee founded the Meimen Qigong and Culture Center in Taipei, which offers qigong and martial-arts courses. He moved away from the fighting-oriented style of qigong he had learned and revamped it into an exercise for people to improve their health.

Lee admitted that much of his qigong knowledge came from the teachings of Lee Ker-lien. "One night, I was asked to transcribe a book of qigong under Devil Lee's instruction, from which I learned a lot," he said. There were no copy machines in those days, Lee explained, so that when a book became old and started to crumble, it had to be copied into another book by hand.

The Meimen center has seven branches located in Yilan, Taoyuan, Jhongli, Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung to educate adults and children about kung fu. Lee said he was asked by the Government Information Office--the agency that publishes this newspaper--to participate in a documentary titled "Taichi," which won the Gold Medal at the Houston International Film Festival in October 2002. In the same year, Lee also founded Meimen Kung Fu Art House, where he combined kung fu, drama and dance together into stage performances. In 2006, he asked Chang, his former teammate, to join Meimen and teach children what Devil Lee had taught them, only without such a harsh regimen.

Today, most of the 91 Action Team members have retired from the bureau, Lee Da-chiu said. He claimed he trained the bodyguards of Ferdinand Marcos, late president of the Philippines, and in October 2006, Lee went back to his hometown in Guangxi Province, China, where he was well received by the martial artists there.

Lee Da-chiu said that he has also taught self-defense techniques to followers of Zen master Miao-tien several years ago. The disciples he trained have since become masters themselves and began teaching martial-arts classes at Taiwan Zen Buddhist Association in early 2007.

"I know that if the master were still alive today, he would have been proud of Lee Fen-san and Lee Da-chiu," Chang said. He added they have taught their young students only about one-tenth of what they had learned from Devil Lee during their training.

As for Chang himself, he also decided to continue practicing the kung fu he inherited from Devil Lee and pass it on to the next generation. In doing so, the three of them would jointly accomplish Devil Lee's final mission.