Taiwan Today

For more than a decade, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has been boosting the socioeconomic development of the nation’s diplomatic allies while simultaneously broadening the horizons of Taiwanese draftees through an innovative alternative military service initiative. Called the Taiwan Youth Overseas Service, the program sends conscripts with specialized skills to assist the Republic of China’s (ROC) medical and technical missions in allied countries in Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Oceania. During their nine-month assignments abroad, the young servicemen engage in a wide variety of foreign aid work, from raising piglets and developing new crop strains to perfecting food storage techniques. “With the Taiwan Youth Overseas Service, we’ve created a situation that benefits the ROC government, draftees and our allies,” says Lai Chien-chung (賴建中), director-general of MOFA’s Department of International Cooperation and Economic Affairs. “This program strengthens our diplomatic ties, increases our nation’s international visibility, and develops global perspectives among our young people.”

All healthy Taiwanese men are required to complete a year of national service. While most draftees serve in the military, they can also apply for alternative service, which allows them to spend this time working for government bureaus, the police force, the fire department, social welfare groups or other similar organizations. Some of these assignments, such as the Taiwan Youth Overseas Service, are available only to conscripts with certain skills or qualifications. According to Lai, applicants for the overseas service program typically have educational backgrounds in fields such as agriculture, business management, green energy, industrial planning, medical science and tourism. Annual funding for the initiative, which covers draftee training courses, insurance, flights, accommodations and allowances for daily expenses, totals approximately NT$50 million (US$1.6 million), he notes.

The program was launched in 2001 as the Overseas Substitute Service before being renamed the Taiwan Youth Overseas Service in 2003. During the initial years of the project, MOFA had difficulty recruiting candidates as “military-aged men and their parents weren’t very well informed about our diplomatic allies, so the few youngsters who were interested back then were often discouraged by their families,” Lai notes. In response, the ministry launched an extensive media campaign to explain the program and its objectives. This publicity drive, which included promotional films that were shown on television, buses and the Internet, proved very successful and the number of participants has increased annually since 2003. Last year, 86 conscripts were chosen from 862 applicants for the scheme, while to date a total of 1,092 draftees have served abroad under the program.

Participants are assigned to overseas projects based on their educational backgrounds and skills; their performance during mandatory basic military training, which typically lasts around three weeks; the needs of the ROC’s diplomatic and technical missions; and a drawing. Before departing, they must also complete six weeks of intensive training in languages, customs, protocol and other subjects at a center in Taipei run by the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund (ICDF), a government-supported foreign aid organization. The ICDF has been commissioned by MOFA to oversee the Taiwan Youth Overseas Service since the inception of the program. “The countries that the servicemen get sent to have very different environments and produce different kinds of culture shocks,” says Tsai Shiang-wu (蔡祥吾), director of the ICDF’s Human Resource Office. “However, all of our embassies and overseas missions have been very positive about the results of the initiative.”

While participants typically feel some degree of apprehension before departing for their assignments, they are also generally thrilled to have the chance to experience life in a different country. In November 2013, Peng Lin-liang (彭麟量), then 24 years old, was dispatched to the Solomon Islands for his stint in the overseas service. The draftee, who had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in animal science from National Chung Hsing University in Taichung City prior to beginning his national service, explains that he was really excited by this opportunity as he had heard many positive comments from former participants who had been posted to the nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. “I felt lucky to have drawn the Solomons because English is the official language and I was keen to improve my English-language skills,” he says.

Peng was housed with four fellow conscripts at the ICDF’s agricultural development center in the nation’s capital of Honiara in Guadalcanal province. Close to a dozen Taiwanese technical specialists, who are also responsible for supervising draftees, work at the center on a variety of different initiatives, and Peng was assigned to what was known among the staff as the “pig project.” “In the Solomons, pigs are a key part of feasts for important occasions such as births and weddings,” he explains. “But local farmers have difficulty raising them for a number of reasons, such as the fragile ecological conditions and the high cost of importing feed.”

The project focused on providing farmers with healthy piglets and training local agricultural workers. “We held very popular workshops to teach important skills such as castration, feeding methods and how to handle newborn piglets,” Peng says. “And we tried to find ways to reduce breeders’ reliance on expensive feed and equipment imports.” For instance, the Taiwanese specialists taught farmers how to build feeding stations for piglets using only cement and discarded items like used car tires. Furthermore, the ICDF team introduced relatively simple devices that produce biogas from pig feces, providing locals with an inexpensive source of fuel for cooking.

The ICDF has launched numerous agricultural and animal husbandry projects in allied nations around the globe, so many draftees with skills in these areas have participated in the Taiwan Youth Overseas Service. In 2009, Chen Yu-chi (陳昱齊), who studied agriculture at National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei City, traveled to Swaziland in Southern Africa to work on a demonstration farm owned by Taiwan’s overseas mission. “I took part in a project to optimize the storage duration of sweet potatoes as they can’t be grown during the chilly Swazi winter,” he explains. “In the winter, the price of sweet potatoes rises, so the farmers could earn more if they had a way to store them for two or three months.”

The draftee worked in the demonstration farm’s storage room, which is equipped with advanced humidity and temperature control systems, and spent his time analyzing how different varieties of sweet potatoes reacted to variations in room temperature and shading. “In the absence of a temperature-controlled storeroom, I concluded that sweet potatoes can be kept for between three and five weeks,” he says. “But I also discovered that the different types of sweet potatoes can easily be separated based on their water content, which is important as the ones with less water can be stored for a longer period of time.”

Chen greatly enjoyed his time in the African nation, though he notes that the relatively short duration of his stay meant he did not have a chance to see whether his research results proved helpful to local farmers. “In many cases, the growth cycles of crops exceed the time that overseas service participants work on a given project,” he explains.

While the draftees are typically quite busy assisting ICDF aid and development programs, they also get the opportunity to engage in cultural exchanges. Peng Yuan-ching (彭元慶), who graduated with a degree in crop science from NTU, developed a fondness for Latin American culture during his nine-month stint in Nicaragua under the alternative service initiative. The conscript spent most of his overseas assignment breeding different varieties of rice in order to create strains specifically tailored to the country’s climate. However, he also got the chance to interact with local government representatives. “Every now and then, officials would invite us to go dancing at the disco,” Peng recalls. “But when going out by ourselves, we had to keep in mind that some places are dangerous, even though Nicaragua is considered the safest country in Central America.”

At present, the future of the Taiwan Youth Overseas Service is in doubt as the Ministry of National Defense plans to transition an all-volunteer military force by 2017. The National Conscription Agency under the Ministry of the Interior is examining policies that will be affected by the transition, and a decision on the future of the overseas service program has yet to be announced. Peng Lin-liang, Chen Yu-chi and Peng Yuan-ching want it to continue as their overseas stints not only helped the ROC’s diplomatic allies but also advanced their careers. Peng Lin-liang now works on a livestock farm in Taoyuan City, northern Taiwan and notes that “it was the ICDF technicians in the Solomon Islands who taught me how to negotiate with customers, handle workers and so forth.”

Meanwhile, Peng Yuan-ching’s experiences in Nicaragua inspired him to begin cultivating wheat and barley in Taiwan. “A friend and I recently set up a brewing company and will soon release high-quality beers that, unlike other Taiwanese offerings, will be produced using local grown ingredients,” he says. And Chen enjoyed his time in the Taiwan Youth Overseas Service so much that he decided to pursue a career with the ICDF. He now works as a project manager for the organization. “When Taiwanese people go abroad, they usually visit Japan, the United States or England, but never places like Swaziland,” Chen says. “This program offers draftees an opportunity to gain an understanding of allied countries.”

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Jens Kastner is a freelance journalist based in Taipei.

Copyright © 2015 by Jens Kastner