Taiwan's public servants have had a bad press, over the years. They may still come across as conservative, but they are also becoming more efficient, as increasingly disgruntled and sophisticated islanders demand value for their tax dollars.
In Taiwan, it never rains but it pours--in this case, literally. On July 22 of this year, four hapless construction workers were stranded in a flash flood that roared along a riverbed in Chiayi, southern Taiwan. They clung together for three hours, patiently waiting to be rescued, but in the end the water proved stronger and they were swept away to their deaths. Such things happen all the time, of course, although they are none the less tragic for that. But this was different. This time, a large crowd gathered on the riverbank to watch the grim story unfold, and among the onlookers were several reporters armed with satellite news gathering equipment.
The images they captured included a heroic rescue attempt by a civilian who came within a few meters of the victims before losing his footing and having to be hauled back to safety. What the cameras conspicuously did not record was any serious attempt on the part of the authorities to save the workers. For nearly three hours, people in Taiwan sat glued to their TV sets, willing boats, helicopters, or even rescuers equipped with nothing more than a rope, to heave into view. They waited in vain. The four died, taking with them to the grave whatever reputation Taiwan's bureaucracy might have had for efficiency, user-friendliness, and the will to serve the public.
Out of evil sometimes cometh good, and if the remarkable public outcry that followed is any guide, this may well turn out to have been one such catalytic occurrence. Nobody, but nobody could find a kind word to say for the so-called emer gency "rescue" services, whose leaders had sat in air-conditioned offices watching the tragedy on television while they intermittently wrangled among themselves over whose responsibility it was to act. The government moved quickly to limit the damage by severely punishing thirteen officials, including the director-general of the island's National Police Administra tion, who received a major demerit and quickly resigned. The KMT and the DPP tried to blame each other. "The new government is incompetent," thundered Lien Chan, chairman of the former ruling party. "We inherited the mess left to us by the KMT," came the inevitable response.
Such charges and countercharges are less than helpful in an environment that has long been characterized by bureau cratic bungling. Until July 22, the aftermath of the September 21, 1999 earthquake stood as the low-watermark for Taiwan's civil service. The public was particularly outraged by the spectacle of the Tzu Chi Foundation, a Buddhist charity group, working more efficiently and a lot more speedily than the taxpayer-funded rescue agencies to bring succor to the homeless and helpless. "The government is rather like a dinosaur," says Chen Chin-kuei, professor of the Department of Public Admin istration and Policy at National Taipei University (NTPU). "If it loses a leg, it takes awhile for the pain to register."
Chen sees the government's inefficiency as almost inevitable, however, because the structure of its bureaucracy mili tates against swift action. Thus on July 22 this year, grassroots civil servants had to obtain authorization from the top, going through several tiers of authority, before they could initiate action to rescue the four workers trapped in the river. "Govern ment employees are often criticized by the public for being slow, but they're obliged to follow certain rules and procedures," Chen points out. "Tzu Chi can be flexible, but if you're working for the government, would you dare make any decision on your own and shoulder the responsibility for it? Well, would you?"
With these words, Chen highlights what is perhaps the most serious charge leveled against Taiwan's government em ployees: They are afraid of taking responsibility and try to shift the blame whenever something goes wrong. "The person who never made a mistake never made anything" is not an adage that would strike them as meaningful. The result? Selfish departmentalism, which is a grievous obstacle to any civil service network.
Yao Yew-mei is deputy director of the Civil Service Development Institute (CSDI), which comes under the jurisdiction of the Central Personnel Administration and is the successor of the former Training Center for Government Officials. Ac cording to her, the rules regulating the behavior of public employees in Taiwan keep them in a straitjacket. "It's time to introduce a bit of leeway into the regulations and allow employees some scope to take initiative," she says. "In the past, all you had to do was follow orders and everything would be fine, but today you have to recognize that society is asking for more."
At present, however, the climate is just the opposite--public servants are almost encouraged to develop a passive ap proach. Yao cites the oath that ranking government employees are required to swear when taking office. "It just bids them not to do certain things--don't waste public money, don't commit graft, don't take bribes."
"Many government employees are very good at first, but their work gradually falls off. Why?" Yao wonders. Chen Chin -kuei has an answer to her question. Under the ROC Constitution and the Civil Service Protection Law, absent exceptional circumstances, civil servants are protected from being removed from office. A private enterprise, in contrast, can fire an employee for good reason or for none. "That job guarantee is crucial to civil servants' attitudes," Chen says. But he acknowl edges that the problems often go deeper. "I find that people who want to become civil servants usually have conservative mentalities. People like that fit into the system really well, but when you do find exceptionally creative public employees, they're usually perceived as freaks or publicity-seekers by their colleagues."
Government workers are often stigmatized as lazy. "Oh, they have so much time off," Chen Chen-huan, 24, says without hesitation when asked for her impression of public servants. She is working for an insurance company but intends to take the civil service exams. "A public post means a stable income for life, and that's not bad," she adds.
But is it true that Taiwan's government work force lacks energy? Many people think so, and the topic has recently been made hot by the new government's decision to switch over to a five-day workweek for its employees, starting January 1, 2001. (At present, the island's civil servants have the second and fourth Saturday mornings of each month off.) Yao Yew-mei is philosophical about the move, pointing out that long working hours do not necessarily translate into efficiency and better service. She does not believe that the shorter workweek will denigrate from the government's overall performance. But the new law does contain provisions to ensure that civil servants whose duties bring them into daily contact with the public can be required to work in rotation on Saturday mornings.
The media gave the pending five-day working week a relatively gentle passage, but newspapers in most countries have a tendency to blow up the weaknesses of civil servants, and Taiwan is no exception. "Misleading reports only serve to strengthen the stereotype," Yao Yew-mei says, adding that elections are particularly tough times for public employees. "Can didates like to criticize the incumbent administration, because that helps them win votes." NTPU's Chen Chin-kuei, on the other hand, can see a positive side to elections. If candidates want to garner popular support, they must find a way of responding to rising popular expectations, with promises to improve public service high on the list. A good example is the transformation of the Taipei City Government, which underwent a rapid and positive change of image soon after Chen Shui -bian won the first election for the office in 1994.
While he was mayor, Chen Shui-bian, who already had a reputation as a reformer, put a lot of pressure on city govern ment employees to shape up or ship out. Soon after he took office, Taipei's Government Employees Training Center was instructed to draw up a program for its middle- and higher-ranking employees, to improve their services and image. The first batch of trainees later became "seed teachers," who in turn trained other civil servants, a process that has been repeated many times since then.
Nowhere are the fruits of that policy more evident than in the city's fourteen household registry offices, where citizens come into daily contact with public servants when they go to inform them of changes of address and other circumstances. "The most noticeable change was that both the staff and the citizens they served became more good-humored," says Chai Ching-li, who now lives mostly in the United States, commenting on his experience of the Da-an District Household Registry Office. "Before, things got done pretty slowly and the atmosphere could turn sour quite easily. The change is very obvious, and the service seems to improve each time I come back to Taiwan."
Nowadays, everyone who visits a household registry office is served a cup of tea, (an idea thought up by the city's Bureau of Civil Affairs), while employees are required to pass papers to citizens with two hands (a traditional Chinese gesture of respect) and, even more importantly, with a smile. "At first there was a backlash," says Lin Jing, chief of the Da-an District Household Registry Office. "Some employees felt uncomfortable serving tea. They'd worked for the government for a long time and they thought it was degrading. So I needed to brainwash them a bit. I told them that people coming here on business are just like guests invited to our homes." It helped that Lin Jing herself served tea, to set her staff an example.
In 1998, Taipei City's household registry offices all met the ISO 9002 standard. Many other local governments, includ ing that of Taiwan's second-largest city, Kaohsiung, are sending their people to Taipei City to study its transformation. "They had to come to us to learn, or they'd find themselves lagging behind and in trouble with local inhabitants," says Horng Jinn -dar, a section chief at Da-an District Household Registry Office. "But maybe the rest of the island still doesn't match up in this area. People are less demanding in other parts of Taiwan, and smaller local governments haven't got as many human and financial resources as Taipei."
The Taipei City reforms had a noticeable effect. Prior to the September 21 earthquake, the image of Taiwan's public servants was starting to improve islandwide, not just in the capital. According to a survey conducted in April 1999 by the Cabinet's Research, Development, and Evaluation Commission, inhabitants gave an 80 percent approval rating to the civil service, about 10 percent higher than in the previous year. The poll also showed that household registry office staff were thought to provide the best service, followed by post office workers.
What was the driving force behind this improvement? One answer, according to NTPU's Chen Chin-kuei, is the devel opment of a better-educated workforce--the combination of high-quality human resources and willingness to meet the expec tations of a more demanding society seems to be gradually having an effect. Then there are the acknowledged areas of excellence, which do something to balance out the negativity. The National Tax Administration in Taipei, for example, is exemplary in the way it treats its customers, both Taiwanese and foreign. It also sets some kind of standard for modesty in public life: When asked why it was held in such high regard, its public relations department would only say that the staff aimed "to administer a fair taxation system and treat everyone with sincerity."
Yao Yew-mei of the CSDI points to the introduction of technology, particularly in the area of data-processing, as another factor that is helping to enhance the efficiency, and consequently the image, of Taiwan's public servants. She also notices a change in the attitudes of those undergoing training at CSDI. "In the past, they rarely asked questions in class, but now a lot of them take the initiative, particularly when it comes to sharing work experiences with one another," she says. "They're trying to create something new." Lin Jing agrees. "You won't catch our employees reading newspapers and chatting during working hours, not these days," she says. "Some people might have that impression. But it's a false, stereotypical impres sion."
There remains a lot more work to be done, of course. People on the whole think that private service enterprises do better than the island's public employees, and Chen Chin-kuei sees merit in that perception. Formerly, he says, people were stuck with public services, but today they can turn to private enterprises to correct the deficiencies of public servants. For example, commercial passenger highway traffic used to be confined to state-run Taiwan Motor Transport Co., but in 1989 it was opened to private competition, with corresponding benefits to the traveling public. The Taipei City Government has grasped this: It once sent household registry office employees to a department store to observe proper customer service at first hand. (Interestingly, the store in question relied on Japanese customer-service consultants.)
Of all the tasks on the agenda of the new government, the fight against corruption is the most important and the one the Cabinet probably takes most seriously. Soon after President Chen Shui-bian took office last May, newly appointed Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan announced that he was setting up an institution inspired by Hong Kong's Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). The ICAC was established in 1974 amid growing local resentment directed at the Hong Kong government, which at that time was plagued with sleaze at all levels. Taiwan's new administration acknowledges that the island's graft problem is no less serious than Hong Kong's used to be, and there is a lot of catching up to do.
Statistics for cases of corruption are notoriously unreliable, because low conviction figures may only mean that the law is full of loopholes, or that enforcement is weak. Some cases, however, are notorious, many of them involving building licenses. In the summer of 1997, for example, twenty-eight people were buried alive when a residential building in Taipei County collapsed after a typhoon and torrential rain that sapped the building's foundations. The subsequent inquiry found that officials of the Taipei County Government had issued building licenses in a slapdash manner, and that certain employees had counterfeited documents in order to benefit the developer. Four of them were convicted and sentenced to jail terms of between five and a half and seven years.
Whatever the crime statistics may say, in most people's minds the problem is serious and growing worse. Many voters believe that the KMT lost this year's presidential election at least in part because the party-controlled government was riddled with bribery and corruption, and the electorate was fed up with it. In fact, however, all the main presidential candidates, including the KMT's Lien Chan, proposed the establishment of an organization modeled on Hong Kong's ICAC.
"Government agencies are often set up in response to a specific social impetus, and an anti-corruption organization is an idea whose time has come," argues Liu Jun-hwa, director of the Ministry of Justice's Department of Ethics. He sees a cultural aspect to the problem. "Corruption's perceived as a big issue in the West, but a lot of people in Asia tend to connive at it," he says, adding that this may be one reason why powerful government institutions set up to fight corruption tend to be more common (because they are more necessary) in Asia than in Europe and the United States.
Liu acknowledges that Taiwan's version of the ICAC is unlikely to be in operation before the end of this year at the earliest. A law governing its functions has been drafted and sent to the Cabinet for review, after which it will be forwarded to the legislature. In the initial stages, the organization will be staffed by between six and seven hundred people, all carefully screened for their professionalism and integrity. They will be required to focus exclusively on the investigation and preven tion of corruption, thus enabling them to probe cases as deeply as may be necessary.
Despite doubts about its future after the 1997 transfer of power to mainland China, the ICAC worked for Hong Kong, where graft is now largely under control. So is Taiwan heading the same way at last? Will the island's bureaucratic system become more efficient and less corrupt as the result of the recent power rotation among the main political parties? Perhaps. As the Taipei City experience demonstrates, government employees can win respect if only they set their minds to it. Presi dent Chen Shui-bian has said that the July tragedy in Chiayi should serve as a turning point in the island's domestic affairs as far as bureaucratic reform is concerned. It is hard to smash stereotypes, but reform, when it comes, often arrives with breath taking speed and thoroughness. Taiwan, remember, is an island where it never rains but it pours.