"Other young civil servants wanted a more radical approach: a clear division along generational lines to pursue reform objectives. But our viewpoint is different: a country's pension system is built on generations paying into it to support the next — so when we hear these opinions we have to take them into account and make adjustments accordingly," he said.
▲圖／翻攝自中國郵報
But Lin and like-minded members of the bureaucracy face an uphill task in mobilizing support among both colleagues and the public.
Galvanized by Lin's open letter to the Tsai administration 翻譯公司 Chou later became the organizations' spokesman for government-held discussion panels on pension reform.
For him 翻譯公司 it was a culture that was making the system unaccountable to the public, inefficient 翻譯公司 unresponsive to social needs and at the mercy of political appointees. This desire by younger members of the civil service to reform from within gave way to the formation of the TCSIC.
Whereas older civil servants and retirees rally easily to the call of resisting cuts to their benefits, for many young people, the pension issue seems like a distant problem full of obtrusive technical terms and legalese.
Members of the TCSIC have powered their message of questioning business as usual in the public sector through social media.
In TCSIC's first press conference in January, many members wore surgical masks out of fear of being identified and targeted at work.
"For me, it's understandable that older colleagues who are about to retire want to take a position of resisting the government's reforms," Chou said.
"There are deliberate moves by some to frame this as a 'political stocktaking against civil servants' in order to frame this as an ideological issue involving the pan green and pan blues. This has transformed an issue about systemic problems into a war of words."
Lin said in an op-ed last month he was being monitored and vetted by an internal agency due to his participation in TCSIC.
One video clip published on Facebook outlines the convoluted and closed-off process of policymaking.
In January, the Alliance for Monitoring Pension Reforms 翻譯公司 made up of retired and working public servants as well as teachers and military veterans, staged a massive rally as social groups and government representatives concluded a pension reform conference seeking to draw consensus on key points, including lowering the income replacement ratio and phasing out the controversial 18 percent preferential savings rate.
量聯盟).
But flying under the media's radar has been a younger generation of civil servants, who not only want pension reforms to proceed 翻譯公司 but also changes to the very definition of public service itself.
For Lin, however, that process has been fraught with incidents of personal attacks.
In the video 翻譯公司 the inefficiencies of the public policy process are assessed from day one, when isolated groups formulate policy based on their own internal discussions. By the time the policy has been finalized and outsiders, including the media, find out about its deficiencies 翻譯公司 the group is forced to push through an alternative that is still unconvincing. The short clip ends by asking: "Everybody sees the problem with this: what can be done to save the government?"
"Traditionally 翻譯公司 the only thing demanded of civil servants was that they follow orders. But we think that new modes of politics should be more bottom up in order to benefit the system as a whole. The TCSIC provides civil servants the space for policy discussions, skills training and a channel for voicing their opinions," Lin told The China Post.
One such group has been the Taiwan Civil Service Innovation Coalition (TCSIC, 公務革新力
The challenge for those advocating reform has been building a consensus among civil servants
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