Young Taiwanese men are obliged to serve 16 months in the armed services, but over the past five years a range of alternatives has become available. Dubbed 'substitute service', the option includes work in weather stations, protecting reservoirs, assisting ambassadors, fighting fires, promoting tourism, training athletes, and teaching or working as a medical assistant in remote mountain areas.
Men opting for these forms of service must serve two months longer than their soldiering counterparts. Even so, some 7 per cent of conscripts are now serving in these alternative roles. Before the Democratic Progressive Party came to power in 2000, the only objections to conscription that would be considered were religious, or unusually demanding family obligations.
Apparently, officials finally realised that to condemn highly qualified young men to 18 months of marching was counterproductive. How much better to benefit from their training, especially at the same rate of pay given to all conscripts. Now the government sets a quota for substitute service (4,100 places last year), and applications are invited in person or online. The young men go to assist the police (the largest sector), firefighters, or man out-of-the-way weather observatories on mountain peaks, where they see few others from one week to the next.
Johnson Yeh, a substitute serviceman raised in Canada, teaches English and assists with the administration of the substitute system itself, working in mountainous Nantou province.
The service received an unwanted public airing not long ago, centring on draftee John Lee. He was doing his substitute service in Taipei's municipal Department of Information, where he helped run its English-language website. But when he penned an article, entitled Macking in Taipei - telling foreigners how to attract Taiwanese women - all hell broke loose.
'I'm the new military attache to the Department of Information,' he wrote. 'Follow my directions and you will be a chiselled and polished love god ... For 13 years, I've been holding my dream girl - or dream girls? - in my arms. Failures: none', and more to the same effect. Taiwan's Apple Daily newspaper grabbed the story, and the offending webpage was pulled off the internet before lunchtime that day. 'Macking' means sexual adventuring, in rap music slang.