I am highly honored to have been named the recipient of the 1969 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service.

I try to follow the teaching of Lao Tze, an ancient Chinese philosopher, to achieve without claiming credit for oneself. Now the Ramon Magsaysay Award is giving me credit that I can accept only as a representative of my medical profession, my organization, and my colleagues. The Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, of which I have been a member for 21 years, is a unique organization. It functions to improve the living condition of the people and to assist other government organizations without claiming any share of the credit. Because of these qualities, it is trusted and welcomed both by the people and government organizations at all levels in the Republic of China.

The scope of medicine and health is expanding from the curative, preventive, and promotional phases to include village health improvement and community development, family planning and food processing. Through the application of modern medical methods, the annual crude death rate in Taiwan, China, has been brought down to 6.5 per 1,000 and the expectation of life at birth in 1967 reached 64.1 years for males and 68.4 for females. Now our effort is to bring down the high birth rate; we aim to change the population pattern from that of developing countries with high birth rates and low death rates to that of advanced countries with low birth rates and low death rates. Both the public and the government in the Republic of China now believe that family planning is a measure important for socioeconomic development and for a happy family life.

Taiwan has also entered a new stage of initiating a planned change in its rural areas on a village basis, making the villages improve progressively. To achieve the objective requires both teamwork in health and other fields, and teamwork between government agencies and the people.