A Taiwanese man whose Chinese wife is not able to join him in Taiwan because of her background as a prostitute asked President Chen Shui-bian (
"Immigration authorities have barred her from coming to Taiwan because she was a prostitute. They told me to marry a decent woman. Who is decent? Should I marry President Chen?" Chou Hsien-chieh (
"I am pleading with authorities to allow my wife to join me, otherwise President Chen must find me a wife," he said.
Chou, 53, a grocery-store owner from Kaohsiung, met Lan Lianhua (藍連花), 23, when he visited a brothel in April last year.
Lan had entered the country to join her then husband, but ended up separating from him and working as a prostitute. When Chou said he wanted to marry her, Lan turned herself in to police -- only to be deported to China.
The couple married at Lan's home in Guangdong Province last October.
Since then, Chou has tried unsuccessfully to have Lan join him in Taiwan. Police and immigration authorities suspect that Lan is "after his money," or that Lan will want to work as a prostitute once again.
"This is discrimination against mainland brides," Chou said.
Since the 1980s, around 154,000 Taiwanese men have married women of Chinese nationality.
To prevent immigrants from exploiting phony marriages, the Bureau of Entry and Exit screens potential brides on arrival.
Human-rights groups have condemned the screening as a violation of human rights.
But the government insists it is necessary on national-security grounds.
Steven Wu (吳學雁), the deputy commissioner of the National Police Agency's Immigration Office, yesterday said that Lan's application was rejected because the activities in which she engaged did not comply with the purpose stated on her visa application.
"The purpose of her visa application was to reunite with her husband. In accordance with the regulations, mainland spouses are not allowed to work in Taiwan at this stage as they are yet to obtain their identity cards," Wu said.
"Not only did [Lan] violate the regulations, the work she was engaged in while in Taiwan -- prostitution -- is illegal," Wu said. Additional reporting by Shih Hsiu-chuan
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: