The government's recent move to tighten screening on visa applications from citizens of Nepal has revealed a dearth of problematic applications by Chinese Tibetan lamas holding fake Nepalese IDs seeking entry into the country.
Statistics showed that 10 percent of all entry visa applications by Tibetan monks holding Nepalese passports applications were fraudulent, the Bureau of Consular Affairs under the foreign ministry said.
There are about 1,500 such applications each year, the bureau said.
The bureau last year started to notice a surge of entry applications from Chinese lamas with Nepalese passports.
Chinese citizens who wish to travel to Taiwan are supposed to apply for entry permits from the National Police Agency's Immigration Office, which can take up to three months to be approved.
Sources from the consular authorities said one of the reasons for such rampant counterfeiting of Nepalese IDs was because it was relatively cheap to buy a fake Nepalese passport, which cost less than NT$100,000 (US$3,030).
The authorities even suspect that organized counterfeiting of Nepalese passports was being conducted from Nepal's consular office in Beijing.
"We discovered that a number of these fake Nepalese passports were issued in Beijing but while we couldn't find any record of these people ever going to Nepal, Nepal's consular office in Beijing was able to provide such travel records for these individuals," a consular official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Taipei Times.
Another method frequently used by Chinese Tibetan monks to obtain Nepalese IDs was by using the foster relationship between Nepalese parents that are adopted by the Chinese lamas, the official said.
According to Nepalese government requirements, any individual intending to apply for a Nepalese passport must be able to speak Nepalese. Furthermore, it normally takes 10 years for an adopted child of foreign origin to obtain a Nepalese ID.
"In many cases, we found applications by Chinese monks were fraudulent because these people couldn't speak Nepalese at all when they were quizzed by our consular staff," the official said.
In other cases, the official found a single Nepalese passport was being used by up to three Chinese monks, with each of them changing the name on the passport when applying for the visa.
The official noted that the regular entry visas issued to Tibetan lamas allows for a maximum stay of two months.
However, authorities also discovered an increasing number of monks were overstaying their visas, with some even staying for up to three years before requesting permanent residence.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesman Michel Lu (呂慶龍) urged Chinese monks to apply for entry through the proper channels (the Immigration Office), which last year alone issued 100 or so such visas to Chinese Tibetans.
Other countries experiencing similar problems have also adopted a tougher stance when reviewing visa applications from Nepalese. Hong Kong decided to stop issuing visas to Nepalese altogether.
Foreign ministry officials said since the authorities tightened the screening for Nepalese visa applications last year, there had been a gradual reduction in fraudulent applications.
"We still welcome Tibetan lamas who come to Taiwan, as most of them enter the country legally and offer spiritual services needed by people here," the consular official said.
"There are about 500,000 Tai-wanese followers of Tibetan Buddhism. There is quite a demand for Tibetan monks to come to Taiwan. I don't think we'll take such drastic measures like Hong Kong and shut the door on these lamas," the official said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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