The recent discovery of several prostitution cases in luxury hotels and apartments has brought to light the large number of Chinese residing and working illegally in the country after having entered the country legally, as most of the prostitutes are of Chinese nationality.
As more Chinese nationals are found to be working illegally as prostitutes — among other jobs — a National Immigration Agency (NIA) official revealed that since 1988, when Chinese nationals were first allowed into the country, 9,330 illegal residents from China have been found to be working as prostitutes, while 17,276 worked illegally in other occupations.
However, the official said that the real number of illegal residents and workers from China is certainly higher than the recorded number.
The NIA official said that initially illegal immigrants from China were smuggled into the country, then, they began to come into the country through “fake marriages,” as the number of cross-strait marriages increased.
As of last month, as many as 150 Chinese women who were born after 1970 have come to Taiwan after getting married to Taiwanese men and disappeared, the NIA said.
Recently, in accordance with government policy to allow Chinese to visit Taiwan for leisure and business, more people are arriving as tourists or businesspeople, but just staying and working illegally, the official said.
In March, more than 100 Chinese nationals were caught working as prostitutes in the landmark Tower 85 in Kaohsiung.
Further investigation found that all of the women came into the country as businesspeople.
“It costs only about 30,000 Chinese yuan [US$4,500] to get forged job certificates and forged invitations,” a Kaohsiung police officer said. “So a lot of [Chinese] who don’t even know how to read and write could become chief executives of some department store or real estate groups in China and come to Taiwan for ‘business.’”
The officer added that many of those who return to China after getting caught would come back again using different names or identities.
NIA officials said that more Chinese choose to come into Taiwan as businesspeople or tourists because it’s much harder to check their identity than through a fake marriage.
Police officers said that, although the government has relaxed entry regulations for Chinese nationals, “they don’t care if there is sufficient manpower to deal with the change.”
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
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:
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
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