The number of students from Southeast Asia studying in Taiwan last year surpassed that of Chinese students for the first time, Ministry of Education statistics showed.
There were a total of 117,970 overseas students studying in Taiwan last year, of whom 37,999 were from nations that are the focus of the government’s New Southbound Policy, the data showed.
The statistics demonstrate that the policy has been effective in decreasing the nation’s reliance on students from China for short-term study programs and is effectively globalizing post-secondary recruitment, an unnamed ministry official said.
However, while the number of Chinese arriving for short-term study and research programs has decreased — last year totaling 25,842, a decrease of about 6,800 from 2016 — China still accounts for the greatest number of students from a single country, the data showed.
Last year there were 35,304 students from China in Taiwan, of whom 9,462 were in full-term degree programs, an increase of 125 students from 2016 and up 1,649 from 2015, the statistics showed.
Of the students from countries that are the focus of the New Southbound Policy, Malaysia last year accounted for the most, with 17,079 students, an increase of about 1,000 from 2016, or about 6.4 percent.
There were 7,339 Vietnamese students last year, a 54 percent annual increase, while there were 6,453 Indonesian students, an increase of about 1,000 from 2016.
Despite an increase in the number of Chinese students in degree programs in Taiwan, Beijing last year denied exit permits to about 1,000 students who had been admitted into such programs and were prepared to travel to Taiwan, the official said, adding that cross-strait political instability has resulted in politics being unavoidable in the recruitment of Chinese students.
Overall, the number of overseas students in Taiwan last year rose 0.9 percent from 2016, with the increase consisting of students from Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia and the US, the official said.
The majority of those students were admitted to degree programs, making them a more stable recruitment source.
While the government has not changed its position on welcoming students from China, it has sought to diversify its recruitment of international students, 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:
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