Award-winning Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong (黃秋生), one of the few Hong Kong celebrities to have openly supported Hong Kong’s democracy movement, has received an employment gold card.
Wong’s receipt of the card, which is a combined work and residence permit given to highly skilled foreign professionals, was on Sunday confirmed by the National Development Council and Wong’s manager.
The actor is in quarantine in Taiwan and plans to stay until June. He has received many offers of work here, although nothing is yet set in stone, his manager said.
Photo courtesy of LiTV via CNA
Wong first hinted that he was considering moving to Taiwan in May last year, when a person commented on Facebook that he should become a naturalized Taiwanese citizen.
At the time, Wong responded that he was “making preparations,” without elaborating.
The 59-year-old actor has won numerous awards in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China throughout his decades-long career. He is best known in the West for his roles in the 1992 action film Hard Boiled, the 2002 crime thriller Infernal Affairs and as General Yang in the 2008 film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
However, after voicing his support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong in 2014, he faced a shortage of roles.
Recently, he has been taking on roles in independent films and his performance in Still Human won him Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2019.
The gold card is a combination of a work permit, residence visa, alien resident permit and re-entry permit. Card holders are covered under the National Health Insurance program, receive tax benefits and can freely change jobs in Taiwan.
Since the gold card initiative’s inception in February 2018, 2,147 cards had been issued as of the end of last month.
They include 1,673 for foreign professionals who work in the economic sector, 269 in technology, 182 in culture and the arts, 165 in finance, 149 in education, eight in architecture and one in sports, council data showed.
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