Jakarta, IO – “Hundreds of Southeast Asian Students recruited to Taiwanese universities under the government’s New Southbound Policy have allegedly been tricked into doing illegal work in factories”, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ko Chih-en said on September 27th, 2023.
According to Taipei Times on September 28th, 2023, at least six schools have allegedly collaborated with employment agencies and companies to make their students provide cheap labor. The names of the schools have not yet been made public, but this includes Hsing Wu University in Linkou.
Lisa, a Southeast Asian student at Hsing Wu University, revealed that the universities arranged for its students to work 10 hours per day, four days per week in factories on August 19th, 2023.
Students were under 20 years old, and they were told by factory overseers that they were no different than regular migrant workers from Southeast Asia, including Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia. It is unknown how many students at these universities were illegallymade to work in factories, but the number is at least in the hundreds, it being known that at least 300 Indonesian students were made to work in this manner.
The scandal follows on the heels of reports that 60 Sri Lanka students at the University of Kang Ning were made to work in slaughterhouses and illegal factories. These students were, again, recruited through a broker, but they were never given student visas, and instead came to Taiwan on visitor visas.
“There were around 6,000 Indonesian university students in Taiwan, around 1,000 of whom were sent under the work-study scheme”, Indonesian then Foreign Ministry Spokesman Armanatha Nasir expressed on a statement on December 3rd, 2023.
Students were originally told that studying in Taiwan was free and that they would have the opportunity to work part-time. Nevertheless, the end result was that some students never went to class at all, but were sent directly to work instead. As the work they were doing was illegal, this meant that sometimes students were working late at night.
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It is clear that many of the efforts of the Taiwan administration to build stronger ties with Southeast Asian country through its New Southbound Policy have become used as a means to recruit cheap labor for Taiwan. This was always a possibility of the New Southbound Policy to begin with, by which Taiwan simply tries to insert itself into Southeast Asia as a capitalist exploiter while touting the claim that these are people-to-people relations.
In addition to promoting educational opportunities in Taiwan for Southeast Asian students, the Taiwan administration has also been promoting tourism from Southeast Asia to Taiwan. Yet an incident involving that the disappearance of 150 Vietnamese tourists after they entered Taiwan shows that efforts to promote tourism from Southeast Asia to Taiwan may have also been used as a means to bring workers to Taiwan illegally.