[Fasces]

NEWS THAT UGANDAN students were forced to work in factories at the Chung Chou University of Science and Technology is the latest incident of international students being coerced into forced labor in the Republic of China. Chung Chou University is located in Yuanlin in Changhua.

The Ugandan students in question originally were told that they had received scholarships as well as paid internships opportunities and that courses would be taught in English. Nevertheless, as it turned out, these paid internships were in fact factory work, and there was little instruction in English. In spite of promises of scholarships, students owed the university money.

That Ugandan students were forced to work in factories at Chung Chou University was first reported on by The Reporter, one of the Republic of China's best-known investigative reporting outlets. [...]

The report was based on interviews with a 21-year-old student, Collines, who had been working under such conditions for two years. The conditions that students were working under only became known after the university tried to deport Collines and to bill him 100,000 NT in tuition, leading him to write a letter to the Ministry of Education about the conditions faced by him and other Ugandan students.

[...]

In 2018, a similar incident involved students at the University of Kang Ning sent to work in a slaughterhouse. This was followed in 2019 by reports of Indonesian students at the Hsing Wu University being forced to make contact lenses in a factory, as well as at five other universities, and students at the Yu Da University of Science and Technology in Miaoli from the Philippines being forced to work in a tile manufacturing factory. Likewise, in June 2020, it was reported that 40 students from Eswatini at Mingdao University were forced to work in a refrigerated factory skinning chickens.

Some of the involved universities reportedly used funding from the Ministry of Education to pay broker fees, to bring students over. In some cases, students did not receive wages for their labor. Instead, factories made “donations” to universities. After their conditions were reported on, some of the students received funds for tuition, but still could not pay for their full education, and faced the difficult choice of whether to stay or return to their home countries.

https://newbloommag.net/2022/01/13/ugan ... ced-labor/

Sad to abuse trust this way. It will be hard to attract students from the developing world in the future, which is a vital way of building social and diplomatic connections internationally.