Not long ago, a Sri Lankan university student named Roshen seemingly had a bright future ahead of him in his home country. He never could have imagined then that he would soon be the center of attention of Taiwanese media.

In the days before his story was trumpeted all over the news, Roshen and some 40 other Sri Lankan classmates in Taiwan on a supposed work/study program discussed their grim prospects in a dormitory lobby on the Tainan campus of the University of Kang Ning. Some complained of being unable to pay tuition they owed, some said they could not cope with hard factory work, and others worried that their school was about to collapse. 

As a student leader, Roshen was constantly being asked by classmates whether they should simply give up on the school year and the money they had spent and return to Sri Lanka.

Once the news media reported their ordeal, Ministry of Education officials visited the school and the media flocked in, bringing some buzz to a campus that had been largely ignored.

What the students had trouble understanding, however, was being almost universally branded by media headlines as “Fake Students, Real Workers” or derided as being “In Taiwan to Happily Make Money.” As the person other students looked up to, Roshen had no idea how to ease their feelings of having been wronged and unfairly characterized.

A month later, with the encouragement of teachers’ union officials, the Sri Lankan students and University of Kang Ning teachers and students took a bus to the Ministry of Education to hold a protest. It was the first time they were taking to the streets to fight for their rights and express their grievances, and they felt considerable anxiety because demonstrating in Sri Lanka carried major risks for the average citizen.

Roshen noticed his roommate Raashid had a serious look on his face, largely because his father had written him a note, telling him not to participate in a protest against the government and that staying safe was more important.

He gave Raashid a pat on the shoulders, signaling him to get ready to hold the banner they prepared, reading: “HELP US to STAY, DON’T LIE to US.” Roshen said they had no choice, because if they were not willing to defend themselves and stand up for their rights, then “who can help us in this distant country?”

Source: Union of Private School Educators, Taiwan

A Problem Caused by an Ad on Facebook

After the controversy emerged, Roshen could not help but look back and wonder how it all got started.

One night in April 2017, in an old town in Sri Lanka’s North Western Province called Kurunegala where Roshen was attending college, he scrolled through his Facebook status as he normally did before going to bed. Suddenly, up popped a poster on his mobile phone screen that appeared especially bright, much like the glowing opportunity the poster described, against the room’s darkness.               

The poster advertised “Higher Studies in Taiwan” and “Free course – 100% free” and featured a smiling Asian women wearing a graduation robe and cap and holding a diploma. It also touted the collaboration between Taiwan and Sri Lanka to recruit students for the first time and promised that not only would students receive a full scholarship but would also have access to a job related to their field of study. The overriding message was the slogan: “Build Up Your True Dream.”

Roshen, who was studying information engineering, and five of his friends had set up a company in Sri Lanka specializing in building websites for clients, where they could earn 150,000 Sri Lankan rupee (about NT$30,000) per website. But the business-minded Roshen was not satisfied and wanted to improve his programming and web-building skills.

The announcement in the poster for openings in the “Department for Information Technology” caught his eye.

“Taiwan is the birthplace of HTC, the best mobile phone maker in the world. I want to learn IT, so I need to win this opportunity,” he thought to himself.

Knowing that wage levels in Taiwan are several times higher than in Sri Lanka, he figured he could get a degree and save money at the same time, and went to sleep that night with the highest expectations.

The Pre-trip Meeting

A few weeks after he saw the enticing advertisement, Roshen and his family took a bus from Kurunegala to the city of Kegalle, known for rubber production and gems, to attend a seminar on the program. Hundreds of students and their parents, many of them from Kegalle, were crammed into the venue, most of them drawn there by the advertisement they saw on Facebook.     

It was at that gathering that Roshen first met the stylish-looking Raashid, who said that he wanted to go to Taiwan to study IT and return to Sri Lanka to make a lot of money. Roshen figured at the time that his future friend was probably one of the most popular people at his school, a suspicion confirmed to be true after they exchanged social media sites. Raashid had more than 1,000 followers on Instagram, and he was involved in a campus radio station and photography studio part-time.  

Another young man with long hair and an artistic bent, a second-year college student named Thilinda joined their conversation and said he wanted to be an audio engineer. He was also interested in the opportunity.

“If I went to Taiwan, I would have to quit my job and drop out of school. But it's worth it, because the degrees in Taiwan are worth a lot. My family were just worried about the reputation of the agency,” Thilinda recalls. 

Initially, everyone had a wait and see attitude when they attended the seminar, but whatever concerns they had quickly dissipated.

A man claiming to be the president of Kainan University named Paul, who arrived at the gathering in a Bentley, told his audience, “Come to Taiwan to study at Kainan University. It’s a great opportunity.”

In fact, he was an employee of an education development association run by a Mr. Chu that coordinated the program.

Aside from a Taiwanese face attending the meeting to vouch for the opportunity, well-known Sri Lankan parliamentarian Kanaka Herath joined “Paul” in touting the program, saying that the students could study and work at the same time and that Taiwanese schools were very good.

Seminars held to recruit students to study in Taiwan drew big crowds, because a Taiwanese diploma would mean a bright future. Little did the students know that they were being recruited to work illegally. (Source: A Sri Lankan student)

Kanaka’s presence provided the reassurance that the skeptical parents needed. Roshen’s parents, who were Kanaka supporters, ended up encouraging their son to seize the opportunity despite their initial reservations.

Students went online in search of reviews for Kainan University, and while it was not rated as an elite school, just having the chance to study in Taiwan was enough to get them rushing to sign up.

Following each of the three seminars held, the majority of students and their parents signed an English-language contract and a few documents in Chinese, and paid US$1,000 for a plane ticket and visa to Taiwan. Because of the sheer number of documents, nobody had the time to explain to them what each document said, and copies of the paperwork were not provided.

Looking back, Raashid believes that the process starting going off the rails when the contract was signed, but he was so drunken with excitement that he was less alert to the possibility of a scam than he might have been. To the parents, including Thilinda’s, Kanaka’s appearance made everything right.

“After they [his parents] saw Mr. Kanaka, they thought it [the program] was good,” Thilinda recalls.

So how influential was this parliamentarian? In September 2017, one week before the students were set to leave for Taiwan, they were informed by the organizers that they would be studying at the University of Kang Ning rather than Kainan University. Online checks revealed that Kang Ning was not rated as highly as Kainan, yet of the nearly 100 students signed up for the program, 69 decided to stick with it.

They were persuaded by Kanaka’s guarantee that Taiwanese schools are all good and that there was no need to worry.

The 69 students was the number Taiwanese media would later often cite when exposing the story of Sri Lankan students being used as illegal workers. But just prior to when Taiwanese media broke the story, there were only 42 of the students left, and that number had dwindled to 29 by April 2019.

Factory Workers, Not Students

Once they started their journey, the students quickly realized that the change in schools was just a prelude to the absurd farce that their time in Taiwan would quickly become.

In September 2017, wearing their best shirts, they set off from Sri Lanka, ready to embrace their new lives in Taiwan on a work-study program.

Long after, Raashid looked at a picture of his group (which was the second group to leave) prior to its departure with a bittersweet smile and remembered what went through his mind at the time.

“I thought I would get a part-time job related to my major, such as working for an IT company in an office building. That's the reason we brought our best shirts to Taiwan!” he recalls.

The first group of students headed to Taiwan, including Roshen and Thilinda, flew to Singapore to transit to Taiwan, but were stuck there for 10 days and had to pay an additional US$500 because of that. They were told that because they did not have financial statements, they would not be able to get visas to enter Taiwan.  

After the long delay, they were able to secure visitor visas to finally enter a land they had looked forward to visiting for a long time, but awaiting them was not the campus of the University of Kang Ning as they expected but a factory dormitory belonging to Lian Hwa Foods Corp., a publicly listed company.

Thilinda’s first thought when arriving at the dormitory was “what are we doing here?” They knew before leaving Sri Lanka that they would be working as well as going to class, but working at this plant would have nothing to do with his major, Thilinda thought, and he protested to “Paul.”

Excited to have to chance to study in Taiwan, a group of Sri Lankan students were turned into illegal workers. They now wonder if they should say goodbye to the time and money they have expended and return home. (Photo by Justin Wu)

Paul, the self-proclaimed president of Kainan University, explained that there was not enough room in the University of Kang Ning dorms and that the students would first work at the Lian Hwa Foods factory before attending class at Kang Ning’s northern Taiwan campus over the weekend.

His tone, which had been good-natured previously suddenly turned ominous, as he told the students that if they did not cooperate they would be sent back to Sri Lanka but would also have to pay US$1,000 for violating the contract.

From that point on, things changed for the worse, the students say. They worked full-time without a break in Taoyuan from Monday to Friday and then took a bus to Kang Ning’s northern Taiwan campus on the weekend to learn Chinese. Neither the jobs nor instruction provided were in any way related to what had been originally promised.

One of the students who came from a relatively well-off family realized something was wrong and decided to return to Sri Lanka, but other students could only bet that the situation would turn around.

One day, Roshen got a call from his father telling him to come home and not to worry about it. But Roshen knew that the US$1,000 penalty would be a stiff blow to his civil servant father, representing three months’ salary. After agonizing over the issue, he decided to stay.

Less than four weeks into their journey, the remaining students were found to be working illegally by Taoyuan’s Department of Labor and ordered to stop working at and leave Lian Hwa Foods.

Having received complaints from students who returned home, the Ministry of Education also looked into the matter and found that the students were not attending class at the school’s campus in Tainan, that they were being completely controlled by the so-called “education development association,” and that they did not have work permits.

When the second group of 20 Muslim students, including Raashid, arrived in Taiwan shortly after the first group, they were not sent to pork processor Lian Hwa Foods. Instead, they went directly to the University of Kang Ning’s Tainan campus.

Four weeks later, Raashid and Roshen were reconnected, and Mr. Chu and Paul were no longer in the picture. At that moment, the students thought their bad luck might finally have come to an end.

Roshen, Thilinda and Raashid were not only assigned to the same dormitory on the Tainan campus, they were also put in the Department of Digital Applications and the Department of Information Communication and saw “Multimedia Applications” and “Program Design” listed among their courses. Excited about their classes and situated on a spacious campus with good friends, they felt their dream of studying in Taiwan was once again full of hope.

But that hope would not last long.

(This is the first of the two-part series. The second part: Foreign Student Recruitment Scandal)

Translated by Luke Sabatier
Edited by Sharon Tseng