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.
Taiwan is to receive the first batch of Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 70 jets from the US late this month, a defense official said yesterday, after a year-long delay due to a logjam in US arms deliveries. Completing the NT$247.2 billion (US$7.69 billion) arms deal for 66 jets would make Taiwan the third nation in the world to receive factory-fresh advanced fighter jets of the same make and model, following Bahrain and Slovakia, the official said on condition of anonymity. F-16 Block 70/72 are newly manufactured F-16 jets built by Lockheed Martin to the standards of the F-16V upgrade package. Republic of China
Taiwan-Japan Travel Passes are available for use on public transit networks in the two countries, Taoyuan Metro Corp said yesterday, adding that discounts of up to 7 percent are available. Taoyuan Metro, the Taipei MRT and Japan’s Keisei Electric Railway teamed up to develop the pass. Taoyuan Metro operates the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT Line, while Keisei Electric Railway offers express services between Tokyo’s Narita Airport, and the Keisei Ueno and Nippori stations in the Japanese capital, as well as between Narita and Haneda airports. The basic package comprises one one-way ticket on the Taoyuan MRT Line and one Skyliner ticket on
A pro-Russia hacker group has launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Taiwanese government in retaliation for President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments suggesting that China should have a territorial dispute with Russia, an information security company said today. The hacker group, NoName057, recently launched an HTTPs flood attack called “DDoSia” targeting Taiwanese government and financial units, Radware told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). Local tax bureaus in New Taipei City, Keelung, Hsinchu and Taoyuan were mentioned by the hackers. Only the Hsinchu Local Tax Bureau site appeared to be down earlier in the day, but was back
PROXIMITY: Prague is closer to Dresden than Berlin is, so Taiwanese firms are expected to take advantage of the Czech capital’s location, the Executive Yuan official said Taiwan plans to boost cooperation with the Czech Republic in semiconductor development due to Prague’s pivotal role in the European IC industry, Executive Yuan Secretary-General Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said. With Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) building a wafer fab in the German city of Dresden, a Germany-Czech Republic-Poland “silicon triangle” is forming, Kung said in a media interview on the weekend after returning from a visit to Prague. “Prague is closer to Dresden than Berlin is, so Taiwanese firms are expected to take advantage of the Czech capital’s location,” he said. “Taiwan and Prague have already launched direct flights and it is