Topic: Politics
On 30 June, the Malaysian government announced that it was scrapping a rule that required young female visitors from China to be accompanied by either their husbands or fathers when visiting the country.
Earlier last month, the Immigration Department had issued a circular imposing these conditions on women aged between 18 and 25 wanting to visit Malaysia. It also required them to produce documents to prove that they were tourists.
The rule had been implemented to address rising concerns about young women from China entering Malaysia as tourists and staying to work as prostitutes instead. Statistics compiled by the Malaysian police show that last year, 1,971 women from China had been detained for overstaying. In the first four months of this year, 654 women from China were arrested.
It is a problem that is not unique to Malaysia. Hong Kong and Singapore have also reported similar problems with Chinese women working as prostitutes.
The reason for the rescission of the rule is not clear at the moment. However, the Chinese Foreign Ministry had recently issued a travel advisory warning its citizens about snatch thefts in Malaysia.
Coincidence? Hard to say. It would not have surprised me, though, if it had been a calculated tit-for-tat measure by Beijing against Malaysia.
Malaysia's rule on Chinese women visitors seems to me to be so obviously politically insensitive that I wonder why the Malaysian authorities even passed it in the first place if it were at all interested in keeping good relations with Beijing.