For a Taiwan Celebrity, Fake Hypertension Was Cheaper Than a Year in Uniform
Two Taiwan celebrities admitted in court that they paid an agent to fabricate hypertension diagnoses and skip military service, the latest crack in a wider draft-evasion ring that has already netted several stars. The case is a window into how conscription anxiety plays out in Taiwan's entertainment industry.
When Taiwan's conscription office is the judge of your blood pressure, a single fabricated number can be worth more than any role. In a New Taipei district court on the morning of August 21, actor Chen Bolin stood up and admitted he had paid around NT$100,000 — roughly 21,000 yuan, a little over $3,000 — to an agent who produced fake hypertension records so he could avoid military service. Chen Gang, better known on stage as Kun Da, admitted to paying NT$300,000. Both asked the court for probation.
The two men are the visible edge of a machinery the prosecutors have named the "draft-dodging group." The cases traced back to February 2025, when prosecutors began investigating the actor Dalu Wang on suspicion of paying NT$3.6 million for fake medical records. From there the investigation widened: last October it swept up the actors Xiu Jiekai, Zhang Shuwei, and Liao Yunjie, and by this June Chen Bolin and twelve others had been indicted, with prosecutors seeking two years and eight months for obstruction of military service.
Chen Bolin, known internationally for the films "Spirit" and "About Love," had already passed through the system once, obtaining an exemption in 2011 on asthma grounds, according to a widely circulated timeline posted by a Weibo user and liked more than 850 times. The alleged fix for the hypertension fiction went through an intermediary network led by a broker named Chen Zhiming.
The mechanics are almost banal, and that is the point. Taiwan has a shrinking pool of eligible men and mandatory service of about a year; for a performer in demand, a year in uniform is a year of vanishing. Enter the broker: a stack of referrals, a doctor willing to sign, a blood-pressure cuff manipulated with a pill. The court is now sorting through who knew what, and how many payments it took to keep the paperwork moving.
For mainland Chinese viewers watching the hearing play out in news summaries, the story lands less as scandal than as field report from a parallel universe: a conscription system where celebrities grift their way out, prosecuted by the same state that once drafted them. Meanwhile, Taiwan's entertainment industry is watching closely, because the list of implicated names keeps growing.