Taiwan Today

Like any school administrator, Allan Weston, chief executive officer of the Taipei European School (TES), can easily expound on pedagogic philosophies and test results or classroom methodologies and the psychology of learning. But when asked about the role that TES and other international schools in Taiwan—the Taipei American School (TAS) and Taipei Japanese School (TJS) among them—have played in developing the island’s economy, his ears perk up.

“No one ever asks about that, and I’ve been in this business for 31 years,” Weston says. “But I can tell you that if you attend a meeting of the ECCT [European Chamber of Commerce Taipei] you’ll see the same faces you see here on parents’ night.”

Freddie Hoeglund, chief executive officer of the ECCT, concurs that having a top-notch school that allows the children of European expatriate families to be educated in their home-country’s language is key to recruiting foreign talent for European companies with Taiwan branch offices. “ECCT has a lot of members with children at the European school, and it plays a significant role in the decision as to whether or not to relocate to Taiwan,” Hoeglund says. “Few senior executives would come if there wasn’t an appropriate school here for their children.”

Today the ECCT counts around 400 companies on its roster, while its membership consists of some 700 individuals, most of whom work for the 400 companies and belong to expatriate family households. There are equally close links between TJS and TAS with Taipei’s other powerful chambers—the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI) and the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (AmCham). Each business group has slightly more than 400 corporate members. Such support for the schools is vitally important as TES, TJS and TAS are all operated as non-profit organizations and rely partly on corporate sponsorship.

Sharon Hennessy, superintendent of TAS, says “It’s not unusual for a foreign company that’s already here in Taiwan to call and say, ‘I’m trying to get this scientist from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Do you have room for an eighth grader, a fifth grader and a third grader?’ They call us to see what the wait lists are, and whether they can go ahead and tell this person, ‘Oh, no problem. TAS has room.’”

Preparation, Aspiration

Ultimately what the supporters of TAS, TJS and TES hope is that children will be prepared for higher education back home. “Children who want to go to college in the United States cannot do better than to come to TAS,” Hennessy says. “Ninety percent of our students aspire to college in the United States.”

Taiwan’s three biggest international schools lie within a modest radius of the Taipei suburb of Tianmu. Wedged against the abrupt foothills of Yangmingshan National Park, Tianmu was a Japanese resort noted for hot springs and horses prior to World War II and afterwards by Westerners for the rustic charm of its small farms. Then the Korean War erupted in 1950, precipitating an expanded United States armed forces presence on Taiwan. Large tracts of Tianmu owned by the Bank of Taiwan were quickly leased to the US military, and a small American-style town of nearly identical, single-dwelling houses for officers’ families rose from the rice paddies. Embassies relocated to the area, and Western restaurants, grocery stores, realtors and curio shops popped up along Zhongshan North Road, Tianmu’s main connection to Taipei, some 6 kilometers to the south.

Today TAS and TJS face each other across that road, occupying land once used for military housing but abandoned after the United States recognized mainland China in 1979 and withdrew its diplomats and armed forces from Taiwan. Few traces of Tianmu’s military era remain. Instead of khaki-clad soldiers, a few thousand gaily garbed foreign children, ranging from kindergartners to high school seniors, descend on this spot every school day.

Buses offload the offspring of foreign service staffers, CEOs of multinational corporations and financial managers, as well as technologists and entrepreneurs behind local startups. On the west side of Zhongshan North Road, children file past the rising sun of the Japanese flag and enter the current TJS compound, where classes have been held since autumn 1983. On the east side of the street is the current TAS campus, which opened in 1989 and sees kids walking beneath the stars and stripes before finding their way to their homerooms. Meanwhile, a kilometer to the south, TES hosts a similar scene as youngsters arrive at its riverside campus in Taipei’s Shilin District. TES opened its doors at that location in 1992, while classes began in 2002 at a TES high school perched halfway up on the flanks of Yangmingshan.

Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the vast majority of foreigners living in Taiwan had some link with their respective governments. The earliest of the foreign schools was TJS, which was founded in 1947 on the former campus of Taihoku Imperial University, since renamed National Taiwan University. “There was a curriculum for elementary through junior high, and graduates would return to Japan for higher education,” says Akira Suzuki, TJS principal. Many of the students were the children of Japanese technicians who stayed in Taiwan after World War II to oversee the transfer of industrial facilities.

TAS came next in 1949, just months after the arrival of former President Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang government. TAS started with eight students in September that year in the basement of a seminary on Zhongshan North Road in Taipei. Most of the original students were children of dislocated Western missionaries and China hands, who for the most part expected their stay in Taiwan to be short-lived. As the expatriate community grew in the 1950s, the school moved several times. In 1960, TAS’ elementary school settled at a location on Wenlin Road in the Tianmu neighborhood of Taipei’s Shilin District, followed by the upper school in 1969.

Those expectations of short-term stays were dashed, however, as the Cold War swept over Asia and the bamboo curtain divided the Taiwan Strait. The US and Republic of China governments signed a mutual defense treaty and by the mid-1950s, the TAS student body consisted predominantly of military offspring. Enrollment would climb as high as 3,000 in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War, and TAS remained predominantly a school for children of military personnel until derecognition.

“De-recognition ... it was quite traumatic,” says Ira Weislow, who served as assistant superintendent at TAS for 38 years before retiring to Hawaii in 2009. “TAS’ student body dropped from 2,200 to 700 in just one year, plus the school lost all of its operating privileges, such as tax-exempt status, that had been in effect under the Status of Forces Agreement,” Weislow says, referring to TAS’ origins as a military contracted school serving the needs of “the official American presence” in Taiwan, particularly the US Seventh Fleet, diplomatic corps and the foreign aid community.

Yet the departure of the military left behind four pillars of the local American community—TAS, the Armed Forces Radio Network, the Taipei Youth Program Association and the American Club. “The American Chamber of Commerce took over leadership, but it took many, many years to negotiate their status,” Weislow says, referring to the legal status of US-related nonprofit organizations after derecognition. Eventually, a new set of rules governing TAS and the three other organizations would be patched together in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act, which was passed by the US Congress in 1979 to fill the void left by the severance of official diplomatic ties. To Weislow, that marked the first of two major shifts in student population at TAS and other international schools in Taiwan.

Up until the late 1970s, Taiwan’s claim to international fame was mostly as a geopolitical hot spot. But behind the scenes a revolution was underway as the economy had shifted from agriculture and net imports to light manufacturing and net exports. In the 1980s, Taiwan would redefine itself in the world’s eyes as a rapidly industrializing economy. “There was already a small expat business community on Taiwan when US troops left in 1979,” Weislow says, “and after it was clear that Taiwan would not collapse militarily without US assistance, foreign investment poured in.”

Taiwan became known as the world’s factory in the 1980s as US retail chains like Kmart Corp. and Sears, Roebuck and Co. set up sourcing operations here, as did the Japanese consumer electronics giants NEC Corp., Panasonic Corp. and Toshiba Corp., among others. The classrooms of TAS and TJS again filled up, this time with the children of executives who oversaw original equipment manufacturing.

Enrollment swelled and by 1990, TJS had 2,000 students, its all-time peak, while crowding forced TAS to tighten its admission priorities. In the summer of that year, TAS notified the parents of 350 European students that it might lack space for their children after the summer break. Alarmed, Taipei’s European expatriate community formed three new schools—Ecole Francaise de Taipei (EFT), Deutsche Schule Taipei (DST) and Taipei British School (TBS), each in separate locations. In 1992, EFT, DST and TBS joined at the former TAS campus on Wenlin Road under the Taipei European Schools Foundation, collectively calling themselves TES. TES would expand with the Yangmingshan high school 10 years later, and in 2009 it opened elementary and middle school classes in entirely new facilities at the Wenlin Road campus.

The 1990s, however, brought yet another change to Taiwan’s economy. Rising income levels spawned a middle class, but that prosperity forced companies that relied on labor-intensive original equipment manufacturing to seek cheaper bases in Southeast Asia. Perhaps anticipating that day, K.T. Li (1910−2001), widely known as the father of Taiwan’s high tech industry, had advocated for the creation of a science-based industrial park in Hsinchu, northern Taiwan, that would bring mostly US-educated Taiwanese engineers back to the island.

The opening of the Hsinchu Science Park in 1980 precipitated the second big change in student demographics at Taiwan’s international schools, Ira Weislow says. To woo married returnees with children, the park allocated space for an international school, with classes beginning in 1983. Slowly the trickle of homeward-bound Taiwanese engineers and scientists, dubbed by some the reverse brain drain, turned into a flood, enabling the local information technology (IT) industry to transition from original equipment manufacturing to original design manufacturing. Soon Taiwan had chipmakers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., computer makers like Acer Inc. and IT peripheral makers like Microtek International, Inc. and Logitech Inc. Returnees were also recruited to take the reins of multinational banks, finance houses, consumer goods makers, advertising agencies and public relations companies.

Many of Taiwan’s large companies have headquarters units and offices in Taipei, and at TAS, the student body changed as the reverse brain drain continued. The Smiths and Jones were disappearing from class attendance lists and were being replaced by Chens and Changs, the sons and daughters of returning Taiwanese citizens. TAS had entered the era of the “dual-national.” “This put the government in an interesting position because now it had to support the school, but for its own purposes,” Weislow says, suggesting that the government began looking at TAS as a means of enticing overseas Taiwanese talent to return to the island and thus help to develop the economy.

An interesting side effect of the increasing number of dual-nationals was to make TAS—and its Tianmu home—more like a school in a small town in the United States, where parents send their children to the same schools they had attended in their youth. “We just got our first ‘grandchild’ here at TAS,” the school’s Sharon Hennessy says. “She is our first ‘third-generation’ student and is currently in the kindergarten. Her grandmother graduated from TAS, as did her mom and dad.”

Worldwide Localization

The localization of the student population at TAS is part of a worldwide trend, according to ISC Research Ltd., a private company based in London that monitors international schools using English as the language of instruction. ISC currently monitors 5,631 such schools educating a total of 2,590,022 students. Today nearly 80 percent of the students at English-medium international schools come from the host country, with expatriates making up the remaining 20 percent, while 30 years earlier this ratio was reversed.

“Our data shows that today worldwide, 70 to 80 percent of international school students are from local, middle-class families,” says Nicholas Brummitt, ISC managing director. “The reality is that expat children are now a small sector of the overall intake of children entering English-medium international schools.” Except for its classes that teach Mandarin, instruction at TAS is English-only, while French fills that role at EFT, German at DST and Japanese at TJS.

Taiwan’s international schools have experienced the demographic shift toward a localized student body even though only foreign passport holders can attend them. Taiwan and mainland China are the only two countries that still maintain that restriction, according to ISC. For now, this has prevented for-profit international schools, many of them global franchises, from establishing a base in Taiwan and drawing students away from local public schools, as they have done in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and South Korea during the past decade.

Instead, the roster of international schools in Taiwan—18 in total, according to the Ministry of Education—includes only old and familiar names. In Taipei, TAS, TES and TJS are joined by a tiny secular cousin, the Taipei Korean School (a mere 20 students, kindergarten through sixth grade), as well as parochial rivals the Dominican International School, Yang Ming Shan Christian School and Grace Christian Academy. The Morrison Christian Academy has a campus in Taipei—the Taipei Bethany School—as well as in Taichung, central Taiwan and Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan. Hsinchu offers two—the Hsinchu International School and the International Bilingual School at the Hsinchu Science Park—for its technocratic expatriate population. Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second-largest city, also has small American, Japanese and Korean schools.

Attending the foreign schools is not cheap. At TJS, which is among the least expensive, tuition for the junior high section runs NT$7,600 (US$245) per month, but parents must also budget for a NT$23,000 (US$742) enrollment fee and NT$16,000 (US$516) facility fees, as well as NT$1,800 (US$58) Japanese Association fees, among other expenses. Despite their high cost, however, total enrollment in Taiwan’s foreign schools now stands in the high thousands. “Traditionally, there have been waiting lists,” says Hsiao-lan Sharon Chen, director of the Center for Educational Research and Evaluation at National Taiwan Normal University, even though local families with dual citizenship are a minority in Taiwan, which reduces the recruiting pool for the international schools.

International schools in Taiwan today present an interesting and sometimes seemingly contradictory mix. Students at those schools must have foreign passports, but most of them have local surnames and close family ties to the island. And while many of those students have parents who were born in Taiwan, their primary language is not Mandarin, and as a result many of them must learn it as a second or foreign language. Taiwan has long been known as being more open to outside influences than many countries in Asia, as well as for its inclusive society, and the local parents who have ventured overseas and later returned with their internationalized children constitute a strong indicator that those trends remain as strong as ever. Globalization, it seems, has come full circle in Taiwan.
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Glenn Smith is a freelance writer based in Taipei.

Copyright © 2011 by Glenn Smith