Taiwan Today

Open migration policies have increasingly become a hallmark of liberal democracies. If goods move freely in internationalist trading regimes, the logic goes, why should workers not also be able to move toward markets in need of their skills? In a grand experiment, the European Union (EU) began creating a collective labor market in 1999 when the Treaty of Amsterdam entered into force. The treaty calls for EU member states to allow workers from any other member to seek employment regardless of national boundaries. Meanwhile, a halt in the steady flow of immigration would likely cripple growth in the United States, the world’s largest economy.

Yet in Taiwan, the coming and going of people has always been a particularly anxious affair. The economic benefits of migration have traditionally played second fiddle to the national security concerns of a country determined to protect its government and society from the covetous grasp of mainland China. In Migration to and from Taiwan, a group of scholars explore how the particular patterns of Taiwan’s migration history have resulted in a rather surprising strengthening of local identity, even as citizens moved abroad and new immigrants adopted Taiwan as their home.

The most surprising findings of this excellent volume arrive in four chapters on Taiwanese entrepreneurs, or Taishang, and their families who have moved across the Taiwan Strait. Estimated at between 1.5 and 2 million people, this group, the volume’s editors point out, represents at least 10 percent of the ROC’s adult population. The prominence given to this group by various scholars reflects the unique nature of migration across the strait.

The Taishang were subject to the push/pull factors that typically spur migration. The relaxation of cross-strait policy under Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), who served as president of the Republic of China (ROC) from 2000 to 2008, provided an opportunity for manufacturers and other business sectors to capitalize on mainland China’s low-wage labor pool at a time when Taiwan’s considerably better educated workforce had become more expensive. The economic opportunities of the vast mainland China market and its huge labor force represented a pull factor, a positive inducement to set up shop across the Taiwan Strait.

The Chen years also sparked a polarization in Taiwanese society that negatively impacted certain segments of the population. Chen’s election to the presidency marked the first transfer of power between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). While many rejoiced at this important step in Taiwan’s democratic history, the 2000 presidential election proved to be emotional and divisive for two groups of ROC citizens. Those who arrived in Taiwan after 1945, called the waisheng ren, or “people of the outer provinces,” were the subject of unflattering campaign rhetoric. They were contrasted with the bensheng ren, the “people of this province,” who had arrived from mainland China in the generations before 1945. The conflict between waisheng ren and bensheng ren is sometimes described in English as “ethnic” in nature although both groups are from the same Han ethnic group, and both hail from mainland China.

Nonetheless, competing historical narratives sparked old insecurities. During Chen’s presidency, Taiwanese of waisheng ren descent moved to mainland China in search of a more welcome environment. Since the previous migration from mainland China to Taiwan had occurred within living memory, this group retained fond impressions of another life in a different Chinese society. What they discovered in their most recent move, however, was a mainland China radically altered by more than a half-century of communist rule. In the chapter “Taiwan and Globalization,” authors Keng Shu (耿曙), Gunter Schubert and Emmy Rui-hua Lin (林瑞華) note that “when Taiwanese meet Chinese, they feel different from them.” The divergent cultural upbringings created a gulf stronger than an imagined shared community that rested on nostalgia and longing. “This held true even for the Taiwanese mainlanders (waisheng ren),” the authors note.

Indeed, the essays on the Taishang reveal that the experiences of the Taiwanese business community in mainland China have tended to strengthen a sense of Taiwanese identity among the cross-strait migrants. The Taishang, whether bensheng ren or waisheng ren, have so studiously kept apart from mainland Chinese citizens as to create Taiwanese-only communities near their businesses in mainland China. With the acquiescence of mainland Chinese officials, they have founded schools teaching Taiwanese curricula, read Taiwanese newspapers and socialize almost exclusively with other Taiwanese. In the chapter “Bordering Careers on China,” Tseng Yen-fen (曾嬿芬) notes that the differences between bensheng ren and waisheng ren begin to vanish among those working in mainland China. “When it comes to questions regarding whether they make friends with local Chinese, both groups share similar answers,” Tseng writes. “Neither group forms friendships with Chinese and, outside their workplaces, they hardly ever interact with locals.”

This begs the question of whether or not the Taishang can even be considered immigrants. Are they permanent residents, making a new life in a foreign land, or are they more akin to the Western expatriates living in mainland China? Will they remain permanently or stay only so long as business opportunities make for a beneficial environment?

Tseng helps uncover the answer by noting that the majority of Taiwanese residents living in mainland China opt only for one-year resident permits, which can be easily renewed annually. Fewer apply for a five-year permit, and permanent citizenship is not a pressing concern. Tseng finds a common pattern among the interviewees he meets in mainland China: Taiwan remains home, while mainland China is an outpost for business. “The most ideal situation,” explains one interviewee, “would be settling back in Taiwan but maintaining my client base in China.”

Indeed, Tseng found considerable resistance to the term migrant from his interview subjects. Taiwan’s deep integration into global production networks makes mainland China a natural place for some production, but the interviewees seemed to think of it as no more of a home than other places in which they did business. “Working or living in China or other cities around the world is just an adventure away from home,” explains one Taiwanese entrepreneur in mainland China. “I would not consider myself a migrant (yimin, 移民), for I am not settling down. What I am doing is keeping ‘on the move’ (yidong, 移動).”

These important findings should go some way toward putting to rest concerns over the political implications of having so many ROC citizens living in mainland China. Would mainland China, which still represents the chief national security threat to Taiwan, attempt to use this population as a psychological Trojan horse, carrying back pro-mainland China sentiment and undermining Taiwan’s democratic society?

Political Lever

In “Happy Reunion or Brothers in Name Only?” Lin Ping (林平) notes that one of the goals of mainland Chinese policymakers was to use the Taishang as a lever to facilitate a change in political attitudes. Mainland Chinese officials, Lin notes, “regard the feature of Taiwanese people in China as a sign of a ‘happy family reunion’ and a stepping stone to political integration across the Strait.”

Fortunately, achieving this troubling goal has not panned out, as the waisheng ren and the bensheng ren in mainland China have instead discovered that they have much more in common with each other than with local mainland Chinese citizens, thus enhancing their sense of Taiwanese identity. But another factor comes into play as well: For the Taishang to have political significance, they need to be drivers of cross-strait discourse. Before cross-strait relations were formally opened in 2008, the Taishang indeed played an outsized role in cross-strait dialogue, often acting as intermediaries between the governments in Taipei and Beijing. Mainland Chinese policymakers thus courted them with business incentives and special privileges in order to sway negotiations.

In “From Being Privileged to Being Localized? Taiwanese Businessmen in China,” Lee Chun-yi (李駿怡) notes that this courtship ceased after the election of ROC President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in 2008. He quotes one interviewee describing the downgrading of his Taiwanese business association (TBA): “In the past, the function of the TBA was similar to a local Taiwanese consulate because there were no governmental representatives in China. However, after the SEF [Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation] and ARATS [mainland China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits] started to interact again, the TBA became more like a normal association.”

This depoliticizing of the business community after Ma was elected and the KMT returned to power helped relieve the suspicion that the Taishang would undermine Taiwan’s sovereignty. The group’s return to its business roots also occurred at a time of changing incentives in the mainland China market. While mainland China had wooed the Taishang with tax breaks and other incentives for years, these enticements tended to have an expiration date. As they expired, the Taishang found themselves competing alongside other foreign investors and encountering a new source of competition—local entrepreneurs who had capitalized on Taiwanese experience. “We actually helped domestic enterprises emerge,” one interviewee notes. “Many excellent local cadres in my company, after acquiring knowledge and skills, left us and started their own businesses.”

The Taishang experience has thus entered a new phase, one in which it is squeezed by both foreign competition and local entrepreneurs. Opportunity may still exist, but the group’s political influence has waned. In other words, while trade with mainland China continues to engender considerable passion in Taiwan, the Taishang are no longer at the center of the debate. In “Taiwan and Globalization,” Keng, Schubert and Emmy Rui-hua Lin point out that the very grounds of the debate have shifted in recent years. “Those who used to worry about the political dangers of the ‘Taishang factor’ now admit the Taishang’s positive contributions to the stable and peaceful development of cross-Strait relations,” they write. “And those who used to suspect that the Taishang would change their identity to become ‘Chinese’ have relativized their predictions.”

While the Taishang presented a particular set of security and identity challenges for Taiwan, immigration of a more typical nature has also challenged local notions of identity. Some of the most creative scholarship in Migration to and from Taiwan can be found in studies on the changing role of foreign brides in Taiwan. In a country that was unaccustomed to the arrival of permanent immigrants, foreign brides and the children resulting from their marriages have sparked a rethinking of what it means to be Taiwanese. Previously, foreign residents in Taiwan were more generally guest workers at the lower end of the economic ladder or expat workers in high tech industries. Members of these groups were temporary residents, and in the long term altered the population not at all.

Foreign brides, however, introduced the greatest shift in Taiwan’s population since the last great wave of immigration from mainland China in 1949. Such brides, moreover, were genuinely foreign, for although some came from mainland China, many arrived from Southeast Asia. The authors note that by 2011 about 400,000 foreign brides had settled in Taiwan, and that they and their children now outnumber Taiwan’s aboriginal population (which is just more than 2 percent of the total population of Taiwan) as well as that of mainlanders who arrived in 1949. At the crest of the phenomenon in 2003, foreign spouses were involved in more than 31 percent of all marriages in Taiwan.

Tremendous Strides

The demand for foreign brides is the obverse side of the tremendous strides women have made in Taiwanese society, both in education and in the workforce. As local women became more independent, some men longed for spouses more accustomed to traditional roles in the home. “Less privileged Taiwanese men,” write Tseng and Lin Ping, “look to marry women from less developed countries, who are expected to be obedient and traditional wives.”

Because the practice happened among lower-income and frequently less-educated segments of society, it acquired something of the air of a taboo and was often frowned upon by wealthier Taiwanese. By looking closely at two documentaries, My Imported Wife (2009) and Libangbang (2000), Chiu Kuei-fen (邱貴芬) and Tsai Yu-yueh (蔡友月) weaken such prevailing perceptions of intermarriage by revealing a more nuanced power-sharing relationship between husband and wife. In My Imported Wife, Huang, a Taiwanese man with cerebral palsy, discovers that his marriage to a Cambodian bride, Navy, is no less fraught with give and take than any other marriage. The authors note that Navy “appears very articulate and tough rather than a voiceless, helpless victim of transnational marriage.”

Interestingly, the authors note that both subjects of the documentary took great pride in its production, as if the camera itself was a liberating vehicle. “We see both Huang and Navy vigorously voice their opinions in defense of themselves,” Chiu and Tsai write. And it is through their competing voices that each comes to a better understanding of the self. “Both the husband and wife are compelled to see their own culture from another perspective and subject many of their assumptions to critical scrutiny,” they note.

This acts as something of a metaphor for Taiwanese society, where the presence of new citizens hailing from foreign lands has forced a better understanding of local perspectives and a rethinking of what it means to be Taiwanese. That re-examination of local identity and immigration has brought the question out into the open. In the fascinating essay “Migration through the Lens of Political Advertising,” for example, Dafydd Fell explores the emergence of the once very private world of immigrant households into the public sphere.

Into the Open

There is perhaps no better indicator that a group has attained social relevance than when it is targeted in elections. Politicians simply do not overlook voting blocs that could give them a chance of furthering their own ambitions, even if communicating with such blocs means reaching out to different communities. Fell notes that foreign spouses and their households were largely invisible in election advertising until very recently. The KMT was the first to court these new voters. After mainland Chinese were characterized as outsiders by the opposition DPP, the KMT began to take a more inclusive approach to drumming up electoral support. In 2012, for instance, the KMT launched an online campaign advertisement titled “Diverse and Tolerant Taiwan,” which featured a “half-French, half-Dominican lady called Arelis Yoh Gabot, who has adopted Taiwan as her home and immersed herself in Hakka culture,” Fell writes.

The DPP, which had historically sought to create a national identity based largely on the shared historical experiences of the pre-1945 population, followed in the KMT’s footsteps. Fell notes that in 2012, the DPP created ads that targeted the votes of new immigrants. One DPP ad, for example, was broadcast in Vietnamese and portrayed Southeast Asian immigrants in a positive light.

For Taiwan, a nation that historically had very sound reasons to maintain tight control over emigration and immigration, the 2012 political campaign ads revealed that local attitudes were changing. Of course, a degree of anxiety over migration to and from Taiwan still exists today. Policymakers continue to look for ways to discourage highly educated workers from leaving Taiwan, for example, and there is still tremendous opposition to opening the floodgates to immigrants from mainland China.

At the same time, immigration has also developed a positive narrative that celebrates such new arrivals as a source of strength. Eric Chu (朱立倫), mayor of New Taipei City—home to the greatest number of immigrants in Taiwan—recently summed up this sentiment when he noted that foreign brides provide a natural bridge for investment into Southeast Asia, just as older cultural links have made mainland China a natural focus of trade and investment for the Taishang. It is a positive development that these new citizens are now not only openly acknowledged, but also seen as a potential source for greater prosperity in a changing nation.

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Robert Green is a regular contributor to Economist Intelligence Unit publications on Taiwan.

Copyright © 2014 by Robert Green