ABSTRACT
Title of Document: RE-MEDIATING IDENTITIES IN THE
IMAGINED HOMELAND:
TAIWANESE MIGRANTS IN CHINA
Shu-Ling Huang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010
Directed By: Professor Linda Steiner
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
This dissertation analyzes the identity formation and transformation of Taiwanese
migrants to China in light of globalization. Combining migrant studies and media studies,
it explores how the identities of Taiwanese migrants are shaped and reshaped through the
ongoing interactions of mediated communication and lived experience in the place of
adoption. Against the linear model of assimilation, three discourses on transnationalism
argue for the pluralization and deterritorialization of identities among contemporary
migrants, including continuous home-country loyalty, diasporic hybrid identities, and
cosmopolitan consciousness. However, this case study also encounters historical
particularities, such as the opposition of Taiwanese and Chinese identities in Taiwan,
Taiwanese migration to their imagined homeland, and China’authoritarian media system.
While attending to these issues, I analyze the migration patterns of Taiwanese migrants,
their use of the media in China, and the relations between mediation and identity.
Primarily based on in-depth interviews with 68 Taiwanese migrants conducted in
2008, I found that Taiwanese migrants’spatial and upward mobility upon migration
contributes to their class distinction and outsider mentality in China. Moreover, despite
different settlement plans, migrants tend to see their migration as sojourning. Mental
isolation from Chinese society, along with distrust of the Chinese news media, makes
migrants heavily dependent on Taiwanese news media for information. They also utilize
such communication tools as SMS and the Internet to forge and maintain Taiwanese-only
social networks and interpersonal communications. As for entertainment media, migrants
prefer foreign and Taiwanese media products to Chinese ones. Much of their
transnational communication is sustained through the use of illegal means, such as
satellite TV and pirated videos. Everyday experiences—lived or mediated, local or
transnational—enable migrants to renegotiate their own similarities with and differences
from the Chinese. A kind of Taiwanese consciousness based on pride develops among
migrants. Nevertheless, as far as national identity is concerned, Taiwanese migrants
remain divided, although they have also become less nationalistic and more realistic.
RE-MEDIATING IDENTITIES IN THE IMAGINED HOMELAND:
TAIWANESE MIGRANTS IN CHINA
By
Shu-Ling Huang
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2010
Advisory Committee:
Professor Linda Steiner, Chair
Distinguished University Professor George Ritzer
Professor Emeritus Ray E. Hiebert
Associate Professor Scott L. Kastner
Dr. Kalyani Chadha
© Copyright by
Shu-Ling Huang
2010
ii
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the contributions of the many people who made this
dissertation possible. I deeply am indebted to my advisor, Dr. Linda Steiner, whose
mentoring has been invaluable, both academically and personally, to my doctoral study.
Since we met in 2006, Linda has been a loyal reader, a rigorous reviewer, and a
supportive counselor to me. I thank her for investing so much time and faith in me, for
guiding me toward becoming a thoughtful researcher, and for enthusiastically helping me
during the job-search process. I hope to become as good an advisor to my students as
Linda has been to me.
I also wish to thank my dissertation committee members: Dr. George Ritzer, Dr.
Ray E. Hiebert, Dr. Scott L. Kastner, and Dr. Kalyani Chadha. Dr. Ritzer’s seminars in
sociology led me to the fields of globalization and cultural theories. My dissertation and
other work have benefited greatly from conversations with him. Dr. Hiebert’s and Dr.
Chadha’s expertise in international communication and Dr. Kastner’s knowledge of
cross-Taiwan Strait relations have also improved this dissertation.
My thanks also go to the late Dr. Michael Gurevitch, who served on my C&E
committee. His brilliant comments during my defense remain vivid in my mind. Dr.
iii
Maurine H. Beasley and Dr. Carol L. Rogers are wonderful teachers. My cohort, Ray
Gamache, Wenjing Xie, Eric Easton, Rafael Lorente, and A.R. Hogan have been good
companions.
I would also like to express my gratitude to those people who generously helped
me during my field research in China. Most of my informants and interviewees did not
know me, but they were willing to share their thoughts and resources with a stranger.
Without their kind assistance, I would not have been able to finish this dissertation.
This dissertation was supported by the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and
the Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowship, both administrated by the Graduate
School at the University of Maryland; the Study Abroad Fellowship, awarded by the
Ministry of Education of Taiwan; and the Hiebert Journalism International Travel Award,
provided by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at Maryland.
Finally, I want to thank my family for their support. My father has always given me
the greatest freedom to do whatever I want to do. My husband, Ming-sho, is the best
partner I could have in my life. I cannot remember how many times he flew from Taiwan
to Maryland to keep me company over the past five years; his sacrifices allowed me to
concentrate on and complete my doctoral study.
This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, who passed away in 1998.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................ii
Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iv
Chapter 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………1
Fractured Identities and Double Consciousness in Taiwan……………………….14
Going Westward to the “Big Land”……………………………………………….22
Chinese Media System: Reforms within the Party Line…………………………..28
Organization of the Dissertation…………………………………………………..38
Chapter 2: Mediated Communication and Migrant Identities………………………....43
Communication, Identity, and Globalization……………………………………...43
Mediation and Migrant Identities………………………………………………….51
Chinese Transnationalism and its Divergence…………………………………….69
Contextualizing Reception Research……………………………………………...77
Research Subjects and Methods…………………………………………………...82
Chapter 3: Forming a Cosmopolitan Class? Career, Life, and lifestyle………….…....96
v
Who Are Taiwanese Migrants in China?.................................................................97
Spatial Mobility and Upward Mobility…………………………………………..108
Being Global Nomads and Adventurers………………………………………….112
Distinction and Virtual Segregation…………………………………………...…118
Work-life Disjuncture and Home Connections…………………………………..133
Chapter 4: Media Reception—Local Communications, Transnational Contents…….145
Media Overload or Media Scarcity?....…………………………………………..146
News Media: Transnational Connections with Home……………………...……154
Negotiating Between Two (Undesired) Media Systems………………………....168
Entertainment Media: Multiple Sources…………………………………………174
Chapter 5: Re-negotiating Taiwanese Identity through Chinese News………………184
Reading News: Information, Meaning, and Identity…………………………….185
The Sichuan Earthquake: Undesired Media Effects..............................................189
The Beijing Olympics: Belonging, Exclusion, and Outsiders…………………...196
Tainted-milk Incident: Class and Identity………………………………………..208
Chapter 6: Trust—Social Networking and Information Exchange…………………...218
Information Ambiguity, Social Alienation, and Interpersonal Communication…222
Community Websites: Online Sharing and Offline Networks…………………...226
vi
Authentication, Distinction, and Solidarity……………………………………...231
Social Grouping and Networking………………………………………………..241
Watching Out for Each Other and Mutual Help…………………………………248
Chapter 7: Growing Taiwanese Consciousness, Fractured Identities………………...259
Identity of Difference…………………………………………………………….259
Encountering Cultural Similarities and Differences……………………………..263
Continuous Fractured Identities………………………………………………….272
Chapter 8: Conclusion………………………………………………………………...288
Dual Mobility, Transient Mentality, and No Sense of Place……………………..289
Media Use: the Taiwanese Media Sphere………………………………………..294
Growing Taiwanese Consciousness, Conflicting Identities……………………...297
Re-examining Migrant Transnationalism………………………………………..301
Conclusion and suggestions…………………………………………………...…308
Appendices……………………………………………………………………………...312
References………………………………………………………………………………324
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
On May 12, 2008, a devastating earthquake struck Southern China so violently that
people in Bangkok about 2,000 miles away could feel the tremors. One Taiwanese
businessman close to the epicenter told a Taipei newspaper in a telephone interview that
the disaster put local television out of service; but he kept updated about the news via
Taiwanese satellite channels. This man was quoted as saying, “it’s strange that I have to
watch Taiwan’s TV for information about the earthquake on the mainland” (Hu et al,
2008). He might not be alone. Months later, I happened to be seated next to a Taiwanese
expatriate family in a Shenzhen restaurant when conducting field research. Noticing the
little boy’s Taiwanese accent of Mandarin Chinese, I asked whether they came from
Taiwan. The mother confirmed and added that her son learned the accent from Taiwanese
TV programs. These two episodes reveal the great presence of Taiwanese in China, their
transnational connections with the home country, and the intertwined relations between
mediated communication and lived experiences.
The affinity between mediation and cultural identity has been well articulated in
media studies. Mediated communications serve as an important avenue through which the
shared meaning of culture is produced, apprehended, and utilized (Carey, 1989), the sense
2
of belonging to a community is represented and imagined (Anderson, 1983/2006; Hall,
1992), and collective memory is constructed (Morley & Robin, 1995; Zelizer, 1995).
However, globalization brings about what Appadurai (1996) calls irregularities in the
work of the imagination, as neither images nor viewers are confined to local or national
spaces as a result of mass migration and electronic mediation.
Since the late 1980s, a great number of Taiwanese people have followed the
relocation of Taiwanese businesses to China, a magnet of global and regional capital.
Migration across national borders has profound cultural meanings for displaced groups as
well as for their countries of entry and exit, particularly with regard to the issue of
identity. The case of Taiwanese in China is further complicated by historical relevance
and political rivalry across the Taiwan Strait. In this globalized world, how do the
mobility of human beings and the flow of symbolic forms through the media reconfigure
people’s imagery and identity? How much does such identity formation remain
contingent on national boundaries and historical specificity?
Theoretical Background
This dissertation is about migration, communication, and identity in the wake of
globalization. More specifically, it is about how mediated communication interacts with
3
lived experience of contemporary migrants and shapes their identities in the host country,
at a time when national borders seem more porous than before. Social theorists have
characterized social transformation at the turn of the 21st century as late capitalism, late
modernity, postmodernity, globalization, and so forth. Globalization stands as a
multidimensional, all-inclusive, yet contested concept that draws a variety of definitions.
The term, as Ritzer synthesizes the literature on it, refers to “an accelerating set of
processes involving flows that encompass ever-greater numbers of the world’s space and
that lead to increasing integration and interconnectivity among those spaces” (2007, p. 1).
Therefore, mobility and connectivity mark two key concepts in the theory of
globalization. With the compression and uncoupling of space and time, social relations
increasingly become disembedded from physical settings and connected to remote parts
of the globe (Castells, 2000; Giddens, 1990; Harvey, 1989; Thompson, 1995; Tomlinson,
1999). Many modern subjects are constantly on the move, either by travel or through
mediated communication (Bauman, 1998; Clifford, 1992). The process has altered the
context of our meaning construction and loosened the associations of state, nation, culture,
citizenry, people, territory, etc. Consequently, cosmopolitan consciousness and hybrid
identities are increasingly replacing fixed, place-based identity (Beck, 2003; Featherstone,
1990; Hannerz, 1996; Pieterse, 2004; Rosenau, 2004; Scholte, 2005). It is against this
4
theoretical backdrop that discourse on transnationalism emerges, challenging so-called
methodological nationalism in social science that naturalizes geographic boundaries of
the nation-state (Beck, 2007; McGrew, 2007; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003).
Two strands of transnational studies have burgeoned since the 1990s in response to
the changing reality of migration and communication. Scholarly literature documents the
emergence of transnational communities that allow people to engage simultaneously in
two or more worlds across national borders. First, migration research, particularly in
anthropology, finds that many contemporary international migrants maintain multiple
linkages with their countries of origin and form transnational social fields that connect
home and host communities (Foner et al., 2000; Gold, 1997; Levitt, 2000, 2001; Levitt &
Glick Schiller, 2007; Morawska, 2003; Portes, 2003; Rivera-Salgado, 2000; Glick
Schiller et al., 1995; Smith, 2006). The economic reconstructing of globalization
encourages a great number of people to seek investments or employments abroad. New
transportation and communication technologies enable them to sustain a dense and
dynamic cross-border exchange (Portes & DeWind, 2007). Instead of being uprooted
subjects forced to convert their allegiance to the host countries, transnational migrants
continue to hold a meaningful stake in domestic affairs at home. As a result, they live a
life of bifocality—or orientations concurrently toward both here and there (Rouse, 1995;
5
Vertovec, 2007).
The transnational perspective on migration demonstrates the blurring boundaries
between seemingly dichotomous categories, such as sending/receiving countries,
sojourners/settlers, and citizens/non-citizens (Robinson, 2007). It also challenges the
conventional linear assimilation thesis of immigration. Because of their embeddedness in
more than one society, migrants no longer assume a master identity rooted in a single
place, but manage to live with “several fluid, sometimes conflicting identities” (Levitt,
2001, p.202). However, transnational migration research is criticized for its limited
applications to some distinctive immigrant minorities in the United States, whose
long-distance attachments are particularistic rather than transnational (Waldigner &
Fitzgerald, 2004; Waldigner, 2008).
Second, scholars of cultural studies find transnational communities in old diaspora
fostered by the new conjuncture of physical mobility and symbolic communication
(Appadurai, 1996; Athique, 2006; Georgiou, 2006; Hall, 1990, 1992; Morley, 2000; Ong,
1999, 2003; Ong & Nonini, 1997). While migration studies focus on new patterns of
migration and migrant networks across space, recent diasporic studies place the emphasis
on the role of mediated communications in forging deterritorialized identities. As
Tololyan argues, diasporas have become “the exemplary communities of the transnational
6
moment” (2008, p.232). Since the 1990s, Anderson’s (1983/2006) concept of imagined
community has inspired the analysis of the media and diasporic identities in a
transnational context. The application of new communication technologies, such as
DVDs, global ethnic narrow broadcasting, and the Internet, facilitates a transnational
imagination for diasporic subjects. Appadurai (1996) argues that nowadays ethnicity is no
longer contained in locality but can evoke translocal loyalties because of the global flows
of images, news, and opinions. Given the global spread of overseas Chinese, narratives of
transnational Chinese communities also prevail. A wealth of literature explores the
emergent global Chinese media sphere shaped by the cross-border circulation of popular
culture or news (Harding, 1993; Huat, 2006; Ip, 2006; Sinclair et al., 2000; Sun, 2006;
Yang, 1997).
However, migrant transnationalism is criticized for promoting deterritorialized
nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003) and giving the impression of an ethnic,
national, or religious unity (Dufoix, 2008). Diaspora studies, despite its appeal to subvert
national cultural homogeneity, may instead contribute to cultural reification (Dirlik,
2004). The transnational paradigm of migration studies focuses on a particular kind of
state affiliation rather than universal transnationalism (Amit-Talai, 1998; Waldinger &
Fitzgerald, 2004). A true transnational, or post-national, perspective is discourse on
7
cosmopolitanism, which argues for the formation of identity that transcends national
boundaries.
Cosmopolitan discourses emphasize the willingness to engage with cultural others
and the openness to cultural distinction and diversity (Hannerze, 1996; Lash and Urry,
1994; Tomlinson, 1999). Not all migrants are cosmopolitans; likewise, not all
cosmopolitans are migrants. With their transnational mobility, nevertheless, migrants
have a great potential for developing cosmopolitan consciousness (Beck, 2006; Hannerz,
2006). Moreover, the transnational flows of communications enhance the sense of the
world as a whole (Held et al., 1999; Robertson, 1992). Beck (2003) regards
cosmopolitanization as the blurring of the foundations of nationhood through migration,
telecommunications, and transport. However, some scholars see cosmopolitanism as the
privilege of the global mobile elite, whose lack of state loyalty may reflect class interests
and consciousness (Bauman, 1998; Calhoun; 2006; Cheah, 2006; Sklair, 1991). The
flexible citizens portrayed by Ong (1999) are exemplary of capitalist transnational
migrants who seek to maximize their benefits from different state regimes. For these
global nomads, cosmopolitanism seems pitted against locals rather than entails the
appreciation of diversity (Calhoun, 2006).
8
The Case of Taiwanese Migrants in China
These transnational theories and studies envision various pictures of identity
formation and transformation among contemporary migrants, but generally they point out
a tendency toward pluralization and hybridization of identities. This dissertation uses
Taiwanese migrants in China to examine these theoretical theses. According to estimates,
one million citizens of Taiwan now live in China, a remarkable number, given Taiwan’s
population of 23 millions. This group is an intriguing case to examine transnational
theories, not only for its great scale but also for other reasons.
First, Taiwanese in China situate in the intersections between two transnational
discourses—home-host country connections and diasporic networks. China is the original
homeland of the Chinese diaspora. As a large receiver of immigrants from the Chinese
mainland over the past four centuries, Taiwan used to play a special role in this diaspora
(Williams, 2003). The migration of Chinese descendants to China is perceived by
Chinese nationals as the return to the motherland (zuguo).1
Unlike overseas Chinese
(hwaquio), Taiwanese people, along with residents of Hong Kong and Macao, are
categorized by the Chinese government as compatriots (tongbao) (Johnson, 2007). Unlike
the two special administrative regions of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC),
Taiwan has its own statehood by the name of Republic of China (hereafter ROC). China
9
claims the island as an inalienable part of its territory, while Taiwan remains inflicted by
split national identities (Chinese/Taiwanese) and has not produced a consensus about its
future.
Smith (2008) categorizes two routes to nationhood: civic-territorial and
ethnic-genealogical. For some Taiwanese, the civil nationhood (Taiwan) is in conflict
with the ethnic nationhood (Chinese nation). Moving to the mainland thus entails a
renegotiation of national identifications, diasporic identity, and home-county loyalty. That
helps explain why the transfer of Taiwanese capital and businesses to the mainland stirs
fears beyond the economic hollowing-out effect. There are also great concerns in Taiwan
that Taiwanese migrants will become the hostage or a lobby for China to strike its
political agenda (Bush, 2005; Geng & Lin, 2005).
Second, despite Taiwanese migrants’transnational practices connecting home and
host societies, their migration pattern has evolved over time and may change in
accordance with external conditions. Economic migration associated with the relocation
and expansion of Taiwanese businesses to China constitutes the main movement. In a
sense, these people are expatriates, who maintain Taiwanese citizenship for political,
economic, and social rights. However, many people are also in a situation between
immigrants and temporary migrants (Deng, 2005) or a status of permanent temporality,
10
retaining legal status as transits for a long period of time (Tseng, 2005). Besides, although
Taiwanese migrants hardly belong to the same class, they have moved from a more
developed country to a developing country and thus enjoy a higher economic status in
China. Therefore, clarifying and detailing their migration pattern and class relations in the
host society will enrich existing discussions on transnational migration.
Third, China’s political and media environments can play a tricky role in
Taiwanese migrants’ diasporic and home imaginations. Studies on the Chinese media
sphere often focus on the experiences of overseas Chinese and on the area of popular
culture. How Taiwanese use media in China, one of the key producers of
Chinese-language cultural products, serves as a litmus test for the thesis. The centripetal
forces that draw Taiwanese migrants to use Chinese media for news and entertainment
include linguistic and cultural similarities, Taiwanese influences on the Chinese media
culture (Chan, 1996; Gold, 1993), and China’s restrictions on information and cultural
inflows. However, the government control of the Chinese media may also drive them
away. Whether and how the media environments of individual countries affect migrants’
transnational communication is worth exploring.
Research Questions
11
Drawing on the theory of globalization, particularly discourse on transnationalism
about migration and communication, this dissertation seeks to understand how Taiwanese
migrants negotiate their identities through the interactions of their lived experience and
mediated communication in China. More specifically, it explores the following research
questions:
RQ1: How should the migration pattern(s) of Taiwanese to China be defined? What
kinds of relationships do Taiwanese migrants maintain with their countries of exit and
entry, respectively? How do these relationships affect their use of the media—in
particularly for news?
Most Taiwanese migrants retain citizenship of Taiwan and appear to be expatriates
“who have chosen to live abroad for some period, and who know when they are there that
they can go home when it suits them” (Hannerz, 1996, p.106). However, such a definition
neglects external constraints on migrants’ choices of stay, return, or transfer.
Transnational theories emphasize disjuncture between citizenship and economic/cultural
memberships. Does that mean that Taiwanese migrants fit into the category of
transmigrants? If so, how do they engage in political, economic, and cultural activities of
the sending and receiving countries? How do their migration pattern influence their
12
media use behaviors?
RQ2: How do Taiwanese migrants use media for information, entertainment, or
participation in China, and how do their applications of mediated communication entail
the process of identity renegotiation?
Transnational media theories focus on home-host or diasporic interconnectedness
enabled by transnational communication, ignoring place-based media consumption and
participation. This dissertation seeks to understand how Taiwanese migrants sustain
transnational media connections under China’s control over cultural and informational
inflows. In addition, it also explores how migrants use Chinese mainstream media, as
well as how they utilize mediated personal communication via such tools as mobile
phones and the Internet to share information. Furthermore, it asks whether and in what
ways these transnational and place-based mediated communications reshape migrants’
identities.
RQ3: Do Taiwanese migrants sustain, reinforce, or change their self-identifications
as they encounter Chinese culture after migration? Do they develop plural or hybrid
identities as transnational theories anticipate?
13
Transnational theories argued for the increase in plural or hybrid identities due to
human mobility and cultural connectivity. However, China is simultaneous the imagined
homeland and a political adversary in the Taiwanese imagery. Cultural identities in
Taiwan are fractured in terms of Chinese identity and Taiwanese identity. Migration to
China thus complicates the issue of identity. This dissertation will use Taiwanese
migrants’ self-narratives to illustrate the complex process of identity renegotiation.
I adopt qualitative methods to answer these questions. The main data is based on the
author’s in-depth interviewing with Taiwanese migrants in China between October and
December in 2008. The field research took place in the greater Shanghai area (including
Suzhou) and the greater Shenzhen area (including Dongguan) of China. Atotal of 68
interviewees were recruited for this research, which inquired into their backgrounds,
migration history, media use, and identity negotiation. Four administrators of Taiwanese
community websites and organizations were included. Other supplemental data cover
document research on government policy, statistics, and media reports from China and
Taiwan. The methodology and research methods will be detailed in Chapter 2.
In this introductory chapter, I will first explain the context of my dissertation. This
includes the formation of national identities in Taiwan, the background of Taiwanese
14
mass migration to the mainland, and the Chinese media environment. These bodies of
information are crucial to the understanding of Taiwanese migrants’ media use and
identity renegotiations in China.
Fractured Identities and Double Consciousness in Taiwan
The question of identity is complex, and many Taiwanese cannot easily answer it.
Taiwan’s complicated history and political relations with China further perplex this issue.
The ethnic Han Chinese currently constitute the majority of Taiwan’s population, due to
waves of emigration from China over the past four centuries. During which, however, the
island has been ruled by various regimes, including the Dutch (1624-1662), rebellious
Cheng Cheng-kung’s army (1662-1683), China’s Manchu government (Qing Dynasty,
1683-1895), the Japanese (1895-1945), and the ROC (1945-present). As Jenkins
(1996/2008) argues, identity involves the comparisons of both similarity and difference.
The meaning of Taiwanese has been constantly made sense of in relation to the
appearances of the Other, and hence subject to change over the historical trajectory.
According to Tu (1996), the term Taiwanren (Taiwanese) first appeared in Taiwan
around 1920s, after the island was colonized by Japan. During that period, the elite-led
15
Taiwanese nationalist movement also emerged (Ching, 2001). Therefore, the concept of
Taiwanese was conceived as oppositional to the colonial rulers. In the Taiwanese folk
society, however, Taiwanren was labeled in terms of ethnicity. It conventionally referred
to the majority Hoklo people, whose ancestors emigrated from southern Fujian province
(generally called Minnan) of China. The term in daily use thus excluded other minority
groups on the island—the indigenous Austronesians of various tribes and the Hakka
people from China’s Guangdong province.
After the Communists seized China in 1949, the defeated Nationalist government
(Kuomintang, hereafter KMT) took refuge in Taiwan and brought a legion of bureaucrats,
soldiers, and followers. These new settlers were called Mainlanders (weishenren, literally
people of other provinces), as opposed to native Taiwanese (benshenren), now including
Hoklo and Hakka.2
Under KMT’s internal colonialism based on hierarchical ethnic
politics, minority mainland elites dominated the center of power (Lee, 2003). The
weishenren consciousness was shaped by the over-representation of Mainlanders in civil
and military authorities, a residential separation called juncun (the villages of military
families), and the system of jiguan that categorized people by provincial origins (Corcuff,
2002).
Despite the significance of ethnic politics, the current societal contradiction in
16
Taiwan consists in an identity crisis that results from competing projects of
nation-building. Hall summarizes how national identity is constructed by the discourse of
national culture based on five elements: the narrative of the nation, the timelessness of
national character, the invention of tradition, a foundational myth, and a pure people. The
narrative of the nation is told in “a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical
events, national symbols and rituals which stand for, or represent, the shared experiences,
sorrows, and triumphs and disasters which give meaning to the nation” (1992, p.293). In
Taiwan, national identities so far have been constructed by two sets of national narratives
that respectively engineer the Chineseness and Taiwaneseness of its subjects. One is the
history of the ROC, starting from 1912 on the mainland but tracing its root back to the
five millennial civilization of the Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo, China). The other records
a Taiwan (and Han)-centered history that emphasizes diverse cultural influences on the
island for the past four hundred years. Ironically, China is the key reference in each
national narrative.
Shih (2007) sees Taiwan’s “overwhelming obsession with China” as an unnatural
consequence of the KMT’s Cold War ideology. During the last decade of the Japanese
rule, Taiwan had undergone intense Japanization (kominka), designed to erase colonial
identity and to cultivate imperial subjects through such campaigns as speaking Japanese
17
and changing to Japanese names (Ching, 2001). After taking refuge in Taiwan, the KMT
émigré regime built its political legitimacy upon the claim to sole representative of China.
Various institutions in Taiwan were mobilized to serve the purpose of building a Chinese
nation in diaspora. As Clifford argues, diaspora culture mediates the experience of “living
here and remembering/desiring another place” (1994, p. 311). The grand Chinese
narrative constructed mainland China as the eternal homeland. The concept of Huaxia
was used to create a nationalist consciousness that linked to sacred origins and the myth
of a continuous history from Xia Dynasty of China (Chun, 1994). People on the island,
including the aborigines, were honored as “Heirs of the Dragon,” or true Chinese
offspring destined to return (Jacobs, 2005). Mandarin Chinese was promoted as the
national language (guoyu), while local Taiwanese dialects, spoken by the majority of
people, were restrained from use (Chen, 1998; Rawnsley, 2003). In 1966, in reaction to
the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, the Cultural Renaissance Movements were
launched to inculcate traditional Chinese culture and Confucian teachings through myriad
sectors of the culture industry (Chun, ibid). Taiwan became tantamount to Free China
bestowed upon the mission of “restoring China.” The mass media—controlled and
disciplined by the triple alliance of party organs, state machinery, and military
apparatuses (Lee, 2003)—became a carrier of this China-centered dominant ideology.
18
The state-engineered Chinese nationalism in Taiwan peaked in the early 1970s,
when the sovereignty controversy with Japan over the Senkaku Islands took place and
Taiwan lost its seat in the United Nations to the PRC (Hsiau, 2005). However,
consecutive diplomatic setbacks thereafter had endangered the ROC legitimacy.
Meanwhile, societal discontents with the deprivation of constitutional rights accumulated
to the extent that political opposition movements began to emerge. From the late 1970s
on, people voiced their aspiration for democracy and free speech through the use of
various alternative media, such as political magazines, underground radio, and illegal
cable television (Feng, 1995; Ke, 2000; Kuan & Liu, 2000; Lee, 1993, 2003; Rawnsley,
2004). Accompanying the appeal for democracy was the discourse on Taiwanese
consciousness and the campaign for Taiwan independence.
As mentioned earlier, Taiwanese self-consciousness emerged from the Japanese
colonialism. Chinese nationalism was once the impetus for colonial emancipation, but
later became the source of resentment under the Nationalist rule (Ching, 2001). Some
scholars regard the Kaohsiung Incident (1979) as the watershed that Taiwanese
nationalism came to the fore in democratic movements (Chen, 2004; Hsu 2001; Wu,
2000). After the KMT government cracked down on this Human Rights Day rally, some
political activists turned to advocate the principle of majority (native Taiwanese) rule and
19
the idea of self-rule. Exile historian Shih Min stated in an opposition magazine that
Taiwanese nationalism would be the “motor of a democratic and social revolution” (1980,
p.6). The notion that “Taiwan’s future should be determined by all Taiwanese residents”
was formally declared by opposition leaders in 1982 and then written into the platform of
the newly-established Democratic Progressive Party (hereafter DPP) in 1986 (Liu, 2001).
Therefore, the fight for democracy in Taiwan was laced with “a defensive nativism” that
raised the consciousness of being Taiwanese (Buruma, 1996). The so-called
Taiwanization (bentuhwa) movement launched a comprehensive counter-narrative against
Chinese nationalism (Jacobs, 2005). Once-suppressed Taiwanese folklores, religions,
dialects, and traditions were rediscovered. Taiwan studies won legitimacy in academia.
The heritage of aboriginal cultures and Japanese legacy were incorporated to the
construction of an exclusive Taiwanese culture (Brown, 2004).
Since the late 1980s, democratization led to the reorganization of political power,
evidenced in the selection of Lee Teng-hui (KMT, 1996) and Chen Shui-bian (DPP,
2000/2004), both native Taiwanese, as the first democratically elected ROC Presidents.
During their presidencies, Taiwanization was institutionalized and de-Sinicization gained
momentum. One prominent example was the introduction of Understanding Taiwan
(Renshi Taiwan) textbooks to schools. The books characterized Taiwan history as
20
multiculturalism, internationalism, trade, and “a courageous and enterprising people.”
This people was defined by President Lee as New Taiwanese, composed of four ethnic
groups—Hoklo, Hakka, Mainlanders, and the aboriginal. He further called on all
Taiwanese to participate in “the destiny of their nation” (Lee, 1995).
The discourse on people’s common fate under Taiwan sovereignty was, ironically,
amplified by China’s military threats and diplomatic containment. Taiwanese people
desired international recognition at a time when globalization intensified their
interactions with the outside world (Fang & Sun, 1999; Wang, 2000). China as the PRC
hence symbolized a menacing external power and embodied the Other in the construction
of new Taiwanese subjectivity. However, the shift in political power and historical
narrative also made Mainlanders feel unwelcome, marginalized, and threatened in Taiwan.
They lost first the cause for restoring China and then the anchor of being at home. Ethnic
division, entangled with unsolved questions about national identity, concerns Taiwan’s
democracy (Lee, 2003).
National identity in Taiwan is now assessed by a multiple-choice question. Opinion
polls constantly ask people “who they are” in terms of Taiwanese, Chinese, or both.
According to a longitudinal survey (Election Study Center, NCCU, 2009), Taiwanese
identity rose from 17.3% in 1992 to 50.8% in 2008, while Chinese identity dropped from
21
26.2% to 4.7% over the same period. Meanwhile, people who identified themselves as
both Chinese and Taiwanese continued to account for 40-50% of the sample. The
ascendance of Taiwanese identity is not equal to the surge in Taiwanese nationalism
nonetheless. First, identity is a more complicated issue than the simplified question. The
same choices in the survey may mean different things to the respondents. Taiwanese can
imply ethnic, geographical, or national identity, and Chinese connotes cultural or national
meanings (Wu, 2008). Second, dual identity remains significant over the past two
decades, indicating that Taiwanese identity did not replaced Chinese identity (Chu, 2004).
Third, a hybrid Taiwanese identity may have emerged from common experience
after 1949. Lo (2002) argues that Taiwan have formed a Taiwan-centered, hybrid
nationhood while sustaining “double homeland complex.” Other studies (Rigger, 2006)
confirm that younger Taiwanese, who reached adulthood during and after Taiwan’s
democratization, are more pragmatic and more likely to discard the Taiwan/China
dualism. Furthermore, despite the fact that identity in Taiwan is associated with
ethnicity—that is, Mainlanders lean to Chinese identity and native Taiwanese tend to
have Taiwanese identity—this connection has become less salient in recent years (Dittmer,
2005).
The transformation of national narrative and national consciousness in Taiwan
22
demonstrates the fluid, relational, and constructed characteristics of identity (Kuo, 2002).
Moreover, the “China factor” persists in the Taiwanese quest for identity. As more and
more Taiwanese people seek to make fortunes on the mainland, the interactions between
China and Taiwan have intensified. For China-bound expatriates, China no longer exists
in imagination but becomes an everyday reality.
Going Westward to the “Big Land”
Due to the Cold War antagonism, the PRC and the ROC closed borders against each
other for almost four decades. Taiwanese people were only allowed to visit China after
1987. Since then, cross-Taiwan Strait relations had undergone the dual process of
economic convergence and political divergence. During the tenures of President Lee and
Chen (1988-2008), Taiwan pursued international recognition of its sovereignty via
so-called pragmatic diplomacy. The official dialogue between the two sides began in
1992 but was soon interrupted upon Lee’s visit to the United States in 1995, to which
China responded by testing missiles in the vicinity of Taiwan. Lee later defined the status
between Taiwan and China as “special state-to-state relationship” and Chen further
proposed the “one country on each side” formula. Cross-strait relations froze when China
23
adopted Anti-secession Law in 2005 that threatened with the use of military measures
against the island. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP)
started unofficial forums with the KMT, then the opposition party. Since President Ma
Ying-jeou of the KMT took office in May, 2008, both sides have signaled
rapproachement, starting direct flights across the Strait and beginning to negotiate
bilateral pacts, including a free-trade agreement.
Regardless of Taiwan’s regulations on China-bound investment, economic
integration between China and Taiwan has only intensified at a rapid pace.3
The
“westward” (xijin, denoting China-bound) investment rush is parallel to the territorial
dispersion of manufacturing (Sassen, 1991) and the growth of offshore production (Sklair,
1991) elsewhere as a result of the reorganization of global economic activities. By and
large, Taiwanese businesses relocate or expand to China in order to accommodate to new
transnational production networks, prominently in footwear and IT industries (Cheng,
1999; Hsing, 1998; Leng, 2002, 2004; Naughton, 2004). Consequently, they usually
move collectively as an industrial cluster composed of the vertical and horizontal
production chains (Wu 2001; Zhang, 2007). That greatly amplifies Taiwanese investment
to China.
Between 1991 and 2008, Taiwan approved 37,181 investment projects to China,
24
which added up to $75 billions, or 57.13% of the outward investment amount (Mainland
Affairs Council, 2009b). The share would be much higher if indirect investment via Hong
Kong and some tax havens, like the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands, were
counted. In fact, Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation, a private intermediary body in
charge of cross-Strait matters, estimated that Taiwanese businesses had invested 77,000
projects and over $150 billions in China (SEF, 2009). The gigantic gaps between official
statistics and unofficial estimates only highlight the Taiwan state’s incapability to
constrain business interests. In addition to investment, China also replaced the United
States as Taiwan’s largest trade partner, accounting for 28.94% of Taiwan’s export in
2008 (Mainland Affairs Council, 2009d). These numbers show that Taiwan has
increasingly relied on China for its economic prosperity.
Taiwan’s increasing economic dependence on China is evidenced not only by
investment amount but also by industrial change. Over the past two decades, Taiwanese
manufacturing in China has shifted from labor-intensive enterprises (1987-1992) to
capital-intensive heavy industries (1993-1997), and finally to leading high-tech
companies (1998-present) (Geng, 2006). By 2005, 79.5% of the information hardware
made by Taiwanese firms had been produced on the mainland; meanwhile, over 60% of
the companies listed in Taiwan’s stock market had a stake in China (Kao & Tsai, 2007).
25
Besides, service, retail, and agriculture sectors also have increased their presence on the
mainland. Taiwanese investment to China is concentrated in Jiangsu province (33.26%),
Guangdong province (24.01%), and Shanghai (14.86%), but has extended to Fujiang,
Zhejiang, and other parts of the mainland (Mainland Affairs Council, 2009b).
The Taiwanese mass migration to China is closely associated with those waves of
investment. Most of the early migrants (1980s-1990s) were male owners and expatriate
managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This pattern has changed since
the late 1990s, when more professionals, females, family members, and others join the
migratory crowd, particularly to the great Shanghai area. This recent China fever is
facilitated by China’s preferential terms of entering, residing, working, and studying for
Taiwanese (Tseng, 2008). It is manifested in the proliferation of publications in Taiwan
about Shanghai—jobs, investments, travel, literature, and so on (Hsu, 2002; Wang, 2009).
Among them, business magazines are big promoters of the Shanghai fever. In 2001,
Business Weekly selected “leaving for Shanghai” as product of the year, even though it
was not literally a product. Common Wealth (August, 2001) published a special issue on
“ATale of Two Cities,” comparing various index of Shanghai and Taipei. “Shanghai is
hot, and Taipei is cold,” a Newide (July, 2007) article titled. Bestsellers in Taiwan
represent the Shanghai-Taipei connection in terms of the imagination of global urban
26
networks (Huang, 2007). Going to Shanghai is thus a pursuit not only for economic
opportunities but also for a cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Under the generic term taishang (Taiwanese businessmen), the Taiwanese
population in China has grown heterogeneous. Business owners and expatriates assigned
to China remain the prime components of this population. Following these lead migrants
are their family members. Some Taiwanese are employed by foreign and, recently,
Chinese companies. Other groups such as students, teachers, entertainers, and artists are
increasingly present on the mainland. A small portion of China-born Mainlanders have
also returned to their roots. However, several factors contribute to the difficulty in
counting the Taiwanese population in China. First, no clear criteria are suitable to define
them. Aside from people residing in China on the daily basis, the term taishang actually
includes business visitors who shuttle back and forth across the Taiwan Strait. The
boundaries between migrants and non-migrants are also obscured by the phenomena of
circular migration (Tseng, 2008) and cross-border life experiences (Deng, 2005). In 2008,
about 4.3 million Taiwanese traveled to China (Mainland Affairs Council, 2009a),
revealing the busy traffic across the Strait.
Second, Taiwan allows dual citizenship, but those seeking PRC citizenship will have
their ROC citizenship revoked. Most Taiwanese migrants prefer maintaining Taiwanese
27
citizenship and hold Taiwanese Compatriot Passes (Pass for Taiwanese Residents
Traveling to the Mainland, taibaozheng), travel documents designed for Taiwanese by
China, when entering the mainland. Since the pass holders also include tourists, they do
not represent the migrant population. Third, China requires Taiwanese to register
temporary residency with Chinese authorities for their stays. Many Taiwanese fail to do
so, making it difficult to identify their number, much less demographic characteristics
(Hu, 2006).
Despite the lack of statistics, the enormous presence of Taiwanese in China is
greatly felt in Taiwan. According to the 2005 Taiwan Social Change Survey, 7.3% of the
Taiwanese had migrated at some point to the mainland for work, 9.4 % had close family
members working in China, and 61.1% knew someone of Taiwanese nationals living in
China, Hong Kong, or Macao (Chang & Fu, 2006). Consequently, economic integration
across the Taiwan Strait has altered Taiwan’s imagination of China and aroused deep
anxiety in the Taiwanese psyche. The China factor now presents in the form of the
economic reality more than the yearned homeland or a military threat.
Still, China remains a source of attraction and an object of repulsion (Bush, 2005).
The theme of China simultaneously as economic gold mine and a risky country recurred
in business magazines. On one hand, China is represented as the pivotal business
28
battleground for Taiwan to preempt its global position and avoid being marginalized.
Distancing Taiwan from China is equal to closing the gateway to the world. On the other
hand, the mainland (dalu, the big land) is described as an immense frontier full of
unknown risks. Taiwanese businesspeople and expatriates are hence portrayed as pioneers,
economic nomads, and modern representatives of the great conquer Genghis Khan, a
ruler of the Mongol Empire. Contrary to the image of brave explorers is the accusation
about self-interested merchants who fawn on China or even betray Taiwan. Scholars
(Dittmer, 2005; Kahler & Kastner, 2006) predict that Taiwan’s politics will turn to
China’s favor if this Taiwanese constituency in China continues to grow. Therefore,
Taiwanese migrants symbolize Taiwan’s love-hate affair with China and uncomfortable
intersections with globalization.
Chinese Media System: Reforms within the Party Line
To understand how Taiwanese use media in China requires knowing the media
environment in which they situated. In the past, the Chinese party-state monopolized all
media avenues, including newspapers, magazines, books, radio and television stations,
film productions, and so on. The media, as the instrument of ideological control and mass
29
mobilization, enjoyed government subsidies and other economic privileges for survival.
Since the open door policy of economic reforms after 1978, China’s media has undergone
gradual transformation. Current Chinese media system is characterized by state-market
duality, anti-foreignness, and Internet activism.
State-market Duality
Media marketization is one consequence of China’s shift to “socialist market
economy.” The Chinese government allowed media to accept advertising after 1979 and
reduced or terminated subsidies since the late 1980s. Around the turn of the century,
“bigger and stronger” conglomerates were formed to preempt foreign competition upon
China’s entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Lee, He & Huang, 2006).4
The
reliance on advertising to generate revenues has led to rapid commercialization of the
Chinese media, which now assume a dual role—being commodities in the market as well
as ideological apparatuses of the state (Ma, 2000; Zhang et al., 2006). A dual-track
system is developed to accomplish these twin goals. In the press conglomerates,
newspapers are divided into the main party organs that serve the state and mass-appeal
subsidiaries that cater to the market, such as evening tabloids, weekend editions, and
metropolitan dailies. In the broadcast groups, specialty channels focusing on business,
30
entertainment, and lifestyle thrive (Y. Zhao, 2008). All in all, these market-oriented media
outlets are driven towards tabloidization, feeding people with apolitical, sensational, and
light entertainment contents.
Parallel to the trend toward commercialization is the persistent state control of the
media via proliferating party-state agencies and multiplying laws and regulations. The
CCP’s Propaganda Department has the responsibility of setting propaganda guidelines
and a nationwide network of bureaus to monitor every media outlet. Multilayered and
diverse government agencies are established and charged with the regulations of media
contents and structures. For example, the General Administration of Press and
Publication (GAPP) and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT)
maintain annual reviews of the licenses for the press, broadcast, and film and television
program production. They have permanent staff at the local and central levels for
systematically censoring newspapers and television programming (Y. Zhao, 2008). In
2004 alone, the SARFT promulgated more than 20 regulations on the broadcasting
industry (Zhang, 2006).The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has the authority to
review, approve, and grant operation license to Internet service providers. Internet
censorship involves twelve state-party agencies (J. Zhao, 2008). Between 1994 and 2005,
twenty rules and regulations that covered Internet censorship, operations, and users took
31
effect (Zheng, 2007). Despite sporadic tolerances of media revolts, such as the aftermath
of the SARS crisis in 2003, the government has maintained a tight grip on the media of
all sorts. To what extent have market forces undermined the omnipotent power of the
Chinese regime is debatable.
According to some scholars, the Chinese state has unleashed the power of the
market to articulate with neoliberal globalization, while reinforcing coercive and
discursive disciplinary powers. This has been achieved by the use of a more sophisticated
means of censorship, propaganda, and media management (Y. Zhao, 2008). The second
view is that, to cope with commercial competition, China had lessened totalitarian control
and adopted a less repressive approach toward media. Chinese authorities use more legal
and administrative means than coercive apparatuses to entertain, educate, and inform the
audience (Ma, 2000). Official organs have been transformed from propaganda
instruments into “Party Publicity Inc.” that delivers softened publicity messages to the
public (Lee, 2001a; Lee, He & Huang, 2006). Accordingly, the Chinese media has moved
from having no freedom to having some freedom in non-political arenas (Lee, 2001b).
The third perspective holds that the change of the media has empowered other
players—local party cadres and bureaucratic officials, media entrepreneurs and managers,
as well as private and foreign investors—to negotiate with central policy makers
32
(Akhavan-Majid, 2004; Huang, 2007a). The market socialism model has been replaced
by a new “state-controlled capitalist corporation model,” under which the Chinese state
becomes the majority shareholder of the media (Huang, 2007b). Despite these different
evaluations of political control on the media, the consensus holds that the Chinese state
has transformed itself and perfected its propaganda machine in accordance with changing
media and social environments.
Anti-foreignness
The sentiment of anti-foreignness in China is rooted in the “one hundred years of
shame and humiliation” by foreign invasions (Yahuda, 2000). Political discourse on the
idea of a China constantly subjected to external threats has been central to the building of
a modern Chinese state (Renwick & Cao, 2003). The anti-foreigner and anti-Western
emotions have significant implications for the Chinese media. First, the state-controlled
media utilize such emotions to mobilize the general public. After the Tiananmen Square
Incident of 1989, the CCP’s legitimacy was jeopardized amidst international sanctions
and the collapse of communism in Russia and East Europe. Guided by a “patriotic
education campaign,” the Chinese media conformed to the party line by shaping news
frames that recalled previous imperialism and stirred nationalism against American
33
hegemony (Huang & Lee, 2003). This state-led, media-manufactured nationalism
combines critique of external threats with narratives of self-pride. Later on, the nationalist
discourse became increasingly prevalent in cyberspace, where the Internet-savvy “angry
young” devoted their passions to hate-mongering (McCurry & Watts, 2004).
Second, anti-foreignness legitimizes cultural protectionism. In Mao’s China, foreign
television programs not originating from socialist nations were prohibited. After
economic reform, imported programs are permitted to broadcast on Chinese television,
provided that they obtain political clearance from the SARFT (Chan, 1996). Commercial
distribution of foreign films is solely controlled by the Chinese Film Corporation and
subject to quota restrictions (Wang & Zhu, 2004). Foreign television channels are
basically held at bay. The government approves a handful of foreign channels to be
broadcast in China via satellite on the yearly basis, but limits access to upscale hotels and
residential compounds reserved for foreigners (see Appendix C for the list in 2008).5
All
channels must be encrypted and transmitted by China International Television
Corporation—a subsidiary of CCTV. Only residents in partial areas of Guangdong have
the privilege to enjoy foreign channels through cable services, which serves as an
experiment and a showcase of openness. Since the approved landing of the Phoenix
Chinese Channel in 2001, nine foreign channels have been available in cable in this
34
region. Besides MTV of Viacom, these foreign channels are either based in Hong Kong
or Macau and usually involve Chinese capital.6
However, this means Taiwanese migrants
in the Shenzhen-Dongguan area of Guangdong have more choices in terms of foreign
channels than their counterparts in the great Shanghai area.
In addition to the restrictions on foreign broadcasts, foreigners are prohibited from
setting up press and publication entities in China. The import of overseas audiovisual
products and the sale of foreign newspapers and magazines are monopolized by state-run
China National Publications Import & Export Corporation (CNPIEC), an affiliation of the
GAPP. Non-news foreign magazines, such as Elle and Cosmopolitan, are allowed to
partner with local companies to publish Chinese versions. The Internet regulations
require that the flow of information into China be made through state-run public
communication networks, which serves as a filter (McGreary, 2001). Foreign news
reports are forbidden from directly posting on any Chinese websites, except for those
distributed through Xinhwa, the state-owned news agency. Any Internet services with
foreign capital are prohibited from providing news on the Internet (J. Zhao, 2008).
Overseas websites deemed threatening are blocked from access by China’s cyberspace
censorship system, dubbed Great Firewall, particularly during politically sensitive
periods, such as days around the memorial of the Tiananmen Incident. A large force of
35
Internet police—alleged about 40,000—is recruited to monitor users’online activities
(Coonan, 2005).
Despite China’s promotion of cultural protectionism, this does not shield the country
from outside influences. In fact, it is the strict control over foreign media that engenders
widespread illegal media practices in China. Evidence shows that foreign media products
have made inroads to China through satellite transmission, signal spillover, piracy, and so
forth (Chan, 1996). For example, the SARFT repeatedly issues warnings on cable
providers’broadcast of foreign channels and announces crackdowns on satellite dishes.
These actions underscore the fact that foreign television programs are not as difficult to
access as imagined.
A more noticeable phenomenon is commercial piracy, which is justified by the
Chinese as an expression of anti-imperialism (Renwick and Cao, 2003) and receives
more lenient treatments by the government. The rampant networks of pirated CDs, VCDs,
and DVDs provide newly-released albums, films, TV episodes from the U.S., Japan,
Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and beyond at a cheap price. Recently, popular video-sharing
websites also supply a variety of free and up-to-date foreign media products. As of 2008,
China was estimated to have 400 video-broadcasting websites—mostly with foreign
venture capital funds—and 180 million regular viewers (China Telecommunications
36
Newswire, 2009; Ng, 2008). The two leading video-sharing websites—Youku.com and
Tudou.com—respectively attracted more than 100 million video views a day (Madden,
2008). The huge market of free on-demand entertainment has become a new haven of
media piracy.
Internet Activism
Despite continuous political control over the media in China, popular voices have
been increasingly represented in traditional media as well as the fast-growing cyberspace.
The Internet opens a new space for information circulation and collective actions. More
importantly, providing certain conduits for public opinions seems tacitly approved by the
central leadership, as Chinese society is currently torn with many discontents, such as
uneven distribution of wealth, dislocation, corruption, and crime. Over time, the Chinese
media have developed unique ways of carrying the voices of the people that have been
described as “liberalization without democratization” (Yang, 2009; Zheng, 2007). A breed
of Chinese investigative journalism has emerged to expose business wrongdoing,
government corruption, social injustice, and sensational crime stories (Lee, 2001b; Tong
& Sparks, 2009; Zeng, 2006). The trend was initiated by the CCTV’s current affairs show,
Focal Interviews (Jaodian fantan), and energized by the more liberal newspaper,
37
Southern Weekly. Investigative journalism thrived in a more tolerant political atmosphere
in the 1990s but has showed sign of decline into the new century, due to various political
and economic pressures. However, the advent of the Internet, as important sources of
news leads, offer new opportunities for this journalistic practice (Tong & Sparks, 2009).
Since the Internet opened to the public in 1995, China’s cyber population has grown
exponentially. By the end of 2008, the number of Internet users reached 298 million, the
world’s No.1 (CINIC, 2009). The thriving Bulletin Board Services (BBSs), online chat
rooms, and blogs provide platforms not only for alternative information but also for a
new form of association. Under intense censorship and regulations, the sophisticated
Chinese netizens have learned to use SMS (Short Message System), tricky passwords,
and overseas servers to engage in “guerrilla warfare” against state control (Zheng, 2007).
They also developed a creative Internet culture that is full of humor, play, and irreverence.
The various forms of online parodies manifest a cultural revolution in which “the
ordinary people assume an unprecedented role as agent of change” (Yang, 2009, p.213).
Like Chinese citizens, Taiwanese migrants’choices of media are greatly influenced
by these aforementioned transformations, including new forms of state control and
censorship, the proliferations of commercial media outlets, nationalism represented by
the news media and voiced on the Internet, restrictions on foreign news and cultural
38
inflows, prevalent piracy, illegal use of the media, Chinese investigative journalism, and
the popularity of interpersonal communication via cell phones and computers. In
particular, the absence of ethnic media and the restrictions on the inflows of news from
Taiwan, due to China’s regulations, should have some impacts on their use of the media.
Organization of the Dissertation
The movements of Taiwanese capital, businesses, people, and cultural influences to
China manifest the increase in transnational flows. Taiwanese investment to China has
multiplied under the constraints by the Taiwan state. Growths of Taiwanese businesses
and expatriates on the mainland largely result from the reorganization of global capital.
Taiwanese migrants forge cross-border life experiences through frequent travel across the
Taiwan Strait. Taiwanese popular culture is well received in China, as proof of intense
cultural linkages among Chinese-speaking communities. However, these global forces
also meet specific conditions in localities, particularly in regard to identity. In the case of
Taiwanese in China, such local contexts—fractured national identities in Taiwan,
migration to a country that is the source of divided identities, and the regimented media
environment in China—greatly condition their identity negotiations. The following
39
chapters will unfold the tensions between global and local forces, and between
transnationalism and nationalism.
Chapter 2 includes the sections of literature review and methodology. First, it
reviews the literature on globalization theory, particularly focusing on transnationalism.
This issue is researched in the areas of transnational immigrant studies, diaspora studies,
and cosmopolitan theory. Discourses on the Chinese transnational community, such as
cultural China, Greater China, and pop culture China, are surveyed. This chapter also
examines studies on identity regarding migrants of Chinese descent from various
countries to China, including Taiwan. Second, this chapter summarizes a method of
audience research that derives from Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding model” of
communication but has since evolved to emphasize the social context in which media
experiences are shaped. I will detail two qualitative methods used in this study, including
in-depth interviewing and document review, and how I apply them to examine the
relations between migration, communication, and identity.
Chapter 3 explores Taiwanese migrants’ motivations for migration. In addition, I
will provide background information about migrants’everyday life in China, including
the arrangements of residence, children’s education, patterns of consumption, and social
networks. Of interest is how migrants’dual mobility—spatial mobility and upward
40
mobility—shape their work, life, and lifestyle in China. I also stress how they develop a
sojourning mentality as a result of a disjuncture between their career and life, even
though their sojourns may seem permanent.
Chapter 4 analyzes Taiwanese migrants’ pattern of media consumption. I will
explain why Chinese mainstream media have played a relatively insignificant role in their
everyday practices. Instead, migrants generally rely on Taiwanese media for news, while
consuming cultural products from diverse sources, including the global, the regional, the
diasporic, and the local.
Chapter 5 examines Taiwanese migrants’reception of Chinese news about three
events that occurred in 2008—the Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing Olympics, and the
controversy regarding the tainted-milk products made in China. I will show how news
reception entails the receivers’ meaning construction in ways that accommodate their
cultural schemata and lived experiences. With some exceptions, migrants confirm their
Taiwanese identity through a negotiating process but they also develop a sense of
in-betweenness.
Chapter 6 explores Taiwanese migrants’ social groupings and information exchange,
particularly enhanced by mediated interpersonal communication. I will use two migrant
community websites—Taima Club and Taike Life—and three social groupings as
41
instances. Specifically, I focus on how trust relationships are realized by migrants’motto
of mutual help.
Chapter 7 analyzes Taiwanese migrants’ two-layered identity transformation in
China through the examination of their own narratives. On the one hand, the perceived
cultural differences between Taiwanese and Chinese reinforce their Taiwanese
consciousness. On the other hand, migrants’sense of identity involves their
interpretations of cross-Strait politics, and thus remains fractured. Nevertheless, there is a
trend toward convergence, as both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalisms are weakened
after migration.
Finally, in the conclusion, I will reflect on the applications and limitations of
transnational theories to this research. Transnational migration and communication allow
migrants to sustain their attachment to their country of origin and to develop
deterritorialized identities. However, identity is shaped and reshaped by an amalgam of
conditions, and such transnational practice is only one source of identity. Cultural identity
based on the boundaries of the nation state remains predominant.
1
Except for some widely accepted usages, this dissertation uses the Hanyu Pinyin
Romanization system for standard Mandarin Chinese. Additional, the pseudonyms
assigned to the interviewees are based on Wade-Giles Romanization conventionally used
in Taiwan.
2
The KMT followers arrived in Taiwan proximately between 1945 and 1955, with
estimated numbers of 908,500 to over 2 millions. As of 1989, the Hoklo people accounted
42
for 73.3% of the Taiwan population, Hakka for 12%, Mainlanders for 13%, and the
Austronesians 1.7% (Corcuff, 2002).
3
President Lee Teng-hui set the guideline of “No Haste, Be Patient” (jeji yongren) that
constrained mainland-bound investment in terms of industries and amount. His successor,
Chen Shui-bian, adopted the so-called “Positive Openness with Effective Management”
(jijikaifang youxiaoguanli) policy, slightly loosening investment to China.
4
Newspaper conglomeration in China began with the Guangzhou Daily Group in 1996.
In 2003, 677 papers were ordered to stop publishing in the name of “press reform”
(Zhang, 2006). These moves were seen by some scholars as China’s attempt to control
chaotic competition and limit the proliferation of minor papers that defied state orders
(Lee, He & Huang, 2006; Ma, 2000). As for the broadcasting industry, the mandate
mergers were written into the10th Five-Year Plan for the National Economy and Social
Development (2001-2005). The reorganizations of television stations at national and
provincial took places around 2000-2001 (Liu, 2004).
5
According to Measures for the Administration of the Landing of Overseas Satellite
Television Channels issued by the SARFT in June 2004 (SARFT Order No. 22), foreign
satellite television channels may broadcast to stipulated areas such as, three-star hotels
(or above) catering to foreign guests, residential use by expatriates, and within other
specially designated locations.
6
The nine foreign channels available in Guangdong include not only satellite channels
but also networks. These nine channels are Hong Kong-based Phoenix Chinese Channel,
CETV, Xing Kong (STAR Chinese Channel China), TVB Jade Channel, TVB Pearl
Channel, ATV, ATV World, Macau-based MASTV, and MTV (China). Among them,
MTV (China), permitted to broadcast in Guangdong since 2003, is the only channel
operated by real foreign companies. Xing Kong is a joint venture of News Corporation’s
STAR TV and Phoenix Chinese Channel.
43
Chapter 2: Mediated Communication and Migrant Identities
This dissertation draws on theories of cultural globalization and cultural reception to
articulate the relation between mediated communication and migrant identity. In this
chapter, I review theoretical perspectives on communication, culture, and identity, as well
as their conceptual transformation in light of globalization. Then I outline three major
arguments of transnationalism regarding migrant identities: home-country allegiance,
diasporic hybrid identities, and cosmopolitan consciousness. Based on transnational
theories, I categorize three discourses on Chinese transnationalism that are associated
with return migrants of Chinese descent. The following section deals with cultural
reception research that has increasingly emphasized social context. Finally, I explain how
this dissertation project was conducted
Communication, Identity, and Globalization
Identity is the human capacity to know who’s who, and is thus a matter of meaning
(Jenkins 2008). Making sense of self is a process of being and becoming, in accordance
with the criteria of similarity and difference. Our sense of belong to, and the boundary of,
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a community depends on “the capacity of symbols to encompass and condense a range of,
not necessarily harmonious or congruent, meanings” (ibid, p.136). Therefore,
communication, understood as “the construction, apprehension, and utilization of
symbolic forms” (Carey, 1989), plays a significant role in the formation and
transformation of identity. The most powerful and seemingly natural identity is cultural
identity. Cultural identities, as Hall defines in the plural form, are “aspects of our
identities which arise from our ‘belonging’to distinctive ethnic, racial, linguistic,
religious and above all, national cultures” (1992, p.274).
Both Hall and Carey emphasize the importance of representation in producing
shared belief and cementing cultural unity. Carey highlights the crucial importance of
communication, not as information dissemination, but as “the sacred ceremony that
draws persons together in fellowship and commonality” (1989, p.18). Accordingly, “it is
through communication, through the intergraded relations of symbols and social structure,
that societies, or at least those with which we are most familiar, are created, maintained,
and transformed” (ibid, p.110). In Carey’s view, communication produces not only
citizens who assume a relation in space to their contemporaries, but also patriots who
assume a relation in time to the tradition of national culture. Similarly, Hall argues that
“national identities are not things we are born with, but are formed and transformed
45
within and in relation to representation” (1992, p. 292). For Hall, the formation of a
nation requires the production of a system of cultural representation so that its citizens are
able to “participate in the idea of the nation as represented in its national culture” (ibid,
p.292).
Smith (2000) argues that, although people continue to have multiple identities,
national identity has become a preponderant one, with the coincidence of the nation, the
nation-state, and nationalism. Nationalism, in his view, is not primordial or perennial; nor
does it reflect merely a modern ideology. Scholars like Habsbawn (1983) and Anderson
(1983/2006) have attributed the rise of nationalism to the use of symbolic
forms—invented tradition or the print media. Recently, mediated mass communications
are considered a significant factor to consolidate the nation as a sovereign territory and
the people as a collectivity. Collective memory, viewed as the reconstruction of the past
for the present (Halbwachs, 1992), is increasingly restored and mediated by the mass
media (Zelizer, 1995). National cinema and television helps shape the imagination of a
nation (Morley & Robins, 1995). However, Smith (1991) contends that the concept of the
nation is not completely constructed; instead, it blends two sets of dimensions: civic and
territorial on one hand, and ethnic and genealogical on the other. His approach of
“historical ethno-symbolism” recognizes both the importance of historical clusters and
46
symbols and the role of ethnicities in the formation of nations.
The advent of globalization, however, has challenged the isomorphism between
people, culture, sovereignty, and citizenry (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003). Despite the
fact that the nation state arrived in tandem with modernity, the development of modernity
may diminish the state power and national identity as the overriding identity. Giddens
argues that “modernity is inherently globalizing” (1990, p. 63). Modernity is premised
upon time-space distanciation, under which time and space are organized so as to connect
presence and absence. This distanciation results in disembedding, or lifting social
relations out of local contexts and stretching social systems across indefinite spans of
time-space. From a Marxist perspective, Harvey argues that, under the pressure of capital
accumulation, modernity entails time-space compression, or the shrinking of space and
time. This process involves the conquest of space, the tearing down of all spatial barriers,
and the ultimate “annihilation of space through time” (1989, p. 205). In Harvey’s view,
flexible accumulation since the 1970s, accompanied with the facility of transportation
and communication, results in our current overwhelming sense of compression. For
Thompson, the development of communication media has been an integral part of
modernity. In particular, the advent of telecommunication has fostered “the uncoupling of
space and time” and “despatialized simultaneity” (1995, p.32).
47
The compressed and distantiated time-space relation of the late twentieth century is
broadly analyzed as globalization, chiefly characterized by mobility and interconnectivity.
Flows of capital, people, goods, images, information, etc. across national borders and the
increase in global interconnectedness have dramatically transformed not only
organizations of social life but also human consciousness. First, mobility is a crucial
concept of cultural globalization, albeit not understood merely in a physical sense.
Bauman (1998) argues that in the globalized world, most people are on the move—by
changing places, switching TV channels, or even being consumers. Therefore,
contemporary subjects are all travelers or nomads, including those who are physically
immobile. Lash and Urry also use the metaphor of tourists to capture the mobility of
modern societies, in which people are either literally mobile or experience “simulated
mobility” through the fluid signs and images (1994, p.259). Mobility—of human beings,
trade, information, images, and so fort—transforms the meaning of culture, or the way
we view culture. For example, Pieterse (2004) argues that we should treat culture as
translocal, fluid, and outward looking rather than territorial, static, and inward looking.
This perspective on culture, in her view, is particularly pertinent in this period of
accelerated globalization and cultural mixing. In a similar vein, Clifford suggests that we
see culture, along with tradition and identity, in terms of travel—“practices of crossing
48
and interaction that troubled the localism of many common assumptions about culture”
(1997, p.3). Because of the restless movements of people and things, culture should be
studied in circuits, not in a single place.
Second, in addition to mobility, global interconnectivity also destabilizes the
territorial concept of culture and community by altering our sense of proximity and
immediacy. In particular, electronic mediation—through interpersonal or mass
communication—greatly enhances such interconnectivity. In the nascent stage of
television, McLuhan (1964) foretold how this medium would act as a technological
simulation of human consciousness. Based on McLuhan’s thinking, Meyrowitz argues
that electronic media break down the distinctions between “here and there, live and
mediated, and personal and public” (1985, p.309) to the extent that physical presence is
no longer significant and mediated experience can become social reality. Giddens also
likens mediated experience to an “intrusion of distant events into everyday
consciousness.” It produces feelings of reality inversion, as “the real object and event,
when encountered, seem to have a less concrete existence than their media
representation” (1991, p.27).
Tomlinson (1999) argues that intimacy delivered by mediated communication is a
different order from the face-to-face experience of physical proximity within a locality.
49
However, the use of electronic media and communication technologies deterritorializes
our cultural and existential connections to a larger world—a process called
“telemediatization of culture” (Tomlinson, 2007, p. 361). Although our sense of culture is
felt within particular localities, the geographical location of a culture is eroding. For
Hannerz, the increasing global interconnectedness urges us to think of culture as “a pool
of culture” (1996, p.49) and discard the assumption that a culture belongs to a people.
This single large inventory of culture at the global scale allows individuals or
collectivities to assemble particular repertoires. Consequently, people’s “habitats of
meanings” become malleable and may stretch out wherever they may.
As the conception of culture changes, so does the construction of meaning and
identity. Scholars argue, from different perspectives, that increasing global mobility and
interconnectivity has ended the monopoly of national identity. Some emphasize the
resurgence of traditional communal identities based on ethnicity, religion, or civilization,
which may dwell within or above the nation state (Barber, 2001; Huntington, 1996).
Others see the increase of plural identities, drawing not only from various levels of
cultures, but also from diverse aspirations, such as class, gender, and humanity (Castells,
1997, 2000; Scholte, 2005). Hall argues: “The more social life becomes mediated by the
global marketing of styles, places and images, by international travel, and by globally
50
networked media images and communications systems, the more identities become
detached-disembedded—from specific times, place, histories, and traditions, and appear
‘free-floating’”(1992, p.303).
Thompson (1995) reconciles the two images of identity—primordial and
free-floating—arguing that identity can be uprooted, reworked, and re-moored to new
kinds of territorial units. He argues that this process is particularly important to migrant
or displaced groups. They renew their traditions through ritualized story-telling and
increasingly, by way of symbolic forms through communication media. Appadurai
regards electronic mediation and mass migration as two interconnected forces that seem
to alter “the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity”
(1996, p.3, italics in original):
The story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is hardly a new feature of
human history. But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated
images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production
of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films
in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul
through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to
51
cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving
images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres
phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the
nation-state as the key arbiter of important social change. (ibid, p.4, italics added)
As Appadurai sees it, both human mobility and media flow evidence a state of
transnationality. In fact, recent years have seen a rich literature devoted to the studies of
transnationalism in migration and/or communication.
Mediation and Migrant Identities
Although mass migration has recurred in history, according to Massey, only after
postindustrial migration emerged during the 1960s did immigration become a “truly
global phenomenon” (1991, p.34). Held and his colleagues (Held et al., 1999) argue that
contemporary migration patterns are different from historical forms in extensity, intensity,
velocity, as well as its impact on host and home states. Much literature has attributed
recent mass migration to the restructuring of the global economy and the consequent new
international division of labor. First, the shift from Fordism to flexible production in
52
advanced industrial societies results in a segmented labor market structure: highly-skilled
professionals on the on hand, and low-paid casual laborers on the other (Sassen, 1991;
Sklair, 1991). Foreign workers—skilled or unskilled, and legal or illegal—are drawn into
the polarized job markets in advanced societies chiefly because of wage differential
between countries. Some scholars argue that the global dispersion of information and
lifestyle also makes such migration more attractive (Guhathakurta et al, 2007; Massey,
1999). Currently migration from less developed countries to postindustrial countries, or
from the East to the West and from the South to the North, constitutes the largest
movement of people (Iredale, 2001).
Second, the dispersion of manufacturing from core capitalist countries to the
peripheries and the global expansion of multinational corporations (MNCs) facilitate
skilled migration from capital-rich to capital-poor countries. Besides giant MNCs,
recently increasing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) also internationalize their
operations and demand human capital on offshore sites (Morley, Heraty & Collings,
2006). In these foreign invested enterprises, top managers, technicians, and professionals
tend to be expatriates (Sklair, 1991). These skilled persons often move on relatively
short-term assignments, hence defined as skilled transients. Sometimes they have become
indistinguishable from business visitors (Iredale, 2001). Although this is not the case with
53
economic migrants, many refugees, asylum seekers, exiles leave their countries
involuntarily. Artists, students and academics also may choose to live abroad for a while.
Madison (2006) highlights the emergence of existential migrants—people who migrate in
order to enjoy becoming “strangers in a strange land” rather than to pursuit economic
benefits or a better standard of living.
The scale, intensity, and fluidity of international migration, along with other forms
of mobility and connectivity across the globe, have given rise to the field of transnational
studies. Khagram & Levitt claim: “By transnational, we propose an optic or gaze that
begins with a world without border” (2008, p.5). Beck (2003) argues that transnationality
implies a “revolution in loyalties” to nationality and has made the latter a “zombie
category.” Therefore, transnational studies suggest the growing of deterritorialized
identities among contemporary subjects in general and migrants in particular. Basically,
three distinct, but sometimes overlapped, discourses related to migrants’transnational
identity have emerged: home-country allegiance, diasporic hybrid identities, and
cosmopolitan consciousness. These discourses, more or less, include the role of mediated
communication in forging transnational identities.
Home-country Allegiance
54
The first perspective argues that contemporary migrants maintain multi-layered
transnational ties to their countries of origin, and thus sustain substantial attachment,
commitment, and loyalty to their homeland. However, given their cross-border practices,
migrants no longer assume a master identity rooted in a single place. Rather, they are
prone to develop a sense of bifocality (Rouse, 1995) or “several fluid, sometimes
conflicting identities” (Levitt, 2001, p.202). This line of literature on transnationalism is
concentrated on, but not limited to, empirical immigrant studies in the United States,
presenting a shift in academic focus from assimilation to immigrant identities and
ethnicity. Transnational migration, as defined by Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc,
is “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social
relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (1995, p. 48).
Therefore, transnational migrants are not well represented by the conventional image of
immigrants “who uproot themselves, leave behind home and country, and face the painful
process of incorporation into a different society and culture” (ibid, p. 48). Meanwhile,
they are also different from sojourners, whose displacement is temporary.
Whether transnational migration constitutes a new historical phenomenon or
normative pattern is contestable. Nevertheless, a proliferation of studies in the past two
decades document recent migrants’intense and dynamic relationships with their home
55
societies—familial, religious, economic, political, social, and cultural. These
transnational linkages are made through ceaseless back-and-forth movements, political
engagements, remittances and investments, interpersonal social networks, voluntary
organizations, lifestyles, ideologies, and so forth. These connections greatly benefit from
the change in transportation and communication technologies. Migrants’simultaneous
embeddedness in host and home countries creates a space of social practices that span
national borders, labeled by such terms as transnational village (Levitt, 2001),
transnational life (Smith, 2006), transnational social field (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2007),
transnational space (Glick Schiller et al., 1995), transnational habitus (Guarnizo, 1998),
translocal space (Morawska, 2003), and so forth. These transnational practices transform
not only the lives of migrants and non-migrants who stay behind, but also the concepts of
community and identity.
The transnational paradigm of migration studies challenges the assumption of
either-or unitary identity based on the national boundaries. As Kearney argues,
transnationalized identities are constituted in social spaces defined by the logic of
both-and-and, in which “the subject shares partial, overlapping identities with other
similarly constituted decentered subjects that inhabit reticular social forms” (1995, p.
558). Transnational social fields comprise multiple cultural repertoires, by which
56
migrants use to construct identities (Levitt, 2005). Vertovec (2001) explains the relations
between transnational social practices and identity:
[T]he multi-local life-world presents a wider, even more complex set of conditions
that affect the construction, negotiation and reproduction of social identities. These
identities play out and position individuals in the course of their everyday lives
within and across each of their places of attachment or perceived belonging.
(Vertovec, 2001, p.578)
However, Levitt and Glick Schiller (2007) argue that migrants’ ways of belonging
does not necessarily correspond with their ways of being. That is, although engagements
in bi- or multi-localities enrich resources for the reconfiguration of identity, such identity
formation is contingent on the active choices of the subjects. In other words, migrants can
“use their identities symbolically or instrumentally, tailoring them to fit particular
settings” (Levitt, 2001, p. 4). Therefore, transnational migration studies suggest the
decoupling of citizenship and membership, of nationality and political loyalty.
Transnationalism, as Portes and DeWind (2007) contend, enables migrants to “sustain a
presence in two societies and cultures and to exploit the economic and political
57
opportunities created by such dual lives” (p.9). Presence in a country and the act of
naturalization do not ensure a shift in loyalty; rather, citizenship can be used for
expedient purposes, such as making travel easier (Foner, Rumbaut & Gold, 2000).
On the contrary, people who are absent from their home country may continue to
regard themselves as legitimate members of that country. Accordingly, transnational
migrants disturb the built-in analytical triad of “identities-borders-orders” by
compounding identities, ignoring borders, and overruling orders (Vertovec, 2007). Their
homeland allegiance is furthered by the competition between nation states, as more and
more countries provide dual citizenship and political representation to their expatriates in
exchange for their loyalty and economic contribution (Guarnizo, Portes & Haller, 2003).
Increasingly, states incorporate overseas populations into the project of nation-building,
regarding them as strategic transnational constituencies. This results in the emergence of
“deterritorialized nation-states” that are defined socially rather than geographically
(Basch, Glick Schiller & Szanton Blanc, 1994).
Discourse on transnationalism and identity sometimes involves the moral dimension
of identity politics, as many studies research on migrants from countries in the
peripheries to the core, advanced societies, particularly to the United States. Immigrant or
ethnic identities are thus seen as a response to unjust racial relations and a resistance to
58
the linear model of assimilation. However, Wimmer and Glick Schiller connect home
country nationalism to the hegemony of the nation-building project. They warn that
transnationalism studies “reproduce the standard image of a world divided into nations”
(2003, p.598). Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004), instead, argue that exit of emigrants
weakens the home state’s ability to discipline its population and gives migrants
new-found leverage to effect domestic politics at home. No matters whether the home
state or transnational migrants benefit more in the process, their ongoing relationships are
changing the politics in both countries of exit and entry.
Diaspora and Hybrid Identities
The second perspective emphasizes migrants’ hybrid identities, particularly in the
literature of burgeoning diasporic media studies in recent years. According to Safran
(1991), the Diaspora originally referred to the exile and dispersion of the Jews from their
homeland, thus implying oppression and moral degradation. Nowadays the concept of
diaspora is applied to various expatriate minority communities, which share the
characteristics of dispersion from a center to peripheral regions, collective memory about
origin, alienation from the host society, a desire to return, the commitment to the
maintenance of the homeland, and ethno-communal consciousness in relation to that
59
homeland.
For Safran, the existence of a homeland myth is crucial to solidify dispersed
populations. Cultural and postcolonial studies, in contrast, shift the focus of disapora
from roots to routes. Hall, for instance, argues that the disapora experience is defined
“not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and
diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’which lives with and through, not despite,
difference; by hybridity” (1990, p.235, italics in original). Diasporic identities are formed
through the process of translation rather than defined by tradition. In the process,
diaspora subjects must learn to “inhabit at least two identities, to speak two cultural
languages, to translate and negotiate between them” (Hall, 1992, p.310).
Gilroy argues for the necessary link between roots and routes, identifying diaspora
as “a relational network, characteristically produced by forced dispersal and reluctant
scattering” (1994, p.207). He argues that diaspora should be apprehended as live memory,
as “the changing same,” and as “mutable itinerant culture” that is creolized, syncretized,
and hybridized. Clifford, following Gilroy, emphasizes the practices of “decentered,
lateral connections” of diaspora that are constituted in specific maps and histories.
Diaspora cultures mediate “the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here
and remembering/desiring another places” (1994, p. 306, p.331). In Clifford’s view, the
60
renewed, painful yearning for the homeland and persistent double consciousness
distinguish diaspora from immigrant communities.
Since the 1980s, however, the usage of diaspora has been relieved from its burden of
misery and tended to replace immigration/emigration (Dufoix, 2008). Ang (1993), for
example, argues that diaspora can be formed either by force or by choice. As Nonini and
Ong say, diaspora subjects “can play with different cultural fragments in way that allows
them to segue from one discourse to another, experiment with alternative forms of
identification, shrugs in and out of identities, or evade imposed forms of identifications”
(1997, p.26). Shih (2007) argues that the overthrow of victimization and the celebration
of flexible subjects in diasporic narratives mark a theoretical revolution.
Discarding the homeland myth and forced dispersal, recent diasporic studies
emphasize the role of mediated communications in solidifying dispersed populations of
diaspora across the globe. Appadurai’s “theory of rupture” serves as a significant
aspiration. He argues that electronic media and mass migration work together to create
the present world of irregularities, in which both viewers and images are in
“simultaneous circulation”—they “meet unpredictably, outside the certainties of home
and the cordon sanitaire of local and national media effects” (1996, p.4). This process
fosters the emergence of imagined communities in a global context—labeled as diasporic
61
public spheres:
[As] mass mediation becomes increasingly dominated by electronic media (and thus
delinked from the capacity to read and write), and as such media increasingly link
producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audience
themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay,
we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres. (ibid, p. 22)
For Appadurai, diasporic public spheres disrupt the union between nation and state.
As a result, “the nationalist genie, never perfectly contained in the bottle of the territorial
state, is now itself diasporic” (ibid, pp. 160-161). Such trans-local loyalties are
increasingly mediated by electronic media and communication technologies. Morley and
Robin (1995) argue that in the global age, the “spaces of transmission” defined by
satellite footprints provide the crucial boundaries between cultures. In their view,
broadcasting in the current context of fragmentation caters to various forms of nostalgia
and supplies a sense of identity. In the growing field of diasporic media studies, global
narrowcasting that targets ethnic niche markets (satellite television or DVDs) is
considered an important factor that maintains diasporic identities (e.g. Sinclair &
62
Cunningham, 2000). Despite diasporic media’s market-orientation, their presence
destabilizes the dominant forms of cultural representation in host societies and opens up
new possibilities for self-expression and identity negotiations among migrants (Bailey,
Georgiou & Haridranath, 2007). In addition, the use of “small media” such as electronic
mail and videos, along with physical mobility, also sustain communication networks that
link diasporic narratives of identity (Morley, 2000).
However, empirical studies show that the relation between diasporic media and
migrant identity is not so straightforward, or even positive. For example, Gillespie’s
study (1995) finds that young Punjabi Londoners redefine their ethnicity through a range
of transnational and diasporic media available to them. Some media representations
evoke a cosmopolitan stance, while others engender an awareness of cultural differences
and reinforce ethnic identity. In contrast, Kevin and Aksoy (2006) describe Turkish
television in London as an “agent of cultural de-mythologisation,” in that it bring the
banal reality of Turkish life to migrants and undercut the romantic imagination about the
homeland.
Based on her ethnographic research, Georgiou highlights several factors that affect
the articulation of mediation and identity: various lived experiences, diverse ideologies in
diasporic communities, human agency of meaning construction, generational difference,
63
etc. She argues that diasporic subjects can playfully shift between media and between
identities. Therefore, diasporic community belonging is “conditional and partial, as its
members live and belong to other local, urban, transnational communities—all at the
same time” (2006, p.156). Similarly, Athique (2006) argues that a diasporic audience is
not always overlapped with a diaspora. The specificities of the environments where
migrants reside and the plurality of diasporic audiences should be taken into account.
Cosmopolitan Consciousness
The third perspective holds that, because of intensified cultural interactions, more
and more people in the world are developing a specifically cosmopolitan transnational
identity. The mobility of people and the interconnectivity of communication, among
others, greatly contribute to the formation of this identity, which transcends national and
territorial boundaries. Held et al. (1999) contend that an incipient cosmopolitanism has
emerged from huge transnational flows of information, people, and imagery, which
provide real-time cultural link across the globe. Likewise, Robertson argues that the
improved means of travel and communications spreads consciousness of “the world as a
whole” and of “an increasingly singular, but not unified conception of humankind” (1992,
p.59).
64
Therefore, the cosmopolitan perspective indicates a moral imperative. As human
beings, we share common risks and responsibilities; at the same time, we appreciate
cultural differences. Tomlinson thinks of cosmopolitanism as ethical glocalism to
articulate the relations between the global and the local: on the one hand, a cosmopolitan
needs to experience a distanciated identity in a world where “there are no others”; on the
other hand, this person needs “an awareness of the world as one of many cultural others”
(1999, p.194). In this sense, cosmopolitanism is not understood as universalism and
homogeneity that denies local particularities. Hannerz defines cosmopolitanism as “an
orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other,” which entails “an intellectual and
esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than
uniformity” (1996, p.103). In addition, cosmopolitanism also demands a competence to
master different structures of meanings. This definition is similar to what Lash and Urry
(1994/2002) call aesthetic cosmopolitanism—a stance of openness to other and the ability
to judge tastes and distinctions about different cultures. This raises the question of who
are capable of being cosmopolitans.
Beck argues that cosmopolitanization—“the blurring, through migration,
telecommunications and transport, of the foundations of nationhood”—has become an
everyday feature of the human condition (2003, p. 21). This forced mixing of culture
65
creates banal cosmopolitanism that is often unaware of, since one’s life and individual
existence have become “part of another world, of foreign cultures, religions, histories and
global interdependences” (Beck, 2006, p.19). For Beck, people who live cross-border
polygamous forms of life, including illegal immigrants, are inclined to develop a
cosmopolitan outlook. However, some theorists criticize cosmopolitanism as elite-biased.
For example, Bauman (1998) contends that the cosmopolitan, extraterritorial world
belongs only to global businessmen, culture mangers, or academics. The language of
cosmopolitan chatter, in Bauman’s view, presents the privilege of those who are freely on
the move (tourists), as opposed to the localized people and forced movers (vagabonds).
In his early work, Hannerz (1996) also distinguishes cosmopolitans from locals. He
argues that not all mobile persons are cosmopolitans. People with decontextualized
cultural capital, like the expatriates, are more readily to become cosmopolitans than
exiles and labor migrants are. Later on, Hannerz (2006) admits that the social bases of
cosmopolitanism are expanding, while insisting that transnational mobility is not a
sufficient condition for cosmopolitan attitudes. He coins the term instrumental
cosmopolitanism, referring to the skills in managing heterogeneous, alien environments.
We can include Ong’s concept of flexible citizenship to this instrumental
cosmopolitanism. Ong portrays a group of mobile entrepreneurs and professionals who
66
utilizes multiple citizenships to circumvent and benefit from different nation-state
regimes. For these people, citizenship has less to do with loyalty than a strategy to “evade,
deflect, and take advantage of political and economic conditions in different parts of the
world” (1999, p.113). This flexibility may extend from citizenship to identity. Rosenau
(2004) argues that mobile transnational elites are prone to juggle multiple identities that
derive from non-territorial ties, in accordance with the changing circumstances. However,
the cosmopolitanism of transnational migrants, as Cheah (2006) argues, is more likely to
be driven by upward class mobility than the normative imperative. In particular,
[the] cosmopolitanism of corporate workers is essentially the cosmopolitanism of a
new technocratic professional class whose primary aims in life are making a profit
and conspicuous consumption. The only feelings of solidarity manifest here are to
the global firms as a terrain for professional self-interest and advancement. This
type of attachment is gradually disseminated throughout the world through the
global outsourcing of white-collar jobs, which in turn establishes more bridges for
higher-end South-North migration. (Cheah, 2006, p.492)
This technocratic professional class of transnational migrants is part of what Sklair
67
(1991) calls the transnational capitalist class, composed of the entrepreneurial elite,
managers of transnational firms, state functionaries, and politicians, etc. For these
transnationals, class interests override, if not competing against, national interests.
Calhoun (2006) argues that today’s cosmopolitanism reflects the class consciousness of
frequent travelers who carry visa-friendly passports. Cosmopolitans, prominently top
managers of multi-national corporations (MNCs), regard themselves as multi-culturally
modern and thus different from locals—rooted in mono-cultural traditions that limit their
perspectives. Therefore, instrumental cosmopolitanism implies the superiority of the
cosmopolitan over the local: “One is rich, the other poor. One is transient and mobile.
The other is rooted and fixed. One enjoys limitless options. The other opts for the limits
of locality” (Ong, 2009, p.456).
The mentality that Calhoun sees in contemporary capitalist cosmopolitans is similar
to what Watson (1960, 1964) observed among managerial spiralists assigned by large
firms to industrial towns in mid-twentieth century England. The spiralists achieve career
upward mobility through occupational experience in different local communities.
Accordingly, they developed a generic culture with “international standards of value” that
kept them apart from the locals of all classes: “The young business executive in Wigan is
likely to have more interests and friends in Manchester and London, or even in New York,
68
than he has in Wigan” (Watson, 1960, p.417). Like Watson’s spiralists, contemporary
business expatriates of MNCs tend to live in self-contained communities, which separate
them from the local cultural setting (Lauring & Selmer, 2009). They may develop what
Leggett (2005) calls expat identity, marked not only by nationality, but also class, status,
attitude, and lifestyle.
To sum up, theoretical perspectives relevant to migrants identities—home-country
affiliation, diasporic identities, and cosmopolitan consciousness—suggest the formation
of deterritorialized, plural cultural identities. However, these perspectives may reflect
only particular subjects in their contexts. For example, transnational migration research
chiefly studies migrants from less developed countries to developed societies, especially
to the U.S. In this setting, as Waldinger (2008) argues, transnational migrants represent
only one set of actors (Waldinger, 2008). Therefore, even the proponents of transnational
studies recognize that transnational actions are socially bounded and territorially specific
(Guarnizo, Portes & Haller, 2003; Portes, 2003). Meanwhile, diaspora studies focus on
postcolonial migration. The two strands of research tend to see the persistence of
ethnicity as an expression of identity politics against racial discrimination. This stance
may unintentionally result in cultural reification (Dirlik, 2004). Discussions on
cosmopolitanism, instead, are highly theoretical. Whether there is a truly post-national
69
culture or identity based on cosmopolitanism or class consciousness remains empirically
unelaborated.
Friedman (2004) suggests a holistic analysis that articulates the relation between
migration and state structures in particular historical conjunctures. In this framework, the
identification process of migrants with the host countries is understood in terms of a
continuum of variation from assimilation to enclavization, depending on the ways of
group practice. Dirlik (2004) also argues for a place-based analysis that focuses on the
“historicity of identity” and the consciousness of place. Therefore, the question of
identification needs to be analyzed in the context of historical specificities rather than in
abstract forms. Identifying the characteristics of research subjects and particular social
contexts in which they are situated is crucial.
Chinese Transnationalism and its Divergence
Since the 1990s, different variants of Chinese transnationalism have emerged to
review the relations between overseas Chinese and their original homeland—mainland
China. They can be categorized into three concepts: Greater China, Cultural China, and
the Chinese media sphere. To start with, the term Greater China (dazhonghwa) is defined
70
by Harding as “the rapid increasing interaction among Chinese societies around the world
as the political and administrative barriers to their intercourse fall” (1993, p. 660). This
broad definition encompasses a transnational Chinese economy, a global Chinese culture,
and a reunified Chinese state (see also Wang, 1993). Shambaugh argues that Greater
China comprises “various actors, dimensions and processes” and lack institutionalization,
but together it poses a potential challenge to the regional and international order (1993,
p.653). This term, however, usually emphasizes the economic aspect, referring to a
“unifying ethno-economic space” including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other sites in
Southeast Asia (Ong, 2004).
In this economic space, transnational Chinese businesses networks are facilitated by
some interrelated aspects of “Chinese distinctiveness” (Lever-Tracy, Constance & Ip,
1996). Among them, guanxi (interpersonal connections)—built upon famalism, kinship,
fraternal solidarity, and linguistic-cultural commonality—is singled out as representative
of so-called Chinese capitalism, particularly in the practices of small businesses. Recently
academic interests have shifted to production networks in the high-tech sector that
primarily consists of large corporations in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, and China. While no
longer emphasizing the guanxi factor, scholars continue to attribute such business
networks to ethnic connections (Naughton, 2004; Leng, 2002, 2004; Zhang, 2007). Some
71
scholars contest the idea of Chinese uniqueness, arguing that the use of Chineseness by
business people is simply an adaptive and expedient strategy of capital accumulation
(Hsing, 1998; Ong, 1999; Wu, 2001).
The idea of Chinese distinctiveness also ignites a debate over the notion of Cultural
China. In a famous essay, Tu argues that Chinese culture, based on Confucian humanism,
constitutes “a unique form of life.” He identifies overseas Chinese as a unity of people
with “a common ancestry and a shared cultural background, hoping to build a
transnational network for understanding the meaning of being Chinese within a global
context” (1991, p.22). This account presumes constancy and consistency of Chineseness
and bestows a moral obligation on people of Chinese descent for China’s modernization.
Some scholars criticize Tu’s essentialist perspective and China-centered discourse on
Chineseness. Wang, for instance, contends that “there has never been one single Chinese
community abroad” (1993, p.939). The concrete experience of being Chinese, based on
place and practice rather than origin, has oriented Chinese overseas to different directions
(Wang, 1999). Wang specifically uses the term Chinese overseas (haiwai hwaren), as
foreign nationals who are ethnic Chinese, to replace overseas Chinese (hwaqiao), which
implies a continued political link with mainland China.
Similarly, Ma (2003) argues that Chinese overseas are diverse in terms of place of
72
origin, settlement patterns, and socioeconomic characteristics. Consequently, mainland
China is no longer the sole homeland and Chineseness means different things to the
Chinese at various locations. Ang agrees on the polysemy of Chineseness, viewing it as
“an open signifier which acquires its peculiar form and content in dialectical junction
with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people…construct new, hybrid
identities and communities” (1993, p, 13). Chinesesness involves not only abstract
qualities recognized by other people, but also self-identification (Wang, 1999). In other
words, being Chinese is defined both by descent and by consent. To be or not to be
Chinese is often a matter of politics (Ang, 1993).
In addition to Greater China and Cultural China, a growing number of recent studies
have focused on a new kind of Chinese transnationalism fostered by the electronic media.
This body of literature is part of the broader trend of diasporic studies of media.
According to Liu (2004), the concept of “Chinese-language media market” is not new.
However, only in the 1990s did media industries of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and
Singapore become truly transnationalized, owing largely to government promotion. The
penetrations of media industries—film, television, music, newspapers, etc.—in these
societies to each other and overseas niche markets give rise to the speculation of a
deterritorialized Chinese media sphere. Furthermore, the Internet also reinforces the
73
interconnectedness of various Chinese communities. In these discourses, the Chinese
across the globe share a media culture, as consumers of pop cultural products from
different Chinese societies, as audiences of news concerning worldwide Chinese
communities, or as a public emerging from the cyberspace. This global Chinese
imagination is dubbed as “the worldwide diasporic communities of Chinese” (Sinclair et
al., 2000), “a transnational Chinese global media public” (Yang, 1997), “a Chinese
television global village” (Harding, 1993), “a global diasporic Chinese mediasphere”
(Sun, 2006), “Pop Culture China” (Huat, 2006), “Sinophone Community” (Shih, 2007),
“the Huaren cyberpublic” (Ong, 2003), and so on.
The way of being Chinese in the global context thus acquires a new dimension:
mediation. Sun, a China-born scholar in Australia, describes such a mediated experience:
“One everyday practice of being Chinese […] besides eating Chinese foods and speaking
a Chinese language or dialect, is the consumption of a multiplicity of readily available
and accessible Chinese-language media and cultural products” (2006, p.2). However,
whether the global circulation of Chinese-language media products promotes Chinese
identity is contested. First, there is a disagreement concerning the existence of
transnational Chinese community or identity. Some expect or argue for the formation of
such a transnational imagination (Huat, 2006; Yang, 1997), while others see little
74
evidence of it (Chu, 1998; Carsten, 2003). Second, studies on migrants’ local media
practices also produce divergent conclusions. For instance, Ip (2006) observes that
Chinese-language media in New Zealand cement ethnic cohesion among migrants of
Chinese descent from different countries. In contrast, Sinclair et al. (2000) find that the
daily ritual of television news reception provides the Australian Chinese a strong sense of
connection with home, be it China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong.
Narratives of Chinese transnationalism interpret Chinese cultures differently, as
guanxi networks, “a unique form of life,” or a shared media culture. The way to be
Chinese in the global context, hence, is built upon instrumental purposes, primordial ties,
or constructed imagination. The concepts of cultural China and pop culture China are
based on the experience of ethnic Chinese in diaspora. The perspective on guanxi
networks, instead, mainly applies to return migrants of Chinese descent to mainland
China. A number of studies reveal how Chineseness is utilized by overseas Chinese,
Hong Kongers, and Taiwanese to advance businesses in China (Deng, 2002; Hsing, 1998;
Ong, 1999; Shen, 2005; Smart & Smart, 1998; Wu, 2004). Rather than truly identifying
their ancient homeland, these businesspeople manipulate Chinese identity for
instrumental purposes.
Scholars analyze why Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, and Singaporeans usually
75
reinforce their allegiance to countries/places of origin after migration to China in terms of
(1) societal and political differences between China and other Chinese societies, (2)
long-term social isolation of the mainland, (3) and class distinction (Hsing, 1998; Kong,
1999; Shen, 2005; Smart & Smart, 1998). For Taiwanese, the political hostility across the
Taiwan Strait also increases their suspicion of Chinese nationals. There is also a
widespread attitude among these migrants of Chinese descent that they are culturally
superior to the PRC Chinese.
Ong (1999) argues that Chinese kinship rituals and cultural values represented in
ethnic mass media is a key source of translocal Chinese identity. However, other studies
show that overseas Chinese often experience a process of disillusion of their ideal
homeland upon “return” to China. Smart and Smart (1998) observe that Hong Kong
migrants and business travelers tend to see themselves as more developed and rational, as
opposed to incivility of Chinese. Singaporean expatriates in China, portrayed by Yeoh and
Willis (2005), seek “return-to-roots” experience but instead feel strong cultural
differences. Similarly, Taiwanese migrants develop a sense of superiority, considering
themselves economically and culturally better off than Chinese (Hu, 2006; Lin, 2006;
Wang, 2007).
However, other studies report ambivalence in identity transformation among
76
migrants of Chinese descent. For example, Kong (1999) finds that Singaporeans reinforce
their allegiance to Singapore as a nation. At the same time, they also develop stronger
ethnic attachments to Chineseness. Mathews, Ma and Lui observe that Hong Kongers’
northbound experience to southern China has been breaching the wall against
Chineseness. Experiencing a huge national territory and diverse people allow
denationalized Hong Kongers to learn to “belong to a nation” (2008, p.146). Likewise,
some scholars argue that Taiwanese migrants will assume a Chinese identity in the long
run. First, the pattern of Taiwanese migration to China has changed over time. Recent
migrants—composed of the younger generation and professionals—tend to identity with
China because of their long-term settlement plans (Geng, 2006; Leng; 2002). Second, the
longer Taiwanese migrants stay in China, the more likely they are assimilated to the
Chinese society (Fang, 2003).
In sum, Chinese transnationalism consists of economic, cultural, and political
dimensions. For China-bound migrants of Chinese descent, economic transnationalism
has been a reality. However, how their identities are sustained or transformed upon
migration is highly contested. Particularly, research on Taiwanese migrants has produced
divergent answers: Taiwanese identity, Chinese identity, and in-betweenness. This
incoherence demonstrates the complexity of identity among the Taiwanese. Most studies
77
have analyzed Taiwanese migrants’ identifications through the perspectives of primordial
ties or cultural encounters. This dissertation focuses on how the use of media enables
migrants to renegotiate their identities, but also attends to the factors of ethnicity and
lived experience.
In doing so, I am not arguing for a casual relation between mediated communication
and identity formation. Rather, this dissertation is designed to unveil the process of
identity negotiation through the intersections between mediation and lived experience.
Theories of cultural globalization and transnationalism have outlined new possibilities of
migrants’ identity construction—in additional to the conventional view of assimilation.
These theoretical discussions include home-country allegiance, diasporic hybrid identities,
and cosmopolitan consciousness. While more or less emphasizing the role of media and
communication technologies in forging such identities, each perspective has its own
theoretical context. Therefore, it is important to specify research subjects, social contexts,
and historical conjunctions.
Contextualizing Reception Research
This dissertation adopts the methods of reception research in cultural studies to
78
elaborate upon how Taiwanese migrants use media for meaning construction and
participation, and how these processes enact their identity negotiation. Reception research
challenges the positivist, behaviorist paradigm of media studies, which emphasizes media
effects by the measure of the audience’s attitude and behavior change. Williams argues
that communication is not only transmission, but also “reception and response”
(1958/1990, p.313). This statement repudiates the perspective that sees the audience as
the mass or cultural dupes. Carey proposed instead a ritual view of communication that
emphasizes “the actual social processes wherein significant symbolic forms are created,
apprehended, and used” (1989, p.30). Hall (1980, 1982) integrates this culturalist
perspective with concepts of hegemony and semiotics to develop his critical paradigm in
media studies. His encoding-decoding model of communication highlights both ideology
of media text and the audience’s active role in reception.
For Hall (1993), mass communication is articulated by four connected yet distinctive
practices—production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction. Of
importance in this exchange is the discursive form of the message, realized in the
moments of encoding and decoding. On one hand, discourse of the media represents a
dominant cultural order shaped by power and ideology. On the other hand, discourse is
polysemic and, hence, allows “relative autonomy” of entry and exit of the message. The
79
audience may adopt three hypothetical positions in the process of decoding:
dominant-hegemonic (or preferred readings), negotiated, or oppositional. Hall’s approach
analyzes meaning structures in the processes of encoding and decoding, as well as social
structures that constrain such processes, including the frameworks of knowledge, the
relations of production, and material culture (Nightingale, 2003). However, based on
Hall’s model, a generation of reception research thriving in the 1980s and 1990s
highlighted audience agency, resistance, and pleasures (Murphy, 2005). Such an approach
erases the material conditions of social life and fails to locate specific cultural practices
within their contexts (Grossberg, 1994).
Recent scholarship of reception research has paid more attention to social context.
Bird (2003) argues that separating text/audience from the culture in which they are
embedded is problematic. Media researchers need to study not only specific text-audience
relationship, but also everyday experiences. Murphy proposes a perspective of cultural
ecology that focuses on “the embodied, existential field experience of how media
narratives and aesthetic surface and resonate in the everyday life of active, reflexive
social agents” (2005, p.176). This approach brings together media practices and real-life
social relations, replacing a media-centric understanding of collectivity, such as fandom.
In a similar regard, Nightingale outlines a relational approach that points to broader
80
cultural continuities beyond the time-space of viewing/reading. She contends: “people are
not audiences by nature but by culture...We learn to act and to think of ourselves as
audiences in certain contexts and situations—these always possess a textual dimension
which eclipses the mechanical or operational functions of the medium” (1996, p.147).
Therefore, audience is both context- and text-bound.
In addition to social context, scholars also argue for a more comprehensive
understanding of the meaning structure in the process of decoding. Morley suggests that
we deal more with the issue of relevance/irrelevance than the acceptance/rejection of
particular propositions in media texts—that is, to ask the question of how a viewer
“thinks and feels about living her/his social situations” (1986, p.43). Fiske argues that
preferred reading is a textual concept, while relevance is a social one. The relevance
position states that a text can only be activated into a meaningful moment “by the social
allegiances of the person engaged in it” (1988a, p.248). Kraidy extends Fiske’s concept of
relevance to social relevance, emphasizing “the communal aspects of media consumption
in its socio-politico-economic context” (2005, p. 142). For Kraidy, the notion of social
relevance provides a dynamic understanding of the links between media texts and
collective identities.
Georgiou (2006) proposes a more radical position that reverses the relations between
81
text and context. She argues that viewing media culture as context allows a better
understanding of the relation between mediation and identities:
Identities are shaped within the context of media culture. Thus, their multiplicity
cannot but be informed by, and their commonality constructed around the shared
media consumption. In the cultural process of media consumption, audiences
participate in the construction of meaning. What does this mean? The relation
between media and identities is dialectical and homologous, especially as it
unravels in the context of everyday life. The functions and values of the two meet
dynamically in everyday life and although, or perhaps because, conflicts and
inconsistencies exist, they reach a level of constant, dialectic compatibility.
(Georgiou, 2006, p.163)
Therefore, research of media reception is not limited to the correspondence between
a text and an audience that is usually artificially arranged. Instead, we can ask how the
subjects choose media texts available or relevant to them, and how they construct
meaning from media texts socially relevant or irrelevant to them, how such meaning
construction interacts with their lived experience, and how these processes enact their
82
identity negotiation.
Research Subjects and Methods
Cultural studies research asks questions about “meaning and the significance of the
cultural at every level of the social and cultural processes”—why people invest in
particular texts and practices, what meanings these texts and practices have for them, and
how they account for this engagement (Gray, 2003, p.17). Small-scale intensive
qualitative studies enable researchers to explore these questions in detail about the
construction of cultural identity and subjectivity (ibid). To better understand how
Taiwanese migrants use media in China and how they negotiate meanings and identity
through such use of the media, this dissertation applies qualitative methods.
Qualitative research, as Denzin and Lincoln argue, involves an “interpretive,
naturalistic approach” to the world. In other words, researchers “study things in their
natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the
meanings people bring to them” (2003, p.5). The focus of qualitative research is “how
social experience is created and given meaning” rather than the measurement and
analysis of causal relationships between variables (ibid, p.13, italic in original).
83
According to Creswell (2003), qualitative research (1) takes place in the natural setting,
(2) uses multiple methods that are interactive and humanistic, (3) is emergent rather than
tightly prefigured, (4) and fundamentally interpretive. Meanwhile, the qualitative
researcher (1) views social phenomena holistically, (2) systematically reflects on who he
or she is in the inquiry, (3) uses complex reasoning that is multifaceted, interactive, and
simultaneous, (4) and adopts one or more strategies of inquiry as a guide for the
procedures.
This dissertation project aims to understand the “how” rather than the “why”
questions. It inquires into people’s lived and mediated experiences in natural settings, and
takes their own words seriously—that is, how people interpret their everyday practices
and how they negotiate meanings through these practices. Moreover, as explained earlier,
this case study is highly contextualized. The identity negotiation of Taiwanese migrants is
conditioned by a complicated historical process and the ambiguous political relations
between China and Taiwan. Migrants also experience a very sophisticated, continuously
evolving media system in China. Quantitative surveys and experiments, emphasizing
fixed research design and numerical values, would not suffice the purpose of this research.
Small-scale qualitative research allows the “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of cultural
meanings and hence is a preferable research methodology.
84
Marshall and Rossman (1999) list four primary methods in qualitative research:
participation, observation, in-depth interviewing, and the review of documents.
Open-ended interviewing and participant observation allow researchers to obtain
empirical data “collected in the form of people’s own words, gestures, and behavior”
(Fortner & Christians, 2003, p.351). Moreover, secondary materials help achieve a more
complete and accurate account of the subject matter. My research uses all of these
above-mentioned methods to reach triangulation. I mainly adopt in-depth interviewing to
understand my research subjects’narratives, but also use participation and observation to
complement the data. Besides, document research is utilized to contextualize questions to
be answered.
In-depth Interviewing
In-depth interviewing—which by its very nature requires talking to smaller numbers
of people—is crucial to cultural studies work because it provides detailed information as
to why specific answers are given and allows for observation of respondent’s non-verbal
response (Wimmer and Dominick, 1994). This method is used to explore a few general
topics to help uncover the participants’views, but otherwise it respects that “the
subjective view is what matters” (Marshall & Rossman, 1999, p.108). However,
85
Silverman (2003) argues that both the research participants’constructed narratives and
real experiences demand analysis. Besides, interviewing often comes hand in hand with
participant observation (Fontana & Frey, 2003). Therefore, I primarily adopted
semi-structured interviewing in the field, but occasionally used participant observation
when I visited company compounds and schools.
Locating research subjects.
My research subjects are Taiwanese migrants in China. Due to the lack of official
statistics, the number, demographic characteristics, and locations of these migrants
remain unclear. There is no directory of Taiwanese migrants in China, or other methods
for determining the universe of this population. Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation
(SEF) estimated that in 2008, a total of more than 800,000 Taiwanese people were
working and/or living in China. Other figures that appear in the press are much higher,
but one million is frequently cited by scholarly literature. Currently the Taiwanese mass
migration to China is closely associated with the relocation of Taiwanese businesses. The
main components of the migrant population include businesspeople, skilled workers, and
their family members (Tseng, 2008). According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic
Affairs, the Taiwan government approved 37,181 cases of China-bound investment
86
between 1991 and 2008, which amounted to $75,560 millions. Jiangsu province (33.2%),
Guangdong province (24.01%), and Shanghai (14.86%) attracted the largest amounts of
investments (Mainland Affairs Council, 2009b). It is reasonable to assume that the
Taiwanese population in China is also concentrated in these areas. Therefore this is where
I conducted my research.
Selecting the sites.
I chose two key sites for my field research—the greater Shanghai area on central
east coast of China and the greater Shenzhen area in southeast China. The former
includes Shanghai city and nearby Suzhou city, the industrial hub of Jiangsu Province.
The latter includes Shenzhen city and nearby Dongguan city of Guangdong, which
clusters lots of Taiwanese companies. These two areas should have large numbers of
Taiwanese migrants. In addition, both areas encompass urban districts and satellite
cities/townships where numerous industrial parks are located. This allows the comparison
between urban life and compound life, and the comparison of regional differences. In
particular, the media environments are slightly different in these two areas. Some foreign
television channels, chiefly from Hong Kong and Macau, are accessible via cable in
Shenzhen and Dongguan, but not in Shanghai and Suzhou (see Chapter 1).
87
Snowball sampling.
Theoretically, social research requires probability sampling designs to ensure that
the sample selected is representative of things in the population at large. Practically,
random sampling is not feasible in most cases (Knight, 2002). This is particularly true
when the units of a population are not known. The problem of obtaining a list of the
population, called coverage error, is common among immigrant studies (Corbetta, 2003).
In such circumstance, snowball sampling provides a means of accessing difficult to reach
or hidden populations. This technique consists of “identifying respondents who are then
used to refer researchers on to other respondents” (Atkinson & Flint, 2003, p.1).
In my dissertation research, I used snowball sampling to recruit 68 interviewees,
including 32 respondents in the greater Shanghai area and 36 in the greater Shenzhen area
(see Appendix A). I located potential research subjects in China through informants in my
personal networks. After the interviews with my respondents, I asked them to refer me to
Taiwanese migrants with whom they had weak ties and whose demographic
characteristics were different from those of themselves. That is, I took every measure
possible to avoid drawing too many subjects from a particular social network and to
diversify the groups I studied. As a result, I diversified my research subjects in terms of
88
gender, age, ethnicity, employment, education, and years of residence in China (see table
2.1). Most interviewees were migrants who had lived in China at least a half year, but this
sample also included one returnee and five business travelers whose main residences
were in Taiwan.
Table 2.1 Summary of the research subjects
Categories Frequencies
Gender male (37), female (31)
Age under 30 (5), 30s (29), 40s (30), over 50 (4)
Ethnicity Hoklo (43), Hakka (6), Mainlander (19)
Employment business owners and spouses (17), expatriate employees (30), the
second generation (5), housewives (11), others (5)
Education high school and below (4), college* (45), post-graduate (19)
Years of residence
in China
4 years and under (31), 5-9 years (30), 10 years and over (7)
*Two-year colleges are included.
Data collecting.
My field research took place in China between October and December in 2008. The
interviews were conducted in my research subjects’homes, companies, or cafes. I visited
more than ten company compounds in industrial areas, which allowed me to observe
work and life of Taiwanese expatriates. I also visited schools with large numbers of
89
Taiwanese students—one Taiwanese school with K-12 education and one Chinese
bilingual primary and middle school. In the Taiwanese school, I toured the campus,
interviewed school teachers, and observed students. In the Chinese school, I attended a
festival, observed the interactions among Taiwanese parents, and conducted interviews.
I adopted semi-structured face-to-face interviewing. Most interviews were
conducted in the one-on-one format, although some cases involved two or more
participants. My questions encompassed respondents’background, migration history,
media use, and self-described identity (see Appendix B). While following the outline of
the prepared semi-structured topics, I also asked questions specific to particular
interviewees and changed topics according to my respondents’answers. On average the
interviews took 90 to 120 minutes, but some lasted as long as three hours. All interviews,
with the permission of my research subjects, were digitally recorded. After leaving the
scenes, I took notes about my observation and unrecorded conversations with my
respondents. Each interview record was transcribed in Chinese. Only those sentences
being quoted in the dissertation were translated into English. I was responsible for the
transcriptions and translations.
In addition to the general research subjects, I also interviewed three administrators
of Taiwanese community websites (Taima Club and Taike Life) and one organizer of a
90
Taiwanese social group (Shanghai Rice Ball). The purpose was to understand Taiwanese
migrants’ online and offline social networking. There are numerous community websites
in China operated by Taiwanese migrants to share information. Taima Club and Taike Life
were chosen for analysis because they had the largest numbers of participants,
approximately 6,000 to 30,000 at the time of my field research. Shanghai Rice Ball is an
informal social group that has lasted for years. The interview questions to these
administrators were centered on how they operated their websites or organizations. The
details will be analyzed in Chapter 6.
Research criteria.
Qualitative research tends to draw conclusions from smaller samples. From the
perspective of traditional canons in social sciences, qualitative research is weak in
generalizability—or external validity. The issue of generalizability occurs at two
levels—generalizing the findings about a particular sample to the population and
applying the findings about a population of interest to the second population (Gray, 2003;
Marshall & Rossman, 1999). Aside from the small scale, samples acquired by
snowballing tend to be biased, due to the researcher’s subjective choices of the
respondents and the inclusion of individuals with interrelationships. Therefore, snowball
91
samples are criticized for the lack of representativeness (Atkinson & Flint, 2003).
However, these deficiencies do not mean that qualitative studies drawing from
small-scale, snowball samples are not valuable. Atkinson and Flint (2003) argue that
snowball sampling has the advantage of locating respondents who are otherwise
unaccessible by survey. The technique also allows researchers to obtain more
comprehensive data on a particular research. The issue of generalization can be addressed
through the use of larger samples and by the replication of results. Knight (2002)
contends that whether one sampling strategy is better than another depends on the
inquiries. In his view, random sampling methods applied in positivist social research
projects regard one person in the sample as substitutable for another. Small-scale research,
in contrast, emphasizes contingency, complexity, subjectivity, and multiple meanings,
which make it scrupulous, meaningful, significant, and generalizable.
Other scholars treat the claim of generalizability differently. Corbetta (2003), for
example, argues that generalization in qualitative research is based on classifications and
typologies rather than correlations, which are emphasized by quantitative research. For
Gray (2003), generalization in small-scale qualitative studies is theoretical rather than
statistical. These studies employ reflexive and innovative methods appropriate to the
research questions, and produce valuable insights transferable to different contexts.
92
Similarly, Lincoln and Guba contend that qualitative research should be accessed by the
criterion of transferability instead of generalizability—that is, whether the findings will
be useful to other researchers in similar situations, with similar research questions (cited
in Lincoln, 1995). Marshall and Rossman (1999) suggest researchers elaborating on how
data collection and analysis is guided by theoretical frameworks to counter the challenge
of generalization.
This dissertation does not claim its generalizability to the whole Taiwanese
population in China or to other migrant groups in China and beyond. However, I
followed some procedures to make my sample more representative. I expanded the scale
of the sample to 68 respondents, recruited research subjects with diverse backgrounds,
and chose two different sites for my field research. In addition, as Marshall and Rossman
(1999) suggest, my interview questions are guided by the research problematic and
theoretical concepts. Gray argues that validity of qualitative research consists in “the
accuracy of the picture presented of the subject and context of study” (2003, p.71). In my
data analysis, I emphasize historical factors and social context. I also truthfully report the
accounts of my research subjects and use classifications and typologies to present
research findings. These measures increase the credibility and validity of this case study.
93
Document Research
The review of documents or archival records, both public, such as newspapers and
official reports, and private, such as diaries and letters, linking to the conceptual
framework of the study, supplements other qualitative methods (Creswell, 2003; Marshall
& Rossman, 1999). In the course of my research, I collected documents about law and
regulations, statistics, official reports issued by the Taiwanese and Chinese governments.
I also read books, media reporting, and online postings regarding Taiwanese migrants in
China.
The key government and semi-government websites I accessed included, for China:
The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China, The State
Administration of Radio Film and Television, General Administration of Press and
Publication, Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, China Internet Network
Information Center, and China National Publication Import & Export Corporation
Shanghai Branch. For Taiwan these were: Mainland Affair Council, Straits Exchange
Foundation, National Statistics, and Government Information Offices. These websites
provide a range of regulations, policies, statistics, and reports about trade, human
movements, and media, etc. Some secondary materials were collected from Taiwan
Social Survey, Report on Development of China's Radio, Film and Television (2008),
94
Report on Development of China’s Media Industry (2009), and others.
I prepared for my field research, in part, by reading lots of trade books written by
Taiwanese migrants about their business operations and everyday lives in China. I also
downloaded articles of Commonwealth, a Taiwanese news magazine, relevant to
Taiwanese migrants. I enrolled in several Taiwanese community websites, such as Taima
Club and Taike Life, and constantly read Taiwanese migrants’online postings on these
websites. I also watched videos of such television show as Stories of Taiwanese
Businesspersons (Taishanggushi, CCTV of China) and Discovering China and Taiwan
(Zoujinliangan, ETV of Taiwan), which featured Taiwanese businesspeople in China.
These materials provided rich information about migrants’ lived experiences and ways of
thinking.
I read news coverage of major news events in 2008 about China and cross-Taiwan
Strait relations—including the Sichuan earthquake, the Tibet riot, the Beijing Olympics,
the tainted milk scandal, and the visits of two Chinese envoys to Taiwan. News reports of
the United Daily News (Taiwan) served as the main source because this newspaper and its
website were the most-used news outlets by Taiwanese migrants. I also accessed other
news sources, such as The New York Times (US), Xinhwa (China), the China Times
(Taiwan), and the Liberty Times (Taiwan). I did not aim for textual analysis; rather,
95
reading news coverage of these events helped me better understand my research subjects’
narratives; and it helped me to formulate more relevant and productive questions of my
subjects.
96
Chapter 3: Forming a Cosmopolitan Class? Career, Life, and
Lifestyle
“I feel as if my family are living in a fish bowl. The only difference is that this
fish bowl has relocated to mainland China. Our lives remain the same. We have
never swum out of this container. I know little about local things, people, and
surroundings.” (Hsiao-hui Tien—housewife, 6 year residence in China)
The “fish bowl” metaphor cited above was used by a Taiwanese housewife to
portray her life in Shanghai. By the time of my interview, she had moved to Shanghai
twice because of her husband’s job assignments, and had lived there for a total of nearly
six years. Both of her parents were born in China, so she had always thought of herself as
Chinese and of mainland China as her homeland. However, she lived like a stranger there.
Not every Taiwanese lives within an invisible fish bowl in China. Nevertheless, there is a
widespread outsider mentality and willful resistance to assimilation among migrants of
all sorts. Previous studies have attributed the Taiwanese sense of cultural strangeness in
China to several factors—the long-time political hostility and social separation between
Taiwan and China (Shen, 2005; Wu, 2001), differences in local dialects (Lin, 2006), and
97
Taiwanese socioeconomic superiority (Hsing, 1998; Wang, 2007).
These narratives were also frequently heard in my interviewees and should be taken
into account. This chapter analyzes why Taiwanese migrants insist on maintaining a
“Taiwanese way of life” in China. The term refers not so much to the transplanting of
Taiwanese culture to China as to migrants’making distinctions from the host society. I
argue that Taiwanese migrants’notion of living a Taiwanese way of life is affected by
their migration patterns. I focus on the mechanism of mobility—that is, how migrants’
transnational spatial mobility enables their upward mobility and creates a mobile culture
that makes them intentionally isolated from the locals. The first section provides
background information about my research subjects. The later sections discuss Taiwanese
migrants’ dual mobility, virtual segregation and lifestyle, and the sojourner mentality in
China.
Who Are Taiwanese Migrants in China?
As mentioned in Chapter 1, the mass migration of Taiwanese to China has been
largely associated with the relocation and expansion of Taiwanese businesses. The first
wave of economic migration started in the late 1980s, and was chiefly composed of male
98
owners and managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These early
migrants were generally called Taiwanese businessmen (taishang) by their compatriots in
Taiwan. Since the late 1990s, larger Taiwanese firms have also expanded their operations
to China and brought a great number of expatriates to their local subsidiaries. Since most
Taiwanese assigned to the mainland hold managerial jobs, they are called Taiwanese
cadres/executives (taigan). In recent years, however, such terms as Taiwanese moms
(taima), sisters (taijie), and students (taisheng) have also emerged in China to specify
new components of this migrant group, including family members, female expatriates,
and students. These proliferations of the tai-prefix phrases indicate the growing diversity
of the Taiwanese population in China. Aside from Taiwanese business-associated
migrants, my sample also includes people working for foreign or Chinese companies,
school teachers, academics, students, freelancers, and so on. In addition to these migrants,
partly for purposes of comparison, I also include returnees and business travelers in my
analysis.
This section uses some personal stories to illustrate who these Taiwanese migrants
are. I roughly categorize migrants into three groups according to their employment
statuses: business owners and spouses (including the self-employed), expatriate
employees, and family members. I further divide family members into housewives1
and
99
the second generation. Such categorization is not all-inclusive, but it offers a sketch of the
Taiwanese migrant population.
Business Owners (taishang)
Taiwanese investments in China include the relocation of companies, the extension
of Taiwan’s businesses, and joint ventures. Among business owners, the actual migrants
are those who have transferred their companies’key operations to China. In many cases,
the spouses of businessmen, called “boss’s wife” (toujianiang),2
may not have a formal
title, but they are de facto in charge of many tasks in the companies and households.
Contrarily to these business owners and spouses who live in China on a daily basis, the
heads of large enterprises or businesspeople with joint ventures usually visit China only
on business trips, albeit frequently.
Yu-Sheng Wang is a typical Taiwanese SME businessman who owns an electronics
company in Dongguan. Since the 1980s, his small factory in Taiwan had manufactured
low-end plastics exports, but in the mid-1990s, a shortage of low-waged labor and stricter
environmental regulations drove his factory out of the island. Meanwhile, the local
government in Guangdong was offering investment incentives such as tax holidays and
inexpensive lands. Wang relocated his company as well as his family to Dongguan. In a
100
few years, he began to manufacture electronic gadgets and set up a distribution arm in the
Untied States. His wife has since taken care of the U.S. business and their children, who
attend schools there. As a high school graduate, Wang hopes that American education will
equip his children with English skills and an “international outlook” (guojiguan), which
he thinks is crucial to future entrepreneurs. The children and his wife have all obtained
U.S. citizenships and regularly travel back and forth across the Pacific.
Wang’s company in Dongguan employs about 600 workers, but all senior
managerial positions are held by Taiwanese only, including family members and three
other expatriates. He explained that Chinese employees’ loyalty and ethics were
questionable. Taiwanese reside on higher floors of one dormitory building, segregated
from the Chinese staff’s residence on lower floors. They have a housemaid who takes
care of their meals, laundry, and other chores. They dine together and, after lunch and
dinner, watch Taiwanese satellite news channels—illegally received—in the living room.
Chinese staffers share a restaurant with shop-floor workers, who live in a separate
building. Wang bought a mansion outside the company compound but has never really
moved in. He feels more comfortable living close to his factory, in case something
happens. After doing business in Dongguan for over a decade, Wang has built good
relations with local officials. His guanxi networks enabled him to downplay a fire
101
incident at his factory days before my visit. However, his close friends, with whom he
haunts karaoke bars in the evenings or plays golf on weekends, remain Taiwanese. He
hopes to return to Taiwan with his wife once his son takes over his business, but the
timing seems indefinite.
Unlike Wang, Chi-Ming Shih has large investments in China but maintains his
furniture company’s core sectors in Taipei, on the grounds that Taiwan still has the
comparative advantage in design. He said that the Guangdong province of China had
become an “international hub” of trade in furniture. He had no choice but to build his
business there. Three years ago, Shih set up two exhibition centers in Dongguan and
invested in another two-dozen stores across China’s east coast via joint venture. He
thought it was the right decision because of his frequent encounters with foreigners of
diverse origins—from Dubai, India, Australia, Russia, and so on—in his stores in China.
Despite the rapid expansion of his business, Shih emphasized that he had no plan to
migrate to China. Instead, he hired Taiwanese managers to supervise his Chinese business.
On average, he stays in Taiwan for two weeks and then travels to China for one week.
During his stay, he visits his stores and meets his Chinese friends, including furniture
suppliers and business partners. Shih said that he is usually sleepless at night in
Dongguan, fearing that his safety might be compromised. Only when he returns to
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Taiwan does he feel at peace.
Expatriate Employees
Taiwanese expatriates usually enter the Chinese job market through one of three
tracks: job assignments by Taiwanese employers, recruitment through headhunters, and
personal connections. According to my interview data, being assigned by Taiwanese
parent companies to Chinese subsidiaries was the most common avenue. However, those
who had work experiences in China would transfer jobs to other companies through
personal networks if they saw better opportunities. A job assignment to China may or
may not be a free choice; the boundaries are not clear-cut. For example, Eric Chen and
Ellen Sun, both in their late twenties, took jobs in China from different routes and lived
divergent lives there. However, they share similar economic motivations for migration.
After losing his first job in Taiwan because of company downsizing, Eric worked
with a Taiwanese OEM (original equipment manufacturer) that produced athletic
footwear. Between 1976 and 1987, Taiwan was the world’s largest exporter of footwear
(Hsing, 1998). In the 1990s, most Taiwanese contractors of American footwear
companies moved their operations to China and maintained only value-added activities in
Taiwan, forming what has been called triangle manufacturing (Cheng, 1999). In the
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2000s, however, those value-added activities were also transferred to China and
Southeast Asia. Five years ago, Eric was asked by his company to either accept a new
assignment to Shenzhen or take severance. He had just proposed to his girlfriend and was
reluctant to leave Taiwan. But his employer promised to pay him double and provide
eight round-trip flight tickets a year. He considered it a good offer. Three days after his
wedding, Eric flew to Shenzhen alone, while his wife stayed in Taiwan. They have lived
separately since then.
Eric’s company employs around 20,000 Chinese and fifty Taiwanese in the
Shenzhen factories. The campus is so gigantic that it includes a soccer court, a bank, and
a clinic in addition to factories and dormitories. Taiwanese expatriates reside in a modern
building with such facilities as gyms, entertainment rooms, and a restaurant. Only
Taiwanese employees are permitted to use these facilities. When I visited on a Saturday at
noon, about a dozen younger Taiwanese took out their meals to the main entertaining
room and watched Taiwanese variety shows on a big TV screen. Someone told me that
the television set was turned on all day long on weekends. Eric works 7:30am-9: 30pm on
weekdays and is on duty on Saturdays at times. When he is free, he either watches videos
in his own room or hangs out with other young expatriates. He phones his wife and
mother in Taiwan every day, but his Taiwanese coworkers are more like his family
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members—they work, dine, live, chat, and have fun together. At the time of my visit, Eric
was worried about massive job cuts in the coming year. Should it happen, he might return
to Taiwan.
While Eric stays in the company compound most of the time, Ellen Sun enjoys life
in Shanghai city. She works at the Shanghai subsidiary of a Taiwanese high-tech
corporation, one of the top service ODMs (original design manufacturers) in the world.
Holding an MBAdegree from the United States, she had searched for jobs in Taiwan that
could keep her connected with “foreigners.” She found that the electronics industry was
the best choice, but most of the positions she pursued moved to China. Through an
executive recruiter, she landed her current job where her responsibility is to coordinate
with American clients to develop electronic products. Ellen said that most expatriates
took jobs in China because of “money.” She is satisfied with her salary as well as her life
in Shanghai. She lives in the city and takes a shuttle to her office in the industrial district
on work days. As a result, she is able to have a metropolitan lifestyle—shopping in
modern malls and frequenting restaurants, KTVs, lounges, and disco pubs. As a single
woman, Ellen feels lucky to stay in an “internationalized” city but is open to working
anywhere, as long as a job brings a better pay package.
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Housewives
While, in China, the wife and adult children of a business owner often hold
important positions in family enterprises, the spouse of a male expatriate employee tends
to be a housewife. On the one hand, it is difficult for these wives to find satisfying jobs in
the places where their husbands work. On the other hand, a sense of economic security,
owing to their husbands’ higher incomes, persuades them to stay home. Many of the
housewives I interviewed used to be career women in Taiwan. They chose to quit jobs
and move to China for the sake of family unity. Besides, widespread stories about
Taiwanese men’s causal sexual encounters with Chinese women or the phenomenon of
“bao ernai (keeping mistress)” (Shen, 2005) also encouraged them to migrate with their
husbands. Many Taiwanese households in China hired full-time or part-time housemaids
for domestic chores. Accordingly, housewives usually had leisure to build a more active
life outside the family, if they established their own social networks.
Hsiao-hui Tien came to Shanghai five years ago with her husband, who was
promoted to a high-ranking position in a Taiwanese retail chain. She said that the
opportunity was too desirable to be passed by. She reached an agreement with her
husband that they should move together to avoid “family problems.” After a scrutiny of
schools, she found that the “international division” of an elite public school in Shanghai
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taught in English and would provide a good education for their son. However, migration
turned out to be more difficult than Tien had expected. Her husband was too busy in his
new job to take care of the family. Although they hired a full time housemaid, Tien was
helpless in the beginning. She was not familiar with the environment and often felt
cheated by locals. Her life, she said, was devoid of meaning, as she stayed home all day
long without much to do. The only person she could talk to was her housemaid. She said
that she almost cried every day until she became acquainted with other Taiwanese
housewives via a Taiwanese community website (details in Chapter 7).
Tien’s family bought a decent house in a gated community close to the city center,
and she got a car to drive around. By the time I met her, she had developed a hectic
schedule—eating out with friends, playing mahjong, working out, shopping, and going
for spa treatments and massages. She is content with her new life in Shanghai but has
never felt a sense of belonging. She emphasized that her family’s migration to Shanghai
was temporary because her husband might repatriate to Taiwan or lose his job.
The Second Generation
Currently, most adult children of Taiwanese migrants are not exactly the second
generation. Taiwanese investments to China started in the late 1980s, but early migrants
107
were overwhelmingly lone males. Therefore, the China-born second-generation migrants
are mostly in their childhood. However, many Taiwan-born children did move to China,
before or after coming of age, in great part because of family businesses. They are better
described as the 1.25, 1.5 or 1.75 generation coined by Rumbaut (1997).3
Vichy Kao migrated to Dongguan at fourteen, six years after her father moved there
to establish a new arm for his electronic company. Before the family was reunited in
China, she stayed behind with her siblings and mother, who took charge of the family’s
factory in Taiwan. During her adolescent years in China, she was sent to a Hong Kong
boarding school in nearby Shenzhen. Then she attended college in Japan to enhance her
capacity for doing business with Japanese clients. Since graduation, Vichy has worked at
the family business as her father planned, and resides upstairs from her office. On
weekends, she either plays video games or watches DVDs in the dormitory, hobbies that
she grew up with. She told me that her parents had been too busy at work, so she had
learned to entertain herself.
A young woman in her mid-twenties, Vichy said that she had been used to the life at
factories, either in China or in Taiwan. Her family also maintains a very Taiwanese way
of life. They have shrines in the company, at which they worship every day as they did in
Taiwan. At my visit on a traditional Taiwanese festival day, the family prepared an
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abundant feast in honor of gods and ancestors—rituals that were wiped out in China due
to the Cultural Revolution. Vichy is adept at practicing complex rituals that fewer and
fewer of today's Taiwanese comprehend. As the oldest child, she feels responsible for
helping the family business, which she expects will be inherited by her younger brother
someday. Vichy emphasized that she could go anywhere if she left the company. After all,
she had been “floating” all her life.
Unlike Vichy, Yuen-Kai Lee moved to China as an adult. While his parents left for
China for investments in the early 1990s, he stayed in Taiwan to finish his higher
education. Eight years ago, he was asked to help his family’s real estate business in
Suzhou. Lee initially regarded his stay in China as a short journey because of his aversion
to the Chinese regime. Unexpectedly, he got stuck there. The real estate company, his
father’s joint venture, promoted him to the rank of senior manager. Besides, he met a
Chinese woman whom he has since married. Following his parents’ retirement to Taiwan,
Lee has found himself increasingly involved in his wife’s family business in Beijing,
where he has begun to establish a Chinese network. Lee said that he sees a brighter career
vision in China, so he has no desire to move back to Taiwan in the near future.
Spatial Mobility and Upward Mobility
109
Taiwanese migrants in China consist of people of various education levels, incomes
or wealth, and cultural capital. However, the vignettes shown in the last section
demonstrate that generally these migrants enjoy a high socioeconomic status in the local
society. Recent migration studies (Foner, Rumbaut & Gold, 2000; Wimmer & Glick
Schiller, 2003) note that contemporary migrants represent polarized demographic
characteristics: manual laborers and low-wage service workers on the one hand and
highly-educated, highly-skilled professionals, technicians, and managers on the other. It
is true that most Taiwanese migrants hold managerial jobs—in SMEs or large
corporations—but not all of them are highly-skilled workers. Besides, the threshold of
migration to China is relatively low, due to China’s proximity to Taiwan—geographically
and culturally—and its looser policy on visas and work permits towards Taiwanese.4
Despite the fact that Taiwanese migrants do not all belong to the same economic
class, they indeed form a distinctive social group in China, based not only on nationality
but also on social status. Two factors contribute to their economic privileges: the
difference of living standards between China and Taiwan, and Taiwanese migrants’
spatial and upward mobility. First, Taiwanese take the advantage of migrating from a
more advanced society to a developing country. In 2007, Taiwan’s GPI per capita was
110
$17,950, sharply in contrast to China’s $2,370 (The World Bank, 2007). That means the
average Taiwanese family can live the life of an upper-middle class family in China, if
they wish. As a result, they often feel a sense of superiority, owing not only to their
higher incomes but also to a more “progressive” place of origin.5
This class distinction is
most obvious in industrial districts, where Taiwanese managers encounter Chinese
migrant workers (dagongzai)6
from poorer inland provinces.
Second, migrating to China, for the Taiwanese, accompanies the ascendance of
economic and occupational statuses. Watson (1960, 1964) observed that the expansion of
national corporations in mid-century England brought a legion of managerial spiralists to
industrial towns. These professionals’ upward mobility was combined with their spatial
mobility. Despite sharing similar economic standards with local businessmen, the
spiralists developed a more generic culture, one with international standards of value that
kept them apart from the locals. Spiralism—the combination of mobility in residence,
career, and social standing (Watson, 1960, p.416)—is evident among Taiwanese migrants,
albeit in a transnational context. Expatriate job assignments to China often, if not always,
bring pay raises and career promotions. Business people, if they succeed, are able to
extend the scale and influences of their enterprises.
By and large, expatriate employees can skip some rungs on the career ladder when
111
taking jobs in China. Their occupational upward mobility is evidenced by better salaries,
higher job positions, greater scopes of management, and possibly, more impressive
resumes. In Taiwanese firms, expatriates—newly hired and existing employees
alike—are paid much higher salaries than Chinese in the same positions. This is because
the wages of Taiwanese workers are measured by their ranks in Taiwan’s parent
companies, while the pay of Chinese workers is based on local levels. On average, my
interviewees had 50% to 100% pay raises immediately after transferring to China. The
pay packages might also include flight tickets, homecoming vacations, allowances,
bonuses, stock options, and so on.7
A young engineer (SH20A) working for a Taiwanese
electronic company told me that his starting salary in China was roughly equal to ¥18,000
($2570) per month, a 50% pay raise. He also became a division head supervising a team
of 80 people. On the contrary, Chinese employees in his position were paid between
¥6,000 ($850) and ¥9,000 ($1285), half of his salary. An operative on the shop floor was
paid only the minimum wage—about ¥750 ($107) per month at that time. The pay
differentials are sharpened by the fact that Taiwanese usually hold higher positions in
Taiwanese firms. This has created a distance between the Taiwanese and Chinese in terms
of class relations.
Investments in China can also mean upward mobility for business people, as they
112
usually expand the scale of their enterprises. A manager (SH02) who owned a share of a
printing house in Kunshan said that he hired thirty employees in China. Their payroll was
equal to that of only five workers in Taiwan. Because of the larger workforce, he could
showcase the plant to his clients and feel like he was running a “real company” rather
than a workshop. It was precisely this achievement of being a “boss” that made a
businesswoman (SH26) feel like “Empress Dowager Cixi,” a woman who held supreme
authority for nearly half a century in China’s Qing Dynasty. When I walked with her
around her business center in Shanghai, I saw that she received salutes from a herd of
compliant security guards. Taiwanese expatriates’dual mobility—spatial and upward
mobility as one package at the time of migration—and the gap in the standards of living
between China and Taiwan provide huge economic incentives for people to invest or
work in China. They also greatly influenced migrants’lifestyles and mentality in places
of adoption.
Being Global Nomads and Adventurers
As Gold (1997) argues, post-migration reconstructions of reasons for exit can be
distorted by current experiences or selective memory. When asked why they had moved
113
to China, my subjects often showed an ambiguous attitude. On one hand, they felt
compelled to “follow the business trend”—meaning “moving westward” (xijin) to China.
Some people said that migration was not their previous life plan. They just seized the
opportunities. Such narratives of passivity were more apparent among expatriate
employees, who often moved to China because of job assignments. Only few
acknowledged that they had actively looked for jobs in China. On the other hand, even
these passive migrants would say that China had abundant economic opportunities, which
only occurred during a radical societal change. Accordingly, they were anxious to “seize
the moment.” Business people were particularly keen to become a shareholder of “China
Inc.” upon its initial public stock offering (IPO). They saw China as the world factory, as
an emergent gigantic consumer market, and as an international hub of trade (see table
3.1). Whatever they were aiming for—cheap labor, the big market, or trade—Taiwanese
investors felt urgent to act.
Table 3.1 Most-mentioned reasons for investment or working in China
Push factors of Taiwan Pull factors of China
Common
factors
Political infighting and uncertainty
(Expecting) economic slump
The same language and culture
Business
People
Higher labor cost
Small market
Cheap labor
Investment incentives and government
efficiency
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A getaway to the global market
Huge domestic market
Expatriate
workers
Difficult to land (appealing) jobs
Small scale of companies
Higher salaries
Preempting good positions
Having the “China experience” for
better career development
The anxiety not to be kept out of China’s economic prosperity also haunts some
wage earners. My interviewees often mentioned the importance of having the “China
experience,” particularly when one is young. “China experience is inevitable,” a
housewife (SZ19) explained why she gave up her job in Taiwan and came to Shenzhen
with her husband, who became a senior manager with a Fortune 500 Taiwanese company.
“Only in China could my husband oversee large orders for high-end consumer electronics
from around the world,” she added. Such reasoning was not limited to managerial elites
in multinational corporations. Ping Liu, a middle-aged single mother with a high-school
degree, cherishes her job as finance manager in a lumber company in Dongguan. She said
proudly that when her boss is away, she is de facto in charge of the whole plant with
about 1000 employees. On the contrary, she would never have been able to get a senior
managerial job in Taiwan. In fact, a 2008 survey on Taiwanese wage-earners revealed that
the main attraction of working in China was that “the China experience facilitated career
advancement” (Peng, 2008). Even a Western-educated academic (SH27) turned down a
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job offer from a prestigious university in Taipei and chose to work at a higher-education
institution in Shanghai. Besides economic incentives, he told me that he wanted to have
the China experience: “I don’t want to be an onlooker in Taiwan and fail to witness the
rise of China.”
Although China’s economic development lagged behind Taiwan's, the nation is
incomparably larger than Taiwan, and increasingly, becoming a powerhouse of the world
economy. It is precisely the two faces of China—as an industrial latecomer and as a rising
giant—that motivate Taiwanese to invest and work in China. Migration from a small
island to the vast, “uncultivated” mainland feels like a great adventure. For businessmen,
it is a realization of entrepreneurship. For expatriate employees, it becomes a rite of
passage that one should experience at least once for the sake of career development. As a
result, my subjects often reasoned their presence in China with the logic of “nomads” or
“adventurers.”
First, there is a widespread nomadic mentality among Taiwanese migrants that “one
should graze cattle on pastures when they are lush and green.” Business people argue that
an opportune timing for entry to China will be short-lived. If they fail to hitch on the
“China-fever” bandwagon early, they may miss the window of opportunity. One
interviewee (SH11) asked her previous employer for a job in Suzhou in order to help her
116
husband set up restaurant business there. She said that China was a “goldmine” but one
had to dig into it early. “We don’t want to be trailblazers, but we don’t want to be left
behind, either,” she emphasized. Similarly, Li-ling Chang, a CFO with a leading
Taiwanese high-tech corporation, said that she met a group of Chinese graduates from
elite universities in the late 1990s and started feeling insecure about her career. She
decided to preempt a position in a big Taiwanese firm in China and eventually got
promoted as she had planned. The necessity of seizing the moment was also expressed in
such notions as “Shanghai is the next New York and Tokyo,” emphasized by my research
subjects. Therefore, there was a need to “catch up the last train” to China’s prosperity.
Second, migrating to China was somewhat adventurous. Migrants feel that the vast
land of China is a “frontier”—full of opportunities and dangers at the same time. On one
hand, it is easier to start a business or find high-salary jobs in China. On the other hand,
one has to tolerate China’s living standards, particularly when the business or job
opportunities are located outsides modern cities. When Feng-yi Pang came to Shanghai in
the mid-1990s, what he saw was a status of “chaos.” He sensed that there were a lot of
chances to make a profit because Taiwan had experienced the same process before.
Besides, compared with vast China, Taiwan was like a small “cage” that would restrain
his business potential. “I liked adventure and challenge, so that I decided to move to
117
here,” Pang recalled. The comparison between small Taiwan and big China was
frequently heard during my field trip. One businessman (SH26) emphasized: “A market
to businessmen is like a stage to actors. China is such a big stage to play. But one has to
be aware of numerous traps.” Even a housewife (SZ13) said that when she arrived in
China, the image of Wagon Train, an American western movie, appeared in her mind. She
felt as if her family had been heading to an unexplored land.
Of course, not every adventure leads to success. Some of my interviewees had been
jobless at some point. An expatriate (SH16) who had stayed in China for ten years
lamented that he had had a lot of ups and downs there. He once had a monthly income of
¥60,000 ($8500) when making a fortune from business investment, but he also once lived
on a salary tantamount to that of a Chinese migrant worker. This man emphasized that
economically, he was not successful in China. However, the idea of moving back to
Taiwan made him feel unfulfilled, so he had decided to hang on. Some migrants joke that
currently there are a lot of “Taiwanese vagabonds” (tailiu) in China—people who are
jobless but refuse to return home. Betty Lee, an expatriate employee turned
businesswoman, said that she was once unemployed for one year but felt ashamed to go
back to Taiwan.
Migrants like Betty might not be the great conqueror Genghis Khan, as portrayed by
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the Taiwanese media (see Chapter 1), but they do see themselves as global nomads and
adventurers who have come to the mainland to pursue their China dreams. Their mobility
has helped them develop a self-perception of having a more “cosmopolitan” vision,
compared not only with the Chinese locals but also with their “insular” countrymen in
Taiwan. The vastness of China and this country’s rising global influence make migrants
feel more “internationalized”—a buzzword repeatedly raised by my interviewees. In this
way, they are simultaneously engaged in Taiwan and China, or even other countries, and
they also develop a consciousness of being the transnational class separated from the
immobile people in any of those places.
Distinction and Virtual Segregation
Despite the fact that many expatriates work for Taiwanese firms and do business
with Taiwanese companies, they do not actually live in ethnic enclaves in China. Instead,
they are constantly in contact with Chinese people at work and in pleasure. However,
interviewed migrants often indicated that they continued to live a “Taiwanese way of life”
after migration. A sales manager (SH06A) likened the Taiwanese in Shanghai to Jews in
the Diaspora: “We form a small circle of Taiwanese in which we continue to see
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Taiwanese doctors, eat Taiwanese foods, and watch Taiwanese TV.” He joked that
migrants in nearby industrial districts were virtually living in Taiwan. A visit to Shanghai
city once in a while was, ironically, like “going abroad” for them. Literally, this was an
overstatement and at best, a metaphor. Nevertheless, Taiwanese migrants often said that
they felt like they were still living in Taiwan and made little effort to adapt to the local
life. Taiwan’s linguistic and cultural affinity with China might create such an illusion,
allowing them to maintain their original lives without much change. However, many
migrants do intend to keep their distance from the locals. Their isolationist mentality is
related to their higher class status and their self-perception of having a more
cosmopolitan outlook, which presents itself in their residences, children’s education,
consumption patterns, and social lives, and so forth.
Residence
Previous studies (Deng, 2002; Wang, 2007) show that Taiwanese migrants usually
reside in gated communities in China, such as company-provided dormitories and
luxurious residential complexes, which makes them spatially segregated from the outside
world. However, these company compounds and residential communities are not
exclusive to Taiwanese residents. Neither do all migrants confine their activities to these
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isolated settings. Their degree of spatial mobility is contingent on the locations they live
in. In modern cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, Taiwanese feel comfortable
traveling around. In industrial districts, particularly in less developed areas in Southern
China, migrants tend not to inhabit local neighborhoods because of safety concerns.
Most Taiwanese companies in China provide meals and accommodations for
expatriates, without or with a minimal charge. In industrial districts, Taiwanese
employees and business owners usually reside within or close to company compounds
consisting of factories, warehouses, offices, restaurants, and dormitories. In a sense, such
compounds are self-sufficient oases. Expatriates’ basic demands and daily chores are well
taken care of by service laborers so that they can concentrate on their work. In the
Shenzhen-Dongguan area, working from 8 am to 9 pm, six days a week, is normal.
Sometimes night shifts are not made official, but expatriates feel obligated to work late. A
female asset manager (SZ07) emphasized that her job is based on “responsibility” rather
than working hours. As long as the shop floor is in operation, she has to stay on the alert.
On Sunday, she is either on duty or too exhausted to go out.
In addition to long working hours, business owners and expatriates in Shenzhen and
Dongguan expressed a concern about safety in their surroundings. They argued that crime
rates were high and that Taiwanese—deemed richer than locals—were easy targets.
121
Business owners often have personal drivers for transport. Some expatriate employees
rarely leave company compounds, especially during weekdays. When they need to do so,
they hire acquainted drivers and band together. Some of my interviewees reminded me
not to take public transportation or stop a taxi on the streets to avoid robberies or
something worse. Although these compounds are equipped with tight security, some
cautious businessmen still feel unsafe. A general manager (SZ25) arranged for his family
to live in the city and spends two hours daily commuting to his factory in the outskirts of
Shenzhen. He insists on driving himself so that company chauffeurs will not know his
family’s residence.
Expatriate employees living in well-planned industrial districts are less constrained.
In Suzhou, for instance, more migrants drive, and those who don’t are less fearful of
crimes. A senior manager (SH09) emphasized that Suzhou was safer than Taipei because
the streets are patrolled by the armed police. However, a more subtle segregation, along
an ethnic line, remains in factory settings everywhere. Taiwanese expatriates, whatever
their positions are, usually reside and dine separately from their Chinese coworkers. In
smaller firms, the boundaries between the boss and the Taiwanese subordinates are
blurred, while the division between Chinese and Taiwanese is salient. Eric Chen, who
worked for a Taiwanese footwear firm, said that his company accommodated Chinese
122
staffers only outside the compound based on a fear that they would steal business secrets.
The spatial separation furthers not only mutual suspicions but also class distinction
between the Taiwanese and Chinese. The dormitories and restaurants for the Taiwanese
are usually better than those for the Chinese. A female expatriate (SH20B) said that the
restaurant for the Chinese workers was closer to her dormitory, but she seldom dined in
there for the sake of her health.
Those migrants who have families around are more likely to live away from the
factories and reside in gated residential communities. For example, in a huge residential
complex in the Shenzhen suburb concentrate hundreds of Taiwanese, most of whom are
employees or family members of a big Taiwanese corporation. Shu-Min Lu’s family lives
in a community within this complex, protected by two security checkpoints and
numerous patrolling guards. Visitors are only allowed entry with IDs and confirmed
invitations. As a housewife, Lu said that she seldom goes outside the complex unless she
is with her family or other Taiwanese housewives. She feels that the neighborhood is
dangerous because it is situated outside the gateways of the Shenzhen Special Economic
Zone (SEZ) (guanwai). On the contrary, migrants who live in Shanghai or Shenzhen
guanne (inside the zone) feel safe to idle in the city by car, taxi, or subway.8
The main
reason given for living in those security-guarded residences is that they are newer and
123
have better housing units. While these gated communities do not actually segregate
Taiwanese migrants from their neighborhoods, they do serve to distinguish them as
people of the higher class in the Chinese society.
Children’s Education
Compared to company compounds, the campuses of Taiwanese schools are even
more isolated. The rapid increase of Taiwanese families in China has created a great
demand for educational institutions suitable for Taiwanese children. Since 2000, there
have been three Taiwanese schools set up in China that provide K-12 education.9
These
schools hire instructors from Taiwan to teach core subjects, such as Mandarin,
mathematics, and science. Students study the traditional Chinese characters used in
Taiwan. They also adopt Taiwanese textbooks so that they can take the entry exams for
Taiwan’s universities.10
Most students—including kindergarteners—and teachers live on
campus and have various activities together day and night. These private schools are
partially subsidized by the Taiwanese government, and their tuition is middle-of-the-road
in China (see table 3.2 for a comparison of various school types). An administrator of
Taiwan Businessmen’s Dongguan School (SZ23) said that he never considered himself to
be in the land of China because the campus was a “little Taiwan.” In fact, many
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Taiwanese children are sent to this school to avoid mixing with local children.
Table 3.2 Tuition of schools with large numbers of Taiwanese students
School types Examples Tuition (semester)*
International
School
Shanghai Singapore
International School(K-12)
¥72,000-136,000
Taiwanese
School
Hwa Dong Businessman’s
School(K-12)
¥15,000-19,300**
Private School SMIC Private School(K-12) ¥12,000-16,000 (Chinese track)
¥30,000-37,000 (English track)
Charter School Shenzhen Nanshan Bilingual
School(1-12)
¥ 4,400-6,000 (ordinary)
¥ 10,000-11,600 (experimental)
Public School
International
division
Shanghai High School
International Division
¥ 38,800-42,800
Public School Free/ “Sponsor fees” may apply
*Tuition is based on the 2009-2010 school year. Other fees are not included.
** Total expense, including the fees of dormitory and meals.
Sources: school websites.
However, attending Taiwanese schools is not the sole option for Taiwanese migrants'
children. On the surface, the number of students at these schools seems to grow annually.
However, they have been increasingly losing the edge in student recruitments. In 2006,
the three Taiwanese schools had about 2,500 students. In Shanghai alone, however, there
were 4,300 Taiwanese children of age to attend grades K-12 (The Ministry of Education,
Taiwan, 2007). My interviewees often complained that Taiwanese schools were boarding
schools far away from homes. Some migrants feel that their children should receive more
125
“internationalized” or “localized” education instead of staying in Taiwanese enclaves. In
Shanghai and Shenzhen, there are a variety of schools to choose from—international
schools, international divisions of public schools, private schools, charter schools, and
various ranks of public schools.
Without a doubt, only well-heeled families can afford the expensive tuition of
international schools. For example, Shanghai Singapore International School asks as
much as ¥272,000 ($40,000) a year for tuition alone. Min-yi Chang arranged for her son
to attend this school, hoping that he could learn English earlier in a more
“internationalized environment.” She plans for her son to study in a Western country for
higher education. For those families with less disposable incomes, the budding private
schools in China deliver an alternative. Their tuitions are usually moderate—similar to
Taiwanese schools. They also offer English-track education in addition to Chinese
courses. Some parents say that studying Chinese is also important for their children
because they might have to work or do business in China in the future. The same reason
propels more and more parents to send their children to public schools, preparing them to
compete with Chinese students from the start. After a survey showed that some
Taiwanese students wished to pursue higher education in China, Taiwan Businessmen’s
Dongguan School negotiated a special channel for their graduates to apply to Chinese
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universities.11
Attending public schools may be a step toward “going native,” but such localization
is highly selective. Public schools in China are tuition-free but explicitly hierarchical,
ranking from elite schools through schools for locals to schools for migrants. Even elite
schools are graded on several levels. Taiwanese parents often target the better ones, if not
the best ones. Pei-ying Chu sent her children to local public schools upon migration, with
the thinking that “China is the linkage to the international society.” She only realized
afterwards that the student body of this school was comprised of the children of migrant
workers, and she then immediately transferred her children to an elite pubic school. Also,
not every public school is “free” for all. Many jurisdictions in China ask a local
household registration (huko) or payment for students to attend public schools. It is an
open secret that a certain “sponsor fee” is required by elite schools.
Feng-yi Pang, a veteran migrant whose daughter is enrolled in a top public
elementary school in Shanghai, emphasized that even money did not guarantee admission
to this school. “You need to have better guanxi than others,” he noted, adding that the
child of a high-profile district official had been rejected. Therefore, while the walls of
Taiwanese schools segregate Taiwanese children from the outside world, the barriers to
entering better schools in China prevent them from contact with certain components of
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the Chinese society. Vichy Kao, a housewife, admitted that schools of higher tuition or
fees functioned as the mechanism of “sifting” some students from others. The reasons for
sending children to these different kinds of schools may look different—staying
Taiwanese, becoming internationalized, or going native. However, underneath these
various reasons exists the common intention of making a distinction.
Consumption
Consumption is a significant symbol of class status. Because of their higher income in
relation to average Chinese households, Taiwanese expatriates enjoy a more luxurious
lifestyle in China. When asked whether they were indigenized to the local society,
Taiwanese respondents often used consumption as a key index. Such examples include: “I
usually buy foods of higher quality, but I’m not afraid of eating disgusting street foods at
times” (SH05); “Unlike other Taiwanese people, I ride on subway for work instead of
taking taxi” (SH13); “I’m okay with eating a ¥5 lunch box, like most of my Chinese
coworkers do” (SH19). In Shenzhen, every housewife I interviewed said she buys
groceries at Sam’s Club at least once a week, saying that the quality of products is better
than that of those in traditional markets and local supermarkets. Some frequent Hong
Kong to search for products not “made in China.” Since many migrants are concerned
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about food safety and product quality in China, they are willing to spend more money to
keep a higher living standard.
However, it should be noted that few Taiwanese live a life of “conspicuous
consumption” as described by Veblen (1899/1994). First, not every migrant can afford to
keep up with the Joneses. As Mei-li Wu stressed, income differences among migrants
were too great to ignore, but Taiwanese still lived with an expectation that they were
richer than locals. For instance, it can be difficult for Taiwanese to make satisfactory
bargains with Chinese merchants. In fact, it was a common complaint among my subjects
that they were asked a much higher price for the same product and treated like “daibao”
(Taiwanese simpletons). As a result, they have tried to learn Chinese accents and usages
to avoid exposing their Taiwanese identities. Second, richer migrants have another reason
to remain low-profile in China. They are self-restrained in lifestyle to prevent possible
crimes or unnecessary controversies.
Avoiding conspicuous consumption, Taiwanese mark class distinction in a more
subtle way—the difference of taste. Some migrants joke that only a few years ago,
Shanghainese would wander around the streets or shop at department stores in pajamas,
indicating their lack of decency. Despite the fact that nowadays few Shanghainese really
do so, “pajamas parties” become cool events among young Taiwanese migrants.12
They
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may have transformed the meaning of wearing pajamas in public from vulgarity to
avant-garde, but the sense of belittling remains. A school teacher (SZ24) emphasized that
he would rather wear counterfeit brand-name casual attire than Chinese suits. He said that
his wife was Chinese, but he didn’t want to “look like Chinese” from the countryside.
Taiwanese migrants’criticism of Chinese low taste includes those nouveau riches,
who, in migrants’view, like to parade their wealth. A businessman (SZ01) analyzed
different consumption patterns between the Taiwanese and Chinese: “When we have
disposable money, we use it to expand the factory or buy equipments. On the contrary,
Chinese would spend on luxurious goods, cars and houses. They focus more on their
appearances.” In a similar regard, a restaurant manager (SH19) observed: “Taiwanese are
clinging to every dollar, while Chinese like extravagant restaurant experiences. They
need not work hard as we did to get their ‘first barrel of gold.’” Therefore, some
Taiwanese migrants admit that they live a better life than the average Chinese, but they
are also moderate on spending. What distinguishes them from affluent locals, they
believe, is a higher standard in taste.
Social Life and Marriages
Outside of work, Taiwanese migrants usually have a limited social life in China.
130
Visiting massage parlors is a favorite activity outside the home. When seeking out
companions, they haunt restaurants or karaoke bars. Those who live with family may buy
groceries at international supermarket chains on the weekend. Some have “healthier”
hobbies, such as playing softball or golf, cycling, and travel, albeit mostly with other
Taiwanese. A few are more socially active, but many of my interviewees said that their
lives are simple and somewhat boring in China. Expatriate employees living in company
dormitories often described themselves as a zhainan (family man) or zhainu (family
woman)13
who enjoyed staying at home. Even those living in Shanghai said that it was
difficult to find satisfactory entertainment. A manager (SH05) explained that China was a
“materialistic society,” in which only rich people could afford better services—highways,
theme parks, and high-end restaurants. Therefore, he would rather spend his time at home
on weekends.
As for social networks, those who stay longer in China may have more Chinese
acquaintances in the business community or at local bureaucracies. Some have kinship
relationships with the Chinese, by blood or by marrying Chinese women. These people
are more likely to say that they have Chinese friends. Nevertheless, they still maintain a
Taiwanese-only intimate circle. The majority of my interviewees hang out only with other
Taiwanese at leisure. On one hand, staying in the Taiwanese social network is an
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intentional act of “self-protection.” Many migrants complained that they had been
defrauded by Chinese business partners or employees, so they distrusted Chinese people
in general. Contrastingly, they thought of their fellow Taiwanese as more loyal and
trustworthy.
The suspicion towards the Chinese also comes from political antagonism between
the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Some migrants said that they had good relations with
Chinese but felt tired of their nationalistic unification campaign (tongzhan)—arguing that
Taiwan was part of China and criticizing Taiwan independence. A businessman (SZ04)
who regularly visited China on business trips recalled that he once had dinner in China
with some Chinese officials. At that occasion, he was reminded that one should not forget
where his ancestors came from—meaning mainland China. The next morning he found
himself forcibly “escorted” to visit his ancestral town hundreds of miles away.
On the other hand, the formation of Taiwanese social networks is also a consequence
of class differences. In office or factory settings, Taiwanese tend to occupy higher
positions. It is not appropriate or desirable for them to make friends with their
subordinates. Sometimes the two reasons—mutual distrust and class difference—overlap.
After an eight-year stay China, one expatriate manager (SZ05) has developed personal
networks primarily composed of Chinese people. However, he said in a definite tone that
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Taiwanese people are more reliable. “You have to be cautious of making Chinese friends
because the economic inequality in China is so great that you never know why people
approach you.” Therefore, many Taiwanese migrants are too afraid of being taken
advantage of by Chinese to associate with them too closely.
Despite the prevalent intermarriages between Taiwanese men and Chinese women,
my interviewees who married Chinese wives seldom make Chinese friends through their
wives. In addition, Taiwanese women rarely marry Chinese men. Here class distinction
and gender hierarchy work together to create the perception that it is appropriate for
Taiwanese men to marry Chinese women, but not for Taiwanese women to marry Chinese
men. Every single Taiwanese woman I met in China told me that she would never marry
a Chinese man. They often cited “cultural difference” as the reason, but the sense was
that they did not want to “marry down.” One of my female interviewees (SZ15), a single
woman, made fun of Taiwanese women in China—they were either single, divorced, or if
lucky, getting married before migration. Accordingly, single Taiwanese women often see
their stays in China as temporary, unless they want to remain single. They also sense their
disadvantage in competing with Chinese women for Taiwanese men. They have thus
developed a somewhat hostile attitude towards Chinese women, who they see as
“unrestrained” in sexuality. This hard feeling is also shared by Taiwanese married women,
133
who fear that their husbands will be seduced by Chinese mistresses.
On the contrary, Taiwanese men find themselves popular in China. For example,
Feng-yi Pang told me that he was pursued by his Chinese wife, a physician in Shanghai.
He reiterated a saying: “The most beautiful women sail across the Strait, while the less
beautiful ones stay in Shanghai”—meaning that Shanghai women were crazy about
Taiwanese men. The gender and ethnic differences in the marriage market in China
explain why female migrants are more detached from Chinese society, viewing it as a
temporary stop. In addition, since male is considered the dominant sex, Taiwanese men
who marry Chinese women are less inclined to be incorporated into their wives’personal
connections. As a result, Taiwanese migrants often maintain a Taiwanese-dominant social
network in China.
The examination of Taiwanese migrants’life experiences—residences, children’s
education, consumption habits, and social networks—show that they intend to live a
“Taiwanese way of life” and keep a distance from the host society. The “Taiwanese way
of life” indicates the making of distinction, not only in terms of socioeconomic class, but
also in terms of lifestyle.
Work-life Disjuncture and Home Connections
134
Waldinger (2008) categorized contemporary international migrants into three
groups—immigrants who plan to settle down in a new place, transmigrants who maintain
here-there ties, and sojourners whose displacement is experienced as temporary and who
never put down roots. My interview data suggest that it is not appropriate to place all
Taiwanese migrants in China into the same category. The issue of categorization is further
complicated by historical and political relations between China and Taiwan. A few of my
interviewees were extremely resistant to the term immigrants (yimin) in Chinese, for
different reasons. Some argued that migrating to China was different from migrating to
other foreign countries; therefore, immigration sounded wrong to them. Conversely, some
said that labeling them as immigrants suggested a betrayal to Taiwan, a stain they tried to
avoid. Those who planed to stay in China for a long while suggested settlers (yijuzhe) as
a more neutral and acceptable term, despite its indication of a status of immigration.
From the perspective of citizenship, Taiwanese migrants are expatriates—foreigners
who decide to live abroad for a while. My interviewees said that they had never heard of
any Taiwanese changing citizenship to the PRC. At present, Taiwanese passports make
border crossing easier, greatly enhancing the spatial mobility of the Taiwanese. Some
hold, or intend to obtain, passports of Western countries, while at the same time retaining
135
their Taiwanese citizenship. Other reasons for continuing their membership with their
home country include Taiwan’s better medical services and welfare system, China’s
undemocratic political environment, and migrants’ allegiance to Taiwan.
Maintaining Taiwanese citizenship allows migrants to “keep feet in both worlds”
(levitt, 2000), as transnational migrants do. However, their engagements with the
countries of exit and entry are highly selective. Mostly Taiwanese migrants are
economically embedded in China but are rarely involved in other types of activities.
China’s political system and sensitive cross-Strait relations in particular make them
politically silent in China. In contrast, many migrants remain concerned about Taiwan’s
domestic politics. A community website administrator told me that his website mobilized
thousands of migrants—by helping them to book airline tickets—to return to Taiwan for
casting votes on Taiwan’s presidential election in 2008. He estimated that eight out of ten
migrants in China were Blue Camp voters (KMT supporters)14
so the mobilization
should help KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou, who spoke in favor of reconciliatory cross-Strait
relations, get elected. Some migrants said that they did not go to the poll but gathered
with friends in China to watch the televised vote-counting via Taiwanese satellite
channels.
Economic involvements also keep Taiwanese migrants’ transnational connections
136
with their home country alive. Many business people still have investments at home and
have to take care of them once in a while. The pay of expatriate employees at Taiwanese
firms is usually split between Taiwan and China, but sometimes involves a “third place”
with which their companies register, like Hong Kong. Such distributions of salaries lower
expatriates’ income taxes, especially in China, which has higher tax rates. Accordingly,
migrants usually have direct deposit bank accounts in Taiwan. Some expatriates are
offered share options in Taiwan’s parent companies. These economic considerations make
migrants keep a watchful eye on Taiwan’s economic and political change. In this sense,
they are better described as a large transnational constituency of Taiwan.
Kinship linkages matter a lot in migrants’transnational activities. Some expatriates
are single and others leave their spouses and children behind in Taiwan. Even family
migration rarely includes migrants’elderly parents. Therefore, most Taiwanese firms
provide several round-trip flight tickets a year for expatriates, making them frequent
flyers across the Taiwan Strait. Mediated personal communication, such as the use of
MSN and Skype, helps migrants to sustain their social networks in Taiwan—although
some interviewees said that such virtual relationships waned over time. A married finance
manager (SZ26) migrated to Shenzhen alone. At night, he usually keeps his Skype
connected with his home in Taiwan for hours. Through video-conferencing, he said that
137
he is able to monitor his children’s homework and tutor them. “I can live anywhere as
long as I have access to the wireless and the Internet,” a businesswoman (SZ11)
emphasized. These examples demonstrate that telecommunications do shorten the sense
of distance. However, virtual presence remains different from physical presence. One
expatriate (SZ16) works in Shenzhen, while his wife lives in Dongguan, and their child
stays with his parents in Taiwan. He said that no technologies would be able to ease his
anguish over the family separation.
A more profound factor that sustains migrants’ relations with Taiwan is their life in
China. Many migrants said that they moved to China for work or business rather than the
pursuit of a new life or a desire to return to the “motherland.” Because of their heavy
workload and China’s lower living standard, they rarely enjoy life or feel relaxed in the
places to which they have migrated. Betty Lee, a businesswoman who is single, said that
going back to Taiwan once in a while is the only way she can recharge her energy.
Sometimes the inconsistency between career and life can tear apart a soul, particularly
when the person moved to China alone. James Wang, a manager with a foreign bank in
Shanghai, has lived away from his wife—a successful career woman in Taiwan—for five
years. Despite visiting Taiwan five times a year, he suffers from his self-interested
decision to pursue his own career in China:
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I feel a conflict all the time. For the sake of my career, I should stay here (China).
Have you heard of the TV documentary The Rise of the Great Nations? China is the
next rising great nation and Shanghai will soon reclaim its status as the center of
Asia. In the past, I often lamented that I was not born in a great epoch. Now I have
the opportunity to witness the opening of a new era and become part of the history.
Shouldn’t I stay here?[......]But I also tell myself that life is more than work. My
migration to China is temporary and I will return to Taiwan anytime soon. However,
it’s like running against the current of the times. (James Wang, junior
manager/banking).
The work-life disjuncture in China increases migrants’homesickness, but few said
that they planed to return to Taiwan at the years to come. Alex Ho, a businessman, told
me that several years ago he was shocked when hearing his friend’s decision to stay in
China for good. Only after he came to own his business in China did he realize the
dilemma: “since you have had your hair wetted, you can’t stop in the middle of
hair-washing.” Generally speaking, businesspeople have greater motivation to immigrate
than expatriate employees do. However, the principle does not always hold true. Some
139
business owners have more than one passport and are thinking of moving to Western
countries or returning to Taiwan after their retirement. Some managers insist on working
in China to advance their careers or to establish their businesses in the future.
I listed seven terms used by Taiwanese media to describe the Taiwanese in China
and asked my subjects which one best matched their migration status (See table 3.3). The
first group include “returnees,” “immigrants,” and “settlers,” which implies a plan of
permanent stay and the feeling of getting settled. Those who choose these terms can be
seen as self-described immigrants.The second group contains “nomads,” “sojourners,”
and “strangers,” and epitomizes a transient mentality and a disassociation from the local
society. People of this group are better described as sojourners. Those who choose
“migratory bird” may be caught in between.
Table 3.3 Taiwanese migrants’self-description of migration status
Migration
mentality
Frequency Reasons
Returnee
(guixiangren)
1 Retuning to parents’ hometown
Immigrant
(yimin)
3 Getting settled or planning to settle down
Settler
(luohu)
5 Planning to stay for a long while
Being living with family
Migratory bird
(honiao)
5 Flying back and forth
Being able to live either in Taiwan or China
Nomad
(youmuminzu)
7 A temporary stop for work
140
Sojourner
(guoke)
22 A temporary stop for work
Feeling job insecurity
Lacking the feeling of belonging
Planning to return to Taiwan or migrate to other
Preferring to living in Taiwan rather than in China
Stranger
(yixiangren)
13 Lacking the feeling of belonging
Feeling isolated from Chinese society
Being Taiwanese/Home in Taiwan
Planning to return to Taiwan
The majority of my interviewees fall into the category of sojourners (including
nomads, sojourners, and strangers). They see China as only a stop for work and think that
they will return to Taiwan or move to other countries, although the timing for that
proposed move is not clear. Others consider themselves returnees, immigrants, or settlers.
These people are more likely to be married males who live with their families in China
and who consider themselves Chinese. However, there is a gap between reality and desire.
For example, Wei-chi Hsu has a successful family business, a highly-educated Chinese
wife, and a luxurious home in Shenzhen. He categorizes himself as an immigrant but he
also has a strong desire to return to Taiwan: “I don’t like here. I just get used to it and try
to accept it. My home is in Taiwan. Strolling on any streets in Taipei makes me happier
than shopping in any fancy malls here.”
Such ambiguity and uncertainty about the status of migration are best described by
Betty Lee, who said that she is “physically a settler but mentally a sojourner” because she
141
can not identify with the place of adoption. As a result of similar feelings, this
multi-choice question often led interviewees to a kind of self-pity. A businessman (SH26),
in his fifties, likened himself to a “Taiwanese ox”—a symbol of the Taiwanese spirit of
hard work—fated to toil and live a vagabond life. He moved to Indonesia alone in the
past and has worked in China for years without his family around. This man said that
being a wanderer (liulang) was the destiny of Taiwanese people, evidenced in Taiwan’s
history.
In sum, the interviewed group of Taiwanese migrants consists of people with diverse
migration patterns. The majority of migrants categorize themselves as sojourners, but
their sojourns might look as long as permanent residence. A few migrants plan to get
settled in China, without altering their citizenship. Self-described immigrants and
sojourners share similar translocal lives, economically engaged in China and politically
and culturally involved in Taiwan. No matter which category they chose, they maintain a
transient and outsider mentality on the mainland, which prevents them from assimilating
to the local life.
Conclusion
142
This chapter shows a disharmony between migrants’career choices and life plans,
reinforced by the structural difference between Taiwan and China. First, moving to China
often helps migrants climb up on the career ladder. In this sense, Taiwanese migrants are
transnational spiralists whose occupational upward mobility is combined with
geographical mobility. Second, China’s living standard is much lower than Taiwan’s. As a
result, migrants enjoy a higher socioeconomic status in the places of adoption, as seen in
their choices of residence, children’s education, consumption habits, social networks, and
so on.
On the one hand, the dual mobility of Taiwanese migrants makes them a group of its
own kind in Chinese society, not only distinguished by their nationality and
socioeconomic status, but also characterized by their culture of transnational standards
of values and lifestyle. Migrating to China—a rising global giant—makes them feel they
have a more international and cosmopolitan outlook than both the Chinese locals and
their Taiwanese compatriots at home. However, this sense of connecting to the global
nomad culture also prevents them from adapting to the local life.
On the other hand, life in China is not as satisfying as in Taiwan or elsewhere for
many migrants. They often feel tormented by the decoupling of work and life.
Consequently, they insist on living a “Taiwanese way of life” in China, which
143
demonstrates their expat lifestyle more than a transplantation of Taiwanese culture. Their
sojourner or outsider mentality is an intentional resistance to assimilation. As the next
chapter will argue, Taiwanese migrants’ detachment from Chinese society deeply shapes
their behaviors of media use in China.
1
One of my male interviewees moved to China with his fiancée and virtually
became a househusband. However, this is not a typical migration pattern among
Taiwanese.
2
“Boss’s wife” is a crucial role in Taiwan’s family businesses. According to Lu’s
(2001) study, a wife of a small business owner usually lacks a title in the company.
However, she is often in charge of the company’s internal affairs and able to establish
bargaining power in decision making.
3
Rumbaut coined the term, “the 1.5 generation,” to describe those foreign-born
youths who immigrated before age 12 and came of age in the country of destination. He
later developed the concepts of “1.25ers” (who entered at ages between 13 and 18) and
“1.75ers” (who entered at age under 5) (Rumbaut, 1997).
4
The Chinese visa is a tricky issue for Taiwanese. On one hand, under the Chinese
government’s “One China Policy,” Taiwanese can only enter China by holding the “Pass
for Taiwanese Residents Traveling to the Mainland” (taibaozheng), on which the visas
are stamped, instead of Taiwanese passports. On the other hand, China has increasingly
given the Taiwanese more privileges of entering, residing, and working than other
nationals. Taiwanese are allowed to apply for multiply entrance visas effective for one
year and since 2005, Taiwanese can work anywhere in any sector if they meet certain
conditions. In fact, currently Taiwanese can renew their visas in cities such as Shanghai
and Shenzhen for fees as low as ¥100 ($14).
5
Wang’s (2007) study finds that Taiwanese expatriates’ sense of superiority in
relation to local Chinese is based on their economic affluence and being “culturally
better-off.” Such feelings are reproduced by the segregation of their social networks and
educational systems from those of the local people. The “sense of superiority” was also
an oft-mentioned term by my interviewees.
6
Lee (1998, p.109) defines Dagongzai as a generic term for “workers laboring for
the bosses,” a new collective identity claimed by millions of workers in south China since
the mid-1980s.
7
Some companies offer a handsome amount of allowances and stock options to
attract talent. One housewife (SZ20) whose husband worked for a high-tech corporation
said daily allowances for expatriates ranged from $400 (HK) to $500(HK). However, the
most attractive incentives were stock options, which generated tremendous profits in the
bull market.
8
The modern and urban part of Shenzhen, meaning inside the Shenzhen Special
Economic Zone, lies in stark contrast to its industrial districts on the skirts. A housewife
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living in the Shenzhen city told me that she visited Hong Kong once a week but, out of
safety concerns, she seldom went to neighboring areas outside the zone.
9
The three Taiwanese schools are Taiwan Businessmen’s Dongguan School
(Dongguan, Guangdong Province), Hwa Dong Businessman’s School (Kunshan, Jiangsu
Province), and Shanghai Taiwanese Children’s School (Shanghai), respectively
established in 2000, 2001, and 2005.
10
Those textbooks are censored by China’s education authorities before distribution
to students. In early 2000s, students returning to Taiwan for the entry exams often
complained that their textbooks were a mess—missing pages or having been written all
over. An administrator (SZ23) of Taiwan Businessmen’s Dongguan School told me that
textbook censorship still remained. The school faculty had to spend two days collecting
the content of textbooks in accordance to the requirements of Chinese authorities. Now
they have learned to use stickers to cover forbidden words, such as “Republic of China,”
to expedite the process.
11
According to one administrator of Taiwan Businessmen’s Dongguan School (SZ23),
in 2008, 85% of their high school graduates went to Taiwan’s universities, 10% to
Chinese universities, and 5% to other, Western countries.
12
For example, a Taiwanese woman recorded her experiences of attending a
“Shanghai vulgar pajama party” on her blog posted on June 21, 2009
(http://babe0827.pixnet.net/blog/post/25316045), describing how a group of Taiwanese
youngsters visited a restaurant and a karaoke bar in pajamas.
13
The terms zhainan and zhainu derive from Japanese otaku, referring to people with
obsessive interests in such pastimes as cartoons or video games. They have negative
denotations in Taiwan, used to describe people not only enjoying being at home but also
becoming socially stunted.
14
Taiwanese voters are principally divided into the Blue Camp, which supports the
KMT, and the Green Camp, which supports the DPP. The KMT is inclined toward
unification with the PRC, while the DPP is inclined toward Taiwan’s de jure
independence. Many of my interviewees said that the majority of migrants in China were
Blue Camp voters and the minority Green Camp voters were reticent about their political
stand. Before the 2004 presidential election, Chinese officials warned Taiwan
entrepreneurs not to campaign for the DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian. After that election,
those labeled green businesses—whose owners supported the DDP— were threatened to
be closed down in China.
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Chapter 4: Media Reception—Local Communications, Transnational
Contents
This chapter examines Taiwanese migrants’ reception of news and entertainment
media and explores its implication for their identity. Transnational migration studies point
out how home-host connections and diasporic imaginations are enabled and reinforced by
electronic communication technologies. Studies of media globalization often attribute
cultural proximity to increasing cultural flows among geo-cultural regions. Given China’s
role as the imagined homeland for many Taiwanese and cultural affinity between China
and Taiwan, how do Taiwanese migrants use media for information and entertainment in
China? In what ways does the media environment in China constrain or facilitate such
behaviors of media use?
According to my interview data, Chinese mainstream media play an insignificant
role in Taiwanese migrants’media consumption. Migrants seek Taiwanese media for
news and receive media products from diverse sources—the global, the regional,
home-country, and the local—for entertainment. Because of China’s regulations on
informational and cultural inflows, migrants often utilize various underground
communication tools, illegal but widely available in China, to keep their transnational
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connections alive. This chapter explains why, and in what ways, Taiwanese migrant adopt
localized communication tools to sustain transnational connections, particularly with their
home country. The following sections analyze media resources in China available to
Taiwanese migrants, their use of communication tools and reception of media content,
and the implications of their media consumption for identity.
Media Overload or Media Scarcity?
China’s unique media environment greatly influences Taiwanese migrants’behaviors
of media use. On the one hand, rapid commercialization of the media has made abundant
domestic entertainment and news sources available to them. On the other hand, overseas
media products and news information, including those from Taiwan, are both restrictive
and expensive through legal avenues. Accordingly, the attractiveness of the Chinese
media to Taiwanese migrants determines whether they follow the mainstream or go
underground for their media consumption.
To quote the words of an IT manager (SH24), “the media in China have made
inroads into every space of people’s lives.” What he referred to was not just newsstands
that sprawled in many streets corners. In Shanghai and Shenzhen, multimedia devices
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may appear on the buses, cabs, and subway cars, or even in the elevator banks of
commercial or residential buildings. These devices forcibly expose passengers or
passersby to news sound bites, entertainment information, and more importantly,
advertisements. The number of mainstream media outlets in China has also been
exploding, especially in big markets. In 2008, China had a total of 1943 newspapers,
including 224 national publications. Any of the four markets under my
investigation—Shanghai, Suzhou, Shenzhen, and Dongguan—has at least two municipal
newspapers (see Appendix D for the list of major newspapers and television channels in
the four regions). Shanghai alone has more than one hundred registered dailies or
weeklies devoted to regional news or specialized issues, such as sports, entertainment,
and fashion. In addition to the local press, newsstands also sell papers circulated
nationally, such as Southern Weekly, Reference News (Cankao Xiaoxi), People’s Daily,
and Global Times. The retail price of a daily is around ¥0.6-1.5 ($0.1-0.2). Subway riders
in Shanghai can get Metro Express which is distributed for free on weekday mornings.
Although compulsory subscription is not formally enforced, some Taiwanese
companies reluctantly subscribe to Chinese publications for the sake of avoiding trouble
or in exchange for bureaucratic favor. According to my interviewees, organ papers
(jiguan bao)—especially those published at local levels, such as Dongguan Daily, or by
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government departments, such as China Taxation News—are often promoted by village
leaders or directly delivered to Taiwanese companies. Few companies refuse to pay the
subscription fees. From a passive point of view, subscribing to those publications is like
buying a “talisman” (pingan fu), as one finance manager (Ping Liu) argued. A
businessman (Yu-Sheng Wang) said that he spent about ¥30,000 ($4,300) a year on
newspapers and government documents from salesmen who claimed to represent
government units. He doubted their identity but still paid the money in fear of offending
any officials. From an active perspective, newspaper subscription was also part of public
relations. Another finance manager (SZ17) emphasized that subscribing to newspapers
promoted by local officials was a gesture of being “cooperative,” which would pay off
when the company got into troubles. As a result, most Taiwanese companies I visited
subscribed one or more Chinese newspapers. However, only very few of my interviewees
said that they read those subscribed publications.
Besides the press, broadcasting is fast-growing in China, too. According to official
statistics, China had 2,324 television stations as of December 2007, many of which
carried multiple channels. Cable service reached 153 million homes nationwide. The four
cities of my fieldwork have been well covered by cable television—cable penetration
rates are 99.94% in Shanghai, 84.40% in Shenzhen, 62.40% in Jiangsu Province (where
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Suzhou is located), and 62.26% in Guangdong Province (where Dongguan is located)
(SARFT, 2008). Cable providers in these four cities carry 55 to 75 basic channels with
monthly rates of less than ¥30 (under $5). The program menus are usually composed of
13 CCTV channels, 30-plus provincial satellite channels, and several channels operated
by local stations. In Shenzhen and Dongguan, nine foreign channels sanctioned by the
Chinese government are also included in basic cable packages. With the development of
digital television, more channels—including unauthorized overseas channels—are
available with additional fees.
These four coastal cities are also well connected to the Internet. In 2008, the Internet
penetration rates in Shanghai and Guangdong—59.7% and 48.2% respectively—were
much higher than the national average (21.9%). It should be noted that 90.6% of Chinese
Internet users had broadband access, mostly provided by cable. Besides, 117.6 million or
39.58% of Internet users went online via mobile phones (CNNIC, 2009). The better
telecommunication infrastructure in coastal cities and the application of mobile phones
create a beneficial environment for online information circulation and media
consumption. In sum, my research subjects have easy access to the Internet. A verity of
Chinese print publications and television channels are also available to them at low price.
Contrary to the thriving domestic media market, legal foreign media products are
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extremely scarce in China. On the website of the CIPIEC, the exclusive importer of the
print press, virtually major Taiwanese newspapers and magazines are open to
subscription, including the pro-independent Liberty Times. However, my interviewees
concluded that only five Taiwanese publications are legally circulated in China—The
China Times, The Commercial Times, The United Daily News, The Economic Daily News,
and Business Weekly magazine. These titles belong to three media organizations deemed
friendly to China. In addition to regulations on media imports, economic measures also
restrain the spread of foreign publications. The CIPIEC asks ¥4,970 ($710) of annual
subscription fees for each of the four dailies and ¥3,650 ($520) for the weekly, about five
times of their prices in Taiwan. Due to the cost, these publications are chiefly supplied to
Taiwanese-owned restaurants or companies instead of ordinary households. Only one of
my interviewees (SH17) had home delivery of Taiwanese newspapers. Since 2008, The
United Daily News has secretly distributed papers in China via its own agents and thus
greatly reduced its price.
A tricky fact is that this newspaper’s website (udn.com) has been one of the few
Taiwanese online news outlets unblocked in China. Under normal conditions, Taiwanese
websites administrated by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and
news institutions are fully or partially barred from access. The blocking list may change
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frequently in accordance with political climates, special timings, or the attitude of
particular media. During the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, for example, the control of
inbound information was loosened for a brief time. Afterwards, the Chinese government
swiftly resumed its grip on the Internet and re-blocked some foreign media websites,
including The New York Times (Tran, 2008). Major Taiwanese news portals—such as
Yahoo! (Taiwan), PC Home, and MSN (Taiwan)—were also among the casualties.1
Because of China’s media regulations, Taiwanese migrants find it difficult to receive
home-country media through lawful channels. Meanwhile, the Chinese media is full of
representations of Taiwan. On television, Taiwan-related productions range from news
talk shows, entertainment programs to TV dramas. Since the broadcast of Strait Express
(Haixiaxinganxian) on Fujian TV’s Southeast Satellite Channel in 2004, there have been
eight news programs devoted to Taiwanese affairs on Chinese television. The list includes
CCTV4’s Across the Taiwan Strait that has been on air since January 2008. Two foreign
stations—Phoenix of Hong Kong and MASTV of Macau—also have several similar
shows available in Guangdong via cable. These programs often obtain news footage from
Taiwanese media and frequently live broadcast with Taiwanese reporters and pundits,
making them an alternative source of Taiwanese news.
Asides from news programs, Chinese television stations scrambled to broadcast or
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adapt Taiwanese variety shows and TV dramas in the 1990s (Gold, 1993; Sun, 2003). The
import of Taiwanese programs only reduced after 2000, due to SARFT’s restrictions on
Hong Kong and Taiwanese dramas (Liu, 2004). In 2008, 191 foreign TV dramas and
films were approved for broadcast on Chinese television. Taiwanese programs accounted
only for 15%.2
However, the Chinese government has encouraged cross-Strait
co-productions to facilitate cultural exchange. Since January 2008, Taiwanese
co-productions have been granted the same privileges as domestic programs (China News,
2007). Accordingly, five out of seven approved co-produced dramas in 2008 involved
Taiwanese companies.3
It should be noted that even without co-productions, a great
number of Taiwanese talents and production staff has worked with Chinese stations for
years.
In addition, Taiwanese news often hits the headlines in Chinese newspapers.
Because of the lack of Chinese correspondents in Taiwan, mostly the Chinese press picks
up stories from Taiwanese media and re-edits them to suit their publications. Chang
(2006) finds that People’s Daily, the Communist Party organ, adopts nine news frames to
cover Taiwanese news, such as one-China policy, anti-independence discourse,
facilitation of unification, the appeal of ancestral and cultural origin, and so on. In recent
years, this newspaper has learned to make its coverage more convincing by citing
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Taiwanese media to emphasize negative news about Taiwan.
In addition to legal imports and Chinese media, Taiwanese migrants also can resort
to illegal tools for Taiwan’s information and media products. Satellites television is an
expensive but convenient way. Since 1998, two Taiwanese satellite companies have
operated in China—C-Sky-Net of CSTV (Chinese Satellite Communication Group) and
D-Sky. Other operators, such as Pacific Satellite TV of Hong Kong and Dream Satellite
TV of Philippine, also provide a few Taiwanese channels. Depending on dealers and
packages, each new customer pays about ¥2,600-4,500 ($370-640) for equipments,
installations, and subscription fees. From the second year on, subscribers pay about
¥1,500-1,800 ($215-255) annually to renew their smart cards.
According to my interviewees, flyers that advertised satellite TV installations are
widely distributed. The real risk of installing satellite dishes is not the government
crackdown; rather, people fear mostly of commercial scams by unauthorized dealers, who
might sell pirated smart cards that work only a few days or weeks. Some companies also
descramble the encrypted satellite signal and deliver it to customers via cable. This
technique reduces the price to less than ¥2,000 ($285) for the installation. Users only pay
additional ¥100 ($14) annually but risk receiving unstable and unclear signals. China’s
control over foreign media hence creates a black market of foreign satellite TV that
154
allows swindlers to sell unauthorized products with dubious quality. However, Taiwanese
satellite TV remains a vital news sources for many migrants, including those who have
lived in China for years.
News Media: Transnational Connections with Home
As discussed, media outlets available to Taiwanese migrants are plentiful, especially
in Shanghai and Shenzhen. TV channels are mostly broadcast in Mandarin Chinese,
which is official language in Taiwan. Newspapers and magazines are printed in the
simplified Chinese characters, slightly different from the traditional Chinese characters
used in Taiwan but not difficult for Taiwanese to understand. Despite linguistic
similarities, my interview data show that the mainstream Chinese media play a relatively
insignificant role in migrants’reception of news and entertainment. Receiving Taiwanese
news from Taiwanese media remains a common practice for almost every interviewee. A
few migrants routinely access Chinese media for information about China. The degrees to
which they engage in Chinese media, however, vary.
I asked my research subjects what kind of news concerned them most and then
surveyed which news media outlets they accessed frequently. According to their answers,
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I categorize migrants into three groups: home orientation (primarily receiving Taiwanese
news from Taiwanese media, 59%), balanced reception (access to Taiwanese media and
Chinese media equally, 29%), and host orientation (primarily receiving Chinese news
from Chinese media, 6%). Of course, some migrants also obtain Chinese news from
Taiwanese media, since many Taiwanese news outlets report “mainland news.”
Conversely, some acquire Taiwanese news from Chinese media, particularly when they
have no access to the Taiwanese media. These behaviors show that to some extent the
Chinese and Taiwanese media sources are exchangeable for certain people.
Home-oriented Reception
The majority of my interviewees—regardless of their demographic
characteristics—said that they pay more attention to Taiwanese news than Chinese.
Satellite TV and the Internet are two primary media tools. More than a half of my
subjects have access to Taiwanese satellite TV, either in the public areas of their
companies or in private spaces, such as their dormitories or homes. In Taiwanese
companies, satellite TV is usually installed in restaurants or recreation rooms, and is set
on 24-hour news channels, such as TVBS-N, CtiTV News, or ETTV News. As a result,
watching Taiwanese news became a collective ritual among expatriates. Some private
156
rooms also have satellite access, either paid for by employers or by users themselves.
The choices of media tools for those living at home are often determined by their
ages and family circles. Middle-aged expatriates living with families are more likely to
subscribe to Taiwanese satellite TV. They are able to afford this than younger migrants,
more dependent on traditional media, and spend more time at home. On the contrary,
singles or youngsters rely more on the Internet to receive Taiwanese news. Some use
proxy technologies—as many Chinese do—to access the blocked Taiwanese news portals
and websites. However, proxy software often slows down their computers and thus
become impractical. Therefore, China’s control of inbound information does not prevent
migrants from obtaining Taiwanese news via the Internet. Instead, it directs the traffic to
the few unblocked websites, such as udn.com, the United Daily News’online outlet. In
addition, some Taiwanese companies or restaurants also supply Taiwanese newspapers.
Migrants’ persistence in receiving home-country media is heavily influenced by
their relations with Chinese society and their opinions on the Chinese media. When asked
why they were attentive to Taiwanese news instead Chinese news, basically interviewees
cited three reasons: deep connections with Taiwan, an outsider mentality in China, and
the dislike of the Chinese media.
First, the consumption of domestic news from countries of origin serves to satisfy
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the longing for home (Sinclair et al., 2000). Very often my interviewees said that it is
“natural” that they care about news in Taiwan. Some people are interested in Taiwanese
news because they have savings, stock shares, or companies in Taiwan. For most
migrants, Taiwan represents their “roots,” “homes,” or “motherland” to which they may
or may not return, but have maintained emotional attachment. Several migrants who lived
in other countries in the past said that they maintained the habits of receiving Taiwanese
news abroad. By and large, the reception of Taiwanese news results from homesickness,
but it also shows migrants’concern of Taiwan’s political future.
The enthusiasm for Taiwan’s domestic politics is most apparent among middle-aged
men, many of whom watch Taiwanese news talk shows everyday. One businessman
(SZ14) admitted that he started the subscription to the United Daily News because he was
too concerned with the 2008 presidential election. When I visit Shanghai in late 2008,
many migrants were preoccupied with the news about the detention of former President
Chen Shui-bian of the DPP, who was under investigation of corruption after leaving
office. One KMT supporter (SH15) said that he stayed up to 2 a.m. watching live
broadcast of the news. Unlike Chinese narrow broadcasting in diaspora whose news is
reedited by local stations, Taiwanese satellite TV delivers Taiwanese news in real time
and in the original form. It allows migrants to sustain their routine news consumption and
158
reinforces the sense of synchronicity. Yu-Sheng Wang, a business owner, emphasized that
watching Taiwanese TV keeps him connected with Taiwan after living in China for more
than one decade. Some migrants said that it is important to remain updated of Taiwanese
news so that they can chat with other migrants or their acquaintances back in Taiwan.
Second, Taiwanese migrants’ distance from the host society, as analyzed in last
chapter, reduces their interest in Chinese news. Some migrants live in segregated
environments and rarely feel the need to understand their surroundings or the country
they have migrated to. Interviewees would said that “I feel like living in a factory rather
than in Suzhou so that I don’t care things outside the factory” (SH20A) or “I have a
chauffeur for transportation so that I don’t need to know local news” (SH14). More often
than not, the indifference to Chinese news presents a sojourning mentality beyond
practical considerations. A businessman (SH15) told me that sometimes he was bothered
by his ignorance of local issues, such as gas prices. He suspected that local people had
“particular channels” to get information but he said he would not make great efforts to
figure these out. A few migrants refuse Chinese news due to political reasons. “I don’t
identify with this place and feel like an outsider;” the wife of a business owner (SZ10)
explained, “therefore, I’m not so motivated to keep updated of Chinese news.” The
feeling of living in a rivalry country is best portrayed by a housewife’s (Shu-Min Lu)
159
citation of the Chinese proverb: “I am forced to stay with the camp to which I swear no
loyalty” (shen zai cao ying xin zai han).
Because of their feeling of closeness to Taiwan and remoteness from the Chinese
society, home-oriented migrants are interested more in Taiwanese news than in Chinese
news. As Rosenau (2003) argues, distant proximities are subject appraisals of what is
remote or close-at-hand. A young female expatriate’s (SZ15) statement illustrates a sense
of “distant proximity” to Taiwanese news and the feeling of “near remoteness” from
Chinese news: “Taiwan is such a small island that you care about any trivial news there
[…] China is just too huge. Not long ago a fire in Shenzhen killed more than forty people,
but I didn’t pay too much attention to it. It’s true that Shenzhen is closer than Taiwan to
our factory, yet it’s like an alien world to me.” Her statement demonstrates that mediated
communication to some extent alters people’s perception of distance.
The sense of remoteness from Chinese news is further reinforced by migrants’
negative perception of the Chinese news media. A former media executive (Alex Ho)
reminded me of Journalism 101 that people cared most about news proximate to them.
When I questioned that he lived in China but cared little about Chinese news, he
emphasized that China was an exception to the principle: “Because of propaganda, you
can’t get what you want to know from the Chinese media.” Mostly, interviewees
160
criticized Chinese media’s features of propaganda, censorship, government control,
corruption, incredibility, nationalism, cliché, and boredom. Such criticisms are
particularly concentrated on, but not limited to, organ papers and CCTV’s National News
Broadcasting (Xinwen Lianbo) aired by most national and provincial stations at 7 p.m.
every night.
The issue regarding news credibility was cited by migrants as the main reason
preventing them from using Chinese media for news. A real estate manager (Yuen-Kai
Lee) said that he had tried to read Chinese newspapers but found them too one-sided and
biased. Very often, migrants who hold deep suspicions on the Chinese regime assume that
Chinese media deliver little more than “lies.” Vichy Kao, who migrated to China in her
early teens, said that she had accustomed to Chinese media’s dishonesty and cover-up so
that she never bothered to access them. Besides trustworthiness, migrants also
complained about formalism (bagu) of the Chinese media. “The delivery of Chinese
news media is like the lecture a teacher gives to students,” a finance manager (SH11)
said.
As a result, home-oriented migrants rely heavily on Taiwanese media for Chinese
news. Some said that Taiwanese media covered most significant issues about China,
which were sufficient for them. Specifically, they were more interested in knowing news
161
about the Taiwanese community in China. Some contended that Taiwanese media would
reveal negative news unseen in Chinese media. More importantly, migrants said that they
needed a “Taiwanese perspective” to compliment their understanding of China. That was
especially true when they were confused by the chaos of information during some
controversial events, such as the Tibet riot in 2008. Many migrants looked to Taiwanese
or even Western media for uncovering the truth. Despite their physical presence in China,
these home-oriented migrants virtually live in a Taiwanese news media sphere.
However, some migrants emphasized that they had some avenues to get information
and were not that ignorant about Chinese news. Businesspeople and high-ranking
managers said that they relied on government announcements and news briefs submitted
by Chinese subordinates. Expatriate employees said that they were often informed of
local affairs through word-of-month communication or email messages from Chinese
coworkers. A few people subscribed to wireless services for the update of weather and
other information. Some said that they got to know Chinese news randomly: reading free
papers in subway, viewing mobile television on bus, browsing magazines in restaurants,
watching Chinese television at massage parlors, glancing over community billboards in
residential complexes, and so on. These random information avenues show the limited
role of Chinese mainstream media in the lives of home-oriented migrants—the majority
162
of Taiwanese migrants in China.
Balanced Reception and Host-oriented Reception
Receiving Chinese news, especially from Chinese media, is indicative of migrants’
willingness to “go native.” Less than one third of my interviewees said that they received
Taiwanese news and Chinese news equally. Only four interviewees paid more attention to
Chinese news than Taiwanese news. These two groups of people are emotionally more
receptive to China than home-oriented news recipients. Particularly, those marrying to
Chinese spouses are more inclined to frequently access Chinese news media at home.
Various reasons encourage migrants to use Chinese media for news. First, Chinese
media can be a substitute of news sources, especially when migrants have no access to
Taiwanese satellite TV. Some people cut off Taiwanese satellite TV on purpose. They
criticized Taiwanese electronic news media—several 24-hour channels on the air—as too
annoying, repetitive, shallow, and sensational. One businesswoman (Betty Lee) said that
she felt peaceful without the noise of Taiwanese TV at home. She joked that one of her
friend had become emotionally disturbed for watching too much Taiwanese news. In
most cases, however, migrants cited external constraints on satellite TV
subscription—high prices, commercial scams, technological problems, government
163
crackdowns, and tight work schedules, etc. Sometimes they merely wanted to prevent
themselves from indulging in TV watching.
The Chinese media as the secondary choice is demonstrated by the fact that many
migrants rarely tuned in Chinese channels when they had Taiwanese or foreign satellite
TV. When migrants seek substitutable media, usually they access those resembling
Taiwanese TV. Most watched Chinese channels include CCTV4 (Chinese International
Channel of the CCTV), business news channels such as CCTV-2 and CBN (Shanghai),
and local channels with on-the-spot live news broadcasting like SZTV’s City Channel
(Shenzhen). These channels are thought of less clichéd and similar to Taiwanese
television in style. In Shenzhen and Dongguan, foreign channels from Hong Kong and
Macao—such as Phoenix and MASTV—are much more welcome than Chinese TV.
Migrants consider these channels more reliable than the state-controlled Chinese media.
Besides, several programs on these channels cover Taiwanese news, some of which are
even hosted by Taiwanese.
Media substitutability also explains the popularity of current affairs shows on
Chinese TV that deliver Taiwanese news. A businessman (SH18) emphasized that
watching twenty minutes of Taiwanese news on CCTV4’s Across the Strait and Fujian
TV’s Strait Express was enough information for him. Otherwise he would read the United
164
Daily News at Taiwanese teahouses once a week for detail. Since these shows often
present news footage, reporters, and pundits from Taiwan, they provide the Taiwanese
audience a sense of familiarity. However, some migrants complained that these programs
are biased against Taiwan. A housewife recalled how she ended up watching Taiwanese
news on the Chinese TV:
I planed to subscribe to Taiwanese satellite TV, but it was unreasonably expensive.
Then I figured out I didn’t have to watch Taiwanese TV. Watching bad news
repeatedly aired on those channels kept me in bad mood. Since I lived in China,
why would I torture myself by watching Taiwanese TV? Therefore, I started to
watch Xinwen Lianbo (CCTV), which only broadcast good news and official news.
I was bored. Then I found the show First Scene on Shenzhen TV’s City Channel. Its
muckraking style was close to Taiwanese TV. But this program only cared about
local news, as if nothing had happened in the world. I started to watch Greater
China Live on Shenzhen TV because it covered Taiwanese news. It’s strange,
though, that this program often focuses on trivial news that put Taiwan in negative
light […] I still watch this program, though. I have no other choices. (Men-jung Tu,
housewife)
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The second reason to access the Chinese media is the need to understand the
Chinese society. Those active Chinese-news seekers are more likely to read Chinese
newspapers, which are unattractive to most migrants. In total, only three interviewees
have home delivery of Chinese newspapers and several others frequently read them at
office. Two areas of Chinese news are of interest to them. The first category encompasses
economic and financial issues, especially when government policy is involved.
Businesspeople and investors would access Chinese mainstream news media for official
announcements. Yu-Sheng Wang, owner of an electronic company, said that he read the
“A” section of Dongguan Daily everyday in order to keep an eye on government policy,
which changed frequently. The second area of Chinese news reception is concentrated on
security issues, in particular food safety and crime. A housewife (Shih-ying Hong) said
that she did not cared so much about Chinese news, but she would watch First Scene
(Diyi Xianchang) on Shenzhen’s City Channel. This live show offers muckraking-type
news not available on other Chinese TV; it has covered issues such as tainted food and
avian flu.
Some migrants receive Chinese news out of pragmatic purposes. However, they
hope to equip themselves at least with a rudimentary understanding of the society they
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have migrated to. A second-generation businessman (SZ03) compared his reception of
Chinese news media to his father’s dependence on guanxi for information:
My father has been in China for 16 years and has made some “local friends.” When
our company gets into troubles, he is used to looking to his friends for help. That’s
his style. He relies very much on personal connections to scout insider. I’m different.
I spend less time on socializing and pay more attention to local newspapers to
familiarize myself with business-related policies. Honestly, I had a parochial
mentality in my early days of migration. Basically we Taiwanese businessmen stay
in our own circle and watch only Taiwanese TV. We have few contacts and care
little about outside communities. I felt ignorant of this society and started to
subscribe to the Guanzhou Daily in our factories…I pay a lot of attention to labor
issues. Our employees read newspapers. It’s important that we know what they
know. (SZ03, manager/plastics)
For a few migrants, reading Chinese newspapers or watching Chinese television
have further implications beyond their superficial messages. Receiving Chinese news
media is not as incompatible with guanxi building. Rather, becoming more
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knowledgeable about Chinese society help migrants extend local social networks. One
sales representative of a software company (SH06A) said that he received Chinese news
occasionally in order to keep up conversations with his Chinese clients. As a senior
manager (Min-yi Chang) argued, “the more topics for conversations you have, the more
friends you make.” She was recently assigned to cultivate government relations and had
home delivery of major newspapers in Shanghai.
More importantly, some migrants regard Chinese media as a significant barometer of
politics in China, which should be watched carefully. A self-claimed “mainland expert”
(dalutong) (SH18) explained the importance of reading untold messages in Chinese
media: “Most Taiwanese are bored by routine news on Xinwen Lianbo. They don’t realize
that even the sequence of political figures’presences on this news program reveals
something important about politics in China.” These political messages are conveyed not
only through news but also through entertainment programs. Some interviewees observed
that there were less and less dramas about civil war between the KMT troops and the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Chinese TV, indicating a more cordial relationship
between the two formal rivals. These evaluations, not matter whether they are correct or
not, show that migrants maintain high political sensitivity in China. Chinese media
transmit not only plain and simple information but also implicit messages to them.
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Negotiating Between Two (Undesired) Media Systems
Taiwanese migrants’news reception reflects their relationships with the countries of
exit and entry. In addition, they also need to negotiate between the two diverse media
systems in Taiwan and China. As aforementioned, the Chinese media have experienced
rapid commercialization but remain tightly controlled by the CCP. In Taiwan, people’s
constitutional rights of “freedom of speech, lecture, writing and publication” had been
denied under the authoritarian KMT regime after 1949 (Rampal, 1994). The liberalization
and deregulation of the media only took place since the late 1980s, accompanied with
political democratization. Nevertheless, present Taiwanese media are criticized as
“liberalization without full democratization” because of their tabloidization on the one
hand, and partisan rifts about national identity on the other (Lee, 2003). Under the
circumstances, neither Chinese media nor Taiwanese media are considered reliable news
sources by interviewed migrants. They point out that Chinese and Taiwanese media
systems present polar opposites: eulogist versus naysayers, cover-up versus demagoguery,
and control versus anarchy, etc.
On the one hand, most interviewees consider Chinese media to be the mouthpiece of
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the CCP and thus lack objectivity (See table 4.1). They recognized that in China, “good
news is news.” Several “news-savvy” interviewees reminded me that the CPP still
frequently gave orders to news organizations, that exposures of bad news were
determined by the government; they reminded me also about the Golden Shield Project
(jindun gongcheng) that involved the Chinese government sophisticated control over the
Internet. Therefore, getting complete information from the Chinese media, they thought,
was impossible. Some migrants also said that they were annoyed by Chinese media’s
nationalistic tones and narratives on Taiwan—for example, the usages of such derogatory
terms as “leader of the Taiwan area” (Taiwandequ lingdaoren, referring to Taiwan
President) and “people of the island” (daomin, referring to Taiwanese people).4
Global
Times and Reference News—the solely Chinese newspapers allowed to reprint foreign
coverage—were signaled out as hostile publications that often covered untrue and
provocative stories. Even a self-described “Chinese nationalist” (SH27) told me that he
was offended by such news.
On the other hand, most interviewees also held very negative views on Taiwanese
news media. They complained that Taiwanese media focused on trivialities instead of
substantial issues, carried partisan opinions rather than news, and indulged in
uncorroborated expose. In their views, all these factors made Taiwanese media fraught
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with bad news. One interviewee (SH06A) lamented: “Every time I watch Taiwanese TV, I
feel like Taiwan is going to sink into the Pacific Ocean.” A senior manger (Li-ling Chang)
said that she felt shamed of watching Taiwanese TV with Chinese coworkers because the
news contents were too shallow. Discontent with Taiwanese news media, several
migrants emphasized that they appreciated the depth and scope of Chinese news,
particular in the coverage of foreign affairs. They argued that Taiwanese media’s focus on
inter-party fights was proof of “insular mentality” (daomin xintai), as opposed to China’s
great power attitude.
Table 5.1 Taiwanese migrants’views on Chinese and Taiwanese news media
Positive evaluations Negative evaluations
Chinese
media
Quality international news: more
non-Western news
Professionalism: informative
news, substantial issues
Vibrant Internet culture: rich
information, the fifth estate
Propaganda: good news only,
government mouthpiece, lack of
objectivity and fairness,
pre-packaged news, model news
State control: cover-up, information
regulations, censorship, single
perspective, lacking foreign
sources
Cliché (bagu): routines, formality,
flatness,
Nationalism: anti-foreignness, hostility
toward Taiwan, emotionality
Taiwanese
media
Diversity: various perspectives,
transparency, media
Yellow journalism: sensationalism,
trivialization, shallowness,
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freedom
Rich foreign sources:
international connections,
free flow of information
Animated style
infortainment
Attack journalism: muckraking, scandal
exposures, bad news orientation
Partisanship: opinions over facts,
non-value free, lack of authority
While criticizing Taiwanese news media, most migrants continue to access them.
They legitimize their behaviors by treating Taiwanese news coverage as “TV dramas,”
“jokes,” “entertainment shows,” “farces,” “fictions,” or “gossip” (bagua) that needed not
to be taken seriously. In contrast, news in Chinese media is like the “model plays”
(yangbanxi)—politicized Chinese revolutionary dramas with routine scenes and
standardized contexts. In general, migrants prefer the sauciness of melodramas in the
Taiwanese media to the monotonous model plays. Besides, they also find pleasure (Ang,
1982; Radway, 1984) watching Taiwanese news, while distasting for the content.
Taiwanese migrants’negative evaluations of both Taiwanese and Chinese news
media lead to their distrust of journalism in general. By and large, my interviewees said
that Taiwanese and Western media are more credible than Chinese media, but some also
added that no media source is truly reliable. Accordingly, they often emphasized the
importance of “media literacy” and “judgment.” A senior manager (Chung-Hsing Kao)
said that news can be manufactured anywhere: “We should believe in our own wisdom
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rather than any media. It’s terrible that news has become an instrument for some people’s
agenda. I think everyone knows the trick.” The best strategy to deal with such media
environments is to “read news at a distance,” another interviewee (SH23) suggested.
Like many Chinese citizens, some migrants said that they had become accustomed
to searching information online. “I have changed my ways of getting information,” said
Lucy Tang, a freelance writer. She emphasized that after migrating to China, she learned
from her Chinese friends that the Internet provided abundant information unavailable in
mainstream media. An in-house attorney said (Rei-yi Deng) that she was surprised to see
a message about a large-scale “right-defense” (weiquan) protest on Chinese websites,
although such information disappeared soon. She added that the Internet was also a
primary news source for her Chinese coworkers. The vibrant Chinese Internet culture
often make migrants believe that the government have somewhat lost media control and
trust information whatever they see online.
Migrants’ experiences with two divergent media systems also result in polarized
views on the role of journalism in society. First, some interviewees justified China’s
media control as a means of social control. They argued that China is a huge country with
numerous illiterate peasants and workers. “If Chinese media work like Taiwanese media,
the society is going to collapse,” an interviewee contended (SH16). One manager (Li-ling
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Chang) explained: “Present Chinese media are just like past Taiwanese media under the
martial law. To tell the truth, I don’t think that’s bad…Sometimes it’s necessary to blind
the people. Is it so important to tell the truth? I prefer the media here. At least they give
people the hope.” These statements reveal a conservative perspective reinforced by
migrants’ class status in China. Like the Chinese political elite, the Taiwanese business
community counts on a stable Chinese society for their prosperity. Besides, when
migrants said that they supported media control, they had alternative channels to get
information.
Second, some migrants feel aversion to the Chinese media system because of
information control and indoctrination. A graduate student (SH25) was shocked that when
she ordered the Internet service, her computer was being examined and labeled a
“permit.” “I feel like living in the Iron Curtain,” she emphasized. Several housewives
complained that they felt personally insulted for not being able to get such simple
information as recipes and train schedules from Taiwanese websites. In addition, some
interviewees stressed that the Chinese media had indoctrinated their people, who became
extremely nationalistic. The negative view on Chinese media often deepens migrants’
dislike of China. Therefore, the isolation of Taiwanese migrants in China reduces their
motivations to use Chinese media for information; nevertheless, the resistance to access
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Chinese media, for some migrants, also furthers their alienation from Chinese society.
On the contrary, Taiwanese media play a complicated role in migrants’relationship
with Taiwan. On the one hand, migrants’attachment to Taiwanese media keeps them
connected with their home-country. On the other hand, receiving Taiwanese news often
reinforces their resentments against domestic politics. A housewife (Mei-li Wu) lamented:
“Taiwan is my homeland, but every time I see those partisan fights on television, I don’t
feel like going back to Taiwan.” Therefore, the reception of Taiwanese news is not always
positive to migrants’ bonds with Taiwan. Robin and Aksoy (2006) find that transnational
Turkish television brings banal reality of Turkish life to the migrants in London, which
de-mythologizes their nostalgic dreams and fantasies about the homeland. For Taiwanese
migrants, what they experience from Taiwanese satellite news channels is hyperreality
(Baudrillard, 1981/2006) of Taiwanese life, which reinforces their negative view on their
home country.
Entertainment Media: Multiple Sources
Access to entertainment media is a significant practice in migrants’everyday lives.
They watch TV dramas, movies, variety shows, or documentaries from Chinese cable TV,
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Taiwanese satellite TV, DVDs, or online videos. Their media experiences involve the
local, the regional, the diasporic, and the global. Underground media enormously
contribute to such diverse patterns of consumption.
Illegal DVDs and unauthorized online videos are the primary sources of
entertainment for migrants. While TV watching is often a collective ritual either at
households or in factories, playing DVDs or online videos on personal computers
delivers the pleasure in private space. This reflects a universal trend toward fragmentation
of the audience and individualization of media consumption. Choosing channels on a
shared TV is often a process of negotiation accompanied with compromises. DVDs and
online videos supply a variety of choices on demand anytime for anyone. Most
interviewees living in companies’ dormitories said that they enjoyed staying at their
rooms at night or on the weekends because they needed some space of their own.
In addition, migrants’ isolated way of life increases their media consumption at
leisure. “Killing time” was the most cited reason of frequent video watching, as explained
by a finance manger (SZ08) who lived in the company compound in Dongguan: “When I
was in Taiwan, I would hang out with my family, dine with friends, see a movie, or just
walk around. I had a lot of options for leisure activities on the weekend. But I don’t know
what to do here. Besides, I feel exhausted after six workdays. The neighboring public
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space only makes me nervous rather than relaxed.” This manager’s statement illustrates
why video watching is so prevalent in expatriates’ dormitories. Nevertheless, those living
with families in cities are also crazy about DVDs and online video, only to less extent.
Finally, the media environment in China encourages migrants to go underground for
entertainment. With few exceptions, dramas and entertainment programs on Chinese TV
are deemed unattractive by interviewed migrants. Chinese dramas—often set in rural or
revolutionary contexts—hardly resonate with migrants. Foreign dramas aired on Chinese
TV are said to be outdated and weirdly dubbed in Mandarin. As for cinema, very few
interviewees have ever gone to movies in China. They complained that films were
extremely limited and theaters were shabby—like Taiwan’s cinemas thirty years ago. Of
course, the rampant piracy culture in China is the most important factor. Several migrants
said that they rarely accessed pirated media products and felt shamed of buying
unauthorized DVDs in the beginning; however, they got used to it soon.
First of all, it is difficult to find copyrighted DVDs, especially those popular movies
and dramas. Secondly, it seems less morally questionable if most people do the same
thing. A law student (SH25) said that she was asked to bring back the DVD of a Chinese
epic drama to Taiwan. She felt embarrassed to ask her classmates where to buy it because
most of them were justices or attorneys. Then she got a surprising answer from them:
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“Who still buy DVDs? It’s all free online.” She emphasized that media piracy was
legitimized and advocated as a weapon against “evil American imperialism” by Chinese
intellectuals. Many migrants know that Chinese authorities are halfhearted about
anti-piracy measures. A regular DVD-buyer (SZ07) said that one street in nearby
downtown concentrated many video shops. “Every storeowner knows when the police is
coming and will hide recent Hollywood movies to their warehouses in advance,” she
observed.
Some interviewees feel it natural to access pirated media products. Taiwan had also
been an empire of piracy in the past and up to recently, the Hong Kong-Taiwan link
remains the bedrock of Chinese-subtitled pirated Japanese TV dramas (Hu, 2004). The
real contention about piracy, for interviewed migrants, is whether DVDs or online videos
provide more satisfying media experiences. Some said that DVDs saved time on online
searching or downloading and had better special effects. Other argued that online videos
were free and could be done without leaving one’s own room. Which video shops had
most recent DVDs with best quality was a common chatting topic.
My interviewees’ passion for pirated media is beyond imagination. A young female
manager (SH20B) said she had watched over three hundred episodes of One Piece, a
Japanese cartoon, from a video-sharing site. A housewife (Yu-Sheng Wang), in her fifties,
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said that on average she finished a Korean drama series from rented DVDs per week.
These videos are usually subtitled in Chinese, produced by the privacy networks or fans.
Several interviewees admitted that they often stayed up watching videos until dawn on
the weekends. Among them, an expatriate (Eric Chen) who resided in his company’s
dormitory, revealed that he could watch DVDs for 12 hours without a break. As a result,
he had damaged two DVD players within two years.
The most popular videos come from diverse sources. Gender is an important
determinant of video-viewing behaviors. In general, male interviewees tended to enjoy
Hollywood movies, Japanese cartoons, and Chinese epic dramas. Women preferred Asian
dramas, including those from Japan, Korean, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or China. American
series were extremely popular among migrants of different ages and genders. Many
interviewees had collections of recent seasons of Prison Break, CSI, or Grey’s Anatomy,
reproduced with Chinese subtitles. Therefore, China’s regulations created a huge
underground economy that featured foreign media products and satisfied Taiwanese
migrants’ appetite for global, regional, diasporic, and local productions. Because pirated
DVDs and online videos were so accessible, many interviewees said that they become
impatient of waiting for TV broadcasting. If they found some programs attractive on
television, they tried to watch them immediately from DVDs or the Internet.
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Unlike Taiwanese news, Taiwanese entertainment media play a less important role in
migrants’ everyday lives. The most attractive programs are variety shows, such as Kangxi
laile (a celebrity show) and Quanmin Dammenguo (a satire show famous for imitating
and mocking politicians). Since these two shows are also popular among Chinese
netizens, migrants without satellite TV can watch them on many video-sharing websites,
such as Tudou.com or PPStream. They said that these hilarious Taiwanese shows helped
them relax because they could easily understand the punch lines. Another popular
category of Taiwanese programs is the talent show, notably Super Star (Chaoji
Xingguang Dadao). Two middle-aged men living with families (SH15, SH24)
emphasized that watching Super Star was an important “family time.” Some interviewees
said that they would watch the program online hours after the original broadcast.
One single woman (SZ09) said that she wanted to watch what she used to watch in
Taiwan so that she felt closer to home. The same reason explained that several
interviewees frequently watched the so-called Taiwanese local dramas (bentuju)
broadcast in Hoklo dialect, although they might not be so interested in their contents per
se. A female manager (SZ29) said that at night, most male Taiwanese coworkers were
having fun outside the company compound. She usually watched Taiwanese local dramas
in the dormitory alone, which made her feel like having someone familiar talk to her.
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Therefore, Taiwanese entertainment media provided not only viewing pleasures but also
cultural connections with Taiwan.
Sometimes watching Taiwanese programs is a deliberate collective ritual for
migrants. My interviewees said that they got together with fellow Taiwanese migrants to
watch televised vote-counting of elections in Taiwan, the games of Taiwanese sports
teams, or popular movies produced by Taiwan. In 2008, Cape No. 7 (Haijiao Qi Hao), a
Taiwanese romance film, was well acclaimed in Taiwan and broadly celebrated as a
harbinger for the revival of the Taiwanese cinema. I found that many of my subjects
excited about the movie and had watched it via the pirated DVD, since the copyrighted
DVD had not yet been released. Some told me that they saw the movie with Taiwanese
friends and tried to keep up current hot topics in Taiwan.
Some Chinese television programs and movies also offer migrants a sense of
cultural proximity. In general, Taiwanese migrants are not attracted to Chinese
entertainment media. However, Chinese epic dramas and historical documentaries are
well received among interviewed migrants. In fact, epic drama has been the only genre
among Chinese TV programs that have sporadic successes in Taiwan—such as
Yongcheng Dynasty (Yongchen wanchao), The Family (Dazhaimen), and Qiao's Grand
Courtyard (Qiaojia dayuan)—all of which are big productions by the CCTV. Some
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interviewees said that those epic dramas were exquisite art works. Besides, they were
fascinated with Chinese historic sagas. In addition to epic dramas, CCTV10 (Science and
Education Channel) is most watched Chinese non-news channels. This channel features
such programs as Exploring (documentaries mostly on Chinese history) and Masters’
Forum (Baijiajiangtan, lectures about Chinese culture). Some migrants—often above
certain age—said that watching these programs reminded them of history they had
learned from textbooks in Taiwan. The popularity of Chinese epic dramas and historical
documentaries among older migrants demonstrates that the instillation of China-centered
historical narratives through cultural institutions in Taiwan has had profound influences
on Taiwanese. In particular, migrants having a Chinese identity are very fond of these
genres. On the contrary, films and TV dramas that portray the Chinese society after 1949,
especially about the Communist revolution, barely find their audience among Taiwanese
migrants.
In sum, Taiwanese migrants’ viewing experiences of entertaining programs shows
their appropriations of diverse media sources—the global, the regional, the local, and the
diasporic. However, the global (American films and series) and the regional (Japanese
and Korean TV dramas) are dominant forces, even though these cultural products are
rarely legally accessible in China. Receiving Taiwanese or Chinese entertaining media is
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based on cultural affinity—cultural representations that Taiwanese migrants have been
familiar with. Certain Chinese media products provide migrants a sense of cultural
affinity with the historical China rather than the contemporary China. Taiwanese
entertainment media satisfy migrants’ longing for home and maintain their feelings of
belonging to Taiwan.
Conclusion
This chapter shows that despite the thriving of Chinese media and linguistic
commonality between China and Taiwan, the Chinese mainstream media has played an
insignificant role in Taiwanese migrants’everyday lives. That does not mean that
migrants’ habits of media consumption are entirely at odds with the Chinese mainstream.
Instead, migrants localize their use of media tools—such as illegal satellite TV, pirated
DVDs, and online videos—to circumvent government control and regulations and to keep
their transnational connections alive. They enjoy pirated DVDs and online videos from
various sources, as many Chinese do. However, such viewing behaviors also show the
domination of the global and regional media forces.
Additionally, Taiwanese migrants also seek alternative or underground media
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channels—such as the Internet and satellite TV—for information otherwise unavailable
in the Chinese mainstream media. In particular, they rely heavily on the Taiwanese media
not only for hometown news but also for local knowledge. Such patterns of media
consumption contradict the assertion of the transnational Chinese media imagination.
Although the performance of Taiwanese news media has conflicting influences on
migrants’ perception about their home country, Taiwanese news reception keeps migrants
connected with Taiwan. On the contrary, except for some active Chinese-news seekers,
the majority of Taiwanese migrants hold a suspicious attitude toward the Chinese media.
That furthers their sense of being outsiders in China. The next chapter will use the
examples of some events to illustrate migrants’ news reception and their relationships
with the host and home countries.
1
I tried to access major Taiwanese news websites during my stays in hotel rooms in
China. Most Taiwanese news websites were not blocked from access in Shanghai
between October and November in 2008. In December when I visited Shenzhen, however,
many of those websites were again fully or partially prevented from access.
2
The figures are based on SARFT’s seasonal announcements of “Approved Foreign
Television Dramas and Films” in 2008. These approved foreign shows cannot be aired in
the prime time and on more than four channels in the same periods.
3
The figures are base on SARFT’s seasonal announcements of “Approved Co-produced
Television Dramas” in 2008.
4
According to “Opinions on Correct Propaganda Usages about Taiwan,” a mandate
issued by the CCP’s Propaganda Department in 2002, the names of all Taiwanese
government institutions and titles of officials at national level should be altered in
accordance to the guidance.
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Chapter 5: Re-negotiating Taiwanese Identity through Chinese
News
“In 2008, China faced Olympian challenges, of which the Olympics was but one,”
one China scholar said, referring to, among others, the enforcement of a new Labor
Contract Law, a severe winter storm, riots in Tibet and consequent protests along the
Olympic torch relay overseas, the Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing Olympic Games, the
tainted milk scandal, and the global financial crisis (Belcher, 2009, p.74). Some of these
events made news internationally, inviting myriad media representations that expressed
diverse concerns, interests, and perspectives. Visiting China toward in the year’s end, I
wanted to understand how Taiwanese migrants received information and judged facts
from competing media narratives. Unexpectedly, I found that their reconstructions of
Chinese news events involved a deeper reflection of situational self. Through news
reception, migrants confirmed, confronted, or redefined their different and sometimes
conflicting identification marks—ethnic Chinese, citizens of the ROC, and Taiwanese
migrants in China. The search for the meanings of news thus entailed a quest of identity.
Based on interviewees’ accounts of Chinese news, this chapter explores the
relationships between news reception and identity negotiation. That is, “how people
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represent themselves in relation to media narratives, exposing in the process instances of
appropriation and conflict” (Murphy, 2005, p.176). Moreover, the subjects are treated as
“socially and historically situated people,” not merely news receivers (Fiske, 1987, p.63).
Three significant news events are chosen for analysis: the Sichuan earthquake, the
Beijing Olympics, and the tainted milk scandal. They are most mentioned Chinese news
of 2008 by interviewed migrants. They also stand for divergent news categories: a natural
disaster, a festive sports event, and a man-made mishap. I will analyze how the reception
of various news events converges in an isomorphic process of boundary-drawing, as
migrants make sense of self, collective community, or national identity.
Reading News: Information, Meaning, and Identity
Before formally analyzing the three cases, I shall point out that identity negotiation,
despite its significance to Taiwanese migrants, is only one aspect of news reception. The
act of reading news may contain three levels of involvements. First, it is simply a process
of getting information, desired or unwanted—for example, the brands of milk products
contaminated by toxic chemical or the death tolls of a disastrous earthquake. The
journalistic practice, based on the norms of objectivity and fairness, assumes that a fact
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can be collected by news producers and then disseminated to receivers. However, even a
plain message can be framed by newsmakers via the principles of selection and salience,
or “making a piece of information more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable to
audiences” (Entman, 1994, p. 295). Interviewed migrants’ notion that one needs to be
news-savvy (see Chapter 4) indicates their awareness that news can be biased and
manipulated by journalists or news institutions.
The second level of news reception engages meaning constructions by way of
decoding news messages. A salient news message is not always meaningful to receivers,
or the meaning structure of text does not always correspond to that of receivers. Entman
(ibid) attributes the gaps to the difference of frames or schemata between a text and its
receiver. For Hall (1993), the key issue regarding text is not the selection question but
dominant ideology represented in the discursive form. Despite hegemonic discourse of a
text, the viewer may read its meaning with a preferred (affirmative), a negotiated, or an
oppositional position. Morley (1994) argues that any hegemonic discourse is insecure and
incomplete, but scholars should not be over optimistic about semiotic democracy. As I
will discuss later, consistent with Hall and Morley, my subjects articulated diverse
interpretations of the same news events, even when they did not misunderstand the
denoted or connoted meanings of media messages. However, their news reading is also
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constrained by their assumptions about the Chinese media.
While news reception involves information transmission and meaning construction,
this chapter will focus on the third level—that is, identity negotiation. For Taiwanese
migrants, the issue of national identity and/or cultural identity often assumes high priority
in their self-identifications, as they frequently encounter conflicts concerning their special
status as “compatriots” in China. Hall (1992) points out that “national identities are not
things we are born with, but are formed and transformed within and in relation to
representation.” A nation is “a system of cultural representation” that produces meanings
and generates a sense of identity and allegiance (p.292). In Taiwan, national identities are
highly politicized and divided, precisely because of a profound rupture in the system of
cultural representation. Migrants bear different national/cultural identities to China and
constantly re-negotiate their allegiances through both lived and media experiences.
Therefore, news reception is not merely a segment of information transmission in which a
receiver interact with media text. Rather, the process involves both social context and
cultural relevance.
Carey proposes a ritual view of communication that treats news more as drama and
less as information. He argues that news “invites our participation on the basis of our
assuming, often vicariously, social role within it” (1989, p.21). News reading, in this
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ritual view, is like “attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in
which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed” (ibid, p.20).
Communication cannot be treated as a phenomenon isolated from lived experience. Real
life and media, using Meyrowitz’s (1985) term, constitutes “the structure of social
situations” in which many once-distinct social spheres become blurred and overlapped.
Consequently, people think of their social role in terms of physical settings as well as
informational settings created by the media:
For media, like physical places, include and exclude participants. Media, like walls
and window, can hide and they can reveal. Media can create a sense of sharing and
belonging or a feeling of exclusion and isolation. Media can reinforce a “them vs.
us” feeling or they can undermine it. (Meyrowitz, 1985, p.7)
What Meyrowitz describes is that media, like places, create social situations in
which our role-playing is activated. Mediated situations can change our perception of
physical situations, and vice versa. Media enable people to adjust social roles in
face-to-face interactions, while real life experiences provide a frame of references at the
contact point of news reception. Media can create a sense of sharing or isolation, but the
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same media text may enact a person’s feeling of belonging or isolation in various
physical settings. Therefore, Taiwanese migrants’reception of Chinese news may be
different that of their counterparts in Taiwan. The following sections analyze how
Taiwanese migrants re-negotiate their identities through three significant news events of
China in 2008, given their physical presence in China.
The Sichuan Earthquake: Undesired Media Effects
On May 12th, 2008, a devastating earthquake—8.0 magnitude on the Richter
scale—struck Sichuan Province of southern China. It killed 80,000 people, and left
368,500 more injured, and 15 million homeless (Blecher, 2008). The Chinese government
swiftly responded to the tragedy, as Premier Wen Jiabao rushed to the damaged areas to
direct the relief operation. A total of 130,000 military service members and police officers
were deployed to the earthquake zones (Wong, 2008). Instead of blocking bad news as in
the past, Chinese authorities held press conferences on an almost daily basis and granted
foreign reporters access to the scenes (Chen, 2009). China’s adoption of more open and
timely media management won praises from a range of foreign media.
The extensive coverage of the earthquake news in Chinese media was also
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unprecedented. Xinhwa, the official news agency, publicized the earthquake within 18
minutes of the tremor. Four minutes later, the CCTV, the state-owned national broadcaster,
delivered the breaking news. Television channels across the country for the first time
replaced regular programming with around-the-clock news coverage. They devoted a
total of 1,397 hours to the earthquake newscasts in the first week of the disaster. In
particular, CCTV’s marathon broadcast lasted for as long as 294 hours (Gao, 2008; Hu et
al. 2008; Jiang, 2008).
The earthquake also caused a media frenzy for days in Taiwan. Major news
organizations sent reporters for on-spot reporting. Several TV channels acquired footage
from Chinese Television stations and held cross-Strait charity events with them. News
about damages of the disaster, safety of Taiwanese tourists and expatriates, and relief
efforts from Taiwan, dominated newspaper pages and television airtimes. For example,
the earthquake made headlines in the pro-unification United Daily News’s front pages for
six days, during which related stories spread across the first seven pages. The
pro-independence Liberty Times was less frantic about the earthquake news, but it also
covered the event on page three for five days.
As Renwick and Cao argue, Chinese political discourse formation is characterized
by consensus building (gongshi), a drive for unity (tuanjie), and a need for propagation of
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this consensus through education (jiaoyu) (2003, p.72). The Chinese media coverage of
the Sichuan earthquake was credited with unifying the country faced with a critical crisis.
Premier Wen set the tone of “putting people first” for the earthquake relief. Li Changchun,
the de facto propaganda chief of the CCP, ordered media to focus on positive news and
“uphold unity and encourage stability” (Dickie et al, 2008). Such instillation of positive
thinking included the promotion of heroes—notably the braveness of the People’s
Liberation Army, the leadership of the CCP cadres, and the generous donation of oversea
Chinese (Chen, 2009).1
While the Chinese media highlighted China’s national unity, the Taiwanese media
often focused on Taiwan’s compassionate response to the disaster, such as donations by
ordinary people and relief efforts by Taiwanese rescue, medical, and charity groups. At a
news conference, Wang Yi, the head of China’s Taiwan affairs, appreciated Taiwanese
people’s fraternity as proof that “blood is thicker than water” (China Review News, 2008).
The theme of blood ties and compatriot love was echoed by United Daily News’s May
16th editorial, “Humanitarianism and Human Nature: Earthquake Opened the Door for
Cross-Strait Dialogues.” This article analyzed why Taiwanese treated the tragedies of the
Sichuan earthquake and a cyclone disaster in Burma that also claimed tens of thousands
of lives differently: “It is natural to be so, and it ought to be so. Moreover, no one can
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prevent it from being so.”
Chung-Hsing Kao, a middle-aged senior manager, said that he felt emotionally
connected with “fellow Chinese” when receiving the earthquake news from the Chinese
and Taiwanese media. He was touched that “all Chinese across the globe worked hard
together” for the earthquake relief. This man resonated with the tone of “blood is thicker
than water.” For him, the earthquake confirmed his Chinese identity and symbolized a
unified Chinese nation in the future. In most cases, however, my subjects read the theme
of unity represented by Chinese media with a negotiated or even oppositional position.
They often expressed a humanitarian concern rather than comradeship with Chinese.
Betty Lee, a businesswoman in Shanghai, watched the earthquake news mostly from
Chinese television. She decoded the Chinese media messages with lay wisdom, while
being emotionally affected by the storylines. Her narrative presented a negotiated process
through which she constructed the meanings of the news:
Chinese news media had become much more transparent than before, but still only
positive news was allowed. The media tried to promote heroes. People’s Liberation
Army was great, the Chinese Communist Party placed people in priority, and the
earthquake victims had full support from the government. The message was clear:
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Every cloud had a silver lining. Wow, it’s amazing that a disaster solidified a
nation…But I still wept over those touching stories. (Betty Lee, businesswoman)
Betty simultaneously ridiculed and praised Chinese media’s instilling of positive
thinking and national unity. Her analysis actually echoed her dissatisfactions with the
partisan media and political infighting in Taiwan, a subject she raised frequently during
our conversations. She argued that “whether Taiwan is on the right track does not matter
so much to our everyday lives here, but it affects our feeling of belonging (guishugan).”
Therefore, the national unity she saw from the Chinese media reminded her of a divided
Taiwan. She said that Taiwan was her “root” to which she desired to return, but the
politics on the island concerned her very much. While the earthquake news affirmed
Betty’s Taiwanese identity, it also refreshed her memory about the shaky foundation of
such identity and reinforced her sense of rootlessness.
Like Betty, other interviewees also often mentioned Chinese media’s overemphasis
on positive stories, heroism, and national unity. Mostly, they adopted an oppositional
reading, complaining about too much propaganda in the earthquake news. A study
revealed that nationwide, the Chinese television viewership rate slightly reduced in the
first month of the earthquake (May 12th-June 12th), due to the interrupt of regular
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programming (Hu et al., 2009). It was not clear whether the Chinese audience became
tired of the earthquake news framed by the Chinese media. However, my interviewees
complained a lot about the repetitive coverage of similar stories in Chinese media.
One severe earthquake that struck Taiwan in 1999 and killed more than 2,000 people
served as a frame of references to migrants. They emphasized that, compared to
Taiwanese media’s coverage of that tragedy, Chinese media’s reporting of the Sichuan
earthquake ignored the voice of the survivors, lacked the criticism of the government, and
looked more like propaganda than news. A female expatriate (SH20B) said that she
glanced at news programs on Chinese TV after the earthquake but could not stay tuned
for long: “You could see only positive news on television. No one criticized the
government. Maybe those negative stories were censored and cut out.” Some migrants
said that the Chinese media coverage of the earthquake lasted a long time and out of
proportion. Alex Ho, a businessman in Kunshan, said that he decided to subscribe to
Taiwanese satellite TV after the Sichuan earthquake:
After May 12th, the whole country was laden with grief. Every time you turned on
TV, you saw news about how catastrophic the earthquake was, how well the
government responded to the disaster and took care of its people…etc. For as long
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as one week, all of the fifty-plus channels on my cable TV broadcast the same news
stories. Nothing else was on the air. Yes, the earthquake was a huge matter, but the
news was so ubiquitous that I couldn’t take it anymore. (Alex Ho, businessman)
As Gans (1994) argued, the intentions of the audience can limit media effects
because people may tune out much undesired content. In addition to opting out of the
Chinese media because of information overload, some Taiwanese migrants also expressed
their dislike of official propaganda, particularly media-constructed patriotism. A real
estate manager (Yuen-Kai Lee) said that “the Chinese media tried to use the earthquake to
make the case of national unity; that was really overdone.” ATaiwanese student (SH25)
complained: “The Chinese television was full of stories about the great government and
people’s patriotic behaviors. For example, a kid was rescued alive, thanked to national
anthem sung by his classmates to encourage him. Afterwards, these students were
showcased on TV, singing patriotic songs together and eulogizing the CCP leadership.”
Migrants’ discursive practices on the earthquake news suggest their apathy towards
the themes of unity and compatriotic love represented in the media. Fiske argues that the
meanings of a text is activated by relevance—the bridge between text and receiver at a
“concrete, contextualized moments of semiosis” (1988, p.250). Kraidy extends Fiske’s
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notion of relevance to the concept of social relevance, seeing it as the link between media
text and “the communal aspects of media consumption” (2005, p.143). That means that
news reception—even when it takes place in an individual—involves cultural meanings
shared collectively. The same text that encourages Chinese national morale thus becomes
a source of discomfort to some interviewed migrants. Low social relevance helps explain
why, in a moment of semiosis, few migrants activate the meaning of Chinese
patriotism—despite the fact that they understand the messages in the Chinese media.
Instead, the reception of the earthquake news is a process that affirms their
self-consciousness of being Taiwanese, or outsiders, in China.
The Beijing Olympics: Belonging, Exclusion, and Outsiders
The theme of 2008 for China was supposed to be “One World One Dream,” as the
slogan of the Beijing Olympics announced. From January on, however, internal ethnic
conflicts surfaced—including the unrests in Xinjiang and Tibet, where minority Uighurs
and Tibetans were discontent with the majority Han Chinese rule. The most serious
clashes took place in Lahsa, capital of Tibet, on March 14th. After a wave of riots by
Tibetans, China deployed thousands of troops into the region to restore order and barred
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foreign journalists from entries. Most Western media expressed concerned over China’s
military crackdown on Tibetans (Blecher, 2008), while Chinese media reported the
killings of Han Chinese and blamed Dalai Lama for masterminding a plot to embarrass
China during the Olympic year (Latham, 2009). The drama continued as pro-Tibet
protesters and pro-China crowds brawled along the Olympic torch relay route across the
Atlantic. A threatened boycott of the Olympic opening ceremony by France caused
anti-French rallies across China.
The media war between China and the West only cooled down after the disastrous
Sichuan earthquake. As Beijing was counting down to the Olympics, issues about human
rights, media regulations, air pollution, qualifications of Chinese athletes, etc. reemerged
in Western media. On August 8th, China showcased a stunning performance in the
opening ceremony of the Beijing Games, one that surpassed all expectations (Brady,
2009). The two-week sports event proved to be a huge success for China, not only as the
host of the Games but also as the champion of gold medals. However, some negative
news began to spread—for example, the fireworks shown to television viewers were
enhanced by computer graphics, a female leading dancer became a paraplegic after
falling during a rehearsal, a cute little girl singing solo in the ceremony turned out to
mime another girl’s voice.
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The media coverage of those controversies also invited academic criticism from
different angles. A study (Ono & Jiao, 2008) of the New York Times coverage of Tibet, the
Olympics, and the 2008 earthquake harshly criticized its “Sinophobic discourse” and
“yellow peril motif.” In contrast, another study (Brady, 2009) showed how the Chinese
government tutored domestic media to collaborate on the Olympics propaganda
campaign to promote patriotism and distract people’s discontents (Brady, 2009). As
Latham argued, the Olympic coverage was the site of competing representations of real
China: While foreign journalists strived to debunk China’s “state propaganda” and
“official deception of the public,” Chinese media tried to correct “biased, outdated and
even malicious representations” of their country (2009, p. 26).
In Taiwan, anything relevant to China can be politicized. Tibet unexpectedly became
a focal issue in the last days of Taiwan’s presidential election in March. Whether Taiwan
would be “Tibetized” and whether Taiwan should boycott the Beijing Olympics were
heatedly debated. Before the Games, the name of the Taiwanese Olympic delegation
again made news. China’s official media initially referred to Taiwan’s delegation as
Zhongguo Taipei (China Taipei)—instead of Zhonghwa Taipei (Chinese Taipei),
conventionally used in the Olympics. This implied that Taiwan is part of China. Later on,
China resumed the use of Chinese Taipei as a gesture of goodwill to Taiwan’s recently
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elected President Ma Ying-jeou, who adopted a conciliatory approach to his China policy.
Diverse media narratives surrounding the Beijing Olympics make it difficult to
understand the reality. Interviewed migrants often felt better informed because they
received Western perspectives through Taiwanese media; meanwhile, they also noticed
the limitations and prejudices of some foreign news sources. Despite information
confusions, migrants seemed more interested in understanding the meanings of media
representations than discovering the truths behind the news. More specifically, in their
reception of the news about Tibet, Taiwanese migrants found their ambiguous role—both
as ethnic Han Chinese and citizens of a nation whose sovereignty is denied by the host
country.
Some people stuck to their ethnic identity but struggled over the issue of human
rights. Pei-ying Chu, a housewife who strongly identified herself as Chinese, said that she
doubted the Chinese media’s one-sided reportage about Tibet. Yet she was not motivated
to figure out the truth. Other migrants disliked nationalism and Han Chinese chauvinism
expressed by the Chinese media and the general public. For example, a freelancer (SH23)
said that he happened to be traveling with a group of Chinese in Europe when the
Olympic relay was protested: “I kept quiet in the course of the trip because Chinese
people discussed the issue everyday with angry emotions. It wasn’t fun.” Generally
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speaking, migrants said that they were confused by various media reportages, but they
did connect Tibet’s situation to Taiwan’s future. Through Tibet, they confirmed their view
that China is determined to defend territorial integrity at any price. Feng-yi Pang, having
migrated to China for 13 years, expressed his knowledge of China:
While Western media focuses on human rights, Chinese authorities insisted on
sovereignty and would never let go of Tibet. That’s why China stations so many
troops in Tibet and Xinjiang. Had Tibetans succeeded in the uprising, Xinjiang
would revolt. Had Xinjiang revolted, there would be a chain reaction in the East
Coast (meaning Taiwan). (Feng-yi Pang, senior manager)
Compared with their rational analysis of the Tibet controversies, Taiwanese migrants
seemed to involve themselves deeply in the drama of the celebrated Beijing Olympics.
Their responses were often associated with self-identification—or the social role they
held in such an extraordinary moment for China. I first noticed the symbolism of the
Olympics to some Taiwanese when I met with a migrant in Taiwan months before my
fieldtrip to China. At that time, he was returning home to cast his vote for the President of
Taiwan. With political enthusiasm, he asked me whether I would support China or the
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United States during the Olympic competitions. His rationale for asking was that one’s
answer to this question revealed one’s political stance and voting behavior. I asked him
why “supporting Taiwan” was not an option, since, after all, Taiwan was fielding its own
separate teams. I was told that the Olympics would be a showdown between Chinese and
Americans.
During my field research in China after the Beijing Games, I did find the Olympics
an indelible and emotional experience for some interviewed migrants. However, their
sentiments were more complicated than what that informant had implied. Chung-Hsing
Kao, the man who was touched by Chinese unity for the earthquake relief, echoed the
theme of China’s victory over the U.S. He emphasized that the Beijing Olympics honored
all Chinese people across the globe, “showing off China’s prowess to Western countries.”
It was understandable that migrants with strong Chinese identity shared the sentiments of
foreign humiliations in modern Chinese history. They felt resonated with the Olympic
triumphalism that permeated in Chinese media and people.
Some were ready to see a strong Chinese nation ascending on the world stage, albeit
in the name of PRC rather than the ROC, which now represented Taiwan. Kao’s personal
experience helped him to accept the transition. He said that Taiwanese people of his age
grew up studying Chinese history and geography. He was content with his six-year job
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assignment in Japan, but had never fitted into Japanese society. After returning from
Japan to Taiwan, he said that he was annoyed by the soaring Taiwanese nationalism on
the island and did not feel at home. Instead, he found his comfort in China: “What I see
here is totally the same with the portrayal of the textbooks I read in the past.” Similarly,
Min-yi Chang, a female manager in her early forties, also said that her studying in Japan
a decade ago made her disillusioned with the ROC. “I was asked by a foreign student
‘where Taiwan is’and felt extremely insulted,” she recalled. She resumed her dignity
because of China’s hosting of the Olympics—only after a negotiating process:
The hot tears welled up in my eyes when I watched Li Ning (a Chinese gymnast) lit
the Olympic cauldron in the air in the opening ceremony. I don’t know how to
explain my feelings. At least Li Ning is Chinese, not Japanese, isn’t he? He is one
of us! When will Taiwan get the opportunity to host the Olympic Games? It’s time
to wake up! I’m proud to be Chinese who was born in Taiwan…Taiwan has no
leverage over the United States, but China can say no to Americans. (Min-yi Chang,
senior manager)
There was no surprise that the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony aroused Min-yi’s
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emotions. The fifty-minute show boiled down 5,000 years of glorious Chinese history
and civilization—Chinese characters, arts, technological innovations, philosophy, etc.
The spectacle was achieved by modern technology and astonishing synchronized actions
of around 14,000 performers. Chinese official media exclaimed that the media event had
been longed for a hundred years and was “giving millions of reasons to Chinese to have a
sleepless night” (Xinhwa, 2008).
On the other hand, Yu-Sheng Wang, a housewife and a former school teacher who
had taught Chinese in Taiwan, was sleepless for another reason. Her reception of the
Olympic opening ceremony proved to be a painful experience. She used the term
“loneliness” to describe her feeling:
Wang: I was shocked by Chinese people’s passions for the Olympics. I didn’t have that
and felt left out.
Researcher: How come?
Wang: You know, even the beauty salon I usually visited was closed during the opening
ceremony of the Olympics. All employees gathered in the shop to watch the show
and celebrate its success. They were so proud that the whole world was watching
the Games hosted by their zuguo (motherland). Despite some controversies, they
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supported their country wholeheartedly. Taiwanese are more aloof. We don’t have
the concept of zuguo in mind.
Researcher: Can you elaborate on your point more specifically?
Wang: It’s strange. Is our country Taiwan or the Republic of China? We claim to be the
Republic of China, but few countries recognize us. We’re lost. We can say that we
are Chinese also and be proud of the Olympics. To tell the truth, I don’t have such
a strong feeling.
Researcher: Didn’t you say earlier that you considered yourself Chinese?
Wang: But people here don’t treat you as Chinese. I almost burst into tears when
watching the opening ceremony. Yet when China hosted the Games, what did we
do for it? Nothing! I felt like floating here and there without an anchor.
The theme and performance of the Olympic opening ceremony evoked Wang’s
historical memory, one that had defined her Chinese identity all her life. Yet her
enthusiasm was dampened by her nonchalant media experience, which was in sharp
contrast with Chinese people’s passionate reception. She lacked the feeling of
participation and pondered over the question of exclusion. She was confused of her
identity as historical memory, media reception, and life experience clashed. As
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Meyrowitz argued, “while we tend to think of our group affiliations simply in terms of
‘who’ we are, our sense of identity is also shaped by where we are and who is ‘with’ us. A
change in the structure of situations—as a result of changes in media or other
factors—will change people’s sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’” (1985, p.55). Therefore, Wang
might not be aware of her outsider status if she had never lived in China and had watched
the opening ceremony in Taiwan.
Chung-Hsing Kao, Min-yi Chang, and Yu-Sheng Wang exemplify Taiwanese who
have a strong Chinese identity. They were emotionally aroused by the Beijing Olympics,
as they strongly felt the sense of belonging and exclusion. In sharp contrast, some
interviewed migrants situated themselves as outsiders from the beginning. Instead of
feeling excluded, they begged to be left alone by Chinese media’s extensive coverage and
Chinese people’s patriotic behavior. When talking about the Olympics, several migrants
described their media experiences as Terror bombing (pilao hongzha)—a military
terminology originally referring to periodical air raids aimed at exhausting patience of the
enemy. In Chinese, this term is applied to an intolerable status of information overload.
Yuen-Kai Lee, coming from a family that had supported Taiwan independence, explained
his distaste for the Olympic fanaticism portrayed by the Chinese media:
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The Olympics was a huge gala for China. All Chinese media eulogized the glory of
China—how the Games was well held, how foreigners praised its success, and how
many medals China had won. I was bombarded by these similar news messages
everyday and really felt fatigued of it. (Yuen-Kai Lee, senior manager)
Tracy Cheng, a second-generation Mainlander, used stronger and more malicious
words to illustrate her unpleasant viewing experience of the Beijing Olympics:
Chinese media’s coverage of the Olympics tried to convince people how great
China had become and how communism worked for the country. If I were Chinese,
I might appreciate the achievement of the motherland. But I’m Taiwanese! I just
found the news laughable [...] It’s disgusting. We all know that this is a totalitarian
regime, but its people are unaware of it. What they see on TV is a caring
government. News is just a performance here. (Tracy Cheng, housewife)
Tracy said that her Chinese identity had been gradually diluted after she moved to
Shanghai with her husband, a Westerner, years ago. She constantly noticed her difference
from the Chinese. Her media experiences in China—particularly with such a big event as
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the Olympics—often consolidated her Taiwanese identity. She said that she was expelled
by media manipulation of patriotism and desired to shun away from that. Some migrants
rarely used Chinese media but also sensed the soaring patriotism among the Chinese
public. An asset manager (SZ07) was asked by her Chinese subordinates to give the
Olympic opening day off. She thought the request “nonsensical” and wondered why the
Games aroused so much enthusiasm among Chinese. Chi-Ming Shih, a businessman who
regularly traveled to China, felt the same way: “Even a salesman would boast about
China’s gold medals.” For certain migrants, the Olympic experience—via media
representations and real life encounters—was a practice of drawing boundaries between
“us” and “them.” They reaffirmed their Taiwanese identity and reinforced their outsider
mentality in the placed they lived.
Still for other migrants, the boundary-drawing was the rediscovery of the difference
between self and other rather than an expression of hostility. They said that during the
Olympics, they only paid attention to baseball games, Taiwan’s national sport. At work,
they viewed the games via online text-cast and discussed with Taiwanese coworkers.
They also watched television broadcast with Taiwanese at private homes or public spaces.
For example, one interviewee (SH13) said that he attended a “Go Chinese Taipei” event
at a restaurant in Shanghai when Taiwan played Japan. That event attracted more than
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one hundred Taiwanese. The collective experience of watching baseball games was a
confirmation of the Taiwanese social bond, both from physical settings and from media
settings.
The Beijing Olympics was a glorious moment for China, at which Taiwanese
migrants often found their ambiguous role. Some thought of the question of belonging
and exclusion, in their struggles to make sense of self. Others just maintained an outsider
mentality, either feeling indifferent or aversive to the media constructed heroism and
triumphalism. Whatever their reactions were, migrant’s reception of the Olympic news
evidenced a process in which they confirmed, confronted, or transformed their identities.
Tainted-milk Incident: Class and Identity
On September 11, 2008, a report in Dongfang Zao Bao (Oriental Morning Post) of
Shanghai disclosed that dozens of infants in Gansu and other provinces had been
diagnosed with kidney stones. This report connected the illnesses to milk powder
products of Sanlu Group, one of the leading Chinese infant formula providers. Chinese
authorities then acknowledged that Sanlu’s products contained chemical melamine, which
was added to boost the reading of protein in milk. A nationwide inspection found that 22
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of China’s 109 infant formulas were contaminated, including some of the most trusted
brands. About 53,000 infants were sickened by tainted dairy products, of which 13,000
needed to be hospitalized (Yardley, 2009). The scandal soon developed to an international
storm, as various doses of the toxic industrial additive was found in Chinese-made
products of some of the world’s top food brands.
Taiwan was one of the countries heavily stricken by the melamine storm. Before the
government was able to take action, the melamine-tainted milk powders imported from
China had been distributed to numerous food providers in Taiwan. A variety of other
packaged foods contaminated with the toxic chemical, such as instant coffee and canned
beverage, had been sold to consumers. A melamine scare grew in Taiwan as bakeries and
bubble-tea shops lost businesses or even closed down. A Health Minister was forced to
resign among the public outcry about government’s indecisive actions in response to the
incident. A mass protest under the banner of “Opposing toxic products and defending
sovereignty” attracted a half-million people to the street.
The melamine storm also aroused discontents among Chinese. Journalists posted
stories in the Internet about how the Sanlu Group and local authorities covered up the
news for weeks or months. A Nanfang Daily editor revealed that the paper postponed its
investigation because of the Olympics.2
Chinese authorities had denied the accusations.
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However, the delayed exposure of the tainted milk scandal furthered Taiwanese migrants’
suspicions on Chinese media and products.
When asked of their impressions on China from the Taiwanese media, migrants
painted a polarized picture. On one hand, China was described as an economic gold mine
and a nation with spectacular natural landscapes. On the other hand, it was felt as a third
world country fraught with crimes and hazards. In fact, these impressions to some extent
matched conflicting media narratives of China in Taiwan over the past two decades. In
the 1990s, popular travel programs on Taiwanese television depicted the pastoral and
underdeveloped parts of China, which denied coevalness between China and Taiwan
(Shih, 2007). Since the 2000s, proliferating discourses in various Taiwanese media
promote a China fever that focuses on economic opportunities. However, the assertion
that Taiwan is more civilized than China persists in Taiwanese media about China-made
heixin (literally black-hearted in Chinese) products—unsafe goods produced unethically
and hazardous to human health.
Although many countries, Taiwan included, more or less manufacture unsafe
products, the phrase heixin is usually reserved for China by Taiwanese, thanks to local
media’s interest in picking up sensational exposés from Chinese media. Those bizarre
stories about heixin products include “fake” eggs, “hairs-made” soy source, “goat
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urine-immersed” duck meat, and DTT-added buns. A study (Chang, 2009) shows that
major Taiwanese newspapers, regardless of their political positions, tend to apply such
terms as “counterfeit,” “poisonous,” “low-priced,” and “poor quality” to Chinese
commodities, under the generic term of heixin. Consequently, it is not only that the
meaning of heixin is monopolized by China, but also that all Chinese goods are
generalized as unsafe, low-quality products.
The tainted-milk scandal revived Taiwanese migrants’memories of unsafe
Chinese-made products, putting them on the alert for possible contamination. Their fear
was amplified by their mistrust of the Chinese mainstream media. Betty Lee, a
businesswoman, attributed this incident to the lack of transparency in Chinese political
and media systems: “The news actually appeared on the Internet months before it became
public. But it had been blocked for a while, thanks to the Olympics. You see, how terrible
it was that mainland China suppressed the news for such a long time.” An IT manager
(SH24) echoed: “News here was tailored by the state apparatus. That’s why the news [of
the tainted milk scandal] was only released after the Olympics. Human life could be so
sacrificed for a big national event.” Migrants were not only critical of Chinese
government’s initial cover-up of the news but also suspicious of the trustworthiness of
media coverage in the aftermath. One expatriate (SH05) working for a software company
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said that he frequently browsed Chinese websites for news. He contended: “In China,
dissident voices might be heard for a short term, but they would be silenced
eventually…Now we’re told that milk products produced after a certain date were safe.
Do you believe it?”
Migrants’ fear of contamination connotes physical and metaphorical meanings.
Unsafe products in China are not only seen as an issue of hygiene but also as a sign of
moral decay. The tainted-milk scandal only reminded migrants of their migration to an
“uncivilized” place and confirmed their difference from locals, in term of the capacity of
“telling right from wrong.” For example:
I feel it difficult to fit into local society…The moral standard is very low here. Take
poisonous milk for example, I was shocked by the news, but most local people were
blind to it. (Amy Dai, housewife)
The news about melamine was really big… My husband said that it’s okay to ingest
minimal of it. But he also emphasized that “in China, anything could happen.”
(Shu-Min Lu, housewife)
These statements revealed that the reception of the news about tainted milk scandal
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reinforced migrants’sense of moral superiority and seemingly legitimized their resistance
to assimilation to the Chinese society. At the same time, migrants also stressed their
difference from Taiwan’s public in general, and certain components in particular, through
the news event. As they saw it, both Taiwanese media and Taiwanese people overacted to
the incident because of prejudice against China. At worst, the melamine panic in Taiwan
was exploited to spread China-phobia. Betty, who criticized China’s information control
over the tainted-milk scandal, was also discontent with Taiwanese media’s performance:
“News in Taiwan is overdone. It’s a shame that Taiwanese media politicize everything.
They favor politics over justice and ignore the moral distinction between right and
wrong.” A school teacher (SZ24) also felt that Taiwanese media tended to exaggerate the
dark side of China. “China has more than one billion people and most of them were not
poisoned by tainted milk,” he emphasized.
Migrants used the tainted milk scandal as an ideal example to prove their point on
Chinese media’s subjection to state control and Taiwanese media’s tendency toward
sensationalism and partisanship (see Chapter 4). Meanwhile, their opinions also involved
a reflection of situational self. First of all, they felt a sense of in-betweenness—as being
Taiwanese in China. That explained why, despite their caution on Chinese goods,
migrants felt obligated to correct unfair accusations against China. Lucy Tang, a
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freelancer, illustrated such a struggle. She said that her Chinese-Canadian boyfriend often
received forwarded e-mails from his Canadian friends. More often than not, those emails
contained stories about China that she called “biased, and sometimes untruth.” She
concluded that “Western media often gloat over China’s mistakes and enjoy disclosing
problematic Chinese products.” However, Lucy is also sensitive to food safety in China.
Once she suspected that the grapes she bought were artificially colored. “I threw them out
right away, based on my knowledge about Chinese heixin foods,” she said.
Many interviewed migrants shared such ambivalence. They felt insulted when
Taiwanese criticized China. A more profound and subtle feeling was the fear of being
ostracized by their compatriots in Taiwan. They regularly received e-mail or instant
message alerts from Taiwan about unsafe made-in-China items. When they returned to
Taiwan, the topic of heixin products was often raised by friends or relatives. “In Taiwan,
any Chinese imports are considered problematic,” a female manager (SH20B) recalled
her uneasiness during the milk episode. Similarly, another female manger (SZ07) disliked
some of her Taiwanese friends’hostility against China: “They teased me that the
mainland is full of heixin foods, and I would give them a chilly response, saying that
Taiwan also had a lot of [unsafe products].” For migrants, speaking up for China was a
self-vindication by which they fanned away doubts of themselves—Taiwanese who chose
215
to live in China over Taiwan.
Second, although the news about the tainted milk scandal catches many migrants in
limbo between China and Taiwan, it is clearly a reaffirmation of their class identity.
Curiously, such class identity is often associated with their being Taiwanese. Migrants felt
it unnecessary to panic over tainted milk in part because they had been well prepared for
unsafe products in their everyday lives. They brought crucial daily supplies from Taiwan,
changed their diet so as to avoid processed foods, and shopped in decent supermarkets.
Some migrants said that they rarely bought cheap stuff in China, especially as far as food
was considered. After the tainted-milk scandal, some set up a stricter standard—refusing
all made-in-China products, including those foreign brands. Therefore, consumption
became an expression of identity for many migrants, with an emphasis on brands and
product origins. One businessman’s (Alex Ho) comment epitomized such identity
construction: “In China, Taiwanese commodities have been distinguished from local
products. So have Taiwanese people become distinctive from locals.” Therefore, migrants
confirmed their distinctiveness through a discriminative process of othering, which
assured them of not being contaminated.
Conclusion
216
Taiwanese migrants’reception of Chinese news about these three episodes shows
that news reception involves not only the process of information transmission but also
meaning construction. Moreover, the meaning of news constructed by human subjects is
not always correspondent to the meaning of media text. First of all, people read news
differently because of social contexts where they are situated and because of social
relevance of the news to them. Taiwanese migrants make sense of Chinese news with
reference to their real life experiences. They also react to news in accordance with their
cultural frames. It demonstrates that, just as Morley and Hall would predict, not merely
other forms of popular culture, but also news stories are polysemic texts. Even news
readers will exploit the leakiness of the news text.
Secondly, news reception enacts different levels of meaning construction, including
the process of identity negotiation. For Taiwanese migrants, the reception of Chinese
news often invites a reflection of situational self, reminding them of being “Taiwanese
migrants of Chinese descent.” Three various news events in the host country—a natural
tragedy, a national gala, and a man-made disaster—all activate migrants’identity
negotiations. Some confirm their Chinese identity, but mostly migrants strengthen their
feeling of being outsiders and reinforce their Taiwanese consciousness. However, the
217
process is not straightforward. Sometimes migrants also develop a sense of
in-betweenness that they are distant from both the sending and receiving countries. In fact,
it is the Taiwanese migrant community in China that bestows them with the feeling of
sharing and belonging. Next chapter will analyze how migrants’ information exchange
with fellow Taiwanese helps reinforce their sense of Taiwanese solidarity.
1
What viewers saw on Chinese television after the disaster, as a Chinese scholar
described it, included the footage of “Premier Wen’s speech when flying to the scene and
his gravity upon arrival, Chen Jien’s last appearance that deeply moved every Chinese, a
student’s backpack dug out from the ruins, the tears of survivors who lost their families,
the rescue effort by our generous and respectful soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army,
great passion of volunteers who rushed to help, and the national spirit presented by the
Chinese people’s unity under the relief effort” (Jiang, 2008, p.5). Chen Jian was a victim
of the Sichuan earthquake who died shortly after being pulled out of the rubble that
trapped him for three days. During the rescue process, Chen showed tremendous courage
as he expressed his strong will to survive and reunion with his family. His voice was
heard by the nationwide audience through a telephone interview by a Chinese TV station.
2
City officials of Shijazhuang, Hebei Province, admitted in a news conference that the
Sanlu group knew the contamination in its baby formula weeks before alerted the city
authorities on August 2nd
(Quek, 2008). However, the affair only became public after the
expose of an Oriental Morning Post report on September 11th
. The reporter, Guangzhou
Jian, posted an online article, saying that he was not the first journalist to report the story
but only the first one to name the name of Sanlu. Fujian Feng, an editor of Nanfang Daily,
also posted an article revealing that his news organization was tipped the story in July but
did not start the investigation because of “a reason that everyone knows,” indicating the
Olympics.
218
Chapter 6: Trust—Social Networking and Information Exchange
Trust, as defined by Giddens (1990), is “confidence in the reliability of a person or a
system, regarding a given set of outcomes or event, where that confidence expresses a
faith in the probity or love of another, or in the correctness of abstract principle” (p. 34).
In Giddens’account, trust is vital to social existence because it reduces or minimizes the
sense of risk and insecurity. Modernity marks a transformation in which the foci of trust
relations shift from localized contexts, such as the local community, to abstract systems,
especially expert systems. Meanwhile, modernity also changes our feeling of intimacy in
that personal trust becomes one that needs to be worked at and to be earned (ibid).
Trust is a crucial concept for Taiwanese migrants. It affects how migrants organize
social relations as well as how they obtain information. Previous studies have shown that
building trusting interpersonal relationships (guanxi) with local Chinese bureaucrats is a
substantial component of doing business in China among overseas Chinese, including
Taiwanese (Hsing, 1997; Lever-Tracy and Ip, 1996; Ong, 1999). My research also
confirms that such guanxi connections help Taiwanese migrants scout insider information
and ask for favors (see Chapter 4). The relationships between Taiwanese businesspeople
and Chinese officials are instrumental in character: there are explicit objects of social
219
exchanges. On the other hand, migrants also develop Taiwanese-only networks for social
support and information exchange that they see as altruistic, based on their belief in
mutual help. These social networks among migrants retribalize interpersonal relationships
to the primary level, although they are not necessarily built upon localized contexts.
Migrants’ networks become a significant medium through which information is initiated,
relayed, and received.
This should not be surprising since seminal communication research has
rediscovered that, given the prevalence of mass media, primary groups—informal
groupings of families and friends or formal groupings of clubs and
organizations—remain important to news distribution and personal decision-making
(Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). Early immigrant studies have also showed that the exchange
of reportage, gossip, and news hold together the networks of immigrant peer groups
composed of kin, friends, and neighbors (Gans, 1962). With the development of
electronic communication technologies, interpersonal communication among migrants is
no longer limited to face-to-face conversations. Rather, it can be carried out by “mediated
interactions” (Thompson, 1995), such as telephone and the Internet.
Mediated interactions have twofold implications for migrants. First, interpersonal
communication transcends the limitations of time and space (Cathcart & Gumpert, 1983).
220
Therefore, the concept of community is transformed from physical space to cyberspace,
as well as from groups to networks (Wellman, 2001). Migrant networks become well
connected beyond physical constraints and across group boundaries. People are able to
establish new ties, retain old ties, and rediscover lost ties in the cyberspace that links to
wherever they reside (Hiller & Franz, 2004). Second, compared to the one-way
transmission of ethnic media, migrants also can contribute to information flow within
their networks. Deuze (2006) argues that the worldwide emergence of online ethnic
community media reflects a trend of participatory culture, owing to people’s growing
dissatisfaction with mainstream news media.
In fact, ethnic communication networks—interpersonal communication and ethnic
media alike—not only help cement tradition and facilitate assimilation (Jeffres, 2000),
but also substitute for mass media’s function of surveillance of the environment (Lasswell,
1964). Since immigrant groups are vulnerable to discrimination in host countries, ethnic
media work as community sentinels, acting as both radar and early warning system
against external threats (Viswanath & Arora, 2000). Digital technologies virtually allow
everyone in the networks of communication to play the role of gatekeeper. Additionally,
the new cyberspace provides marginalized immigrants a discursive comfort zone in which
they can articulate their identity narratives (Mitra, 2005).
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Taiwanese migrants are not marginalized in China, at least in terms of class. They
enjoy economic privilege and cultural affinity. Nonetheless, they do face political
hostility or at least opposition. Studies have shown that high economic status (Hu, 2006;
Wang, 2007) and political rivalry across the Taiwan Strait (Shen, 2005) heighten
Taiwanese migrants’ sense of insecurity and anxiety. At the core of their consciousness is
a trust crisis—disbelief in Chinese expert systems and in Chinese people. Because of
their isolation from the adopted society (see Chapter 3) and suspicion toward Chinese
mainstream media (see Chapter 4), migrants seek interpersonal or community networks
for social support and vital information, screening out external hazards and reducing their
sense of insecurity. As one of my interviewees (Feng-yi Pang) argues, a sublime principle
of being Taiwanese in China is “keeping watch together in mutual defense and helping
out one another (shou wang xiang zhu).” This Chinese proverb highlights a return to
solidarity in the local community, although the meaning of community has changed.
Previous chapters have demonstrated Taiwanese migrants’use of mass media. This
chapter focuses on community websites and interpersonal communication, exploring how
trust relations influence migrants’ modes of communication and associations—that is,
informal information exchange and interpersonal social support. First, I will discuss
institutional factors that contribute to the proliferation of interpersonal communication
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and social groupings. Second, I will examine the role of community websites in
distributing information regarding migrants’everyday lives and in facilitating their social
groupings. Finally, using the examples of three Taiwanese groups/networks, I will
analyze how Taiwanese migrants utilize communication technologies to keep themselves
informed and to cement solidarity.
Information Ambiguity, Social Alienation, and Interpersonal Communication
As analyzed in previous chapters, many Taiwanese migrants insist on living a
“Taiwanese way of life” and pay little attention to Chinese news. Their lifestyle and news
reception greatly influence their dependence on Taiwanese migrant networks for what
they think as “reliable” information. Of course, the practice of interpersonal
communication is not limited to Taiwanese networks. First, some migrants also recognize
Chinese people such as local officials, business partners, office coworkers, house helpers,
or personal chauffeurs as their news sources. Even the taxi drivers and massage therapists
they meet occasionally provide local news. Businesspeople and high-ranking managers
usually ask their Chinese subordinates for news briefs related to business operations.
Second, communication by word of mouth is also prevalent among the Chinese, due
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to China’s special media environments. Allport and Postman (1946-1947) argue that
“rumor travels when events have importance in the lives of individuals and when news
received about them is either lacking or subjectively ambiguous” (italic original) (p.502).
In China, it is often the lack of information in mass media that make interpersonal
communication prevail. For example, many Chinese citizens utilized alternative
platforms of information exchange—word of mouth, cell phone SMS (Short Message
Service) and the Internet—to cross-verify rumors about the SARS outbreak in 2003, at a
time when official information control created a high level of ambiguity and uncertainty
(Tai & Sun, 2007). In fact, SMS is broadly used by the Chinese for information
production and dissemination in everyday life. As of the end of 2008, 39.5% of Internet
users in China receive online content through SMS (CNNIC, 2009). This affordable,
movable, and interactive communication device is dubbed “the fifth mass media” in
China, where newspapers, broadcasting, television, and the Internet are controlled by
authorities (Li, 2009). He (2008) argues that SMS has emerged as a quasi-mass
communication channel through which a deviant discourse universe is carried out against
the official discourse.
Taiwanese migrants also resort to interpersonal communication for news and
sometimes utilize such tools as SMS to expedite and expand information flow. Compared
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to Chinese citizens, however, migrants even rely more on informal news sources because
they receive news less from Chinese media, and Taiwanese media offer only a sketch of
Chinese news. More importantly, a deep distrust of Chinese society and people furthers
their dependence on information exchange within Taiwanese-only social networks. As
analyzed in Chapter 3, migrants intentionally keep their distance from the local society.
Social isolation has contradictory implications for migrants’ reception of news. On one
hand, they become apathetic toward local affairs and are concerned little about Chinese
news. On the other hand, their ignorance about the outside world makes migrants feel
insecure, so they demand reliable information to ease the sense of uncertainty.
Many of my interviewees saw China as a high-risk society fraught with unknown
dangers. They were worried about the social ills emerging from China’s societal change,
such as social inequality, crimes, food safety, environmental hazards, and so on.
Furthermore, doubts about China’s expert system, including political, economic, and
social institutions, made them feel like being in a jungle in which they had to struggle for
survival. The distrust of Chinese society was expressed by a notion often mentioned by
my interviewees, that “China is a society governed by humans rather than cast by the rule
of law.” Businesspeople were wary of frequent policy changes and rent-seeking by
Chinese officials. For example, businessman Wei-chi Hsu described his sense of
225
insecurity about “information asymmetry” in China: “Chinese society is still groping its
way. One thing may be right at the moment but then become wrong at a different time.
You need to figure out when to do the right thing.” Because of a sense of uncertainty,
migrants utilize interpersonal communication to make sure they have sufficient
information.
Aside from distrusting Chinese expert systems, Taiwanese migrants also distrust
Chinese people. “Untrustworthiness” (buchengxin) and “disloyalty” (buzhongcheng)
were common perceptions of the Chinese voiced by my interviewees, who cited their
personal experiences to defend this prejudice. An accountant manager’s statement was
representative of a common view among migrants:
I have learned to protect myself from being taken advantage of … To tell the truth,
it’s not easy to survive here. You get hurt if you’re not skillful enough … We wish to
stay in our own [Taiwanese] circle. I used to treat some local people as good friends
but didn’t realize what they were up to. Taiwanese culture is different. We make
friends with sincerity and are willing to help one another. (SH11, finance manger)
This statement indicates that trust among Taiwanese has a twofold meaning: First,
226
migrants think that other Taiwanese are more trustworthy than the Chinese, even though
they know also stories about betrayals among their own kind. Second, they have a strong
belief that the Taiwanese they meet will give them a helping hand. Based on mutual trust,
migrants often band together, not only for information but also for social support. A
freelance writer (SH01) explained how she felt more secure in Shanghai than in other
parts of China: “There are many Taiwanese in Shanghai. It makes you feel that whatever
happens, you always have people from your home country on your side. It’s a kind of
comfort.” Despite the fact that this writer made few Taiwanese friends in Shanghai, the
presence of Taiwanese alone eased her anxiety about the external environment. It was
precisely these trustful relationships among Taiwanese migrants that furthered their
reliance on community websites and Taiwanese groups and networks for information and
social support.
Community Websites: Online Sharing and Offline Networks
Ethnic media are generally thought to produce geo-ethnic stories that provide
culturally relevant and locally vital information to immigrants in their places of residence
(Lin & Song, 2006). In China, government regulations make it impossible to launch
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media under sole foreign ownership. However, various publications that cater to the
Taiwanese business community still thrive in China, such as Strait Bridge (Taishang) and
China Taiwan Businessman (Zhongguo Taishang), monthly magazines sold both on the
mainland and Taiwan. Regional Taiwanese business associations also have their internal
publications delivered to their members. In Shanghai, such magazines as Emigrate to
Shanghai (Yiju Shanghai) provide myriad kinds of information, including health care,
education, advertisements for goods and services, and so forth. Most of my interviewees
said that they had heard of these publications but rarely paid attention to them. Generally,
they thought that these publications failed to provide useful information.
A newer format of ethnic media is the group of Taiwanese community websites that
have burgeoned in China over the past years. The absence of viable ethnic presses may
contribute to the popularity of websites that exclusively cater to the migrant community.
Nevertheless, it should also be noted that the web supplies immediateness, interactivity,
and intimacy for migrants. Besides, the long list of Taiwanese websites blocked from
access in China also diverts online traffic to community websites. Wellman (2001)
defines community as “networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support,
information, a sense of belonging and social identity” (p. 228). Taiwanese community
websites serve as an avenue that satisfies these functions. Among them, Taima Club
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(Taishang Taitai Xintiendi) and Taike Life (Taike Shenghuowang) are the two largest sites
in terms of membership.
Taima Club: Supporting Networks for Housewives
Taima Club was launched in 2005 by three Taiwanese migrants and was initially
designated as an online platform for information exchange for Taiwanese housewives in
Shanghai. As the time of my fieldwork in the end of 2008, this site had reached 30
thousand members, making it the most prominent Taiwanese community website in
China.1
It had also extended membership in other parts of China, Taiwan, and even
foreign countries—as its previous users re-migrated to other places—and had recruited
many male participants. Su Wu (an online alias), the chief administrator and one of the
founders of Taima Club, explained that he was motivated to inaugurate this website out of
his own frustrations with getting useful information after he migrated to Shanghai. He
rarely used Chinese mass media and was unfamiliar with Chinese websites. The
Taiwanese community website he had formerly been using had set up many restrictions in
fear of censorship by Chinese authorities. However, his online interactions with other
participants made him realize that Taiwanese housewives were responsible for the
well-being of their family and thus most needed information to conduct their lives in
229
Shanghai. Besides, they also had more time to spend online than other migrants did.
Therefore, Su Wu and the other co-founders decided to adopt a bulletin board system
(BBS) for Taima Club so that Taiwanese housewives could exchange information with
one another.
According to Su Wu and Jason’s Ma (online alias), an active participant of Taima
Club, the website became well known to Taiwanese housewives because of its forum on
education. With more and more expatriates moving to China with families, locating a
suitable school was a big concern for many housewives. The website awarded prizes,
such as online prestige, virtual money, and even actual trophies, to encourage participants
to get involved in discussions and to answer questions. The back-and-forth exchange not
only enriched the content of the website, but also reinforced interpersonal interactions.
Those messages increasingly touched on a wealth of topics related to migrants’ everyday
lives—for example, where to shop and eat, how to apply for visas and driver’s licenses,
whom to ask for the installation of Taiwanese satellite TV, etc. Sometimes the topics
would become very personal. The Wing of Desire (Yuwangziyi) was one of the hottest
forums: in it, housewives would discuss their husbands’infidelities.
As a result, active and seasoned members of Taima Club became acquainted with
one another beyond the Internet. The website began to hold offline activities, such as
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lectures, classes, and informal gatherings. Jason’s Ma was the chief organizer of lunch
meetings on the weekdays. She said that the gatherings in Shanghai usually attracted
more than one hundred housewives, who had had deep interactions with some online
friends and were eager to know each other in person. Therefore, Taima Club is not only a
platform of information exchange and social support in cyberspace, but is also a medium
that helps Taiwanese housewives build new ties in a place where they have lost most of
their old ties.
Taike Life: Sociability for Young Professionals
In contrast to Taima Club’s focus on housewives, Taike Life targets younger,
working Taiwanese expatriates in the greater Shanghai area. It was founded in 2007 for
commercial purposes by a Taiwanese-invested IT firm and has been maintained by a team
of full-time employees. Although its website resembles Taima Club, Taike Life
emphasizes topics related to consumption, such as shopping, dining, and travel, to cater
to the interests of youngsters. From the onset, it has utilized offline interactions to cement
its online community. With an aim toward profit, the Taike team hosts a variety of indoor
and outdoor leisure activities—bowling, Christmas parties, and group trips. The website
also allows participants to invite other Taiwanese young people to join their small group
231
activities.
The site’s administrator (at the time of my field research), nicknamed James Pond,
told me that as a latecomer in the arena of community websites, Taike Life initially
emphasized members’ face-to-face interactions to create a sense of belonging to the
online community. In addition, to publicize itself via Taiwanese mass media, the site also
relied on existing members’personal networks to recruit new blood. Within one and a
half years, Taike Life already had more than 6,000 registered members. According to
James Pond, most of Taike Life’s offline participants are salaried men and women in their
twenties and thirties, whose demographic characteristic are different from Taima Club’s.
These people want to meet new friends, lovers, and potential working partners. Therefore,
sociability is emphasized by the website. The Personal Network sub-page allows
members to find their lost ties, such as classmates and hometown friends. Offline social
activities help members to build new connections. If Taima Club fosters small groups via
its online community, Taike Life hopes to connect scattered groups into an expanded and
interwoven migrant network.
Authentication, Distinction, and Solidarity
232
Trust relations among migrants play an important role in the maintenance of such
Taiwanese community websites as Taima Club and Taike Life. Because of trust and the
belief in mutual help, information exchange and social support among strangers are made
possible through online conversations and offline interactions. Being Taiwanese is the
fundamental criterion of being trusted. The following is an analysis of how trust works in
the three mechanisms of authentication, social distinction, and solidarity.
Authentication
Despite Internet anonymity, the administrators of both Taima Club and Taike Life
emphasized that their websites maintained a composition of at least 90 percent “effective
members,” by which they meant that these members not only provided truthful profiles
but also actually came from Taiwan. Some measures were taken to ensure participants’
Taiwanese identity. First, website administrators would verify whether a newly registered
member provided a real e-mail address, msn account, and telephone number. Then they
would monitor online postings to judge whether this person was Taiwanese. Second, on
both websites, only registered members were permitted to post new messages and
respond to others’questions. When participants expressed their opinions, the websites
would show their personal profiles, including the information about their hometowns in
233
Taiwan. Third, based on their involvement, online participants were assigned various
ranks. Certain sensitive messages or forums were open only to privileged members who
had been actively involved in online sharing for a long while—meaning that their
authenticity had been well tested by other participants. Finally, offline activities were the
ultimate verification procedure, allowing participants to reveal their real identities to one
another.
Given the volume of information exchanged and the number of participants involved,
the effectiveness of these mechanisms to screen out non-Taiwanese is probably overstated.
However, their very existence shows how much website administrators are concerned
with maintaining a Taiwanese-only online environment. Su Wu emphasized that he did
not intend to make a distinction between Taiwanese and Chinese members, but he had to
appease Taiwanese users’“sense of insecurity” about sharing information and exchanging
thoughts with strangers online. He argued that the presence of Chinese users on Taima
Club’s forums often incurred unnecessary quarrels between Taiwanese and Chinese
participants, particularly when political issues were involved. James Bond, whose wife
was Chinese, also emphasized that Taiwanese people, including himself, preferred
hanging out with fellow Taiwanese because of cultural “commonality.” Therefore, Taike
Life hoped to keep a Taiwanese-only community.
234
The desire for sharing among Taiwanese, either online or offline, was reinforced by
migrants’ life experiences. Many of my interviewees mentioned that it was important to
maintain a low-key lifestyle in China. Unless absolutely necessary, they would not
expose their Taiwanese identities to Chinese people. Being Taiwanese made them an easy
target for swindling and forced them to declare their respect for China as the motherland.
Because of this forced and intentional reticence in everyday life, migrants found
Taiwanese community websites a shelter and “discursive comfort zone” in which they
could articulate a “silenced identity narrative” (Mitra, 2005). Mei-li Wu, a senior member
of Taima Club, explained why she appreciated this haven of discussions shared by
Taiwanese. She said that she used to visit Chinese websites related to her interests but
learned to keep silent because “Taiwanese often became targets of attacks.” If she wanted
to ask questions, she would pretend to be Chinese by typing in the simplified Chinese
characters used in China and used as few words as possible. “It’s a kind of self-protection
not to reveal we’re Taiwanese on Chinese websites,” she emphasized. Only after the
establishment of Taima Club did Wu feel secure to freely share information online
without disguising herself.
China’s online censorship also made community website administrators and
participants cautious of the presence of non-Taiwanese people on the forums. Most
235
Taiwanese community websites set up in China reminded members of the ten taboo
topics stipulated by the State Council’s Telecommunications Regulations (September,
2000), including the prohibition on spreading information to “undermine national
unification.”2
Website administrators also frequently warned users not to discuss political
issues and disparage the Chinese. “We need to follow [China’s] rules of game; after all,
we live on its turf,” James Pond argued. He said that he exercised self-censorship by
deleting some messages on the website that might cross the red line; he also cut out some
sensitive keywords, such as “Taiwan independence” or “Democratic Progressive Party,” a
group in Taiwan which was hostile to the PRC. In fact, Taima Club was once shut down
for a month because participants posted inappropriate content. Su Wu said that he
received phone calls about twice a month from the police, asking him to delete certain
postings. To maintain the website’s operation, he had no choice but to comply with the
orders. With the growth of the website, Taima Club has added 25 volunteer (in 2008)
assistant administrators to monitor its voluminous content. The practice of self-censorship
has also expanded to ordinary members, who regularly notify administrators of
suspicious or unsafe messages. Jason’s Ma, one of the assistant administrators of Taima
Club, emphasized that she had gradually begun spending less time “patrolling” her
forums because of members’reports. Devoted members become sentinels to protect the
236
sustainability of the online community. Preventing the involvement of non-Taiwanese
participants assumed priority as a means to shelter this discursive sanctuary from external
threats.
Distinction: a “Taiwanese Perspective”
Some migrants continued to cling to Taiwanese media for information in part
because they were hungry for news from home. In addition, my interviewees often
mentioned that they wanted a “Taiwanese perspective” from the Taiwanese media so they
could understand China, although the meaning of this term was not clearly defined.
Administrators and participants of community websites also emphasized the demand for
a public platform that allowed migrants to trade information from a Taiwanese
perspective. Su Wu illustrated what constituted a Taiwanese perspective by giving me an
example of online sharing about a trip to the Great Wall. He argued that what made a
pleasant travel experience for Chinese visitors might be a nightmare to Taiwanese
because of different concerns about safety, noise, cleanness, and so on. That made
travelogues shared among Taiwanese important and distinctive: “If you read a piece of
information posted by other nationals, you may have doubts about its truthfulness; but if
the story is told by fellow Taiwanese, you tend to trust it.”
237
This account demonstrated that the sense of reliability about information on the web
was built upon trust relationships among Taiwanese, particularly when participants were
strangers to one another. What made the Taiwanese perspective distinctive was the
mutual trust in Taiwanese people’s sincerity, shared values, and willingness to help one
another. In fact, Su Wu specifically stressed that Taiwanese housewives’kindheartedness
and sincerity contributed to the success of Taima Club. Alex Ho, an occasional visitor of
Taike Life and TWGOCN (a Taiwanese community website focusing on business), also
explained why he felt information on Taiwanese sites more truthful: “Taiwanese are
sincere about sharing knowledge online. Chinese disregard copyrights and tend to copy
postings from other websites.” Ho emphasized that he preferred visiting Taiwanese
websites to look for local information that involved a “Taiwanese angle.”
Trust among Taiwanese online participants was also expressed via language
distinctions. For a start, most Taiwanese typed messages in traditional Chinese characters
that were different from the simplified Chinese characters used in China. It seems that
over time, messages typed in the simplified form have increased, indicating a trend
toward localization. However, the Chinese characters used by online participants remains
an apparent index of nationality. A more subtle way to demonstrate one’s being
Taiwanese is the adoption of Taiwanese-style Chinese. Some idioms and usages are only
238
used by Taiwanese. For example, participants would type “JJMM” as a codeword for
“sisters” in the online community. Some Chinese terms used by Taiwanese users were
meaningless to Chinese readers because they were transformed from Taiwanese-tongued
Mandarin or the Taiwanese Hoklo dialect. A mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic
symbols (zuyin), adopted only in Taiwan, is often seen in online postings, too. Jason’s Ma
argued that using Taiwanese-style Mandarin on Taima Club was an intentional gesture to
express one’s Taiwanese identity: “We have a common language and share the same
thinking. That’s why people appreciate this online community.” Linguistic distinction not
only testifies to one’s nationality but also offers a cordial and intimate environment for
conversations in which people feel acquainted to one another and demonstrate their
solidarity.
Solidarity: Social Support
Community websites serve as a platform of information exchange. They are also a
source of social support through participants’ online interactions and offline activities. At
the informational level, online participants believe in mutual help and play the role of
community sentinels to watch out for each other. People constantly update news stories
related to the migrant community. They also alarm others if they detect anything unusual
239
in their surroundings. Ellen Sun, a product manger in Shanghai, said that she cared little
about Chinese news but regularly visited such sites as Taike Life and Taiwanese on
Mainland (Taiwanren Zaidalu) to keep informed of local information, in particular about
crimes. “Many people are willing to search for information and then share it with others;
that’s enough information for me,” she explained.
One recent college graduate elaborated on the point of mutual help in online
communities: “Because of anonymity, it’s difficult to evaluate the validity of online
messages. You need others’help to verify the information. It’s like Wikipedia. Many
people will correct false information for you.” This young man said that he basically
depended on the Work in China forum of PTT, the largest BBS site in Taiwan, for
Chinese news. Hsiao-hui Tien, a housewife and a Taima Club participant, valued the
information provided by community websites: “We [Taiwanese] are a minority here so
we buy things at a higher price and are often fooled by taxi drivers.” She thought that
most Taiwanese migrants had similar experiences, so that online information exchange
was a collective effort to share strategies for survival in China.
Online communities also provide emotional aid and companionship for participants.
As the proverb goes, “birds of a feather flock together.” People with similar characters
also tend to associate together and share personal experiences. On Taiwanese community
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websites, such forums as Men’s Talk (of Taima Club) and Expatriate Zone (of Taike Life)
create a space in which expatriate employees trade complaints about jobs, salaries, and
job-related issues. However, emotional support was most evident among housewives,
who have often sacrificed their own careers and relocated to China for the sake of family
unity. In the place of adoption, they lose not only careers but also social networks and
self-esteem. Throughout my interviews, many housewives told personal stories about
their lack of confidence, feelings of loneliness, worries about spouses’infidelity, and
sense of helplessness after moving to China. Personal narratives revealed how they reset
their anchors in life with the support of other women in similar situations. Mei-li Wu
emphasized how much such websites as Taima Club meant to her:
[Taima Club] is a place for killing time and talking with people about what’s
bothering me now. For example, I’ve been in a bad mood recently because my
husband’s job is shaky. I can’t show my worries in front of him, but I can share
secrets with other sisters on the website. They would come to comfort me. It makes
you feel that you have someone to count on. For me, Taima Club is like my natal
home. (Mei-li Wu, housewife)
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The emotional aid and companionship among participants can be strengthened by
offline interactions, through which some weak ties are transformed to strong ties.
Hsiao-hui Tien said that she rebuilt her social networks in China after attending Taima
Club’s workshops. However, she gradually faded out from online communities because
she found like-minded friends from the workshop to spend time with offline. Some
website participants, like Tien, build their own groups or networks for various kinds of
support.
Social Grouping and Networking
Despite the impressive scale of some community websites, their frequent visitors
only constitute a small portion of the Taiwanese population in China. Many interviewed
migrants instead formed various social groupings and networks for information exchange,
making interpersonal communication prevalent in the migrant community. But because of
China’s political climate, some migrants said that they were cautious of getting involved
in formal organizations and associations. The most visible Taiwanese organizations in
China are the chambers of commerce of different regions, called Taiwanese Business
Associations (Taishang Xiehui). These organizations are sanctioned by Chinese
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authorities and composed of Taiwanese companies located in the same townships.
Various local associations are then incorporated into larger business associations at
municipal, provincial, and national levels. They hold regular meetings, publish pamphlets,
and work as intermediaries between Taiwanese companies and Chinese governments.
According to my interviews with businesspeople and senior managers, views on
Taiwanese business associations were polarized. Some business owners were deeply
involved in those associations, confirming the functions of information exchange among
different companies and of guanxi-building with local officials. Others, on the contrary,
considered these associations nothing more than rubber stamps or decorative
organizations that benefited their businesses little. Some senior managers of big
corporations even told me that, given their companies’ clout in local politics, joining
business associations was only a gesture of doing a favor to other smaller Taiwanese
firms.
In addition to business associations, a variety of Taiwanese groupings also have been
burgeoning in China, such as religious groups, professional clubs, and amateur sports
teams. Some are formal groups, and others are merely loose interpersonal connections.
During my field research in China, I was impressed by how much migrants relied on
these Taiwanese groups and networks for “reliable” information and social support and
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believed in the spirit of “watching out for each other.” In the following section I list three
examples: senior managers in Suzhou, housewives in Shenzhen, and an informal
Taiwanese gathering called Shanghai Rice Ball (Shanghai Fantuan).
Senior Managers in Suzhou
In an industrial township in Suzhou, a “study group,” composed of 22 top-level
Taiwanese managers of different firms, is formed to share information about how to do
business in China. Named Finance Manager Fellowship (Caiwuzhang Liangyihui), the
group includes executives in charge of finance, public relations, customs, and personnel
management. According to Feng-yi Pang, a key figure in this group, only senior
managers whose companies are listed in Taiwan’s stock market are eligible for
membership. The monthly meeting is hosted by the company in rotation. Participants
discuss issues related to government policies, Chinese bureaucratic culture, labor
relations, and so forth. For example, they further their understanding of China’s major
economic policies by reading red-head (official) documents frequently. However, given
the fact that local bureaucracies in different jurisdictions might have diverse
interpretations of central policies, members also share information they have scouted
from officials. Sometimes they also exchange experiences of dealing with Chinese
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employees, especially since China tightened its labor law in 2008. Pang concluded that
this study group realized the principle of “keeping watch together in mutual defense.”
Cheng-wu Yu, a member of this group, said that he benefited more from the
informal gatherings with other Taiwanese executives than formal meetings at business
associations. As an assistant general manager with a Taiwanese electronic firm, Yu is
concerned with issues relating to taxes, customs, safety regulations, environmental
standards, and so on. Information exchange among group members makes him better
informed of these topics. More importantly, he can consult other managers about “the
right person” and “the best way” to solve problems if his company gets into trouble.
What Yu means is the ability to get things done behind the scene, possibly involving red
envelope (bribes). Pang, and others like him, can contribute on these issues because he is
a counselor to several local government agencies and maintains good relationships with
officials. For these managers, “social practice” (termed by Pang) provides them with
more valuable information than the media can offer, as they distrust the “public scripts”
of Chinese officialdom and feel insecure about frequent policy changes in China.
Networks of Housewives in Shenzhen
In China, many Taiwanese housewives have housekeepers to help with daily chores,
245
but they remain the persons that keep their households running. In Shenzhen, I found that
some Taiwanese housewives had developed interconnected social networks through
several primary groups—religious gatherings, residential communities, children’s schools,
and so on. They would inform one another about news crucial to their everyday lives,
such as crime, food safety, and shopping information. Each grouping was essentially
formed by weak ties and inter-group interactions were loosely connected by some key
persons. However, when asked about their news sources, every interviewee involved in
the networks pointed out the importance of interpersonal communication among group
members. Moreover, new communication technologies, such as listservs and SMS, were
applied to enable efficient information sharing.
Every Tuesday morning, a Bible study session is held in a house within a gated
residential complex in a Shenzhen suburb. This residential complex attracted many
Taiwanese families because of its geographical proximity to an industrial park in which a
large Taiwanese corporation was headquartered. The Bible group includes Chinese
housewives, but its core members are mostly Taiwanese.3
In this huge residential
community, another Taiwanese housewife group consists of members of the Buddhist
Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, a major Buddhist organization in Taiwan.
Regardless of religious differences, Christians and Buddhists become “sisters” with one
246
another and join efforts to do such things as donate resources to the Sichuan Earthquake
survivors. In addition, almost every Taiwanese housewife in this community has her
email address on a common mailing list managed by an active volunteer. The listserv is
usually used for group purchases, including buying goods from Taiwan. Sometimes
members also share personal experiences, such as avoiding certain bad landlords and
recommending a good house helper. Shu-Min Lu, a housewife, emphasized that this
neighborhood group provided her vital information as well as discounts she could not get
by shopping alone. Ping Liu, also a housewife, urged newcomers of the residential
community to sign up for the mailing list, or “they would be left out and know nothing
about the locality.”
I accompanied Amy Dai, a member of the Bible group, to her children’s bilingual
school in Shenzhen city when a Christmas performance was held. It turned out that many
Taiwanese children attended this school and most Taiwanese parents knew one another.
Shih-ying Hong, one of the parents, was considered an opinion leader by Taiwanese
housewives of this school community. She had diverse social networks aside from this
school, such as her own Taiwanese neighbors and people she knew from Sunflower, a
club composed of Taiwanese housewives in Shenzhen. Hong said that she watched a
Hong Kong-style tabloid news program on a local channel every morning and became
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more knowledgeable about local affairs than other housewives. Therefore, she frequently
sent out text messages to people in her network. However, information exchange among
this network that involved dozens of housewives was multi-directional and interactive;
Hong played a crucial role, but did not act alone. Every day several messages were
transmitted among the networks, including news, personal experiences, or group
activities.
Shanghai Rice Ball (Shanghai Fantuan)
Shanghai Rice Ball was launched by Milan (a nickname) in 2001, designated as a
group meeting for casual dinners that allowed Taiwanese migrants to socialize with one
another. Milan emphasized in her interview that back in the early 2000s, there were not
so many Taiwanese in Shanghai as today. She used to get excited when she overheard
someone speaking in the Taiwanese Hoklo dialect. She decided to organize Taiwanese
gatherings after finding out that one of her Taiwanese friends faced some career
difficulties because he lacked connections in China. Since its first test-run, the group’s
parties have been thrown sporadically and now attract one hundred more participants on
average. Milan said that she saw about half new faces appearing at the meetings every
time. Over the past seven years she had collected more than two thousand phone numbers
248
from these gatherings.
Milan argued that Shanghai Rice Ball was a very loose network and she had no
intentions of making it a formal organization. She “notifies” people in her network about
activities by sending cell phone text messages and by publicizing the date and location on
her MSN account. Sometimes the event is co-hosted by other Taiwanese groups and
makes the news in Taiwanese media. At the gathering, people show up for fun and
exchange business cards. Those who want to further business or personal relationships
then keep contact amongst themselves. “Because it’s a Taiwanese gathering, people get to
know one another in a very natural situation,” she emphasized. Three of my interviewees
said that they had attended Shanghai Rice Ball’s activities before, hoping to extend
personal networks. They told me that the gathering could become commercialized, as
people scrambled to promote commodities by giving samples and direct mails. Some
party goers also sought job opportunities on these occasions. However, they did not
anticipate immediate benefits for attending such events, but only hoped to get to know
more Taiwanese.
Watching Out for Each Other and Mutual Help
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The three examples above demonstrate a sampling of the diverse social groups and
networks organized by Taiwanese migrants. In Shanghai, where the largest Taiwanese
population is concentrated and where urban facilities make socializing easier, a myriad of
Taiwanese organizations prevail, such as 1881 Taiwanese Professional Women’s Society,
Taichum Gentlemen and Ladies Club, and Wine and Gourmet Club. Fennie Tseng, who
considered herself a socialite, emphasized that many members of these organizations
overlapped because they were active in the Shanghai Taiwanese circle. Asides from those
formal organizations, many migrants joined only unnamed groups, such as golf teams,
cycling teams, and even KTV or travel pals. As one businessman (SZ04) argued, “it’s too
sensitive to get involved in formal organizations in China.” Under such circumstances,
informal social grouping and network building served as a trading zone in which
migrants shared information and social support.
Sense of Being Taiwanese
The Taiwanese community in China is a loose concept rather than a tightly-knit
network. Social groups are not necessarily composed of people with close relationships
and strong-ties, either. In fact, I observed that some of the small group members did not
really know each other well. Nevertheless, many interviewed migrants shared a
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commitment that Taiwanese should and would help one another. Based on this belief, the
membership of groups or networks was highly extendable, as long as the new recruits
were Taiwanese. Milan explained why such loose gatherings as Shanghai Rice Ball
would attract friends and strangers alike: “Taiwanese social networks are important here.
Taiwanese are willing to give a hand to our compatriots. We all strive to make a living in
an alien place. People often admire that Taiwanese are united here!”
Mei-feng Luo, a housewife in Shenzhen, recalled how she learned the norm of
mutual help in the Taiwanese migrant community. The second day after Luo’s arrival in
China, a Taiwanese woman on the street recognized her Taiwanese accent and said hello
to her. After a short conversation, this woman gave out her contact information in case
Luo, then a newcomer, needed help. “Her offer didn’t involve personal interests,” Luo
claimed. Similar experiences repeated in her life in Shenzhen and made her strongly
believe in the sincerity and goodwill of Taiwanese people.4
She noticed that Taiwanese
usually kept their guard up in China but became less self-defensive when associating with
people of their kind, even though they were strangers to each other. Li-ling Chang, a
high-ranking manager, confirmed the openness of social groupings and networks among
migrants. She frequently traveled around China with a group of Taiwanese whose
members had constantly changed because of many expatriates’transient stays in China.
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She argued that migrants in China had to cope with constantly “losing old friends” by
opening their hearts to make new ones:
Taiwanese have a peculiar pattern of sociability on the mainland. When I met
college friends in Taiwan, I’d never bring my colleagues with me. But this happens
all the time here. Since we’re in an alien place, we don’t care so much about
[Taiwanese] strangers. We’re really much more open-minded here than in Taiwan.
(Li-ling Chang, CFO)
Therefore, my research shows that trust relationships and faith in mutual help among
migrants are grounded more in membership in the Taiwanese community than in the
strong ties of primary groups, although such trust and faith are still activated and
reinforced by interpersonal interactions—face-to-face and mediated. Social grouping and
networking among migrants satisfies their need for leisure, information, and sociability,
with the companionship of fellow Taiwanese.
“Watch Out for Each Other”: the Role of the Community Sentinel
Many migrants described their lives in China as constrained to a “fish bowl,”
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“fortress,” or “small circle” that segregated them from outside communities, physically or
psychologically. Consequently, their information exchanges concentrated in two areas:
surveillance of the environment and internal integration. First, a strong sense of insecurity
drove migrants to scout out information about their surroundings for one another. One
migrant (SH24) labeled his communication network in China as “feelers” (chuxiu) that
served as an organ of reconnaissance and “bodyguards” (hufa) who protected him from
external threats. Interpersonal communication among Taiwanese migrants thus plays the
role of a sentinel or watchdog for immigrant communities. In the case of finance
managers in Suzhou, information exchange concentrates on Chinese bureaucratic
practices that otherwise seem opaque and whimsical to them. Group members also share
experiences concerning management of the labor force, chiefly composed of Chinese
migrant workers, whom Taiwanese executives regarded as unruly and dangerous.
Similarly, Shenzhen housewives also warn one another through their listserv or SMS
communication against hazards and dangers in China, such as crimes and product safety.
They also send information about “group purchase programs,” with the assumption that
Taiwanese will be easily cheated by local merchants. In sum, the Taiwanese migrants
treat information sharing as a means of minimizing the external risks they face and
reducing their sense of insecurity.
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It should be noted that messages traded by migrants include news and personal
experience, as well as misinformation, gossip, and rumors. Shih-ying Hong, an opinion
leader among housewives, said that she once received a text message about the
contamination of HIV in meat sold at barbeque stands on Shenzhen streets. Based on trust
in and mutual help among her fellow Taiwanese, she immediately forwarded it to other
housewives in her cell phone network: “I believe the story was true because it was sent
from my friend.” Another network member (SZ28B) confirmed: “Alternative
communication networks shape our understanding of local environments. We don’t trust
mass media here, [but] we trust the veracity of text messages sent by our friends.”
This logic is flawed because much information traded by the housewife network
originates from Chinese media. It is personal trust in sincerity and common judgment
among the Taiwanese that endorses this sense of news authenticity. The alternative
communication network among migrants cements group identity but also furthers their
distrust of and isolation from their host society.
“Mutual Help”: Sociability and Bounded Solidarity
The second type of information shared by migrants involves internal integration,
including messages general to the Taiwanese migrant community, such as issues
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concerning visas, schools, and, company benefits. Updates regarding Taiwanese
investments and job opportunities are also circulated through interpersonal
communication. By and large, migrants regard their guanxi with Chinese officials and
business partners as instrumental. For example, a businessman (SZ04) emphasized that
he frequently gave gifts to local bureaucrats even while he cautiously maintained an
appropriate distance from them. Gift giving is an explicit signal of social exchange in the
expectation of the repayment of political favors. On the other hand, migrants tend to see
their social groupings and networking with other migrants as altruistic, although they do
not exclude instrumental purposes.
The sociability among Taiwanese migrants is similar to what Bourdieu (1986) calls
social capital—“the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to
passion of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual
acquaintance and recognition—or in other word, to membership in a group” (p.248).
Bourdieu regards profit as the basis of the solidarity accrued from social capital, but he
also argues that an investment in sociability is not necessarily a calculated pursuit of gain.
Rather, an investment can be emotional and indebtedness can be transformed to gratitude.
Disinterested and altruistic investment can be motivated by bounded solidarity, or
identification with one’s own group, sect, or community (Portes, 1998).
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One of my interviewees (Fennie Tseng) called the Taiwanese sociability in China a
form of “resource pooling” (ziyuan zhenghe), in that migrants lack sufficient disposable
resources—which they could have enjoyed in Taiwan. People who participated in
Taiwanese groups and networks—golf teams, softball teams, KTV gatherings,
etc.—admitted that through this participation they got access to some privileged
information and cultivated good relationships that might help in their future. At the same
time, they also denied specific instrumental motivations to join these groups and
networks. Amanager (Yuen-Kai Lee) who planed to move from Suzhou to Beijing began
attending the activities of a so-called Taiwan Rice Ball group there, hoping to build new
social networks. He emphasized: “We’re not classmates or neighbors. People join these
events with some purpose, but it’s not always for profit.” A businesswoman (Betty Lee)
disclosed her ups and downs in China, emphasizing that “it’s important to have someone
pull you up from the abyss.” For migrants, this “someone” is more likely to be
Taiwanese.
Interpersonal information exchange and (potential) social support among migrants
enables a bounded solidarity in the Taiwanese community. One housewife (Men-jung Tu)
in the aforementioned Shenzhen suburb complex described how Taiwanese neighbors
took care of one another—for example, looking after Taiwanese children whose parents
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needed to return temporarily to Taiwan because of an emergency. She argued: “Local
people are not as united as we are…in this neighborhood, you can easily single out who
is Taiwanese.” Because of this sense of solidarity, she enjoyed her life more in the
Taiwanese circle of China than in Taiwan. Therefore, such solidarity was specifically
bounded to the Taiwanese community in China. This feeling of comradeship in the place
of adoption was also reinforced by the severe social division and political partisanship at
home. Another housewife (Mei-feng Luo) lamented: “Taiwanese are united here but
divided in Taiwan; [people in Taiwan] can’t see our differences from other peoples.” The
construction of community identity thus was also based in a nostalgia for lost unity in the
home country.
Conclusion
China’s control of mass media and its rapid development of communication
technologies make mediated interpersonal communication through the use of such tools
as SMS and e-mail popular among ordinary people. Like Chinese citizens, Taiwanese
migrants also rely on personal networks for certain information. Such interpersonal
information exchange in China is even more important to the Taiwanese, given their
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status as foreign citizens. With the absence of viable ethnic media and the demand for
immediate and interactive ways of communication, Taiwanese community websites
become a platform of social exchange among migrants, not only for information but also
for other types of support. Migrants actively involve themselves in groups and build
social networks exclusively for Taiwanese migrants, in which they produce, relay, and
receive information through word-of-mouth communication.
Ethnic communication networks’ function of the surveillance of the environment has
been documented by previous research. However, these studies often focus on
economically disadvantaged immigrant groups who depend on internal networks for
resources. Taiwanese migrants enjoy economic privilege in China but feel politically
discriminated against by Chinese people and censored by Chinese authorities. This
particular situation nurtures their sense of insecurity in the host society. Interview data
show that trust plays a pivotal role in the Taiwanese networks of interpersonal
communication. With deep suspicion in their surrounding environments, migrants band
together for information and support. They believe in the notion of “keeping watch
together in mutual defense and helping out one another.” This communal spirit solidifies
the Taiwanese community through the mechanism of identity authentication, circulation
of Taiwanese perspectives, and trust in mutual help. However, it also sustains migrants’
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intentional distinction from the local society and reinforces mutual distrust between
Taiwanese and Chinese people.
1
As of December 2009, Taima Club’s membership had grown to over 50,000.
2
According to Telecommunications Regulations of PRC, information is prohibited: 1)
that goes against the basic principles set out in the State constitution; 2)that endangers
national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, or undermines national
unification; 3) that is detrimental to the honor and interests of the state; 4) that instigates
ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination or that undermines national unity; 5) that
undermines the state’s superstitious beliefs; 6) that disseminates rumors, disturbs social
order, or undermines social stability; 7) that disseminates pornography and other
salacious materials; 8) that promotes gambling, violence, homicide, and terror or that
instigates the commission of crimes; 9) that insults or slanders other people or that
infringes upon other people’s legitimate rights and interests; and 10) other information
prohibited by the law or administrative regulations (cited from Zheng, 2007, p.60)
3
Most Chinese left after the Bible study session, which gathered about thirty people.
After lunch, less than ten people stayed to discuss a holiday activity. It was evident that
the core members of this group mostly consisted of Taiwanese women, but my
interviewees explained that the Chinese housewives had errands to run so they left earlier.
4
My field research in China was benefited greatly from Taiwanese migrants’trust in
me—as Taiwanese—and their belief in mutual help. After we ended the interview, this
housewife, whom I had met only occasionally, volunteered her contact information.
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Chapter 7: Growing Taiwanese Consciousness, Fractured Identities
In the previous chapters, I have shown how Taiwanese migrants construct we-group
sameness and consolidate Taiwanese consciousness through a range of transnational and
local practices. This chapter focuses on their perception of cultural difference and the
consequent distinction of “we” from “they.” This intentional cultural othering reinforces
migrants’ pride in being Taiwanese. Nevertheless, as I will also discuss, their
self-narratives of identity usually involve politics. This sense of being Taiwanese, as
distinguished from the PRC Chinese, sometimes contradicts with their existing identities
or perspectives on Taiwan’s political future. In the following sections, I will unravel
Taiwanese migrants’ ambiguous, and sometimes conflicting, self-identifications.
Identity of Difference
In The Global and the Local, Hall (1997) describes a peculiar kind of identity
emerging from the cultural encounters of difference in the history of English imperialism:
To be English is to know yourself in relation to the French, and the hot-blooded
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Mediterraneans, and the passionate, traumatized Russian soul. You go round the
entire globe: when you know what everybody else is, then you are what they are not.
Identity is always, in that sense, a structured representation which only achieves its
positive through the narrow eye of the negative. It has to go through the eye of the
needle of the other before it can construct itself. (Hall, 1997, p.21)
Cultural othering is a way of identity formation through which the sense of “we” is
clarified by being distinguished from the “they.” What happens, then, when the search for
“we” turns out to be the encounters of otherness? Wessendorf (2007) finds that, driven by
nostalgia, second-generation Italians in Switzerland return to their parents’hometowns in
Italy. These “roots migrants” constantly deal with the discrepancies between the imaged
and real homelands. What follows are shocking and uprooting experiences:
In Italy, roots migrants become aware of their idealised images of the homeland
and struggle to integrate into a society and a culture which they had until then
perceived as their own. This shock is caused by existential fears of economic and
social insecurity, and by the cultural expectations of the communities in which they
settle. (Wessendorf, 2007, p.1098)
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Such experiences of culture shock amplified by “cultural expectations” also happen
to some “return” migrants of overseas Chinese. Yeoh and Willis (2005) find that
Singaporean expatriates in China have more difficulties in negotiating cultural difference
than their British counterparts do, because they have expected to rejuvenate their lost
Chinesesness with their journey to the motherland. The notion of encountering China as a
“return-to-roots” experience, however, is soon replaced by the assertion of Singaporean
identity, which is distanced from PRC Chineseness. They quote a housewife’s narrative
of how Singaporeans rediscover their Singaporeanness in Beijing:
And the culture shock at first was quite (tremendous) for we thought we were all
Chinese, but their attitude towards life, their attitudes towards hygiene, their
mannerisms are all totally different from us as Chinese…My son told me, “Mommy,
I hate the Chinese.” I said, “Don’t say that, you are Chinese.” He said, “No, I’m
Singaporean. I can’t stand them.” (quoted in Yeoh & Willis, 2005, p.227)
Yeoh and Willis argue that Singaporean expatriates in China mostly belong to the
elite strata—highly educated professionals and managers or business entrepreneurs. With
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their superior economic resources and geographical mobility, they manage culture shock
by constructing physical and psychological boundaries between themselves and local
Chinese. Smart and Smart likewise observe that Hong Kong investors’negotiation of
identity inclusions and exclusions in China involves negative assessments of mainland
Chinese—a kind of colonial mentality. Hong Kongers tend to see themselves as “much
more developed and rational than their benighted counterparts who have been degraded
and decultured by the socialist experience” (1998, pp. 116-7). Studies on Taiwanese
migrants also show that Taiwanese develop a sense of superiority (yoyuegan) in China,
feeling that they are culturally more progressive than the PRC Chinese (Hsing, 1997; Lin,
2006; Wang, 2007, 2008). Moreover, the awareness of cultural difference is also
furthered by exposure to the Chinese people’s discipline of the “one-China discourse”:
that Taiwan is part of China (Shen, 2005). Wang (2008) argues that different economic
and political systems and histories on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have led to
dissimilar lifestyles, which strengthens migrants’Taiwanese identity.
During my field research, I also found that cultural difference (wenhwa chayi) was
the key concept in the minds of Taiwanese migrants when drawing boundaries between
themselves and the Chinese. At the same time, Taiwanese migrants were also aware of
their cultural affinity with China. The majority of Taiwanese are descendants of Han
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Chinese immigrants. As I reviewed in Chapter 1, Taiwanese who grew up before the
1990s were educated in school as Chinese. They were taught to appreciate Chinese
cultural heritage such as Confucianism. As a result, Taiwanese migrants develop mixed
feelings of similarities and differences in the place of adoption, which became
constitutive of their identity renegotiation in China.
Encountering Cultural Similarities and Differences
Cultural Similarities
Generally speaking, my research subjects pointed out three aspects of how they felt
culturally connected to mainland China—daily life, tradition, and business. Although
these cultural similarities were less emphasized than cultural differences, they were
important reference points when migrants talked about their identities. First, most
migrants said that they accommodated themselves to local lives without too much effort,
at least when compared, as they saw it, to foreigners in China or their own experiences in
other foreign countries. Shanghai foods, despite their saltiness and greasiness, remained
the Chinese dishes they preferred, rather than Western foods like hamburgers. Local
dialects like Cantonese were difficult to learn, but Mandarin was the common language
264
that allowed them to speak with locals. Secondly, the natural landscape and cultural
heritage on the mainland often reminded migrants of the Chinese history, literature, and
geography they had studied in school. Some of my interviewees described the excitement
of witnessing the scenery in China that they had learned about from textbooks. To them,
touring the old towns in Suzhou and seeing architecture described by ancient Chinese
poets was like revisiting familiar places.
The third aspect of cultural similarity was emphasized by businesspeople, who said
that Taiwanese had the advantage of understanding the “grey areas” of Chinese
society—particularly the red-envelope (bribe) culture. They argued that Hong Kongers
and Singaporeans had become too Westernized to grasp the subtleties of doing business
in China. In this sense, migrants asserted their Chineseness—in an instrumental way.
However, this Chineseness implies a negation of the Chinese culture presented by the
PRC nationals. When asked how the factor of “the same language/culture and the same
ancestral stock” (tongwentongzhong) conditioned their relationships with local Chinese,
Taiwanese migrants tended to deny that part of their “cultural sameness.”
Cultural Differences
As Hall (1997) argues, identity in its positive sense is achieved through the eye of
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the negative. The consciousness of being Taiwanese in China, for migrants, was
reinforced by their negative evaluations of Chinese people, ranging from the superficial
“uncivil behaviors” they observed to profound “moral corruptions” they asserted.
Migrants often complained about the ways the Chinese acted in public—spitting, littering,
clamoring, not queuing, etc. They said that they were annoyed by the bad demeanor and
rudeness of local Chinese. In the workplace, business owners and managers accused
Chinese employees of being disloyal, irresponsible, untrustworthy, opportunistic, and
inclined to steal company properties or secrets. They argued that these “bad behaviors”
reflected the backwardness of Chinese society in terms of social norms, moral values, and
ethics. Therefore, cultural difference, in the usage of Taiwanese migrants, connoted
cultural discriminations against the Chinese. My interviewees usually had unpleasant
personal stories at hand to illustrate their strong feelings of cultural difference. A
Christian described her disappointment at the “uncivilness” of Chinese people after a
religious gathering:
We had a Christmas event a few days ago. When the Santa was giving out the
presents, he was almost toppled down by a swarm of (Chinese) people who wrestled
to grab the gifts. After the party, all the decorations on the wall were gone. We still
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needed those decorations and didn’t know what to do. We felt so upset. […] They
have become rich now, but they have remained uncivil. (Men-jung Tu, housewife
and former school teacher)
Tu said that, for her whole life, she had adamantly regarded herself as Chinese. She
was excited when leaving Taiwan for China because those who “advocated Taiwan
independence”—meaning the DPP—were in power. After living in China for four years,
as she saw it, her Chinese identity was diminished by the everyday experiences of
cultural difference.
Migrants’ assertion of Chinese “incivility” was not limited to how Chinese people
behaved but also how they thought. A business owner (SZ04) contended that the
reasoning of the Chinese was different from that of the Taiwanese:
I can’t imagine their ways of thinking. Some of my (Chinese) friends are used to
littering drinking bottles about. I asked them why they did that, and they would
answer that someone was going to clean it up anyway. They thought that they paid
the taxes and thus had the right to litter. I didn’t know how to contest this argument.
But their ways of thinking were different from ours. (SZ04, businessman)
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Like this businessman, many migrants emphasized that they did not know how to
communicate with the Chinese. Their statements centered on impressions of a lack of
ethical standards and moral values on the part of Chinese. Sometimes migrants might
essentialize these to being differences of human nature. Rei-yi Deng, an in-house attorney,
explained why she remained distant from Chinese people:
I can’t believe in their sincerity. I used to work in an office with a dozen more
Chinese coworkers. It really opened my eyes to see how they attacked others for
their own survival. For example, when someone took a day off, they collectively
badmouthed this person in the office. I felt it was terrible. I was shocked. That’s
against our nature. (Rei-yi Deng, in-house attorney)
Although a few Taiwanese migrants moved to China in search of their roots, their
everyday cultural encounters in China became a challenge to this sought-after
Chineseness. For those who had adored Chinese culture, the gaps between reality and
imagination were unbearable. These migrants tended to blame the Communist regime for
uprooting the virtue of “traditional Chinese culture.” They argued that the Cultural
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Revolution, the one-child policy, and the pursuit of economic growth had led to current
“moral degradation” in China. Instead of completely disavowing their Chineseness, these
migrants thought that Taiwan had preserved traditional Chinese culture and regarded
themselves as “more Chinese” than PRC Chinese. A returnee (Jerry Chen) who had
previously owned a cafe in Shanghai said that he ended his business there and returned to
Taiwan because of his frustrations with the Chinese. He argued: “they (Chinese nationals)
don’t have the traditional virtue of the Chinese, but I do. I have been cultivated by
Confucianism.”
Other migrants interpreted cultural difference with an evolutionary perspective that
China was in the initial stage of modernization and therefore was less civilized. A
businessman (Wei-chi Hsu) said that cultural differences between the Taiwanese and
Chinese were understandable because
Taiwan and China are in different stages of development. China lags behind Taiwan
for twenty years, so do its people […] I think that human beings are shaped by the
environments in which they situate. We should think of individuals and collectives in
this way. Taiwan also had the problem of PCB pollution in the past. Was it different
from the current melamine incident in China? It’s ideological to think of things in
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terms of the differences between Taiwanese and Chinese. (Wei-chi Hsu, general
manager)
Like Hsu, some migrants believe that the Chinese society will continue to become
more “civilized” in accordance with its modernization. In fact, those veteran migrants
report observations of reduced “incivility” in the Chinese over the past decade. However,
these two views of PRC Chinese as either de-Sinicized or uncultivated subjects supported
migrants’ sense of superiority and resistance to assimilation, at least at present. Taiwanese
subjectivity is, therefore, shaped by the distance from PRC Chineseness. Interviewed
migrants considered fellow Taiwanese “honest,” “sincere,” “modest,” “responsible,”
“polite,” “moral,” “hard-working,” and so on—all of which had emerged from their
antonyms designated to the others. This Taiwanese consciousness, despite rising from an
opposition to the Chinese, was no longer the victimized identity developed in Taiwan’s
democratic movements against the KMT Chinese discourse and China’s military threats
(Buruma, 1996; Jacobs, 2005; Lo, 2002) (see Chapter 1). Rather, it was built upon the
glory of being Taiwanese in relation to the PRC Chinese.
Assimilation as Undesirable
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When asked whether they had become localized in China, Taiwanese migrants
expressed their resistance to adapting to Chinese society. Assimilation, implying cultural
degrading for the migrants, was not only unattainable but also undesirable. On one hand,
many said that localization was an important survival strategy in China. It was a common
complaint among migrants that they were taken advantage of by the Chinese because
they lacked sufficient local knowledge. On the other hand, going native, in migrants’
view, meant violating their own ethics and values. A housewife acknowledged that she
behaved differently in China and in Taiwan. She defended her double standards:
You can’t help but have double standards. For example, when you dine out here, you
shout at the waiters to get served. Why do you do this? Because based on your past
experiences, they ignore your requests if you’re being polite to them […] I don’t like
that, but I have to. This behavior contradicts my own principles. But it’s the real life
in China. (Mei-feng Luo, housewife and former HR manager)
In addition to behavior changes, some migrants said that localization was an issue of
altering mentality—in a bad direction. A finance manager (SH11), who also owned a
small business with her husband, illustrated what assimilation meant to her:
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The way of life here is totally different from that in Taiwan. I can’t tolerate lots of
things, but I try to de-emphasize them. Now I don’t have strong emotions about their
(Chinese) bad behaviors. I think I have been assimilated […] We need to
accommodate to their ways of thinking. I have become less honest and sincere.
That’s the way to get things done here. It’s not that I’m mendacious. I just learned to
protect myself. (SH11, finance manager)
For most migrants, assimilation was a negative thing to do. They said that they just
got used to rather than adapted to the local life. Integration into and identification with
the Chinese society were out of question. A student (Wendy Pei) described how she
managed to get used to the life in China by de-emphasizing Chineseness: “If you’re a
foreigner, you don’t care so much. The situation here is that you speak Chinese, but you
can’t communicate with them. It makes you feel a strong cultural difference. What shocks
me is this [...] So I try to think of myself as a foreigner, who’s temporarily experiencing
an exotic place. That makes you feel better.” Similarly, a sales manger (SZ12) argued:
“Some foreign missionaries went to Taiwan at a young age but devoted their lives there.
That made me think why I can’t love here more, given that I will stay here for a while.”
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By thinking of themselves as foreigners, migrants were able to ease the “cultural shock”
that challenged their Chineseness.
Continuous Fractured Identities
My research subjects usually spoke of themselves as Taiwanese and frequently
emphasized “we Taiwanese” in the course of the interviews. In the end, when I asked
how they defined themselves, some began to alter their utterances. This sense of “we
Taiwanese” was in relation to the PRC Chinese, but not necessarily in conflict with their
Chinese identity. Migrants tended to insist on their existing identities; nevertheless, they
might experience a trying process of renegotiation and become less certain about their
identities. I find it difficult to answer whether Taiwanese migrants sustain, reinforce, or
change identities after migration because of the many divergent possibilities that appear. I
analyze their identity renegotiation in three categories: Taiwanese identity, Chinese
identity, and flexible identities. This reduction helps clarify their processes of
re-identification.
Taiwanese Identity: Reaffirmed but Pragmatic
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Migrants who thought of themselves as Taiwanese before migration tend to sustain or
reinforce their Taiwanese identity in China. The majority of these migrants are ethnic
Hoklo or Hakka, whose ancestors immigrated to Taiwan a long time ago. They regard
Taiwan as their homeland and the site of their ancient roots. Moving to China, like
moving to any other country, was a process of rediscovering their affectionate
connections with their homeland. These migrants usually regarded China as a place for
work rather than a motherland. A businesswoman described her mentality of migration:
Both of my parents are (Hoklo) Taiwanese. I don’t feel déjà vu in China. I still
define myself as Taiwanese. Citizens of the world…I don’t think I have such a big
vision. It’s okay to see myself as a member of the global village, though […]
Mainlanders have blood relations with Chinese and may feel that their roots are in
here. I don’t feel that. I’m just a Taiwanese who works in China—an extension of
my career. Nothing else. (Betty Lee, businesswoman)
For these migrants, leaving their own country only made clear where their roots
were. A housewife (SZ28B) had followed her husband’s job assignments to different
countries and was in the process of applying for foreign citizenship at the time of the
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interview. She said that her family does not plan to return to Taiwan. Nonetheless,
“experiencing the world” reinforces her Taiwanese consciousness, strengthening her
feeling that she is Taiwanese. On one hand, migrants tended to romanticize Taiwan—the
cozy ambiance, the cordial people, the vibrant culture, etc.—because of nostalgia. On the
other hand, they said that the trademark of Taiwan had increasingly become a powerful
symbol that they could be proud of. A boss’s wife (SZ30B) illustrated how she
strengthened her sense of being Taiwanese:
I attended a language school in Canada before. When my classmates
passionately talked about their countries, I didn’t know how to introduce my
country to them. It seemed to me that Taiwan had nothing characteristic or to
be proud of. But now I feel good about Taiwan. I have received many nice
comments about Taiwan from my friends of different nationals. When I saw
the movie Cape No.7, I felt that Taiwanese culture was kind of vulgar, but it’s
so sincere and lovable. (SZ30B, boss’s wife)
Her husband explained this kind of transition of attitude by saying that the longer he
and his wife had been away from Taiwan, “the better we appreciated the merits and even
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the drawbacks of our own culture.”
This sense of identification with Taiwan, for some migrants, was reinforced by their
experiences in China, and specifically by the experience of being told by Chinese people
that Taiwan was part of China and Taiwanese were Chinese. Migrants who identified
with Taiwan disliked the feeling that they had to hide their homeland loyalty. Shih-ying
Hong, a housewife, expressed her resentment at the imposition of political views by
Chinese nationals: “The Chinese like to say that Taiwan is theirs. They reject any
disagreements. In my view, people have freedom to express different perspectives. As far
as politics is involved, it’s just impossible to communicate with Chinese.”
Despite these migrants’ persistent Taiwanese identity, witnessing the rise of China
also made them more pragmatic and less nationalistic. Identification with Taiwan,
nevertheless, should not be confused with a specific political stance on independence or a
specific party preference. Some migrants said that they identified themselves solely as
Taiwanese, but also explicitly or implicitly revealed that they were in the Blue Camp,
supporters of the KMT. In Taiwan, the KMT adopts a conciliatory China policy and has
promoted cross-Strait integrations on various fronts. In contrast, the DPP (Green Camp)
is inclined towards political independence. Generally speaking, Taiwanese migrants
supported Taiwan’s further integrations with China, at least economically. Some DPP
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supporters told me that they had adjusted their political views on China after migration. A
real estate manager, who had lived in China for eight years and whose wife was Chinese,
explained that he still hoped for Taiwan’s de jure independence, but he had also become
more realistic:
I still think that I’m in the Green Camp, but I’m a different type of Green now. We
need to take China into account when thinking about Taiwan’s relations with the
world […] Doing business here makes me see through to the reality. We can’t resist
the (political) trends and neglect (economic) interests…If China becomes more
progressive and democratic, I probably will change my mind (about independence).
People are subject to change, and time can change many things. I don’t have to
adhere to a principle forever. (Yuen-Kai Lee, real estate manager)
Lee’s statement showed that while retaining Taiwanese identity, he no longer
assumed the priority of Taiwanese nationalism. Likewise, Rei-yi Deng, a former DPP
local politician, told me about an episode that had made her rethink her political beliefs.
She visited a Taiwanese home in Suzhou and saw the Taiwanese children writing with the
simplified Chinese used in China and speaking Chinese-accent Mandarin. “Is this the
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vision of unification?” she asked herself, pondering that perhaps unification would not be
bad.
Chinese Identity: Shaky but Persistent
Very few of my research subjects developed or strengthened their Chinese identity
after migration to China. These migrants who did tended to love Chinese culture and to
have attained Chinese identity by education. Witnessing the rise of China was solidifying
their conviction that the twenty-first century would be the Chinese Century. They had
become emotionally detached from Taiwan because of what they saw as the rise of
separatism on the island. When I asked a senior manager (Li-ling Chang) about her
identity at the end of her interview, she seemed annoyed. She said “we were all educated
as Chinese, weren’t we?” She asked me: “since when did we become Taiwanese?” In her
opinion, identity was a pseudo issue contrived by pro-independence politicians, and she
was glad that she had stayed in China when the DPP was in power, between 2000 and
2008.
Some migrants with a strong Chinese identity held similar views, but they had also
begun to question their Chineseness after moving to China. This group of migrants
showed similarities to Wessendorf’s (2007) concept of “roots migrants”—the second
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generation who migrate to their parents’homeland in search of their roots. Unlike roots
migrants, interviewed Taiwanese had generally moved to China because of economic
motivations. However, those second-generation Mainlanders did find it difficult to settle
the disjunctures between the homeland in their imagination and the homeland in reality.
As a result, their self-narratives of identity became ambiguous and somewhat conflicting.
On the one hand, they felt culturally and genealogically close to the mainland, and had
hoped for the unification of China—by the Republic of China. They had rarely
questioned their identity as zhongguoren (Chinese nationals) before migration. On the
other hand, they had resisted Communism for their whole lives. Migrating to China only
made them discover their differences from zhongguoren on the mainland. Some had a
double consciousness: that they were also Taiwanese, but their Chinese identity assumed
priority, especially when politics was involved. In Taiwan, they were aware of their
identity as weishengren (Mainlanders, people of other provinces). In China or elsewhere,
the concept of zhongguoren was usurped by the PRC nationals. Therefore, they
experienced a more challenging process of re-identification than other migrants did. One
Mainlander described his difficulties in defining himself this way:
I really don’t know how to define my identity. If you want me to choose, I’d say I’m
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Taiwanese. But if broadly defined, I’m Chinese […] From the standpoint of my
father (born in China) and from what we’ve learned, I think I’m Chinese—in terms
of blood. But the experience of living here for years makes me realize that we
Taiwanese are culturally different from them. I can’t identify myself with them.
(SZ06, technician)
Unlike this technician, some second-generation Mainlanders used “Chinese” in
English to express the ambiguity of their identities. The English term “Chinese” denoted
two meanings: zhongguoren (Chinese nationals) and hwaren (Chinese descendents).
However, neither of these two terms seemed to fully fit their self-defined identities now:
Psychologically I feel that I’m Chinese (in English). If narrowly defined, I’m
Taiwanese. But I don’t have strong Taiwanese consciousness [...] I just don’t think
that I can completely belong to China. That’s for sure. But you can call me Chinese
(in English). (Lucy Tang, freelance writer)
I felt like a stranger (in Shanghai), totally…Anyway, I’m from a different country
[…] As a weishengren, I had a very positive view on the mainland in the past. I had
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assumed its people were nice. But now I don’t admit I’m zhongguoren. I would say
I’m Chinese, I’m from Taiwan (in English) (Researcher: what do you mean by
Chinese, hwaren?) Hwaren, or you can say zhongguoren. But I don’t belong to this
place […] It’s a shame to be (in English). (Tracy Cheng, housewife and freelancer)
Tracy’s use of English to describe this complicated situation indicated, it seemed to
me, that she was confused about who she was. Before we entered the part of the
discussion about identity, Tracy had explicitly identified herself as Taiwanese, as
distinguished from mainland Chinese. Then she became elusive about her Chinese
identity—she was Chinese, but not Chinese of PRC. Therefore, she was zhongguoren, but
in the latter sense, she was not zhongguoren. Jerry Chen, the aforementioned returnee,
avoided this ambiguity by asserting his authenticity of Chineseness: “We’re different
from them. We’re pure Chinese. We’re genuine.” For second-generation Mainlanders in
China, Chinese identity was persistent, but Chinese nationalism was diminishing. Like
Taiwanese nationalists, Chinese nationalists also became more realistic after migration to
China. My conversations with Chung-feng Ko, a sales manager, revealed such a
transition of mentality:
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Ko: I feel I’m zhongguoren. Yes, zhongguoren of the Republic of China.
Researcher: Did you develop a stronger sense of being zhongguoren after moving here?
Ko: No, I don’t think this place is better than Taiwan. Zhongguoren seems to refer to the
people of China, but I don’t feel that I belong to China. I’m…true Chinese. I don’t
know how to explain.
Researcher: Do you mean that you’re culturally zhongguoren?
Ko: Yes, because I can’t say that I’m Taiwanese. After all, I’m a second-generation
weishengren. I’m not pure (Taiwanese)…
Researcher: Would you identify with China if it were ruled by the ROC?
Ko: Yes, I grew up supporting unification (with China). But after I came here, I felt that
it’s not my real business—I mean, unification or not unification. It’s more important
to figure out how to feed my family. I have become less enthusiastic about politics
now. I don’t care so much about identity. But the sense of being zhongguoren has
been bred in my bones.
Some Mainlanders, like Ko, said that they felt like weishenren in Taiwan and
Taiwanese in China. In either case, the distinction in each society represented a sense of
superiority; at the same time, it also fed migrants' feelings of marginality, of
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homelessness: that they were outsiders everywhere. One IT manager (SH24) concluded
my interview with him by referring to The Rootless Orchid, an article written by Chinese
author Chen Tse-fan about his sense of displacement after the Communists came to
power in China: “One without a country is like the grass without roots. It withers without
from the damage of rain and wind.” For these migrants, everywhere is home, but
nowhere is home. They are diaspora subjects in their own homeland(s), because their
ideal homeland is gone.
Flexible Identities
According to a longitudinal survey conducted in Taiwan, about forty to fifty percent
of Taiwanese identify themselves as both Chinese and Taiwanese. This percentage has
fluctuated only a little over the past two decades (Election Study Center, NCCU, 2009).
What this double identification means is subject to different interpretations (see Chapter
1). My interview data with Taiwanese migrants in China showed that Taiwanese identity
and Chinese identity remain two key, and sometimes conflicting, references of identity.
Those who seemed to have double consciousness mostly interpret their double or
multiple identities as hierarchical rather than hybrid. They have a master identity, which
is highly relevant to their political views. However, some migrants also demonstrated an
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ability to change their identities to fit specific situations. Such flexibility might reflect
instrumental use of identity, relativity of identities, or in very few cases,
cosmopolitanization.
First, like the flexible citizens portrayed by Ong (1999), some Taiwanese migrants
instrumentally utilize their Chinese identity for business purposes. In China, they tend to
publicly declared that they are Chinese—in order to take advantage of this ethnicity or
just to avoid arguments with Chinese. One senior manager (Feng-yi Pang) argued that
one cardinal principle of doing business was flexibility. For him, “the sky is blue, the
ground is green, and the blood and heart are red”—meaning that he did not want to
offend any powerful people in the camps of the KMT (blue), the DPP (green), or the CCP
(red). Since he was doing business in China, he considered himself the “descendant of the
dragon” who made friends with his (red) “heart.” Very few Taiwanese migrants I met
were that opportunistic. However, it was common among migrants to express their
Chinese identity in front of Chinese people, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. One
sales manager (SH06A) emphasized that Taiwanese needed to have “split personality” to
survive in China’s business environments.
For some migrants, speaking of identity is a declaration of political positions, and
cautious businesspeople tried to avoid discussing the issue. One businessman (SH26)
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argued: “Identity is all about politics. It does not matter where we belong to. It’s the
problem of the governments.” After I finished the interview and stopped recording, he
told me that “Taiwanese identity must have high priority” for most migrants. However,
this did not mean that migrants’ Chinese identity was pretend. It could be a constitutive
part of their identities. A university professor (SH27) said that he usually told foreigners
that he was Taiwanese. In China, he was willing to identify himself as Chinese, as long as
he was not being pressured by Chinese people.
This type of instrumentalism was not limited to situational adjustments of identity to
fit various occasions. Some migrants anticipated Taiwan’s eventual political unification
with China, whether they liked it or not. That meant that they were flexible about their
identities in accordance with the political change. One finance manager (SH11) expressed
this view: “Of course I insist on Taiwanese identity. But it is possible that Taiwan and
China will become one country in the future. Now the interactions (across the Strait)
already are intensive. Therefore, I usually tell people I’m Chinese.” One bank manager
(James Wang) said that, at present, he identifies himself as Taiwanese and Chinese.
Nevertheless, he is ready to assume a solely Chinese identity because “political
unification is inevitable.” These migrants are instrumentally adjusting themselves to
embrace Chinese identity to accommodate to what they think is the political reality.
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Secondly, flexible identities were also presented by migrants who had multi-layered
identities. They might highlight one kind of identity in relation to others. For example:
—“When I visit restaurants crowded with foreigners, I feel I’m hwaren. But with
mainland Chinese around, I feel I’m Taiwanese because I’m different.” (Ellen Sun,
product manager)
—“I’m Chinese in China. When I’m back in Taiwan, I’m Taiwanese. Because of my
Hakka ascent, I usually tell people that I’m Hakka. (SZ23, school administrator)
—“I define myself as Taiwanese in China and Chinese in Taiwan.” (SZ14, businessman,
consulting firm)
These migrants did not insist on the Taiwanese/Chinese opposition and felt free to
change identities. Their multiple identities are hybrid rather than hierarchical, but
Taiwanese identity and Chinese identity remain key references. There were also people
who argued that national boundaries no longer mattered. Wei-chi Hsu, a businessman
whose wife was Chinese, planned to send his child to a boarding school in Hong Kong.
He asked: “how should this child define herself?” He said that he had traveled around the
world and felt it unnecessary to identify with a specific nation. Amy Dai, a Taiwanese
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housewife who had lived in the United States for years and had attained a U.S.
citizenship, was now staying in Shenzhen with her family. She said that she did not know
how to define herself: “When I visited Hong Kong, I was asked by someone about my
origin. Did he mean where I was born, what my nationality was, or where I lived now? I
didn’t know how to answer.” In the end, Amy decided to speak in English so that she was
not mistaken as mainland Chinese, and thus avoid being discriminated against.
As Calhoun argues about cosmopolitans: “Their passports bear the stamps of many
countries, but they are still passports, and good cosmopolitans knew which ones would
get them past the inspectors at borders and airports” (2002, p.103). Cosmopolitan
consciousness may be reinforced by multiple passports and various visa stamps. In the
case of Taiwanese migrants, it is also present in the privilege of the mobile few.
Conclusion
This chapter shows that, for Taiwanese migrants, encountering cultural others is a
way by which they make sense of self and their own collectivity. This knowing of “who
we are” derives from the negation of the PRC Chinese and the Chinese culture they
represent. Taiwanese consciousness has developed in relation to Chinese and has taken
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on a sense of cultural superiority. Nevertheless, the negation of the PRC Chinese also
implies a negation of their own Chineseness. For some interviewed migrants, this
negation was a painful process to go through.
Despite the consolidation of Taiwanese consciousness, Taiwanese migrants remain
divided about their identities, in terms of Taiwanese identity and Chinese identity. My
interview data demonstrates the persistence of identity among Taiwanese migrants.
However, the daily realities in China have also made migrants become more flexible
about their identities, either because of their perceived cultural differences or their
optimistic view about China’s progression. This resilience is evident among people who
have a double consciousness or multiple identities. How China develops in the
future—economically, politically, and culturally—may influence the identity
transformation of Taiwanese migrants.
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Chapter 8: Conclusion
This dissertation analyzes the identity formation and transformation of Taiwanese
migrants to China in light of globalization. Combining migrant studies and media studies,
it explores how the identities of Taiwanese migrants are shaped and reshaped through the
ongoing interactions of mediated communication and lived experience in the places of
adoption. I draw on three discourses on transnationalism that address possible identity
formations of contemporary migrants in accordance with the changing realities of
migration and communication: the transnational paradigm of migration studies, diasporic
studies, and cosmopolitanism. These discourses argue that, instead of reflecting a linear
assimilation to the host country, the identities of contemporary migrants become plural
and deterritorialized, assuming such models as continuous home-country loyalty,
diasporic hybrid identities, or cosmopolitan consciousness.
While I draw on theories of globalization for my analysis, I also recognize the
historical particularities that may condition Taiwanese migrants’identity negotiation.
First, Taiwan’s national identity is fractured, split between Chinese identity and
Taiwanese identity. Second, this rift in identity is complicated by the Taiwanese mass
migration to China—the homeland with various meanings within migrants' imaginations.
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Third, China’s authoritarian media system and its control over media imports counter the
free-flow image of communication. These variations demonstrate that Taiwanese
migrants encounter a specific political, cultural, and media environment upon migration.
In this chapter, I first synthesize my findings in response to the research questions
outlined in Chapter 1: (1) How should the migration patterns of Taiwanese people to
China be defined, and how do these patterns affect both their relationships with their
countries of exit and entry and their use of the media? (2) How do Taiwanese migrants
use media for information, entertainment, and participation in China, and how do their
applications of mediated communication entail the process of identity renegotiation? (3)
Do Taiwanese migrants sustain, reinforce, or change their self-identifications as they
encounter Chinese culture after migration? Following these questions, I unfold the
dialogues between my findings and general theoretical premises, and, finally, I point out
the limitations of this dissertation and reflect on my own standpoints as a researcher.
Dual Mobility, Transient Mentality, and No Sense of Place
Two patterns of Taiwanese migration to China—the direction of movement and the
planned length of stay—greatly influence the relationships of Taiwanese migrants with
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the countries of origin and settlement and, hence, their media use behaviors, as I showed
in chapter 3. First, the Taiwanese are migrating from a more advanced society to a less
developed country and hence enjoy a higher socioeconomic status. This results in their
expat identity and isolation from Chinese society. Second, although whether and when to
return to Taiwan are indefinite questions for many migrants, they tend to see their stays in
China as sojourns. Because of their social segregation and transient mentality, Taiwanese
migrants retain their habits of receiving Taiwanese news and seem less concerned with
Chinese news. As a result, transnational communications from their home country play a
significant role in their daily media use.
To start with, discourses on migrant transnationalism have primarily been
developed in the Euro-American context. In particular, transnational migration studies
and diasporic studies tend to focus on immigrants and their posterity from postcolonial or
developing countries to Western advanced societies. Such movements of people are
different from the movement of Taiwanese migrants to China—as capital-induced
migration from a newly-industrialized country (NIC) to a less developed society. Despite
individual differences, Taiwanese migrants by and large enjoy upward class mobility,
resulting not only from the increase of their income but also from the huge gap of living
standards between Taiwan and China.
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However, when moving to China, migrants encounter a second difference between
the two societies: China is a rising economic giant with an immense territory, while
Taiwan is a tiny island. Moving from Taiwan to the “big mainland” (dalu) strengthens
migrants’ sense of geographical mobility. The vastness of China presents a great business
frontier to realize interests in entrepreneurship or career advancement for the Taiwanese
migrants. Additionally, China’s economic globalization was strongly felt by migrants
through their jobs and everyday lives—particularly those who worked in large
multinational corporations or lived in metropolitan Shanghai. Such experiences as
developing products for global brands or regularly encountering foreigners at work and in
leisure made interviewed migrants feel that they had a more “international outlook”
(guojiguan) than before. The “China experience,” a term frequently mentioned by my
research subjects, connoted limitless possibilities for careers. They saw going to China as
a rite of passage that one could not afford to miss.
The sense of dual mobility— upward class mobility and geographical mobility—was
decisive in determining the interviewed migrants’attitude towards the places of adoption.
They often explicitly contrasted the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, as if they were polar
opposites: China was big, and Taiwan was small. China was fraught with opportunities,
and Taiwan was losing its edge. Meanwhile, China was backward, and Taiwan was more
292
civilized. Therefore, China was a place for work, and Taiwan was home where the heart
was. Migrants continually experienced conflicts between economic opportunities and life
quality. As a compromise, they insisted on living a “Taiwanese way of life”—meaning
eating Taiwanese foods, haunting Taiwanese restaurants, making Taiwanese friends,
speaking Taiwanese dialects, watching Taiwanese television, etc. On one hand, these
behaviors eased their homesickness and made them feel at home. On the other hand, this
so-called “Taiwanese way of life” might not be completely Taiwanese. For many, it also
was an expression of a lifestyle quality that was different from locals', especially from the
lower classes. Migrants’ class distinction showed in their choices about residences (gated
communities), children’s schools (Taiwanese or elite Chinese schools), consumption
(better taste), social networks (Taiwanese-only circles), and so on.
However, the class distinction was usually uttered by interviewed migrants in terms
of “cultural difference,” as I showed in Chapter 7. Encountering Chinese nationals made
these migrants reconsider the notion that they shared with Chinese “the same
language/culture and the same ancestral stock” (tongwentongzhong). While negotiating
their similarities with and differences from real Chinese, migrants tended to emphasize
the contrasts. They regarded the Chinese of the PRC as uncivil, insincere, disloyal,
nationalistic, and narrow-minded. In this sense, they intentionally resisted assimilation to
293
Chinese society. Although the interviewed migrants said that they become more
cosmopolitan as a result of their dual mobility, for them, such cosmopolitanism meant
their proximity to the global culture and norms. Localization was, in migrants’view,
antithetical to internationalization. Thus they desired to remain outsiders in China.
Taiwanese migrants’settlement plans also influence their relationships with the host
and home societies. In most cases, interviewed migrants recognized their migration as a
result of economic calculations. Even second-generation Mainlanders rarely saw their
move as an act of returning to the roots. Migrants usually thought of themselves as
Taiwanese expatriates and their stays in China as non-permanent. Managers and
technicians assigned by their mother companies to the mainland, in particular, were
unsure of their job security on the mainland. Nevertheless, many were caught in a
dilemma of stay or return. Those who desired to move back to Taiwan were unsure of the
timing when such a move might take place. Some planed to settle in China or migrate to
other foreign countries later on. No matter what kinds of migration plans they had in
mind, migrants retained Taiwanese citizenship and maintained multiple relations with
Taiwan. They tended to see themselves as sojourners, nomads, or strangers in
China—lacking a feeling of belonging. They rarely put down roots in China, or were at
least refraining for the moment. This transient mentality, along with an outsider attitude,
294
isolated interviewed migrants from the host country. Many of these migrants had little
sense of the places to which they had migrated. They were indifferent to Chinese news,
and continued to rely on Taiwanese media for news information, even after years of
migration.
Media Use: the Taiwanese Media Sphere
Mass media of a host country is a significant means of acculturation by which
newcomers adapt to the majority culture. Because of the Taiwanese migrants’outsider
mentality, they showed little interest in “going native” and furthering their local
knowledge. China’s authoritarian media system also pushed them away from using
Chinese news media. According to most media diasporic studies (Gillespie, 1995;
Georgiou, 2006), migrants consume diverse media products available to them, which
shape their hybrid identifications. In China, however, mass media are principally
controlled by the state and the inflows of foreign media are strictly regulated. As I
demonstrated in Chapter 4, Taiwanese migrants, like Chinese citizens, have adopted a
range of media tools to bypass state censorship and sustain their transnational and
interpersonal communications. Their use of media included illegal satellite TV, pirated
295
videos, proxy software, SMS, Internet forums, and so forth. Chinese mass media, instead,
were only rarely used for news, information, or entertainment.
News reception for Taiwanese migrants is highly home-oriented. Even veteran
migrants remain interested in news events in Taiwan—whether because of investment,
personal interests, or homesickness. Taiwanese satellite channels and news websites are
the main sources of Taiwanese news, although some migrants also watch news programs
regarding Taiwan's affairs on Chinese, Hong Kong, or Macao channels. Generally
speaking, migrants depend heavily on Taiwanese media for all sorts of
information—despite the fact that Taiwanese satellite TV is illegal, newspapers are
expensive, and news websites are mostly blocked from access in China. Some
interviewed migrants only paid attention to the Chinese news that appeared in the
Taiwanese media. There were individual differences, however. Those who had long-term
plans in China were more likely to be attentive to Chinese news. They used Chinese news
media not only for information but also for better understanding of local
cultures—especially when business was involved. This showed that the use of Chinese
mass media was closely associated with migrants’relationship with the Chinese society.
A salient phenomenon of communication among the interviewed Taiwanese
migrants was their reliance on personal networks for local information, as I showed in
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Chapter 5. Businesspeople tended to scout insider information from local officials with
whom they had built good guanxi. In most circumstances, however, migrants formed
Taiwanese-only social networks and exchanged information with one another within
those networks. Such sharing might occur in businessmen’s associations, voluntary
organizations, community websites, or informal social groupings in which SMS and the
Internet were utilized. The prevalence of interpersonal communications among Taiwanese
migrants can be explained not only by the absence of vital ethnic media. Also, and more
importantly, the interviewed migrants emphasized trust relations, seeing information
circulated through the Taiwanese circles as more trustworthy and reliable. Therefore, the
resistance to Chinese news media and dependence on Taiwanese news sources also
furthers migrant’s isolation from the host country.
Despite the fact that foreign media products are restricted in China, they play a
significant role in Taiwanese migrants’everyday lives. Many people—particularly those
living in company compounds—have limited leisure activities in China and spend lots of
time watching videos. They use satellite television, pirated DVDs, and online videos for
entertainment. The menu of their media consumption includes American movies and
series, Japanese cartoons and dramas, Korean dramas, Taiwanese variety shows, and
Chinese epic dramas and documentaries. The list involves media products from the global,
297
the regional, the local, and the home-country sources. But in general, the Taiwanese
media sphere overwhelmed the Chinese one in studied instances.
Growing Taiwanese Consciousness, Conflicting Identities
Because of the double-homeland complex (Lo, 2002), identity is a puzzling issue for
many Taiwanese. Moving to China entails a complex, and often difficult, identity
renegotiation, evidenced by migrants’ ambiguous narratives of self-identification. On the
one hand, migrants seem to develop a strong “we-group” sense of being Taiwanese in
China, and easily distinguish themselves from Chinese nationals. On the other hand, the
notion of being “Taiwanese” might mean different things to different people: a local
identity, a national identity, or the identification with a territory of a split nation. As far as
national identity was concerned, some interviewed migrants’self-categorizations became
slippery and somewhat conflicting.
First, regardless of their political positions on unification, the status quo, or
independence, Taiwanese migrants generally developed an awareness of being Taiwanese
in China. Such Taiwanese consciousness was different from that of the “defensive
nativism” (Buruma, 1996) emerging from the Taiwanization movements on the island, as
298
I reviewed in Chapter 1. The concept of being Taiwanese, for migrants, exists in relation
to PRC citizens, but is not exactly "against" Chinese identity. Moreover, the Taiwanese
consciousness advocated by political activists in Taiwan during the 1980s and the 1990s
appealed to a sense of victimhood for native Taiwanese. This Taiwanese consciousness,
in the view of some migrants, was used to promote Taiwan’s independence, and thus was
undesirable. However, what interviewed migrants perceived as Taiwanese solidarity in
China was based on a sense of superiority. Such consciousness of being Taiwanese was
reinforced by daily negotiations of sameness and differences, by the dialectical relation
between mediated communication and lived experience, and by the intersection of
transnational and local practices.
Sameness: transnational studies tend to emphasize migrants’trans-local social
relations and neglect place-based activities. For the interviewed Taiwanese migrants,
Taiwanese consciousness was fostered by their local and transnational practices. At the
local level, migrants participated in Taiwanese-only social networks and presumed a trust
relation among Taiwanese. These networks were embodied in a thriving community of
websites, voluntary organizations, and primary groups based on neighborhood, religion,
business, friendship, and so forth. Mediated communications, such as SMS and the
Internet, were utilized to share information and support. There was also a prevalent
299
mantra that Taiwanese should abide by, shown in this Chinese saying cited by one of my
interviewees: “keeping watch together in mutual defense and helping out one another.”
For the Taiwanese, of course, this refers to other Taiwanese migrants. Migrants’belief in
mutual help reinforces their social bond and the sense of being Taiwanese in China.
At the transnational level, the reception of Taiwanese news remains a significant
daily ritual for migrants. Despite being abroad, migrants continue to keep themselves
updated about Taiwanese news and are concerned with Taiwan’s domestic affairs. This
allows migrants to sustain attachments to their country of origin. News reception thus
becomes a “sacred ceremony” (Carey, 1989) that draws migrants and their compatriots at
home together in fellowship. Besides, watching Taiwanese television programs also
strengthens the feelings of being close to “home.” The Taiwanese accent, the punch lines,
and the scenes presented in Taiwanese TV shows provide a sense of familiarity. However,
Taiwanese news also refreshes, or even amplifies, migrants’ unpleasant memories about
Taiwan’s political infighting. The division in Taiwan is in sharp contrast with migrants'
in-group solidarity in China. For some, the political division seen on the Taiwanese TV
undermines their determination to return.
Difference: Encountering Chinese people and “Chinese culture” on the mainland
enacts the negotiation of similarity and difference for Taiwanese migrants. More often
300
than not, interviewed migrants emphasized differences between Taiwan and China
regarding culture, as marked in etiquette, ways of thinking, moral values and norms,
cultivation, democratic disposition, etc. Migrants tended to think that the genuine Chinese
culture had been destroyed by the Communist regime, particularly in the Cultural
Revolution. When watching Chinese television, they preferred the genres of epic dramas
and historical documentaries, which they considered to represent the essence of Chinese
culture. Otherwise, they found few similarities that resonated with their cultural
frameworks. Migrants’ reception of news about the Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing
Olympics, and the tainted-milk scandal enacted their negotiations of sameness and
difference, and of inclusion and exclusion. In most cases, migrants confirmed their
outsider status through these mediated experiences.
Second, the growth of Taiwanese consciousness among migrants does not directly
translate to national identity. The question of whether Taiwanese migrants sustain,
reinforce, or change their identities is difficult to answer. Migrants came to China with
various identities. Some expressed nationalistic sentiment and others did not.
Interviewees' self-narratives of identity usually involved not only their daily practices of
being Taiwanese but also their thinking about Taiwan’s political future. Sometimes the
two layers of identification were in conflict. When talking about their identities, some
301
migrants seemed ambiguous, or even ambivalent. Generally speaking, those who had
identified themselves as Taiwanese before migration tended to maintain or reinforce their
Taiwanese identity. These people’s self-identifications were more explicit than those of
other migrants. Those who had a Chinese identity before migration rarely discarded such
identity, but their narratives usually became less affirmative. These two groups of people
showed the persistence of their original identities. On the contrary, those who had hybrid
identities prior to migrating demonstrated a kind of flexibility and openness to various
political possibilities. Moreover, the experience of migration seemed likely to diminish
migrants’ nationalistic emotion—be it a Chinese or Taiwanese one.
Re-examining Migrant Transnationalism
Media studies demonstrate that mediated communication, as an important symbolic
form of representation, is appropriated to construct cultural unity and cement solidarity.
In modern societies, the nation state has assumed a dominant role in shaping cultural
identity. Theories of cultural globalization nevertheless portray an image of the world on
the move, in which the scope, velocity, and intensity of human mobility and
communication flows are destabilizing the concepts of territorialized culture and identity.
302
Against this theoretical backdrop, discourses on migrant transnationalism emerged in the
1990s, arguing that contemporary migrants no longer assume a master identity based on a
territorial boundary.
American-led immigrant research has begun to unravel the social space forged by
migrants’ simultaneous, multi-stranded relations linking their home and host societies.
These studies contend that the transnational social space allows migrants to sustain their
loyalty to their country of origin, although such allegiance is but one source of identity.
Meanwhile, the so-called media diasporic studies that have thrived in recent years renew
disaporic discourse in the context of transnational communication. This line of research
focuses on the role of electronic mediation in shaping migrants’ diasporic
identities—which are hybrid and constantly reconstructed. While these two strands of
scholarship emphasize the trans-national identities of contemporary migrants, discourse
on cosmopolitanism envisions a post-national identity based on humanity. Some scholars
argue that cosmopolitanism entails openness to difference and diverse cultures;
nevertheless, others regard it as the privilege of the mobile elite, or worse, a reflection of
snobbish class consciousness. Are these transnational theories applicable to the
Taiwanese migrants in China, and, if so, in what aspects? What kinds of contextual
factors need to be considered?
303
Home-country Attachment: Transnational and Place-based Practices
First, this dissertation confirms that Taiwanese migrants sustain their attachments to
Taiwan, in part enabled by new patterns of transnational migration and communication in
light of globalization. Migrants simultaneously engage in two or more societies and
sustain multilayered relations with their home country. Transnational communication,
particularly via satellite television and the Internet, plays an important role in maintaining
their home connections. Nevertheless, it should be noted that place-based practices
remain dominant in their everyday lives. Transnational migration studies emphasize the
“transnational space” that links places of origin and settlement. In their lived experience,
interviewed Taiwanese migrants largely participate in activities in the local places rather
than this transnational space. Their media use behaviors, such as dependence on
Taiwanese media for news information and entertainment and their adoption of
communication tools for in-group networking, are highly relevant to their lives in China.
In particular, migrants’ mental isolation in China prevents them from deep engagement in
Chinese society and reinforces their home attachments.
The Nation State as the Key Reference of Identity
304
Second, identity based on the boundaries of the nation state remains the dominant
form of cultural identity, despite the fact that transnationalism allows Taiwanese migrants
to sustain deterritorialized identities. Some scholars argue that what migration studies call
transnationalism actually represents bi-state affiliation (Amit-Talai, 1998; Waldinger &
Fitzgerald, 2004). The tricky situation for Taiwanese migrants is that they already had the
dual concept of identity in mind before migration. The fractured national identities in
Taiwan—in terms of Taiwanese identity and Chinese identity—continue to shape
migrants’ bi-state imaginations. On one hand, a Taiwan-centered subjectivity apparently
has currency in migrants’self-consciousness and is reinforced by their daily practices in
China. On the other hand, such Taiwanese consciousness can be equated to a local
identity, which is not in conflict with a unified Chinese nation. Migration to China rarely
increases migrants’Chinese consciousness; rather, a rooted Chinese identity is still
persistent after migration. The nation state—be it a Taiwanese or Chinese one—is still the
predominant framework of reference for cultural identity.
Cosmopolitanism and transnational disaporic communities are too broad a cultural
category for Taiwanese migrants to identify with. Despite rapid movements of people and
communications, it is too early to announce the emergence of either a borderless world or
a post-national consciousness. For Taiwanese migrants, a cosmopolitan outlook means
305
proximity to the global culture—usually a Western lifestyle, values, and norms. It
becomes a cultural distinction, pitting them against the “parochial” locals. Likewise, the
concept of Chinese diaspora rarely exists in Taiwanese migrants. Some identify with the
homeland (mainland China), but they do not have a transnational diasporic consciousness
(hwaren). For others, Taiwan’s nationhood provides a mooring that diminishes the sense
of the Chinese diaspora.
Instrumentalism and Free-floating Identities
Third, despite the fixed opposition between Taiwanese identity and Chinese identity,
there is a space for flexible and fluid identities. Such flexibility is expressed in two very
different senses: deliberately instrumental or more passive and free floating. Scholars
(Levitt, 2001; Ong, 1999; Portes & DeWind, 2007) have analyzed how migrants—skilled
or unskilled—instrumentally use their identities to maximize economic or political
benefits in particular settings. Some Taiwanese migrants, businesspeople in particular,
demonstrate an ability to switch identities to fit specific situations. In China, they tend to
publicly identify themselves as Chinese and avoid asserting their Taiwanese identity. This
is not to say that such self-identification is artificial or insincere. Chinese identity may
constitute a legitimate part of these migrants' subjectivity. However, identity is not that
306
expedient and manageable for everyone. Others experience—and express—a more
free-floating sense of identity proximate to that of postmodern displaced subjects (Hall,
1992). They desire “home” but cannot find a place to put down the roots. This mentality
is particularly evident among second-generation Mainlanders, who often find themselves
strangers in their parents’homeland.
Some migrants express their flexibility of identity and openness to various political
possibilities. They tend to watch the political, economic, and cultural development in
China closely to “decide” their identities. Although this research shows Taiwanese
migrants’ persistent Taiwanese or Chinese identity, it does not assert the fixity of identity.
I have argued in Chapter 1 that both Taiwanese and Chinese identities are formed and
transformed in particular historical and social contexts. I recognize that my study is set in
the initial stage of Taiwanese migration to China. There may be a different picture that
emerges in the long run.
Contextualizing Mediation
Last but not least, this dissertation shows that the analysis of mediation and identity
needs to be contextualized, not only in terms of the settings of reception but also in terms
of specific historical conjunctures. Media disaporic studies tend to emphasize the
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transnational imagination of diasporic communities or of homeland affiliations enabled
by the globalization of ethnic media, such as satellite television, videos, and websites.
Less recognized is how the presence of ethnic media and the audiences’ use of media are
constrained by structural conditions. China’s media environments, the migration patterns
of Taiwanese migrants, and their relationships with host and home societies greatly
influence how they use media for news, entertainment, and participation. The media
consumption of Taiwanese migrants poses a challenge to assumptions of a transnational
Chinese media sphere and an emergent global Chinese community. Even while situated in
the imagined homeland, with linguistic-cultural commonalities, Taiwanese migrants find
Chinese media play a relatively insignificant role in their lives. Their news reception is
highly home-oriented, and their consumption of entertainment media is multilayered.
Therefore, media availability should not be confused with media use, which is highly
specific and intentional.
More importantly, access to the same media content does not necessarily enact a
sense of commonality. More attention needs to be paid to how people interact with media
content. For Taiwanese migrants, the reception of Taiwanese news draws them closer to
home; at the same time, the partisan media of Taiwan also furthers their aversion to
Taiwan’s domestic politics. The reception of Chinese news is often a process of
308
rediscovering difference rather than sameness, and exclusion rather than inclusion. This
results from gaps between the meaning structure of encoding and the meaning structure
of decoding. Despite there being no linguistic barriers, migrants find that Chinese news
media lack social relevance to them, in part because of different cultural frameworks and
in part because of their social isolation in Chinese society. This means that the analysis of
mediated experiences should take into account lived experiences. As far as identity is
concerned, such factors as historical memory, political situation, socioeconomic
conditions, and everyday lives in the place of adoption are converged to shape particular
mediated experiences. Transnational, deterritorialzed mediation cannot be isolated from
place-based lived experiences.
Conclusion and suggestions
This dissertation unravels Taiwanese migrants’identity formation and
transformation shaped by the conjunction of mediated and lived experiences in China. As
a case study in a very specific context, it does not seek to generalize its findings to other
migrant communities. Rather, it provides an empirical examination of theoretical
assumptions in the growing popular discourses of transnationalism that derive from
309
globalization theories. My research confirms that the mobility of migrants and their
communications enable the maintenance of deterritorialized identity. However, such
deterritorialized identity remains framed in the image of the nation state. There is little
evidence of post-national cosmopolitanism and transnational diasporic identity based on
ethnicity. Even ethnicity is defined by cultural rather than genealogical terms. The sense
of cosmopolitanism paradoxically entails cultural othering, disturbing migrants’
imagination about their original homeland. Meanwhile, the experience of migration does
discount the power of nationalism, despite the continuous dominance of the nation state
in shaping identity.
Case studies allow in-depth and holistic probing. Nonetheless, researchers need to
be cautious about external validity—that is, whether the sample is representative (Fortner
& Christians, 2003). Since specifying the demographic characteristics of the Taiwanese
population in China is difficult, this study seeks to diversify research subjects in terms of
gender, age, employee status, occupation, and region. Besides this, it also avoids
over-recruiting interviewees from the same social networks. Still, I recognize that this
sample is slanted toward the better-educated and toward people in the electronic industry.
China-born returnees and Taiwanese aboriginal migrants are not included simply because
of the problem of access. The China-born second-generation Taiwanese are intentionally
310
excluded because most of them are minors. Future researchers might consider expanding
the sample base to include any or all of these groups. Additionally, in order to sort out the
patterns of findings from voluminous interview data, individual differences may be
under-emphasized in this dissertation.
Throughout the course of this dissertation, I have constantly kept in mind the
reflexivity of being a researcher and my relations with my research subjects. In the field,
I tried to be an objective observer and a compassionate but cautious listener. When
writing my dissertation, I thought a lot about ethnic and moral issues. However, I also
recognize that being Taiwanese and interviewing only Taiwanese subjects to some extent
constrains such reflexivity.
I understand that this research deals with a complex historical context, a
sophisticated media system, and a peculiar migration. To avoid oversimplifying the
relations between mediation and identity, I draw on a great deal of background
information to contextualize this case study, which may obscure the central arguments.
However, I believe that these secondary data are necessary for the triangulation of
qualitative research. This research also incorporates a range of theoretical perspectives
that may not directly match its own problematic. These theories, nevertheless, offer a
more holistic picture regarding the conditions of contemporary migrants.
311
Identity is a fascinating topic to analyze for a dissertation. The complexity of
Taiwanese identity formation and transformation in Taiwan and—following migrants’
footprints—in China makes this an intriguing case to study. The opinion polls in Taiwan,
and studies based on these statistics, tend to simplify identities and categorize them into
certain categories. While I adopt these categories as a basic framework, my interview
data show a much more complicated identification process and a more diverse picture of
identity among Taiwanese. Studies of media and identity sometimes assume the direct
relations between the two. To some extent this assumption resembles the media effect
formula. Media diasporic studies, in particular, may amplify mediated imagination in the
transnational context. But Taiwanese migrants’ narratives demonstrate that their
encounters with media contents enact various identity renegotiations. This requires us, as
media scholars, to avoid a solely media-centered approach and attend instead to the
interactions between mediation and other social conditions.
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Appendix A: Interviewee List
Code Pseudonym1
Age Sex Marital
status2
Years in
China3
Occupation/
Job position4
Region
SH01 Lucy Tang 30s F S 2 freelance writer Shanghai
SH02 Alex Ho 30s M S 1 printing/manger+ Suzhou
SH03 30s F S 3 retail/manger Shanghai
SH04 Betty Lee 40s F S 12 consulting/general
manager+
Shanghai
SH05 30s M M# 5 Internet service/
deputy manger
Shanghai
SH06A 30s M M 7 Internet service/chief
operating officer
Shanghai
SH06B 30s F M 6 housewife Shanghai
SH07 James Wang 30s M M 5 banking/assistant
vice president
Shanghai
SH08 Yuen-Kai Lee 30s M M# 8 real estate/vice
general manager
Suzhou
SH09 Feng-yi Pang 40s M M# 13 electronics/
vice general manager
Suzhou
SH10 Chung-Hsing
Kao
40s M M 4 electronics/
department director
Suzhou
SH11 40s F M 7 electronics/
finance manager
Suzhou
SH12 Cheng-wu Yu 40s M M 6 electronics/assistant
general manager
Suzhou
SH13 30s M M# 3 Internet
service/manager
Shanghai
SH14 60s F M 16 real estate/
boss’s wife+
Shanghai
SH15 40s M M 5 agriculture/
business owner+
Shanghai
SH16 40s M D 10 business consulting/
vice general manager
Wuxi
SH17 Min-yi Chang 40s F M 7 retail/ Shanghai
313
vice general manager
SH18 40s M M 9 real estate/
business owner+
Shanghai
SH19 Fennie Tseng 30s F S 8* restaurant/manager Shanghai
SH20A 30s M S 3 electronics/
R&D senior engineer
Suzhou
SH20B 30s F S 3 electronics/
purchase specialist
Suzhou
SH21 Mei-li Wu 40s F M 10* housewife Shanghai
SH22 Hsiao-hui
Tien
40s F M 6* housewife Shanghai
SH23 40s M S 1 freelance writer Shanghai
SH24 40s M M 7 Internet service/
vice general manager
Shanghai
SH25 Wendy Pei 30s F S 2 student Shanghai
SH26 50s M M 10 mechanics/
business owner+
Shanghai
SH27 30s M M 2 university professor Shanghai
SH28 Ellen Sun 20s F S 2 electronics/
product manager
Shanghai
SH29 Tracy Cheng 30s F M 4 housewife Shanghai
SH30 Jerry Chen 40s M W 3 Returnee+ Shanghai
SZ01 40s M M ** trade/
business owner+
Shenzhen
SZ02 Chi-ming
Shih
40s M S ** furniture/
business owner+
Dongguan
SZ03 30s M M# 8 plastics/manager+ Guangzhou
SZ04 40s M M ** attire/
business owner+
Shenzhen
SZ05 40s M M# 8 electronics/
audit manager
Dongguan
SZ06 40s M M 6* electronics/technician Dongguan
SZ07 30s F S 6* electronics/
assets manager
Dongguan
SZ08 30s M M# 5 electronics/ Dongguan
314
finance manager
SZ09 Rei-yi Deng 30s F S 2 electronics/
in-house attorney
Dongguan
SZ10 30s F M 1 electronics/
boss’s wife+
Dongguan
SZ11 40s F S 6* granite/vice general
manager+
Dongguan
SZ12 30s M S 5* mechanics/
assistant manager
Dongguan
SZ13 Pei-ying Chu 40s F M 6 housewife Dongguan
SZ14 40s M M 8 business consulting/
business owner+
Dongguan
SZ15 20s F S 3 footwear/
QA senior specialist
Shenzhen
SZ16 30s M M 8* footwear/
shopfloor specialist
Shenzhen
SZ17 20s F M 5 plastics/finance
manager
Dongguan
SZ18 Eric Chen 30s M M 2 footwear/assets
specialist
Shenzhen
SZ19 Shu-min Lu 40s F M 1 housewife Shenzhen
SZ20 Men-jung Tu 30s F M 4 housewife Shenzhen
SZ21 Yu-sheng
Wang
50s M M 11 electronics/
business owner+
Dongguan
SZ22 Chung-feng
Ko
40s M M 3 electronics/
sales manager
Dongguan
SZ23 50s M M 1 school administrator Dongguan
SZ24 40s M M# 8 school teacher Dongguan
SZ25 Wei-chi Hsu 30s M M# 8 molding/
general manager+
Shenzhen
SZ26 40s M M 9* molding/QC manager Shenzhen
SZ27 Amy Dai 40s F M 4 housewife Shenzhen
SZ28A Shih-ying
Hong
30s F M 4 housewife Shenzhen
SZ28B 40s F M 1 housewife Shenzhen
315
SZ28C Mei-feng Luo 40s F M 2 housewife Shenzhen
SZ29 Ping Liu 40s F D 4 lumber/finance
manager
Dongguan
SZ30A 30s M M 7 molding/
business owner+
Dongguan
SZ30B 30s F M 3 molding/business
owner's wife+
Dongguan
SZ31A Vichy Kao 20s F S 8 electronics/
sales manager+
Dongguan
SZ31B 20s M S 1 electronics/
technician+
Dongguan
SZ32 Li-ling Chang 30s F S 6 electronics/managem
ent division manager
Shenzhen
Notes:
1
Pseudonyms are given only to the interviewees whose words are frequently quoted.
2
M=married, S=single, D=divorced, W=widowed, #=Chinese spouse.
3
*=repeated migrant, **=business traveler.
4
+=family business.
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Appendix B: In-depth Interviewing Questions
A. Basic Information
1. Gender
2. Birth year
3. Birth place/residence in Taiwan
4. Father’s/mother’s ethnicity (Hoklo/Hakka/Mainlander)
5. Education
6. Marital status/residence
7. Occupation/job position
B. Migration History
1. Can you outline your past work experiences in Taiwan?
2. Had you been a resident in any foreign countries before moving to China? If so,
please indicate the names of these countries, your staying periods, and your main
purposes of stay.
3. How long have you lived in China? What motivated you to come here? How did you
get your first and current job in China?
4. Can you describe in detail your current job? For example, your position, work
routines, duty, and the persons you often meet at work.
5. Are any of your close friends or family members living in China? If so, where do
they live? Does that influence your decision to come or stay here?
6. What do you do for leisure and with whom do you hang out on the weekends?
7. Have you joined any Taiwanese groups or organizations in China? If so, what are
these groups or organizations? Are you an active member? What are the major
activities you involved in? Do you join them for business or personal purposes?
8. How often do you come back to Taiwan? Does your company reimburse your
spending? How long do you stay each time? What do you do during your stay in
Taiwan?
9. Are you a house owner in China? If so, do you plan to stay here for a long run? If
your company arranges your accommodation, please describe the living conditions.
C. Media Use
1. What had been your impressions on China before you came here? How did you get
these impressions? Did they affect your decision to move to China?
317
2. Where did you get information concerning life and work in China before your
departure?
3. What kinds of news are you concerned with? What are the media you use for news?
a. Have you ever subscribed to Taiwanese satellite TV? If so, do you watch
Taiwanese news on a daily basis?
b. Have you ever subscribed to any Taiwanese or Chinese newspapers? How often do
you purchase Chinese newspapers on newsstands?
c. What news websites do you visit frequently? Have you ever attempted to use
Taiwanese or foreign news websites that are blocked from access in China?
d. What other news media do you use very often?
e. Does your company subscribe to any Chinese publications? Are the subscriptions
mandatory? Do you read these publications?
4. How do you evaluate the news from the following sources: foreign news outlets, the
Taiwanese media, and the Chinese media?
5. Can you list three major news events this year regarding mainland China and
cross-Strait relations? Did you follow the news with alternative sources? Can you
compare the differences of their content?
6. Do you pay attention to news reports or programs relevant to Taiwan in the Chinese
media? How do you think of their perspectives?
7. Do you know any Taiwanese community media based in China? Do you think they
provide useful information? If you visited some community websites before, did you
participate in any interactive activities?
8. What kinds of entertainment media do you often use—for example, TV, movies,
newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, music, and KTV?
9. How important is it for you to keep informed of the news events in Taiwan?
10. Do you have personal blog(s)?
11. How often do you contact your family members and friends in Taiwan? What kinds
of communication tools do you use? If you use instant messengers such as MSN and
Skype, please indicate the persons on your contact list.
D. Identity
1. Do you think that your migration to China is part of a larger trend, such as
globalization, regionalization or the emergence of Greater China?
a. Is “going native” important to you? How do you adapt to the host society?
b. Some said that it is easy for Taiwanese to adapt to Chinese society because of “the
same language and the same ancestral stock.” Do you agree or disagree on it, based
318
on your own experience?
2. How do you think of the media representations of Taiwanese migrants in China?
3. Which of the following terms best describe your migration status—immigrants,
sojourners, strangers, returnees, migratory birds, nomads, and settlers?
4. Which of the following terms best describe your identity—Taiwanese, Chinese as
zhongguoren (Chinese citizens), Chinese as hwaren (people of Chinese descent), and
cosmopolitans? Is your identity changed after migration?
319
Appendix C: Approved Foreign Satellite Channels in China (2008)
Satellite TV channel Parent company nationality
Cable News Network (C N N) Time Warner USA
Home Box Office (H B O) Time Warner USA
C I N E M A X Time Warner USA
C E T V Time Warner/Tom group USA
CNBC Asia Pacific NBC-General Electric (GE) USA
MTV Mandarin (China) Viacom USA
National Geographic Channel News Corporation USA
STAR Movie International News Corporation USA
Channel V News Corporation USA
Xing Kong Wei Shi News Corporation USA
ESPN Asia ABC/News Corporation USA
STAR Sports ABC/News Corporation USA
A X N Sony Pictures Entertainment USA
Discovery Asia Discovery Communications USA
Hallmark NBC-General Electronic (GE) USA
Bloomberg Asia Pacific Bloomberg USA
BBC World British Broadcasting Corporation UK
NHK World Premium Japan Broadcasting Corporation Japan
Phoenix Movie Channel Phoenix Satellite Television Hong Kong
Phoenix Chinese Channel Phoenix Satellite Television Hong Kong
Phoenix Infornews Channel Phoenix Satellite Television Hong Kong
T V B 8 Television Broadcasts Limited Hong Kong
TVB Galax Television Broadcasts Limited Hong Kong
NOW TV Pacific Century CyberWorks Hong Kong
Horizon Channel Hong Kong Cable Television Hong Kong
Sun TV Sun Television CyberNetworks Hong Kong
MASTV Chinese Channel Macau Asia Satellite Television Macau
T V 5 TV5Monde France
Eurosport news Bouygues France
Celestial Movies Astro Malaysia
Channel Newsasia Mediacorp Singapore
Cuba Vision International Cuba Vision International Cuba
KBS World KBS Korea
Note: There channels are permitted to legally broadcast only in three-star or above hotels,
residential complexes reserved for expatriates, and some other stipulated locations.
320
Source: State Administration of Radio Film and Television, People’s Republic of China.
Retrieved August 28, 2009, from
http://www.sarft.gov.cn/articles/2008/03/17/20080317113340700354.html.
321
Appendix D: Major Newspapers and TV Channels in Four Cities
Cities Major newspapers Local television channels
Shanghai Wenhui-Xinmin United Press
Group:
Oriental Morning Post, Xinmin
Evening News, Wenhui Daily
Jiefang Daily Group:
Jiafang Daily, Shanghai
Evening Post, Shanghai Evening
Post, The Shanghai Times
(weekly), Metro Express (free)
Others:
News Times (Tenten Xinbao),
Shanghai Radio and TV Weekly,
Youth Daily, Shanghai Weekly
SMG Group (13 channels):
Dragon TV, STV, CBN(business),
Channel Young, Dongfang TV
Drama, Great Sports, Documentary
Channel, News Entertainment, Arts,
ICS (international), Drama,
Toonmax TV (cartoon), Children
Suzhou Provincial: Jiangsu Xin Hwa
Daily Press Group
Xin Hwa Daily, Yangtse Evening
Post
Municipal: Suzhou Daily Press
Group
Suzhou Daily, Gusu Evening
Post, City Business News
County:
e.g. Wujiang Daily, Kunshan
Daily
Provincial: Jiangsu Broadcasting
Corporation (JSBC) (8 channels)
Jiangsu Satellite Channel, Variety
Show, Film and TV, Public Service,
Channel Win, Children, Business,
Channel Win
Municipal: Suzhou Broadcasting
System (5 channels)
Integrated News Channel,
Socioeconomic Situation Channel,
Cultural and Life, Film and
Entertainment, Life and Information
County:e.g. Wujiang CATV,
Kunshan TV 1-3
Shenzhen Provincial: Overseas (9 channels):
322
A. Nanfang Daily Press Group
Southern Weekly, Nanfang
Metropolis Daily
B. Guangzhou Daily Press
Group
Guangzhou Daily, Guangzhou
Times
Municipal: Shenzhen Press
Group
Shenzhen Special Zone Daily,
Shenzhen Commercial Daily,
Shenzhen Evening Daily,
Sunshine Daily (Jing Bao)
Phoenix Chinese Channel, CETV,
Xing Kong, TVB Jade Channel,
TVB Pearl Channel, ATV, ATV
World, MASTV, MTV (China)
Provincial:
A. Guangdong Television Group
(GDTV) (6 channels)
Guangdong Satellite Channel,
Zhujiang, Sports, Public Service,
News, Cartoon
B. Southern Television Guangdong
(TVS) (6 channels)
Metropolis (satellite), Economy,
Entertainment, Movie & Drama,
Children
Municipal: Shenzhen Media Group
(SZMG) (8 channels):
Shenzhen Satellite Channel, City,
TV drama, Business & Life,
Entertainment, Sports & Health,
Children, Public Service
Dongguan Provincial:
A. Nanfang Daily Press Group
Southern Weekly, Nanfang
Metropolis Daily
B. Guangzhou Daily Press
Group
Guangzhou Daily, Times
C. Yangcheng Evening News
Press Group
Yangcheng Evening News
Municipal: Dongguan Daily
Overseas (9 channels):
Phoenix Chinese Channel, CETV,
Xing Kong, TVB Jade Channel,
TVB Pearl Channel, ATV, ATV
World, MASTV, MTV (China)
Provincial:
C. Guangdong Television Group
(GDTV) (6 channels)
Guangdong Satellite Channel,
Zhujiang, Sports, Public Service,
News, Cartoon
D. Southern Television Guangdong
323
Sources: Websites of listed news organizations. Retrieved in September, 2009.
Press Group
Dongguan Daily, Dongguan
Times
(TVS) (6 channels)
Metropolis (satellite), Economy,
Entertainment, Movie & Drama,
Children
Municipal: Dongguan Broadcasting
System (2 channels)
News & Entertainment, Public
Service
324
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