Exceptional membership and liminal space of identity: Student migration from Taiwan to China

Student migration in a transnational social field

Pursuing higher education overseas is a common strategy for generations of Taiwanese youngsters to cultivate human capital. Economically developed societies in the global North, such as North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, have long been popular destinations. Only recently has China become an alternative destination attracting an increasing number of Taiwanese students. How is this migration trajectory different from, or even exceptional to, the other cases of student migration?

Migration scholars identify the logic of globalization as the main feature of many state deregulation policies on student migration. Compared to the other types of migration, host governments tend to be more tolerant or even encouraging of the entry of foreigners for tertiary education. Not only can the host institutions profit from the tuition paid by foreign students, but the receiving societies may also benefit from their professional labor if they decide to stay after graduation. Many countries actively build up projects to recruit foreign students and encourage them to immigrate in order to advance in the competition for global talent (Brooks and Waters, 2011; Ziguras and Law, 2006).

Students themselves also pursue overseas education and transnational mobility as a strategy of global capital accumulation. With degrees earned in the global North, they hope to gain access to the global labor market or secure class privilege in their country of origin (Szelényi, 2006; Waters, 2006). The family often serves as an important decision-maker in educational migration. By sending their children to study overseas, wealthy Asian families adopt a strategy of ‘flexible capital accumulation’ to convert economic capital into cultural capital, such as Western degrees and cosmopolitan tastes (Ong, 1999).

The counter-logic of nationalization, on the other hand, describes some cases of student migration and the policies of receiving states. For instance, Taiwan holds special venues of admission for overseas Chinese students, largely from Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Macau, and Burma. By playing the role of ‘surrogate homeland’ (Fan, 2005) for the Chinese diaspora, the KMT regime in exile tried to maintain its ruling legitimacy as ‘the only China’ during the Cold War period. Overseas Chinese families send their children to study abroad as a strategy of risk management, because they have encountered ethnic exclusion in the nation-building process in Southeast Asia (Nonini, 1997).

The above literature provides a useful framework for us to study the migration of Taiwanese students to China. However, many puzzles remain to be answered. First, China’s recruitment of Taiwanese students is not driven by the market calculation of tuition profit or talent recruitment. Taiwanese students pay the same amount of tuition as local students do, which is substantially lower than the tuition charged to foreign students. The competition for college admission and job opportunities is already intense among local youngsters in China. Facing the alarming rise of unemployment rates among college graduates, the PRC government has no obvious interest in recruiting foreign students as an a priori means of talent migration. ³ In other words, the thesis of globalization cannot explain China’s active recruitment of Taiwanese students.

Second, the reasons why these Taiwanese students chose China for overseas study are not fully explained by the thesis of global capital accumulation. Unlike Western education, Chinese universities have not earned an established reputation regarding educational quality. For Taiwanese students, China offers a fairly similar cultural and language environment, lacking the attractions of exotic culture and language education that they can acquire when studying elsewhere. Moreover, Chinese diplomas, medical degrees in particular, are not fully recognized in Taiwan. In sum, although the transnational mobility of Taiwanese students exemplifies the neoliberal logic of the entrepreneurial self, their strategies of flexible capital accumulation are distinct and need further explanation.

We argue that the migration decisions and trajectories of Taiwanese students to study in China are embedded in the transnational social field formed across the Taiwan Strait. Building on the idea of ‘transnational social space’ (Faist, 1998), Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004: 1009) use the term ‘transnational social field’ to describe ‘a set of multiple interlocking networks of social relationship through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed.’ To move beyond the methodological nationalism of the ‘nation-state container model,’ transnationalism as a social field proposes a new way of spatially conceptualizing migration by focusing on ‘networks of networks that stretch across the borders of nation-states’ (Glick Schiller, 2005a: 442), encompassing transnational ties from below in the economic, political, and socio-cultural realms (Portes et al., 1999).

Levitt and Glick Schiller (2004) also argue that transmigrants often experience a disjuncture between ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging,’ that is, their physical presence and actual social engagement are different from their sense of belonging and awareness of identity. Researchers have documented that migration experience creates a liminal space for racial and ethnic identification, in which migrants encounter new mirror images ascribed by the receiving society and become reflexive about how to situate their personal and collective identities (Ahmed, 1999; Glick Schiller and Fouron, 2001; Tsuda, 2003). Scholars also debate whether transnational ties or multiple identities weaken immigrants’ integration in the receiving society or challenge the norm and practice of citizenship (Glick Schiller, 2005b; Vertovec, 2001). The social field approach allows us to examine the identification of transmigrants in global, national, and local contexts simultaneously – how individuals negotiate their presence on different levels that are socially and geographically distant (Golob, 2014).

We find the idea of transnational social field inspiring but we also agree with some critics regarding the critical role of state sovereignty in the formation of transnational social fields. Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald (2004) contend that state policies condition the ability of migrants to form transnational networks and communities – state control not only defines membership and loyalty in the national collectivity but also regulates movement across territorial borders. It is thus important to examine how transmigrants, or even ‘transborder citizens,’ interact with a range of state institutions and civil society agents in both sending and receiving countries, and participate in various forms of political discourses about nation, society, and self (Glick Schiller, 2005b).

In our case, the PRC’s political agenda of nationalization is a critical force in facilitating the multiple forms of cross-border mobility of Taiwanese citizens; their frequent travel back and forth then creates sustained economic networks, social connections, kinship ties, and circuits of intimacy across the Taiwan Strait (Deng, 2008; Huang, 2010; Shen, 2005; Tseng, 2005). Aihwa Ong (2004) has argued that Greater China is a state-driven strategy to economically integrate disarticulated political entities, including Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, as a detour toward eventual political integration. China has deployed various practices of sovereignty, such as zoning technologies, to produce a new space of exception and border-crossing powers. We follow this insight to propose that the educational incorporation of Taiwanese students is part of China’s flexible state practices to produce an exceptional membership and privileged autonomy in border crossing for the breakaway political entity of Taiwan.

The emerging Chinese axis (Ong, 2004), an alignment of the rising Chinese economy with Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, has created a liminal space surrounding the ambivalent identity of ‘Chinese.’ Brenda Yeoh and Katie Willis (2005) interviewed Singaporean expatriates in China and found that their initial expectation of a ‘return-to-roots’ tour was soon replaced by the assertion of Singaporean identity vis-a-vis PRC Chinese, such as these two quotes: ‘The Singaporean Chinese is very different from the Chinese Chinese. We keep telling ourselves not to be deceived by skin color.’ ‘Lucky that our ancestors left the place, or we’d be one of them!’ (2005: 275).

Taiwanese entrepreneurs and managers have joined the Chinese axis based on the linguistic and cultural ties, but they experience further ambivalence and contradiction in the terrain of ethnic and national identification. They are trapped in a predicament between globalization and nationalization, according to Horng-luen Wang (2009): on the one hand, they harbor a deep anxiety about being marginalized in the game of global capitalism and feel attracted by the glamour of global cities in China; on the other hand, they find themselves involved in a tug-of-war of nationalism between the two sides of the Strait, and are forced to choose between the identity labels of ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Chinese.’

The experience of Taiwanese students also demonstrates structural tensions between globalization and nationalization, leading to uncertainties and predicaments for individual migrants. Many are impressed by China’s rising status on the global stage and wish to occupy a niche in the regional economy of Greater China, but their educational experience and career trajectory are still contingent upon the political tug-of-war between the two regimes. The ambivalent status of Taiwanese – neither citizen nor foreigner in China – facilitates their transnational ‘ways of being,’ but political tensions across the Strait render it difficult for them to maintain transnational ‘ways of belonging’ without friction or conflict.

This article investigates the following questions: Why did Taiwan students decide to study in China and what kinds of flexible capital accumulation are involved? How are their migration decisions and trajectories embedded in the transnational social field across the Taiwan Strait, which is structured by China’s flexible state practice and Taiwanese migrants’ economic and social networks across borders? How do Taiwanese students negotiate their ethnic or national identification in this transnational space of liminality?

Research methods and case profiles

This article draws from 61 semi-structured interviews, conducted from August 2008 to September 2009, with Taiwanese students who were studying or had studied in China. We used the method of snowballing to recruit 46 interviewees, but limited each chain of referral to avoid sample bias. The other 15 interviewees responded to our request for interviews posted at the website forums of Taiwanese students. In addition, we systematically collected official documents and news reports concerning relevant policy regulations in China and Taiwan.

We conducted the interviews in Mandarin Chinese, and translated the excerpts quoted in the article. We used open-ended questions such as: Why did you decide to study in China? How was your experience of studying and living in China? What is your plan upon graduation? How often do you go back home, and how do you maintain connections in Taiwan? How would you identify yourself in terms of ethnicity and nationality? How do you perceive the similarities and differences between Taiwanese and Chinese? We also asked about concrete details of their lifestyle in China, including what they eat, where they live, how they speak, and whom they make friends with, regarding their interaction with the local society.

The interviews, which usually lasted for two or three hours, were mostly conducted in public establishments such as coffee shops or restaurants, while some took place in the rental apartments of the informants or in the office of the lead researcher. We interviewed 19 informants in Taipei, who had graduated and returned to Taiwan or come home for vacation. For the rest, the interviews were conducted in three major cities in China, including Beijing (14), Shanghai (10), and Guangzhou (18). These three cities were chosen for their particularly large Taiwanese communities. The context factors, such as the locations of the interviews and the ethnicity of the interviewers (both Taiwanese citizens), may have some effect upon how the informants employ narratives to frame their identification. Therefore, we try to contextualize the data and interpret them with caution.

No statistics have been released about the demographic profiles of Taiwanese students in China, but we tried to maintain sufficient variations in our sample. The 61 participants include 33 females and 28 males. Most of them were aged between 20 and 30, with the exception of two PhD students. We selected interviewees across various majors and professions, including Chinese or Western medicine (20), business and finance (15), social sciences and law (14), humanities and arts (9), and natural science (3). Thirty-three of them were pursuing a bachelor’s degree in China, while the others were graduate students (19 MA, one MBA, and 8 PhD students). Two-thirds of our informants were studying in China at the time of the interview, and one-third of them had recently finished their studies in China. Among these 21 graduates, 13 stayed in China and the rest returned to Taiwan. Most of the students had stayed in China less than five years; 17 people stayed longer than five years for work or PhD programs; and six of them had stayed in China for more than 10 years, because their families had previously moved there.

With participants’ consent, interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. The interview transcripts were coded based on the principle of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2008). Using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo, we conducted initial coding by reading the transcripts carefully and identifying important categories; we later reorganized the data by category (e.g., motives of immigration, and identity negotiation) and identified sub-categories (e.g., seeking distinction, seeking assimilation, and cosmopolitanism) in the process of advanced coding. Engaging simultaneously with literature and the data, we gradually developed broader theoretical themes and an analytical map of the transnational social field.

Exceptional membership as a flexible state practice

With the national policy to open up the market in the 1980s, the PRC government started to welcome the return of the Chinese diaspora for investment and education. Before 1980, overseas Chinese, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwanese students (OHMT in the following) had to take the same national entrance exam (gaokao) as local students to attend Chinese universities. Selective universities, initially two ⁴ and later nine, ⁵ offered special exams and quotas of admission for OHMT students. This exam later turned into the OHMT Normal Exam, with the same content as gaokao but much lower admission scores for overseas applicants. At this time, Taiwanese students were treated no differently from other OHMT students, who paid higher tuition fees than local students did. They were assigned to dormitories for foreign students with higher charges and separation from the circle of local students.

Around 1996, the recruitment policy entered a new stage characterized by the principle of ‘one country, two systems.’ The State Council announced that ‘external territories’ students from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan should enjoy equal treatment as ‘nationals.’ ⁶ They became eligible for scholarships and campus lodging available for local students. Special paths of admission became open, including independent exams held by professional schools such as art and design, pre-university programs (yukensheng) and pre-admission students (chabansheng).

The improved bilateral relationship between China and Taiwan pushed the PRC government to offer even more benefits designed specifically for Taiwanese students. In 2005, after the ‘ice-breaking’ visit of former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan in China, Hu Jin-Tao, then Paramount Leader of China, announced that Taiwanese students would pay the same amount of tuition fees as local students did. Many universities also set up scholarships offered only to Taiwanese students. In 2007, the MOE announced that Chinese universities should recruit a certain number of graduate students from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, because it provided ‘an important venue to promote the task of homeland unification.’ ⁷ Since Hong Kong and Macao have been integrated into the PRC territory under the sovereignty of ‘special administrative regions,’ the educational incorporation of Taiwanese youngsters has become an ever more important policy measure to promote reunification of Taiwan with China. As of 2010, Taiwanese high school graduates can apply for 123 colleges and universities in China, once they have achieved a certain grade on Taiwan’s General Scholastic Ability Test. They do not have to take any additional exams except for personal interviews held in China. This beneficial policy is open exclusively to Taiwanese students.

When the KMT returned to rule in 2008, Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-Jeou promised to recognize Chinese degrees and recruit Chinese students in the near future. Since 2010, Taiwan has opened a limited number of admissions to Chinese students, who are not treated as ordinary foreign students but are under exceptional – more restrictive – regulation. ⁸ To soothe societal concern about the potential impact upon local students, Chinese students are not eligible for scholarships or gainful work on campus, nor are they allowed to take certification exams or stay after graduation. Meanwhile, the MOE in Taiwan has gradually expanded the official recognition of China’s higher education degrees from 41 institutions in 2012 to 111 institutions in 2013. ⁹ This policy lifted a critical barrier for Taiwanese students who would like to return home after their study in China, but medical degrees are still not recognized due to the objection of the professional community in Taiwan.

China’s policy of recruiting Taiwanese students has a clear undertone of nationalism. By contrast, the counterpart policies in Taiwan are largely framed by the narrative of globalization and the neoliberal logic of talent competition. In addition to the goals of promoting cross-strait exchanges and easing the shortage of local pupils in private universities, Taiwan’s MOE declared the benefits of recruiting Chinese students as ‘responding to the global trend of talent competition’ and ‘improving the competitiveness and internationalization of Taiwanese universities.’ ¹⁰ These ‘depoliticized’ narratives attempted to soothe Taiwanese people’s concerns about the hidden agenda of reunification. They also reveal Taiwan’s deep anxiety about being marginalized in the global community, a situation that has been exacerbated by the rise of China.

The bilateral relationship between Taiwan and China constitutes an exceptional space of sovereignty. Both governments have offered exceptional membership for students from the other side of the Taiwan Strait, but their flexible state practices are starkly different – China has a hidden agenda of nationalization, but Taiwan embraces the rhetoric of globalization. Against the backdrop of widespread social anxieties about Taiwan’s economic downturn in recent decades, an increasing number of Taiwanese students are turning to the rising China for the pursuit of educational and career opportunities.

Transnational mobility and flexible capital accumulation

Taiwanese students choose Chinese tertiary education for a variety of reasons. What they share in common is that they capitalize on the ethnic and linguistic ties, as well as the exceptional membership, to facilitate their flexible mobility and to improve their career opportunities in the future. We identify three major reasons for migration: degree-oriented, work-oriented, and family-guided. Each migration trajectory involves specific strategies of flexible capital accumulation, but they are all embedded in transnational social and economic networks that stretch across the Taiwan Strait.

Negotiating identification in a contact zone

The migration of Taiwanese students in China has created a ‘contact zone,’ which, according to the definition of Mary Louis Pratt, refers to ‘an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures and whose trajectories now intersect’ (Pratt, 1992: 7, cited in Yeoh and Willis, 2005: 271). Although Pratt situates this notion in the context of colonial encounter, we find this concept well suited for describing the encounter between Taiwanese and Chinese after the decades of Cold War separation.

For the younger generation of Taiwanese, the images of China are like mosaic paintings that interweave the past, present, and future. China is viewed as the cultural homeland through a nostalgic lens and yet a hostile enemy to Taiwan in the geopolitical reality. The impressive images about the contemporary rise of China contrast greatly with the KMT’s dated political propaganda that China was a poverty-stricken and uncivilized place. These contradictory perceptions about China motivate some curious Taiwanese youngsters to explore China, a place that seems so close yet so far away.

Lily went to Shanghai for post-graduate study, a decision driven by her curiosity about the many faces of China. During her college years in Taiwan, she met a group of visiting students from Peking University, and these Chinese elites impressed her greatly. Lily described how she felt: ‘I was so shocked upon meeting these people and I decided to take a serious look at China. I thought they were poor and underdeveloped. But in fact, they are not at all!’

Upon landing in the actual territory of China, Taiwanese students often experience a ‘cultural shock’ – not about an exotic environment like most foreign students feel, but about a territory that seems so similar and yet quite different. Shen, the woman who studied Chinese literature, vividly described the transformation of her feelings:

I was full of images like the mighty China, the grand history and so on. When my flight was landing and I saw the territory from above, I was so touched, oh, the homeland! But, later on, you realize that it’s not really the case; actually, it’s like a foreign country.

Far from being completely unfamiliar with China, most Taiwanese students had learned much about China from textbooks in history and geography. Yin, who went to China to study business, described her cultural shock: ‘We [Taiwanese students] often joke that Taiwan’s history textbooks are about mysteries and Taiwan’s geography textbooks are like history [out-of-date]. Coming here, you get to know a totally different China.’

The experience of migration not only brings Taiwanese students to ‘discover’ the reality of China, but it also repositions them in a new landscape of identity politics. Their liminal status not only describes their contingent position in the journey of border crossing, but also characterizes their ambiguous location between the identities of Taiwanese and Chinese. Our interviewees described their liminality with metaphors like ‘sandwich cookies’ and ‘nobody in between.’ Facing their Taiwanese friends, they feel the urge to pull apart the negative stereotypes Taiwanese hold about China; while interacting with Chinese people, they also need to defend against the prejudice and misunderstanding about Taiwan. This condition renders them reflexive about their subject positions within discourses that people articulate about the differences between Chinese and Taiwanese. We present three ways in which Taiwanese students negotiate the frontiers of difference: seeking distinction, seeking assimilation, and cosmopolitanism.

Discussion

In the previous sections, we have examined why these Taiwanese students decided to study in China and how they negotiate their ethnic or national identification. Their migration trajectories are embedded in the transnational social field across the Taiwan Strait, which is structured by the competing forces of globalization and nationalization. Taiwanese students study in China in order to pursue flexible mobility and capital accumulation beyond the confines of their home country. They hope to surf the waves of globalization by taking a ride with China’s growing economy. Their capacity to cross borders is paradoxically built on exceptional membership granted by the Chinese government, which gives Taiwanese a quasi-national or even ‘supra-national’ status. In addition, Chinese universities, with broadened ties with Western institutions, provide an environment of ‘intermediated globalization,’ while Taiwanese students can still enjoy the comfort of linguistic and cultural affinity.

China’s recruitment of Taiwanese students through special venues of admission has a hidden agenda of nationalization – seeking political integration for the breakaway island. The policy of educational incorporation has led to unintended consequences in the terrain of identity politics. The journey of migration, crossing the geographic and social divides between China and Taiwan, renders Taiwanese students reflexive about their ethnic and national identities and pressures them to constantly calibrate their subject positions, either as Chinese or Taiwanese, or cosmopolitan.

To further analyze the identity politics in this transnational space, we use the tool of ‘social field’ to map out the in-group differences among Taiwanese students (see Figure 1). We identify two axes in the formation of this transnational social field: First, we consider their anticipation of future migration trajectory after graduation – whether they plan on staying in China or returning to Taiwan. Their various orientations constitute a spectrum in which they perceive of their residency in China primarily as immigration, transnationalism, or temporary sojourn. Second, we analyze how they manage the boundary between Taiwanese and Chinese – whether they emphasize the distinction between Taiwanese and Chinese or they attempt to soften the boundaries. Their various strategies of boundary work constitute another spectrum ranging from seeking assimilation, to hybridization, to seeking distinction. ¹⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The transnational social field of Taiwanese students in China.

Most Taiwanese students fall into quadrants I, III, and IV. ¹⁷ Twelve informants (20%) fall into the scenario of ‘seeking differences and not staying’ (quadrant III). Those degree-oriented students are most likely to identify themselves as ‘temporary resident,’ and many plan to return to Taiwan or to emigrate to another country. During their stay in China, they largely socialize with the Taiwanese community and they make frequent visits to Taiwan and maintain intensive transnational ties back home. Some people in this quadrant, however, gradually change their orientation for identification or future trajectory when they develop intimate partnerships with Chinese people or because their career prospects in Taiwan are limited given the lack of recognition for their Chinese degrees. The arrow on Figure 1 indicates the possibility of shifting locations due to institutional or individual factors.

Ten informants (16%) fall into quadrant I (‘staying and seeking similarities’). They prefer to stay in China after graduation and view the boundary between Taiwanese and Chinese as more porous. They are likely to be those who are interested in finding jobs or doing business in the Chinese labor market, or the children of immigrant professionals. By contrast, a more substantial number of our informants (19 students, 31%) share the orientation of ‘staying but seeking differences’ (quadrant III). They plan to stay in China for employment but strongly demarcate the difference and distance between themselves and locals. They are likely to be the children of Taiwanese entrepreneurs in the manufacturing zones of southern China, and those who aspire to establish a career in multinational companies in China.

Despite sharing the plan to stay after graduation, the informants in quadrant I and quadrant III encounter varied modes of incorporation, i.e., how they as migrants are integrated into the local economy and society. For instance, among the children who accompany their parents to move to China, those who live in the Taiwanese-concentrated suburbs and attend Taiwanese-run schools or international schools (usually the children of immigrant entrepreneurs and high-end managers) are more likely to highlight difference and keep distance from locals; their transnational connections and Taiwanese identity remain strong, even if they have lived in China for a long period of time. By contrast, those who live in big cities and even attend local schools (children of immigrant professionals) are more likely to seek social and cultural incorporation locally.

Conclusion

The migration between Taiwan and China, two countries with cultural affinity and yet political tension, takes place in an exceptional space of sovereignty and a liminal terrain of identity. The frequent border-crossing activities and sustained networks of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, professionals, and students constitute a transnational social field that transcends territorial boundaries. Such ‘networks of networks’ further accumulate transnational social relations and facilitate movement in multiple directions for the later waves of migrants.

This study demonstrates that state sovereignty practices, such as deregulation policies and exceptional membership, still play a critical role in the formation of the transnational social field. While seeking opportunities of education and employment beyond territorial constraints, migrants encounter a predicament between globalization and nationalization in shaping their ways of being and ways of belonging. We urge scholars to examine the dialectical relationship between globalization/transnationalism and nationalization at the multiple levels of state policy, migration trajectory, and identity politics.

We use ‘social field’ as an analytical tool to illustrate the in-group differences among Taiwanese students in China. This analytical strategy can be applied to other groups of immigrants as well. Our analysis challenges the common binary view that portrays immigrant experience as either ‘assimilation’ or ‘transnationalism.’ Immigrants do not necessarily gradually integrate into local society nor do they belong in a long-term transnational state. Instead, we view their tendency toward ‘staying or leaving’ and ‘seeking similarities or seeking differences’ as spectrums, rather than a typologies, which allow us to explore how migrants negotiate their ambiguous identity and how such negotiation can change over time. ‘To stay or not to stay’ is a never-ending question for most immigrants during their journey filled with hardships and uncertainties. The process of identification is also a winding path that involves everyday negotiation in the mundane spheres of food, language, living space, and social life.

The diverse experiences of Taiwanese students show that ethnic or national identification is not a given membership but a product of incessant negotiation in the transnational social field. Transmigrants are reflexive agents and active appropriators who maneuver institutional structures to facilitate their exceptional membership and flexible mobility, but they still face the challenge of identity negotiation in a tug-of-war of nationalism between the host and home nations.