INTIMATE FRONTIERS: CHINESE MARRIAGE MIGRANTS ......integrate into the Hong Kong society,” Lin Qin...

INTIMATE FRONTIERS:

CHINESE MARRIAGE MIGRANTS AND CONTESTED BELONGING IN HONG KONG AND

TAIWAN

by

Man Chuen Cheng

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Sociology

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Man Chuen Cheng 2018

ii

Intimate Frontiers:

Chinese Marriage Migrants and Contested Belonging in

Hong Kong and Taiwan

Man Chuen Cheng

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Sociology University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

Based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Taiwan and Hong Kong

between June 2014 and July 2016, this dissertation examines the everyday regulation and

negotiation of belonging at various sites of Chinese marriage migrants' personal lives,

including social service encounters, domestic space of the home, and Chinese marriage

migrant communities. As Chinese women married across the two politically contested

borders, their post-migration lives are situated within the frontiers of intimate family

lives but also historically grounded political struggles and renewed local discontent

against China’s political encroachment. The struggles of belonging faced by Chinese

marriage migrants illuminate the norms, values, and ideologies upheld by citizens and the

states of Hong Kong and Taiwan. As Chinese marriage migrants yearn to integrate into

the Hong Kong and Taiwanese societies, some Chinese marriage migrants mobilized

hegemonic discourses of belonging to make meanings of their everyday lives, others

contested their exclusion by redefining their identities and in the process, producing new

iii

layers of inequalities against less-privileged Chinese marriage migrants. Delving into the

narratives of belonging developed in everyday interaction, this dissertation shows how

national belonging is a regulated and negotiated process beyond legal categories and

immigration policies. This dissertation also shows how class intersects with gender and

nationality in producing differentiated regulatory practices and narratives of belonging,

illuminating the contradiction and complexity of immigrant belonging in an era of global

interconnection and geopolitical tension. Situating the production and negotiation of

these narratives within enhanced economic integration and shifting geopolitical

entanglement across the China-Hong Kong and China-Taiwan borders, this dissertation

also highlights the unfortunate alignment of market logic and nationalist ideology in the

formation of discursive national boundaries against immigrants at geopolitically

contentious times.

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Acknowledgments

“Looking deeply into a flower, we see that the flower is made of non-flower elements.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear1

Just like a flower that cannot grow without sun, rain, earth, and other non-flower

elements, this dissertation is nourished by the minds and hands of scholars, family, and

friends whose names are not on the cover page but have made everything possible with

their inspiration, trust, love, and care.

My foremost thanks to the people I met during fieldwork in Taiwan and Hong Kong. I

am most grateful to the Chinese marriage migrants who shared with me their intimate

stories and home-made food. I have learned from them the power of resilience,

persistence, and perseverance. I also thank the social workers, immigration officers, and

organizations that had let me participate in their seminars and workshops and helped me

recruit informants. This dissertation would not have been possible without their kindness

and trust.

At the University of Toronto, I thank my dissertation committee Ping-chun Hsiung, Hae

Yeon Choo, and Cynthia Cranford for their intellectual nourishment and unwavering

support throughout my academic journey. I thank Ping-chun for challenging me to reflect

on my epistemological and methodological position. I am a better qualitative researcher

because of her. Thank you to Cynthia, who has always inspired me with her intellectual

rigorousness and clarity.

No word can describe my indebtedness to Hae Yeon Choo. Her analytic criticality,

intellectual creativity, and unfailing dedication are everything to this dissertation and my

1 Thich Nhat Hanh 2002, 47-8.

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academic journey. Her teaching with Zen metaphor is also the most powerful. When I got

caught up with reading these days, I could still hear her say, “look at the moon, not the

finger pointing at it.”

Other professors and graduate colleagues have cultivated my intellectual ability and have

helped to develop my ideas at various stages of this research. Bonnie Fox, Anna

Korteweg, Rachel Silvey, Joan Eakin, and Lisa Yoneyama have informed my thinking

and writing. Ito Peng's Gender, Migration & the Work of Care has connected me with

scholars in the field of gender, care, and migration. I thank Rachel Silvey for giving me

the opportunity to work with her team to organize the conference "Im/mobilities and care

work: Social Reproduction and Migrant Families," where I presented part of this

dissertation. Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard, Katelin Albert, Elise Maiolino, Louise Birdsell

Bauer, Terran Giacomini, and Salina Abji have provided me with valuable feedback,

friendship, and intellectual comraderies.

Beyond Toronto, Nicole Constable, Pei-chia Lan, Kristy Shih, Anthony Spires, and

Connie Koo have shared with me their insights and wisdom about research, career, and

life. Academic and life advice from Nicole have been a guiding light at times of

darkness. Pei-chia had helped me gain access to the immigration office in Taiwan. Kristy

and her family had given me valuable advice at the beginning of my research. Anthony

has been my trusted mentor for many years. Connie introduced me to the world of yoga

and meditation that have saved me from chronic spinal pain. I have learned how to

breathe through moments when this dissertation feels too heavy.

My deepest gratitude to my parents, whose migration trajectories have been the

inspiration for this dissertation. Working on this project has unfolded many untold family

stories and has brought me closer to them.

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And finally, I thank my life partner Otto Ng, whose sense of humor and positivity have

carried me through ill health and distress in life. I am grateful to him for encouraging me

to bring my sociology training to community work. I used to think of sociology and

architecture as separate worlds, yet I am amazed by the similarities in our concerns and

approaches to personal and community lives throughout our collaborations. This

dissertation is not possible without his 3 a.m. company and meticulous formatting.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………. iv

List of Appendices ……………………………………………………………………... ix

Chapter 1 — Introduction ......................................................................................... 1

1 A Gendered Geopolitical Economy of Marriage Migration ............................... 5

2 State-building, “Qualities” of Citizens, and Contested Belonging ................... 12

3 Being in the Field: A Methodological Note ..................................................... 21

4 Overview of Chapters ...................................................................................... 31

Chapter 2 — Gendered Narratives of Belonging: Chinese Marriage Migrants,

Labor, and Immigrant Integration in Hong Kong and Taiwan .............................. 34

1 Gendered Narratives of Belonging .................................................................. 36

2 Chinese Marriage Migrants in Political and Cultural Contexts ......................... 39

3 Settings and Methods ...................................................................................... 42

4 Independent Market Narrative in Hong Kong ................................................. 43

5 Deferential Familial Narrative in Taiwan ........................................................ 49

6 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 55

Chapter 3 — “I’m not a typical dalumei!” Chinese Marriage Migrants, Gendered

Morality, and Classed Belonging in Taiwan ........................................................... 58

1 Marriage Migrants, Gendered Morality, and Classed Belonging ..................... 59

2 Cross-strait Marriage and Representation of Mainland Chinese Women

in Taiwan ....................................................................................................... 62


4 Everyday Reproductions of Dalumei Discourse and the Formation of “Good

Immigrants” ................................................................................................... 68

5 Negotiating with Dalumei Discourse and Becoming “Good Immigrants” ....... 71

viii

6 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 80

Chapter 4 — “Aren’t we all Chinese?” Chinese Marriage Migrants’ Participation

in Transnational Activities and Reterritorializing the Hong Kong — China border

......................................................................................................................... 83

1 Transnational Activities, Reterritorializing Nation-state, and Transmigrant

Subjectivities .................................................................................................. 85

2 The Political and Moral Landscapes of Chinese Marriage Migrants’

Transnational Participation ............................................................................. 88


4 Chinese Marriage Migrants’ Participation in Transnational Activities ............. 94

5 Chinese Marriage Migrants’ Narratives of their Political Participation .......... 104

6 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 112

Chapter 5 — Conclusion ........................................................................................ 115

1 Differentiated Immigrant Belonging at Geopolitically Contentious Times .... 119

Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 123

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List of Appendices Appendix A — Profile of Chinese marriage migrants who were perceived by social

workers, Taiwanese friends, and the Chinese marriage migrant community as middle-

class in Taiwan………………………………...……………………………………... 139

Appendix B — Profile of Chinese marriage migrants who were perceived by social

workers, Taiwanese friends, and the Chinese marriage migrant community as working-

class in Taiwan ……………………………………………………………………... 142

Appendix C — Profile of Chinese marriage migrants I met in Taiwan who do not fit into

the class categorization………………………………………………….....………….. 145

1

Chapter 1 Introduction

Lin Qin and Ming were not sisters, but they shared a strikingly similar migration

trajectory. Both were born in a small town in southwest China, quit high school, and left

their hometowns for Guangdong, an eastern city in China, to look for job opportunities at

a young age. It was in the late 1990s, two decades after China opened its door to

international investment, and jobs in Guangdong were plenty. Lin Qin and Ming took up

their first job at a toy factory but left very soon due to low salary. The two friends then

moved to Zhuhai, another eastern city in China, attended the same workshop about

housing estate, and became property sales agents. Riding the tide of China's rising

property, they earned a million RMB (approx. USD 155,000), and each bought a house in

Guangdong. At the highest point of their lives, they met their husbands, whom they

described as “loving” and “caring,” and had promised them a better life in Hong Kong

and Taiwan. Just before they turned 30, the two friends parted their ways and moved

across the China border to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

“I thought moving to Hong Kong was easy, because we are all Chinese. But what do I

know? These days, some Hong Kong people say they aren’t Chinese but Hong Kongers!”

Lin Qin lamented as she bought me a cappuccino in a busy coffee shop in Tsim Sha Tsui.

In light of the recent anti-China sentiments in Hong Kong, Lin Qin had participated in

political activities organized by pro-China political groups to condemn supporters of

localism— a political movement that emphasizes Hong Kong people’s identity and

autonomy (Law 2013, 96). Besides volunteering in political activities, Lin Qin also took

courses and exams in professional Mandarin speaking and became a certified Mandarin

teacher. When we met, she had just finished all her courses on insurance and became a

full-time insurance agent. “You have to add value to yourself if you really want to

integrate into the Hong Kong society,” Lin Qin explained, “otherwise Hong Kongers

would think that you come here for social welfare!”

Five hundred miles away in her newly furnished apartment in Taipei city, Ming was also

2

frustrated with her new life in Taiwan. “Life was very different back in China.” Ming

recalled earning di yi tong jin—the first million RMB—describing that as “the proudest

moment” of her life. After she moved to Taiwan, Ming joked that her life had changed

from “bread-winning” to “bread-making.” Financially supported by her interior designer

husband, Ming stayed at home and had become what she called a Gongyuan Ka—

mothers who frequent parks with their children. In addition to childcare, she also spent

her days learning bread-making and soap-making at various integration programs

organized by the Taiwanese government. “I used to be a confident person when I was in

China, but after coming to Taiwan, I just feel very small. Even my mother-in-law looks

down on me and thinks I married her son for money. But the thing is, I used to live in a

bigger house in mainland!” Ming lamented as she handed me another piece of home-

made bread.

Lin Qin and Ming were among the 782,0002 mainland Chinese women who married

across two contentious borders of People’s Republic of China (China) to the Republic of

China (Taiwan) and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong) since

the late 1980s. Contrary to their initial expectations, their post-migration lives were

fraught with insurmountable challenges. Despite their ethnic similarity with the majority

of the population in Hong Kong and Taiwan,3 mainland Chinese marriage migrants like

Lin Qin and Ming were constructed as political and class others in both societies

(Newendorp 2008; Lan 2008). Although the Hong Kong and Taiwanese states had

2 This calculation combines the number of mainland Chinese female spouses in Hong Kong between 1986 and 2016 and the number of mainland Chinese female spouses in Taiwan between 1987 and 2018. More than 460, 000 mainland Chinese women married Hong Kong husbands and migrated to Hong Kong between 1986 and 2016 (Census and Statistics Department Hong Kong SARG 2017). It is estimated that more than 322,000 mainland Chinese women migrated to Taiwan after marrying their Taiwanese husbands between 1987 and 2018 (National Immigration Agency ROC 2018). 3 According to the Home Affairs Bureau Hong Kong SARG (2016), 92% of the population in Hong Kong is Han Chinese in 2018. In Taiwan, Han consists of 97% of the total population in 2018 (Executive Yuan ROC 2018).

3

accepted their application to long-term settlement, Lin Qin and Ming were considered

“low-quality” (Ku and Pun 2004; Wang and Bélanger 2008) citizens under the state

discourses in Hong Kong and Taiwan and were asked to participate in various social

integration programs that taught them family values and work ethics. Their morality was

also held in question by the gendered ethnic stereotype of Chinese women as gold-

diggers in both Hong Kong and Taiwanese societies.

For many Hong Kongers and Taiwanese, the recent rise of China’s economic power and

its enhanced trade collaborations with Hong Kong and Taiwan, have symbolized China’s

encroachment in local social, cultural, and political ways of living despite the promise to

boost the local economy (Shih 1998). China-Hong Kong and China-Taiwan geopolitical

tensions are on the rise in recent years, as Hong Kong fuels with rising demands for

internal democracy and Taiwan continues to walk the tightrope of national independence

from China since the Chinese civil wars. Not only are these geopolitical tensions echoed

in recent political events, such as the civil disobedience of Umbrella Movement to protest

for universal suffrage in Hong Kong and the Sunflower Students’ Movement against

cross-strait service trade agreements in Taiwan, but they are also deeply embedded

within postcolonial engagements and histories of civil wars. In the face of local concerns

about the future of political autonomy and economic life of Hong Kong and Taiwan,

despite their ethnic similarity with the majority of population in Hong Kong and Taiwan

and their route to legal citizenship through family reunification, mainland Chinese

marriage migrant women (Chinese marriage migrants) are situated at the frontiers of

everyday intimate lives as well as geopolitical struggles, making them the focal point of

legal, political, and social debates in both Hong Kong and Taiwan (Friedman 2015;

Newendorp 2008).

This dissertation examines the space of what I called “intimate frontiers,” where Chinese

marriage migrants negotiate their moral belonging in their everyday post-migration lives

that are embedded within enhanced economic integration and geopolitical tensions across

the China-Hong Kong and China-Taiwan borders. In her seminal work on the interracial

4

marriages during the colonial rule of Dutch in the East Indies and French in Indochina,

Stoler (1992, 516) uses the term “interior frontier” to describe “the sense of internal

distinctions within a territory (or empire).” Stoler (1992) argues that interracial marriages

between European men and native women had been such a politically charged issue

because it presented a threat to the constitution of European nations. By restricting legal

marriages between European men and native women, colonial states policed the racial

boundary of the nation and excluded the colonized from gaining access to European

wealth and privilege. Building on Stoler, I use the term intimate frontiers to refer to

various sites of contestation and contact over constructed notions of internal distinction

in a given territory. I use the term intimate to describe the political and economic

interconnectedness across the borders of China-Hong Kong and China-Taiwan, but also

to refer to the personal and family lives where Chinese marriage migrants are constructed

as the immoral other. Specifically, I examine the everyday regulation and negotiation of

moral belonging at various sites of Chinese marriage migrants’ personal lives, including

social service encounters, domestic space of the home, and local communities, where

Chinese marriage migrants interact with social workers, immigration officers, family

members, and other Chinese marriage migrants. I parse out the multiple narratives of

belonging in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including the narratives developed by the states to

define Chinese marriage migrants’ belonging and those developed by Chinese marriage

migrants as they reinforce, maintain, and contest their exclusion in Hong Kong and

Taiwan. In this dissertation, I ask:

1. What are the narratives of belonging developed by the state actors of Hong

Kong and Taiwan at social service encounter? What are the images of

“ideal citizens” that are upheld by state actors in Hong Kong and Taiwan

that Chinese marriage migrants are measured against?

2. In Taiwan, how do Chinese marriage migrants experience the discourses

that exclude them as immoral others? How do Chinese marriage migrants

narrate a sense of self-worth and construct their belonging in the face of

such stigma?

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3. At a historical moment with rising “anti-China” sentiments in Hong Kong,

how do Chinese marriage migrants understand their engagement in

transnational political participation? How do transnational political

activities allow Chinese marriage migrants to construct a sense of

belonging?

Delving into the narratives of belonging developed in everyday interaction, I show how

national belonging is a regulated and negotiated process beyond legal categories and

immigration policies. In my analysis, I attend to how class intersects with gender and

nationality in producing differentiated regulatory practices and narratives of belonging,

illuminating the contradiction and complexity of immigrant belonging in an era of global

interconnection and geopolitical tension. Situating the production and negotiation of

these narratives within enhanced economic integration and shifting geopolitical

entanglement between China-Hong Kong and China-Taiwan, this dissertation also

highlights the unfortunate alignment of market logic and nationalist ideology in the

formation of discursive national boundaries against immigrants at geopolitically

contentious times.

1 A Gendered Geopolitical Economy of Marriage

Migration

In her seminal work on the correspondence marriages between American men and Asian

women, Nicole Constable (2003, 118) develops the framework “political economy and

cultural logics of desire” to understand the relationship between economic and political

relations and personal intimacies. Unlike conventional anthropological and sociological

understandings of economic and political relations as the macro-level backdrop of micro-

level social interactions, Constable (2003, 143) argues that “political economy is

implicated in the production and reproduction of desire and is implicated in even the

most minute and intimate levels of interaction.” The desires for American men and Asian

women, Constable (2003, 120) argues, are constituted by their understanding of the

6

imagined America and imagined Asia, which is “made thinkable, desirable, and

practicable by a wider political economy.” In other words, political economy and

personal intimacies are mutually constitutive and inextricably intertwined.

Building on Constable (2003), I understand marriage migration between women from

China and men from Taiwan and Hong Kong and the political economy across the

China-Hong Kong and China-Taiwan borders as mutually constitutive and inextricably

intertwined. Chinese women’s marriage migration to Hong Kong and Taiwan is situated

within broader economic integration and geopolitical relations across the three societies.

In China, post-Mao social transformation in the 1980s, including rural de-

collectivization, rapid urbanization, an increase in employment opportunities in major

cities, and the relaxation of household registration (hukou) system that used to restrict

mobility, have led to a massive increase in rural-urban migration (Chao 2005; Constable

2005; Gaetano and Jacka 2004). The transformation of China from planned to market-

oriented economy has resulted in an erosion of social security that propels rural women

to seek urban employment. Early process of industrialization and urbanization in Hong

Kong and Taiwan have put both at the forefront of Asia economies in the 1990s, making

them two of the “Asian tigers” in the Asia Pacific region.4 As China opened its doors to

foreign investment in 1987, Hong Kong and Taiwanese businessmen directed their

capital to China to reduce labor costs, forming the so-called “Greater China” economic

zone (Ong 1990; Shih 1998).

4 Other scholars have also pointed out the association between marriage migration and the demographic changes induced by Hong Kong and Taiwan’s economic ascendancies, which include rapid urbanization, a rise in dual-income nuclear families, an increase in women’s education and labor market participation, a decrease in the fertility rate among married couples (Lee 2012; Jones and Shen 2008). These factors coupled with a persistent emphasis on women’s domesticity have resulted in the so-called “bride deficit” in the 1990s (Lan 2008).

7

Once seen as potential spies and traitors during the Cold War era, haiwai huaren, or

overseas Chinese, are now considered by the Chinese state as the engine of economic and

national development (Thunø 2002; Ye 2013; Zhou and Lee 2013). In China, Hong Kong

and Taiwanese businessmen are perceived as the “bridge” to economic prosperity and are

perceived to embody “traditional Chinese familism, business acumen, and talent for

wealth-making” (Ong 1999, 44). Accompanying this capitalist embodiment are the

imaginaries about modern manhood. The Chinese women I met talked about marrying

their Hong Kong and Taiwanese husbands for economic security, but they also described

their husbands as more “loving,” “gentle,” and “understanding” than the men they knew

in China, who “smoke, drink, and gamble too much,” “bad habits” that symbolize

backwardness and lower social standing. At the same time, gendered stereotypes have

also informed men’s desires for Chinese women. Compared to Hong Kong women, who

are believed to be spoiled, demanding, and materialistic, Chinese women are thought to

be more submissive, gentle, caring and more traditional when it comes to family values

(Ho, 2014; Li 2001).5

Besides meeting in work settings, China’s open-door policy has also facilitated family

visits and travels to China. Earlier migration of Chinese families in Hong Kong and

Taiwan formed extensive kinship networks across the borders, through which Chinese

women were introduced to their Hong Kong and Taiwanese husbands. Ming, for

example, met her husband through family friends when he traveled to Zhuhai as a tourist.

Family introductions were particularly common for Chinese marriage migrants who

married their veteran husbands from Taiwan in the late 1980s and early1990s when the

Taiwanese government lifted the Martial Law6 to allow communications with China.

5 Ironically, women from China are also subjected to the gendered stereotype of gold-diggers who are believed to be overly-materialistic. I will discuss this in Chapter 3. 6 After the Nationalist Army retreated to Taiwan and took over the island, the corrupt Nationalist government had evoked much political tensions with local residents. The February 28 Incident, triggered by the conflict between a local cigarette vendor and a

8

Although complex economic linkages, extensive family network, as well as shifting

gendered ideologies and desires, have facilitated women’s marriage migration across

China’s borders to Hong Kong and Taiwan; paradoxically, geopolitical relations have

informed immigration policies that often regulate, if not constrained, such settlement.

Historically, Hong Kong was an important transit point for Chinese men in search of

settlements in different parts of the world, including Southeast Asia, the Americas and

Europe (Kwok and Ames 1995). Without any border restriction, Chinese men, mostly

from the Guangdong province, came to Hong Kong to work, but sent remittances and

retired in their home villages at a later age. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, refugees

from all over China fled to Hong Kong to escape the newly established communist

government in the People’s Republic of China (Hambro 1955). Over the next 30 years,

the political upheaval in China continued to propel mainland residents to seek refuge in

Hong Kong.7 At the height of such movement, the Chinese communist government had

implemented border control to prevent such border-crossing. At the same time, in the

face of Cold War politics, the British and the U.S. governments feared that communism

in China would compromise the security of Hong Kong and shifted the immigration

policy from “reactive measures to more deliberate control, planning, and hegemonic

discourse” (Ku 2004, 326).8 From the restriction of ration tickets and quota systems in

government officer, created civil disorder and open rebellion among local residents, who were brutally suppressed by the Nationalist government, leading to the beginning of the Martial Law period. 7 A number of political events in China, including Great Leap Forward (1958—1962) and Cultural Revolution (1966—1976) had propelled such movement despite the restriction imposed by the Beijing government to prevent individuals from crossing from China into Hong Kong. 8 Ku (2004) observes that the colonial government had identified “A Problem of People” in the 1950s when massive influx of Chinese immigrants entered Hong Kong to escape the political upheaval in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Those who arrived after 1949 were identified as “refugees” and were integrated into the society instead of being repatriated to China. During the Cold War era, the British government used such

9

the 1950s to the limitation of entrants from China9 and the implementation of “touch

base” policy in the 1970s,10 the British colonial government gradually put in place an

inclusionary practice to appease the U.S. government, who did not wish to send refugees back to China. Economically, refugees also provided labor for the British government to develop Hong Kong’s external trade (Ku 2004). Ku (2004) argues that, during this period, the colonial government adopted a discourse of benevolence instead of rights when discussing the acceptance of illegal immigrants. However, not all refugees were accepted. “Proper employment” and “clean criminal record” were two important factors in determining the acceptance of illegal immigrants, which resonated with the government’s longstanding emphasis on “visible means of subsistence,” “useful occupation,” and “honest living” in the ordinance of registration, deportation, and banishment (Ku 2004, 339). The emphasis on employment and clean criminal record sowed the seeds for the government discourse in the 1970s, which highlights “law and order” and “self-reliance” as Hong Kong’s ethos of belonging. In the wake of Chinese- nationalism-incited-labor-riots in 1967, the British colonial government called for tighter immigration control. In 1971, the British colonial government introduced the category “Hong Kong belonger” into the immigration policy, separating those who were born in Hong Kong from the “Chinese residents” who were immigrants in Hong Kong, while at the same time demarcating both categories from “resident United Kingdom belonger.” Ku (2004) argues that it was during this period that the government narrated belonging as a set of political rights and entitlement within the local context that were denied to other categories of people. The invention of such categories contributed to the identity-making of “Hong Kongers,” but it was also a by-product of British government state-building process to keep out non-British from moving to the United Kingdom, a post-colonial immigration trend that the British government wished to curtail. In the late 1970s, as the colonial government turned to develop Hong Kong into a knowledge-based city, the government abolished the “touch base” policy to curtail illegal immigrants further. 9 In the early 1950s, the British Colonial government first discouraged entrants from China by denying them social welfare such as ration coupons and subsidized rice. Then, in the mid-1950s, a quota system of 50 was implemented to limit the number of Chinese residents entering Hong Kong (Newendorp 2008). Mainlanders who intended to go to Hong Kong were also required to have valid exit permits issued by the Chinese government (Hambro 1955). 10 “Touch base” policy was implemented in 1974 to reduce the number of illegal immigrants from China in Hong Kong. Under this policy, illegal immigrants could stay in Hong Kong only if they successfully met with their families and entered the city center. Those who were caught before entering the city center were sent back to China.

10

immigration policy that restricted immigrants from China.

Following the transition of China from a planned economy to a socialist market economy

in 1979, a large number of mainlanders began to enter Hong Kong through illegal means.

To control immigration-induced population growth, the Hong Kong colonial government

abolished the “touch base policy” in 1980 so that no amnesty would be granted to illegal

immigrants. An agreement on stricter implementation of the exit permits was then forged

with the Chinese government to limit legal immigrants. Since 1982, the Chinese

government implemented the One-Way-Permit Scheme (OWP)11 that grants residency to

mainlanders to enter Hong Kong for family reunification. The OWP forms a legal basis

through which Chinese marriage migrants apply for residency, together with other

Chinese migrants (e.g., children of Hong Kong permanent resident(s) born in the

mainland) who seek permanent residency in Hong Kong for family reunification.

Following Hong Kong’s reunification with China, the waiting period of OWP has been

shortened from 10 years to four to five years, depending on the provincial government

through which the prospective Chinese marriage migrant submitted their application.12

11 The One-way Permit Scheme (OWP) states that: “for entry into the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, people from other parts of China must apply for approval. Among them, the number of persons who enter the Region for settlement shall be determined by the competent authorities of the Central People’s Government after consulting the government of the Region.” OWP is issued by the relevant authorities of the Public Security Bureau in China. The daily quota of OWP is 150, among which 60 are reserved for Chinese nationals born in the mainland of Hong Kong Permanent Resident(s), and 30 are reserved for mainland residents who have separated from their spouses in Hong Kong for 10 years or more (Census and Statistics Department Hong Kong SARG 2012, 79-80). 12 Currently, the Chinese government gives out 150 permits per day, resulting in about 55,000 mainland immigrants to Hong Kong per year. Prior to obtaining OWP, the mainland spouses could visit their families in Hong Kong on an exit-entry permit for travelling to and from Hong Kong with an endorsement for visiting relatives, known as the “two-way-permit,” which allow them to stay for fourteen days to three months, at the discretion of Public Security Bureau Office in China.

11

In Taiwan, geopolitical relations have also informed the implementation of immigration

policies towards immigrants from China (Friedman 2010b). Cross-strait contacts were

cut after the Nationalist government and army lost in the Chinese civil war against the

Communist Party and settled in Taiwan in 1949. This remained the case until the

Taiwanese government lifted Martial Law in 1987 and re-opened travel to China. Since

then, marriage migration between China and Taiwan has grown, but it continues to be

shaped by tensions over political sovereignty between the two nations. Marriage migrants

from China are put under different administrative categories and face more restrictive

immigration policies compared to marriage migrants from Southeast Asia13. While

marriage migrants from Southeast Asia face a four-year time frame to citizenship,

Chinese spouses face a more extended waiting period in obtaining residency. Before the

revisions of law in 2009, the average time frame for marriage migrants from China to

obtain legal citizenship was about eight years, in addition to a two-year delay in getting

residency and work rights (Friedman 2010b). They were not allowed to work during the

two-year unification period. After being granted kin-dependent residence, only those who

were in abject financial situations could apply for work permits. While the policy

amendment in 2009 has ameliorated the unequal citizenship trajectory by shortening

Chinese spouses’ waiting period to six years and by granting them work rights upon the

first arrival, Chinese marriage migrants continue to face various post-naturalization

restrictions, such as restricted access to civil service positions (Friedman 2012).14

13 Immigrants from China are regulated by The Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area promulgated in 1992. Immigrants from Southeast Asia are regulated by the Nationality Law promulgated by the Nationalist government in 1929. 14 Since the enactment of The Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area in 1992, the immigration policies have been amended four times (Mainland Affairs Council 2018). From 1991 to 1999, Chinese spouses’ route to citizenship only involved three stages: tanqin (family visit); juliu (residence); and dingju (permanent residence). From 2000 to 2003, the process changed from three to four stages: tanqin (family visit); tuanju (unification); juliu (residence); and dingju (permanent residence). After the couple registered their marriage in China,

12

2 State-building, “Qualities” of Citizens, and Contested

Belonging

The era of global migration has presented both opportunities and challenges for

immigrant belonging. On the one hand, the integration of global economy has facilitated

the movement of capital and people across national borders; on the other hand,

geopolitics and national ideologies continue to exclude certain groups of immigrants

Chinese spouses could apply for family visit and stay in Taiwan for three months each time, for the maximum of six months per year. The newly added unification period prolonged the application by requiring Chinese spouses (after two years of marriage) to stay in Taiwan for 300 days per year (for the maximum of three years) on a renewable visa before applying for juliu (residence). During this period, only those who fell under the circumstances stipulated by the Act could apply for work permits. After they completed the stage of unification, Chinese spouses might apply for residence and were granted the right to work. After staying in Taiwan for two more years, Chinese spouses might apply for permanent residence. The third and fourth rounds of the amendment were enacted from 2004 to August 2009 and August 2009 to the present, which changed the procedures into four stages: tuanju (unification), yiqin juliu (kin-dependent residence), changqi juliu (extended residence), and dingju (permanent residence). Since the amendment in 2004, Chinese spouses were required to do an immigration interview before entering Taiwan. Between 2004 and 2009, the interview was conducted at the unification stage; the revision of the law in 2009 postponed the interview when Chinese spouses entered Taiwan for kin-dependence residence. Before the revision of the law in 2009, Chinese spouses had to wait for two years after unification to apply for kin-dependent residence. The amendment in 2009 allows Chinese spouses to apply for kin-dependent residence immediately. The revision also relaxed the restriction of work rights. As of 2009, Chinese spouses can work in Taiwan in the kin-dependence stage without applying for work permits. After four years of marriage, Chinese spouses are eligible to apply for extended residence. After two years of continuous extended residence, Chinese spouses may be granted permanent residence, the equivalent of citizenship. The 2009 amendment also revoked the regulation made in 2004 that required Chinese spouses to provide financial proof of NTD 5,000,000 (approx. USD 165,000). Once granted permanent residence in Taiwan, Chinese spouses’ official residence in China will be revoked. Before this period, however, Chinese spouses’ legal status in Taiwan is contingent on the continuation of the marital relationship, or in its absence, on a dependent bond with a Taiwanese child.

13

from being full members of the host societies. While some scholars (Soysal 1994) have

pointed to a “post-national” turn in citizenship, arguing that the state’s sovereign power

has weakened in the face of global capital and international agencies in governing

migrant rights, within a given context, the state remains an important institution in

granting or denying rights (Choo 2017, Hansen 2009, Ong 2009, Stasiulis and Bakan

2005). From implementing immigration policies to devising various integration

programs, the state continues to define the ethos of belonging—a hegemonic narrative of

what it means to belong to a national community (Basch et al. 1994, Newendorp 2008).

Scholars on migration and citizenship have pointed out how modern nation-state

regulates the national boundary through managing the discourse on “qualities of citizen”

and constructing a homogenized identity of the people in a given territory (Bonjour and

Kraler 2015; Choo 2017; Chao 2005; Ku 2004; Ong 1999 Tseng 2006.) In the era of

global capitalism, market logic has become one of the most salient aspects underlying the

terms of national membership. Ong (1999) observes that the state often adjusts its bio-

political technologies concerning different kinds of immigrants to profit from global

capital while minimizing the costs. In the Asia Pacific region, various states, including

Hong Kong and Taiwan, have benefited from the paid reproductive labor of migrant

domestic workers but have avoided the costs of immigration by denying them the route

to legal citizenship. Marriage migrants, on the other hand, are given access to legal

membership but are often perceived by the states as “low-quality” citizens and hence

subject to various state integration projects (Cheng and Choo 2014).

In Hong Kong, scholars have noted how the discourse on “qualities of citizens” and the

formation of Hong Kong identity is closely linked to British colonial government’s state-

building process began in the 1960s, manifested in the shift in immigration control and

the development of social policies. Prior to the late-1960s, most residents in Hong Kong

considered China to be their “motherland” (Matthews 1997, 7) and saw Hong Kong only

as “borrowed time and borrowed space” (Tse 2002), or a “transitional home” (Matthews

1997, 7) that they would eventually leave for China.

14

As a large number of people in China entered—or attempted to enter—Hong Kong

illegally to escape the political upheaval in China, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the

immigration policies in Hong Kong towards illegal immigrants from China had shifted

from reactive measures and accommodation towards regulation (Ku 2004).

Accompanying with this change was a shift in the discourse regarding illegal immigrants

from victims of communist regimes deserving humanitarianism to a threat to the

development of local economy. The British Colonial government’s presentation of illegal

immigration had also shifted from identifying them as problems of “poverty, poor

hygiene, overcrowding” in the 1950s to “lawbreaking, low productivity and declining

standards of living” in the 1970s, raising questions about the “quality of citizens” (Ku

2004, 351). As Ku (2004, 352) points out, underlying the dominant discourse against

illegal immigration was a sense of cultural distinction that distinguished Hong Kong

people from that of “mainlanders” who were associated with “backwardness and cultural

inferiority.”

While the colonial government had restricted its policy towards illegal immigration, from

the late-1960s through 1990s, it had also initiated a series of programs to integrate

residents in Hong Kong—who were early Chinese immigrants— by providing social

services. These programs included housing (e.g. the resettlement programs in mid-1950s

and the establishment of public housing program in mid-1960s), nine years of free

education (established in 1978), labor legislation (implemented in 1968), and the public

assistance program (established in 1971). Through expanding the social services

provision for Hong Kong residents, the colonial government cultivated its legitimacy

after a massive riot in 1967, a labor-dispute-turned-anti-Colonial-movement organized by

pro-Communist groups.

The oppositional depiction of mainlanders and Hong Kongers in the Hong Kong mass

media has also prolonged the colonial government’s discourse on the “qualities of

citizens.” The famous TV Hong Kong serial, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, portrayed

an illegal immigrant, Ah Chian, from the mainland who came to Hong Kong to join his

15

family. Ah Chian was depicted as a pre-modern subject—backward, unruly, and ill-

disciplined (Ku 2004; Ma 1999; Newendorp 2008)—who was associated with

lawbreaking and low productivity (Ku 2004). His Hong Kong family members, on the

other hand, were depicted as sophisticated, modern, and urban who were law-abiding and

hardworking (Leung 2004). Ku (2004) argues that such media discourse was later

appropriated by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR)

government during the 1997 right-of-abode debate to keep out mainland immigrants.15

By identifying all Hong-Kong-born Chinese children as a threat to social order and

unbearable burden to the society, the government undermined the moral right of family

reunification (Ku 2001). However, such exclusionary immigration practice only applies

to marriage migrants and their children from China, who are perceived as unskilled and

inadequate to contribute to the economic development of Hong Kong (Ku and Pun 2004;

15 The right of abode, or obtaining permanent residency in the local sense, is a tricky and contested issue that could stir a constitutional debate about Hong Kong’s political framework “one country, two systems.” The 1997 political transition triggered intense debates about mainland Chinese people’s legal citizenship claims in Hong Kong. Central to the debate is whether Chinese children born in Hong Kong to non-Hong Kong parents are entitled to the right of abode in Hong Kong. The ambiguity of the Article 24 in the Basic Law—the mini-constitution of Hong Kong—states that “Chinese citizens born in Hong Kong before or after the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region are entitled to the right of abode in Hong Kong” (Basic Law Promotion Steering Committee 2012). This clause had given false hope to many Chinese citizens born in Hong Kong to non-permanent resident parents, believing that they would automatically be granted the right of abode after 1997. When the Court of Final Appeal ruling affirmed the right of abode to claimants, the Hong Kong government, afraid that the chain migration from China would potentially burden Hong Kong’s public systems, sought to revoke such ruling by requesting a constitutional reinterpretation by the Beijing government for the first time. The Hong Kong government’s action caused many protests from pro-rights political camps, bringing hundreds of lawyers, legislators, rights activists, and students to the street, who believed that the Hong Kong government’s actions had given power to Beijing, which undermined Hong Kong’s constitution. In the end, the National People’s Congress’ constitutional reinterpretation altered the ruling and granted the right of abode only to Chinese children born in Hong Kong with one of the parents having permanent residency status (Newendorp 2008).

16

Leung 2004). Meanwhile, to upgrade its “population quality” (Ku and Pun 2004, 9;

Leung 2004, 97), the Hong Kong SAR government introduced the Admission Scheme

for Mainland Talents and Professionals to attract professionals from mainland China to

enhance Hong Kong’s status as the Asian’s world city.

From the self- reliant subject under (British) colonial citizenship (Ku and Pun 2004)16 to

the “enterprising individual”17 under (Hong Kong SAR government) neoliberal

governance (Ku and Pun 2004, 7), the government has continuously developed an ethos

of belonging based on a similar discourse of law-abiding, economistic, and

independence. Specifically, the ideal Hong Kong citizen embodies the personal qualities

of “intelligence, determination, and adaptability,” that allow one to strive for “self-

improvement” and to “rise to the occasion” even during times of adversity (Ku and Pun

2004, 1). As the Hong Kong SAR government promotes Hong Kong as a “global city”

and a knowledge-based society, its ideal citizen image is projected through a discourse of

“population quality” (Ku and Pun 2004, 9; Leung 2004, 97) which emphasizes “talent”

16 According to Ku and Pun (2004, 3), the early idea of citizenship used by the colonial government was very much about law and order. To educate residents in a “proper understanding of the privileges and obligation of citizenship” was to shape law-abiding subjects. This inscribed a colonial conception of citizenship, which has three aspects (Ku and Pun 2004, 4):

1. Dependent status of political membership attached to the colonial sovereign rather than to the nation;

2. The making of a new urban-civic subject as a civilizing (modernizing), depoliticizing, and de-nationalizing project;

3. The limited development of rights and the prioritizing of economic development, with a residual concept of social welfare, over political participation within the colonial state.

17 The “enterprising individual” is “someone who is always on the lookout for resources and new opportunities to enhance their income, power, life chances, and quality of life in order to take advantage of the rapid changes of economy and society” (Ku and Pun 2004, 1).

17

and “value-added human resources” (Ku and Pun 2004, 9). However, as scholars pointed

out (Ku and Pun 2004; Leung 2004), not only has the discourse of “population quality”

deepened pre-existing social hierarchy among citizens, but it has also created new forms

of social inequalities between citizens and non-citizens. Chinese marriage migrants, who

enter Hong Kong under the category of family reunification, are positioned as the

inadequate class others who lack the qualities of human and cultural capital to contribute

to the global competitiveness of Hong Kong (Pun and Ku 2004).

In Taiwan, the formation and meanings of Taiwanese identity have shifted many times

over the course of its nation-building process. Similar to Hong Kong, the majority of the

Taiwanese population is descended from Chinese immigrants. Despite the difference in

dialects and customs, different groups of Han Taiwanese are submerged under the broad

umbrella of Confucian culture against the coexistence of the ethnic other (Lan 2008).

According to Melissa Brown (2004), Taiwanese identity first emerged during Japanese

colonization (1895-1945) as a form of grassroots initiated nationalistic identity among

Chinese immigrants against Japanese rule. Later, the Japanese colonizers developed a

household registration system that divided Chinese immigrants into Hoklo and Hakka. At

the same time, Aborigines, who inhabited Taiwan for thousands of years before Chinese

immigration, were divided into sheng (raw) and cooked (shu), with the latter adopted

much of the Hoklo culture.18 Historically, Aborigines were considered by the ruling-state

as ethnic others and were heavily stigmatized and sexualized.

The Taiwanese identity took up a different meaning during the Martial Law period

(1947-1987). During this time of political suppression by the Nationalist government,

Benshengren, or Taiwanese, was used to refer to Hoklo and Hakka whose ancestors came

18 “Raw” Aborigines live in high central mountains and Taiwan’s eastern plain, and Orchid Island off Taiwan’s southeastern coast, had adopted few or no Han customs. “Cooked” Aborigines, living on Taiwan’s western plains and in the western foothill of the central mountains had adopted much of Han culture (Brown 2004, 9).

18

to Taiwan before the Japanese colonizers suspended immigration from China.

Waishengren, or Mainlanders, was used to refer to those who arrived Taiwan following

the Nationalist Army between 1945 and 1949, as well as their children and grandchildren

born and raised in Taiwan (Brown 2004; Lan 2008). During this time, cooked Aborigines

had disappeared into the Taiwanese category, and raw Aborigines were classified

separately as gaoshanzu (mountain tribes) but had disappeared in the political sphere

(Brown 2004).

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, as Taiwan’s democratization process flourished,

and Martial Law came to an end, Taiwanese identity changed drastically. Against the

backdrop of Taiwan’s political tension with China, the then-President Lee Teng-hui

developed the discourse of “new Taiwanese” to include both Taiwanese, Mainlanders,

and Aborigines (who later obtained the official title as yuanzhumin or original

inhabitants). To differentiate Taiwan from Chinese culture in China, the discourse of

“new Taiwanese” considered Aborigine culture as part of the official Taiwanese identity

(Brown 2004; Lan 2008).

As the Aborigines became incorporated into the “new Taiwanese” identity, marriage

migrants from China and Southeast Asia have become the new “ethnic frontiers” in

Taiwan since the 1990s (Lan 2008). Scholars have pointed out that the early exclusion of

marriage migrants from China and Southeast Asia stemmed from the state’s concerns

about national security and population quality, two key elements embedded in the

Taiwanese state’s nation-building project (Wang and Bélanger 2008). Although Chinese

marriage migrants shared a similar cultural and ethnic backgrounds with the majority of

Taiwanese people, they were nevertheless considered as the class and political others

(Lan 2008) due to the disparity in economic development and the ongoing political

tensions between China and Taiwan in the 1990s. Because of their cultural proximity,

Taiwanese policymakers worried that marriage migrants from China would be “too

easy…to become part of us” (Tseng 2004, 33) and had banned the importation of migrant

laborer from China. As Shu-mei Shih (1998, 294-95) and Sara Friedman (2015, 18)

19

succinctly put, respectively, Chinese marriage migrants present a “threat of similarity”

within the Taiwanese nation, who “lacked the difference necessary to maintain and

police the boundaries of national identity.” In the mass media, Chinese marriage migrants

were hypersexualized and were associated with sex workers with low moral quality

(Chen 2015; Shih 1998).

On the other hand, Southeast Asian marriage migrants were considered ethnic others due

to the difference in their culture, language, and physical features. The Taiwanese

government was worried about the quality of the child born and raised by mothers from

Southeast Asia. This fear stemmed from an emphasis in the “quality” (in terms of

education and health) of Taiwan’s population19 and the belief that the “quality” of

national-born children was higher than those of transnational families (Hsia 2007; Wang

and Bélanger 2008). Such beliefs aligned with the public discourse that links Taiwan’s

economic miracle with the “good quality” (i.e., diligence) of Taiwanese people (Hsia

2007). Early concern about contamination of the “good quality” of Taiwanese was

targeted towards the quality of children from rural areas, aboriginal communities, and

low-income families. In 1998, marriage migrants from Southeast Asia became the target

of this concern. Such a shift in discourse is related to Taiwan’s threatened position in the

global economic stage after the 1997 Asia Financial Crisis and the rise of China as the

“world factory” (Hsia 2007, 78). Fearing that Taiwan would lose its global economic

competitiveness, the children born and raised in families of transnational families,

labeled as “New Taiwanese Children” (Hsia 2007, 77), are constructed as the “new

others” and considered as a threat to Taiwan’s economic power.

19 For example, Article 15 of the “Population Policy Guiding Principles” identifies “elderly, females, disabled, and low-income people” as well as those who are “genetically deficient, infected and mentally ill” as of low quality, hence the government has to “improve their capability to serve the society so that human resources can be fully utilized” (Wang and Bélanger 2008, 96). This guideline was revised in 2006, and the chapter on population quality was later revoked.

20

Since 2002, the Taiwanese state has shifted its citizenship regime from exclusion to

integration, cultivating a multicultural society to embrace immigrants (Bélanger et al.,

2010; Hsia 2009; Lan 2008; Wang and Bélanger 2008). Examples of such shift are seen

in the entitlement of social rights to marriage migrants, including easier access to the

labor market (Southeast Asian marriage migrants in 2003 and Chinese marriage migrants

in 2009), free Mandarin language classes (mainly for Southeast Asian marriage migrants)

and public health coverage (both groups). From 2003 onwards, the Taiwanese

government has also granted significant funding to social services for immigrants. Some

of these state resources are channeled to non-government organizations (NGOs), which

are encouraged to develop service provision for marriage migrants and their families.

Working as an extension of the government (Hsia 2009), these NGOs provide an array of

social integration programs to the marriage migrant communities, including legal

assistance, employment advice, marriage counseling, parental class, language class,

indigenous cultural learning class (Tsai and Hsiao 2006). However, as scholars have

pointed out, these integration programs continue to adopt discourses that reinforce the

image of marriage migrants as inferior, helpless, and underclass “others” who need to be

“Taiwanised” (Wang and Bélanger 2008, 93).

Although various projects of exclusion have come to define the ethos of belonging and

delineate national boundaries, such hegemonic definitions are not fixed and are subject to

contestation (Faier 2009; Choo 2016; Constable 2003; Ornellas 2015; Hsia 2009; Suzuki

2000). For example, Ornellas’s (2015) study shows how Chinese marriage migrants

developed a sense of political consciousness to claim their rights and belonging in Hong

Kong as mothers and wives of Hong Kong citizens even before obtaining their residency.

In addition, Chinese marriage migrants also actively negotiated their otherness by

changing their expectations of marital lives and by taking up ideologies of the receiving

society. Newendrop (2010) argues that while some Chinese marriage migrants did not

intend to do paid work after coming to Hong Kong in the pursuit of domestic life as

wives and mothers, they nonetheless engaged in paid employment, as it is perceived as

central to their integration in Hong Kong. In Japan, Filipina marriage migrants have

21

articulated their marriage using the discourse of love (Faier 2007) to detach themselves

from the stigma of Japanyuki (Japan-bound) that associated them with sex workers.

While some marriage migrants used the gendered morality attached to their roles as

mothers and wives as a protective shield against the label of Japanyuki, others challenged

the dominant gendered ideologies that required them to give birth by claiming their

sexual subjectivity through pursuing romantic love, sex, and affection in extramarital

affairs that were absent in their marriages (Suzuki 2003). As a collective, marriage

migrants also organized public events to introduce themselves as wives and mothers to

local Japanese by highlighting their good feminine virtue (Suzuki 2000).

Building upon the insights of critical feminist scholarship on gender and marriage

migration, in this dissertation, I understand belonging as both a regulated and negotiated

process, subject to reproduction but also transformation as Chinese marriage migrants

maintain and redefine the terms of belonging when they interact with state actors—

immigration officers, social workers—family members, and the Chinese marriage

migrant community. In my analysis, I also attend to how national boundaries are gender

and class constructs which operate differently for Chinese marriage migrants of different

class backgrounds. Understanding the class divide among Chinese marriage migrants is

particularly crucial at the present moment, as China’s economic development and

enhanced trade integration with Hong Kong and Taiwan have facilitated the marriage

migration of educated and professional Chinese women to both locations (Friedman

2016). By situating the production and negotiation of narratives of belonging within

enhanced economic integration and shifting geopolitical entanglement across the China-

Hong Kong and China-Taiwan borders, this dissertation highlights the complications and

contradictions of immigrant belonging during geopolitically contentious times.

3 Being in the Field: A Methodological Note

This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth

interviews that I conducted in Taiwan and Hong Kong between June 2014 and August

22

2015, as well as two months of follow-up fieldwork in June and July 2016. The three

chapters in this dissertation use different elements of the fieldwork and interview data. I

will discuss the methods and data used in each chapter. Here, I offer a reflexive account

of my entry to the fields, my presentation of the self, my evolving relationship with

informants, and the ethical dilemmas that I encountered during fieldwork.

3.1 Taiwan

I first began my fieldwork in New Taipei City, an area where I used to travel to every

year to visit my family since adulthood. When hearing the topic of my dissertation, my

uncle in Taiwan told me, “It’s not difficult to locate Chinese marriage migrants, you can

find them everywhere.” In a marketplace in Xindian area, a neighborhood in New Taipei

City where I began my fieldwork, shops opened by Chinese marriage migrants stand

side-by-side shops and vendors owned by Taiwanese. Chinese marriage migrants were

the owners of small Shanghai Noodle Place, Northeast Dumpling Place, or they helped

out at their husbands’ noodle stall, selling Danzai mian—a southern Taiwan noodle dish.

In less visible ways, some opened low-end boutiques selling clothes made in China,

others had transformed the first floor of their house into a hair salon or other small

businesses. I spent the first month of my fieldwork frequenting this marketplace, where I

got to know a few business owners who are Chinese marriage migrants. Later, as I

followed my informants to gatherings outside of the neighborhood, I extended my field

site to other areas in New Taipei City and Taipei City. Therefore, instead of staying in a

single neighborhood, I followed my participants as they commuted across different parts

of the city for errands, for work, and for gathering.

Because I am interested in learning the integration programs offered by the state, at the

beginning of my fieldwork, I also approached the immigration office at New Taipei City

and a local NGO that provided services to Chinese marriage migrants. After evaluating

my dissertation proposal, I was given access to participate in two biweekly programs

offered by the immigration office—Family Education Program for Foreign Spouses and

23

the Mobile Immigration Service Program. A collaboration with the Family Education

Center, the Family Education Program for Foreign Spouses provided biweekly family

education classes to both Chinese marriage migrants and Southeast Asian marriage

migrants. Every other Friday, Chinese marriage migrants recruited by local NGOs would

gather at a conference room at New Taipei City immigration office, sit around a large

oval table, and listen to two teachers from Family Education Centre talk about family

values.20 The program was followed by a brief introduction to Taiwan’s immigration

policy to help marriage migrants familiarize with the procedures, and a thirty-minute

employment recruitment session.

Every other Tuesday, I followed social workers and immigration officers to different

suburban and mountainous areas around New Taipei City to bring various immigration

services, such as visa renewal, to new immigrants living in remote neighborhoods. In the

morning, we would station at a nearby local district office or an NGO to provide

immigration services to immigrants and migrant workers. After lunch, we would visit

local new immigrant families arranged by the local district office. Social workers at the

immigration offices told me that they were required to visit at least three families per

month to be considered as having “good record” on their annual report. Although the

Mobile Immigration Service Program is not an integration program per se, participating

in the program enhanced my interactions with social workers and immigration officers

and allowed me to understand their perspectives on marriage migrants in Taiwan.

In addition to the immigration office, I also volunteered as an English teacher at a local

NGO in Taipei city that serves Chinese marriage migrants. Chinese marriage migrants I

met on the first day at the NGO asked me to teach basic English so that they could use it

when they traveled to English-speaking countries. I organized my class accordingly and

taught basic vocabularies for self-introduction, wayfinding, airport and hotel check-in,

20 More on Family Education Program will be discussed in Chapter 2.

24

and shopping. For three months, I taught an hour of English to a small class of ten

Chinese marriage migrants every Monday. Five Chinese marriage migrants in my class

later became my informants; others introduced me to Chinese marriage migrants who

volunteered at the NGO as well as friends outside the NGO. Chinese marriage migrants

who attended my class had met each other earlier at a Hokkien class—a dialect spoken

by Hoklo in Taiwan— offered by the same NGO, became friends and came to my

English class together. In addition to classes offered by different NGOs, Chinese

marriage migrants also signed up for classes organized by various local district offices,

such as computer class, manicure class, and dance class, as well as large events

organized by the Immigration Office, including Immigration Day, Taipei City

Multicultural Expo, and Asia-Pacific Cultural Day. During my fieldwork, I followed my

informants to a variety of these classes and events. It was then I learned that the

integration programs had become a space where Chinese marriage migrants negotiated

their belonging. For example, one Chinese marriage migrant from Sichuan, a southwest

province in China known for its spicy food, often brought us home-made chili paste

during lunch. Other Chinese marriage migrants from nearby provinces were all elated at

the opportunity to enjoy a “taste of home,” because Taiwanese food was too bland and

sweet for their taste. Over lunch, Chinese marriage migrants would talk about childhood

memories, share homeland recipes, and discuss family problems.

Some of my informants—including Chinese marriage migrants, immigration officers,

and social workers— did not want to know me just as a researcher, but they also wanted

to learn about me as a person. On each occasion, I introduced myself as a graduate

student working on a dissertation on the lived experience of Chinese marriage migrants

in Taiwan. “Why would a Ph.D. student from Canada be interested in our stories?” was

the question I often got when I told Chinese marriage migrants about my topic. My

personal background as a young woman who was born and grew up partly in China then

migrated to Hong Kong as a teenager, who had a Chinese mother who had remarried a

Taiwanese husband, lent me moral credibility in the Chinese marriage migrant

community. After listening to my stories, some felt more comfortable to share their own.

25

One informant, who later revealed that she did not trust me at the beginning, had opened

her heart to me when she found out that I was born in China and hence “one of them.”

Because of our shared social locations—as women born in China and as immigrants —

some informants, especially those who were older than me, started to call me meimei

(younger sister); those around my age saw me as a trusted friend who would lend them

listening ears when their families were far away.

Not all Chinese marriage migrants and I developed our relationships in the same way. To

some, especially those who became insurance agents, my personal background did not

interest them as much as my networks in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Toronto. One Chinese

marriage migrant who worked as an insurance agent tried to recruit me to work for her by

bringing me to a seminar where a manager-level insurance agent talked about his journey

of becoming an insurance agent after getting his Ph.D. in political science. Some Chinese

marriage migrants brought health supplements to our meeting to introduce me to the

benefits of their products in between their migration stories. Therefore, my relationships

with Chinese marriage migrants were diverse and complex, beyond what the categories

of “researcher” and “informant” can encapsulate.

Immigration officers and social workers, too, were interested in my personal background.

Because of my education background in Hong Kong and Canada, social workers and

immigration officers saw me as “different” from Chinese marriage migrants despite our

shared backgrounds in gender and place of origin. For example, at the end of a Hokkien

class, the teacher said to me, “I’ve always wondered why a high-quality (gao suzhi)

person like you always hangs out with Chinese marriage migrants. You don't look them

one of them!” At times, immigration officers took advantage of my mainland background

to make themselves look “closer” to Chinese marriage migrants and to make their work

easier. One of the tasks for immigration officers was to record the number of marriage

migrants they visited during the Mobile Immigration Service Program in order to renew

funding from the Ministry of Interior. Immigration officers usually relied on local district

offices to arrange visits to marriage migrant families, but this was not always successful.

26

Marriage migrant families could reject the visit, or they sometimes forgot the

appointment. When this happened, immigration officers would go out of their way to

meet marriage migrants and asked them to sign a form so that they could maintain a good

record (yeji). This is where my mainland background became useful. For example,

during a Mobile Immigration Service Program at Jinshan, a remote district in northern

New Taipei, immigration officers introduced me as someone from China when we

visited a Fujian restaurant opened by a Chinese marriage migrant. It was a hot summer

day, and the restaurant owner was sweating as she sliced bean-curd for our small dish.

One immigration officer, desperate to get her record met, interrupted the owner’s meal

preparation and said, “Hello! We are immigration officers. Are you from China?” After

the owner nodded her head, the officer continued, “From where?” “Fujian” “Oh you are

from Fujian, she’s from Hangzhou!” pointing her finger at me and exposing my

birthplace. Confused at where this conversation was going, the owner and I looked at

each other, smiled, and sank into silence. The officer then passed a form to the owner,

“Could you sign this form for us?” Without asking any questions, the owner put down

her knife, took out a pen from her apron, and filled out the form. I then realized my

identity could be mediated by my informants as they presented me to someone else.

3.2 Hong Kong

In March 2015, I extended my fieldwork to Hong Kong, a place where I grew up since

the age of ten. Unlike Taiwan, where I could quickly locate small restaurants and stores

opened by Chinese marriage migrants, in Hong Kong, high property prices made small

businesses difficult for immigrants and citizens alike. I began my fieldwork by meeting

with Lin Qin, one of the Chinese marriage migrants I introduced in the opening vignette,

whom I met through Ming when I was in Taiwan. Friends and family had also introduced

me to Chinese marriage migrants they knew who were willing to talk about their personal

experiences.

27

Unlike Taiwan, where the government is as much involved as NGOs in providing

services to immigrants, in Hong Kong, most of the immigrant services are outsourced to

NGOs. In Hong Kong, I approached an NGO I called WeCare, which received funding

from the Hong Kong government at the time of my research. WeCare organizes various

social integration programs, including employment seminars, language classes, and

computer classes for Chinese marriage migrants. From April to June, I served as an

English teacher and taught classes twice a week at a WeCare branch located in the

eastern district of Hong Kong Island. Upon request from social workers and Chinese

marriage migrants, I taught simple English vocabularies that they might encounter at

work, as one informant observed, “You need to know English even if you are not talking

to foreigners! There are too many English words in Cantonese!” Besides teaching, I also

volunteered in social activities organized by WeCare, where I got to meet Chinese

marriage migrants who were core members of the organization. These core members

later invited me to participate in various transnational activities, which I was not aware of

before approaching WeCare. These transnational activities included visits to China, as

well as political activities organized to support the Hong Kong government’s universal

suffrage bill.21

At WeCare, I introduced myself as a graduate student born in China, who grew up in

Hong Kong, and was working on a Ph.D. dissertation on Chinese marriage migrants’

post-migration lived experiences. Because of my migration history and family

background, social workers at WeCare, most of whom shared a similar migration

trajectory as mine, had welcomed me with hospitality. Chinese marriage migrants that I

met at WeCare or through personal network also treated me warmly. Many saw me as a

“model immigrant” who had excelled in Hong Kong’s educational system and hoped that

I could tutor their children who were lagging behind in schools. Their concerns for their

children reminded me of the difficult days when I first came to Hong Kong—the fear of

21 More will be discussed in Chapter 4.

28

“being behind” and a sense of helplessness in an extremely competitive environment.

The “ghost” of my past, in this case, my memory as a Chinese immigrant in Hong Kong,

had come to “haunt” me as a researcher (Gordon 1996, 24) and informed the relationship

I built with informants and the ways in which I understood their worlds. As Avery

Gordon insightfully points out (1996, 24),

a “ghost” is “a case of haunting, a story about what happens when we admit the

ghost—that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the

dead and the living, the past and the present—into the making of worldly

relations and into the making of our accounts of the world.”

I wished to contribute to the immigrant communities by tutoring my informants’

children, but I also had limited time for fieldwork. In the end, I offered free English

tutoring to a key informant’s son twice a week. In other ways, I also tried to contribute to

the community by helping some Chinese marriage migrants purchase online textbooks or

by helping them apply to NGOs for food coupons, small things that some Chinese

marriage migrants, especially those from the working-class background, found difficult.

At the time of my research, Hong Kong was undergoing a critical political moment.

Student activists and pro-democratic political groups had organized the Umbrella

Movement, a civil disobedience movement to protest and to bargain with the Hong Kong

government for universal suffrage in the next Chief Executive election. It was mid-

September in 2014, and I was in the middle of my fieldwork in Taipei city when I heard

that student protestors were occupying different locations in Hong Kong. I took a short

break from my Taiwan fieldwork to go to Hong Kong to support the Umbrella

Movement, through which I learned that the Hong Kong government and other pro-

establishment political groups had also organized a counter-movement. When I began my

research at WeCare, I was not aware of its collaboration with pro-establishment political

groups, such as the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong,

to organize events to support government’s heavy-handed crackdown of student

protestors. An ethical dilemma arose as Chinese marriage migrants invited me to

29

participate in the political events organized by WeCare, especially an event that

promoted the government’s version of universal suffrage22, which I did not support. As a

researcher, I wished to participate in these events to better understand Chinese marriage

migrants’ involvement, the kind of political work they do, and how they make meanings

of their participation, but as a resident of Hong Kong that cares about its democratic

future, I was concerned about the political consequences of my participation at a

historical moment that could potentially change Hong Kong’s democracy system. It was

a moment where my political orientation and my research agenda did not align, and I

struggled to make a decision. It the end, I selectively participated in activities that did not

have a direct impact on the political system, such as the “Harmony Carnivals” and post-

election debriefing seminars.

3.3 Evolving Relationships and Ways of Seeing

As time passed, my relationship with different groups of informants has evolved. While

my relationship with social workers and immigration officers mostly ended with

fieldwork, some Chinese marriage migrants and I have kept in touch. With the advent of

social media, such as instant chat applications, communications with informants have

become much easier. Technically, I never really left the field. From time to time, my

informants and I exchange news on instant message application — LINE for those in

Taiwan and Wechat or What’s app for those in Hong Kong. When I took a short break

from Taiwan fieldwork in summer 2014 to support Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement,

an informant from Taiwan messaged me on LINE and asked if I could help her

communicate with a suspicious Hong Kong woman who had been talking to her husband

22 In 2015, a year after the Umbrella Movement, the Hong Kong government proposed a new electoral system, which expanded the nominating committee base from 800 to 1200 members, with public vote at the final stage of the election. The proposal was rejected by Umbrella Movement leaders and pan-democrats, believing that the mere increase in the number of committee members would not make the electoral system more democratic, as the committee still has the power to screen out candidates at early stages of the election process (South China Morning Post 2015).

30

online. After I went back to Toronto, a divorced Chinese marriage migrant called me to

report exciting news of meeting a new boyfriend; others sent me pictures of their children

cheerfully playing in the playground. During Chinese New Year, I also received warm

messages and voice recordings that wished me “good health” in the year to come.

These small moments of connection built up to my follow-up visit in summer 2016 to

both Hong Kong and Taiwan. As my informants stayed in Hong Kong and Taiwan

longer, their lives, hopes, and desires had also changed. Some Chinese marriage migrants

had embraced motherhood despite saying they would not have children when we first

met; others had closed their restaurants to establish a marriage migrant NGO. In Hong

Kong, many of my informants had found either a full-time or part-time job, so that they

could become a “useful person.”

My multiple interactions with Chinese marriage migrants have taught me to understand

their stories as evolving and changing. In my follow-up fieldwork, some of them had

disclosed the other side of their personal stories which contradicted the earlier versions of

what they had told me. These inconsistencies are mostly revealed in issues that could

potentially hold their morality into question, such as the ways they met their husbands

and their relationships with men outside of marriage. When inconsistencies arose, I tend

not to judge nor to pressure them to find out the ultimate truth, but to see them as the

“partial truths” (Haraway 1988, 583) that were told against our dynamic and changing

relationship. This understanding later shaped the writing of this dissertation, which

focuses on parsing out the narratives of belonging constructed by both state actors as well

as by Chinese marriage migrants against broader social, political, and moral landscapes

of Hong Kong and Taiwan. As Andrea Doucet (2008, 80) reveals, there are certain sites

of research that “do not lend themselves to knowing subjects, but rather to knowing only

their narratives.”

My understanding and narration of Chinse marriage migrants’ stories are partially

informed by my own “conceptual baggage” (Kirby McKenna 1989, 32; Hsiung 2010) –

my personal background as a Chinese immigrant, the theoretical lens that I wear, and the

31

epistemological position where I stand. Critical feminist scholarship’s understanding of

different institutions as interlocking and interdependent has impacted my ways of seeing.

Instead of seeing different social institutions as separate spheres, I understand the labor

market, family, and civil society as interlocking and interconnected systems (Collins

2000, Glenn 2002). They are spaces of domination but also have transformative

potential. Such understanding has also propelled me to see marriage migrants as holistic

persons engaging in multiple social institutions—as mothers, wives, daughters-in-law,

workers, volunteers, and activists. In my analysis, I attend to the interconnection between

different institutions and Chinese marriage migrants’ involvement in them, as well as the

fluid meanings that Chinese marriage migrants attached to their position in one

institution to make sense of another. Informed by postcolonial feminists’ critique on

early representation of Third World Women as victims of oppression (Mohanty 1988)

and critical feminist scholars’ efforts to illuminate the agency of marriage migrants

(Constable 2003, 2005; Choo 2016; Faier 2009; Kim 2013), I see Chinese marriage

migrants as active agents who reinforce, contest, and challenge pre-existing inequalities

in their everyday encounters with state actors, family, and immigrant communities. These

epistemological and theoretical positions, weave into my personal journey of belonging,

have come to shape the direction of this dissertation, the relationship that I built with

informants, as well as the ways in which the stories are told in the following chapters.

4 Overview of Chapters

This dissertation examines the narratives of belonging constructed by the Hong Kong and

Taiwanese states as well as by Chinese marriage migrants as they define and contest their

exclusion in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Chapter 2 parses out the states’ narratives of belonging in Hong Kong and Taiwan to

show how national boundaries are articulated through institutionally-grounded gendered

norms at various social service encounters. I show how Chinese marriage migrants’

belonging in Hong Kong and Taiwan, while both discursively organized around their

32

labor in relation to low fertility, are differentially defined by state actors based on

distinctive interpretations of the demographic challenge. Chinese marriage migrants in

Hong Kong face an independent market narrative that defines their belonging through

their productive labor, subjecting them under the normative image of disembodied,

independent, masculine worker-citizen. Chinese marriage migrants in Taiwan are

subjected to a deferential familial narrative that defines their belonging through their

reproductive labor to maintain a heterosexual family and the nation and are measured

against the normative image of middle-class, modern, feminine familial worker-citizen.

Chapter 3 focuses on the heterogeneous narratives developed by Chinese marriage

migrants as they negotiate with the moral stigma of dalumei (mainland little sister) in

Taiwan. This chapter shows that, while the discourse of dalumei renders all Chinese

marriage migrants as moral suspects, the everyday reproduction of dalumei discourse is

used to construct the category of “good immigrants” that differentiate Chinese marriage

migrants based on their perceived class backgrounds. In everyday interactions, class

markers, such as Chinese women’s educational backgrounds and professional work

experiences in China, as well as their Taiwanese husbands’ background, were translated

into the intention of women’s marriage migration to Taiwan. Chinese marriage migrants

who had a university degree of professional work experiences in China were considered

as married for love, compared to the dalumei—Chinese marriage migrants married

veterans—who married for money. In the search for moral acceptance, more educated

Chinese marriage migrants also distanced themselves from the Chinese marriage

migrants who were considered as dalumei. While all Chinese marriage migrants I met

mobilized the morality attached to their gendered labor as mothers, wives, and daughters-

in-law to narrate themselves as a moral figure, more educated Chinese marriage migrants

also drew upon their volunteer labor to refashion themselves as a selfless subject in the

public arena, hence reinforcing the moral distinction against less educated Chinese

marriage migrants.

33

Chapter 4 looks at how Chinese marriage migrants redefine their belonging through their

participation in transnational activities organized by pro-establishment political camp

amid heightened political tension between Hong Kong and China. By delving into the

meanings that Chinese marriage migrants attached to their transnational participation, I

show how, in the face of competing political ideologies organized by the Chinese state

and Hong Kong localist groups, Chinese marriage migrants mobilize diverse ethos of

belonging to resist their everyday discrimination while at the same time reproduce the

broader moral landscape of Hong Kong that produces their marginalization in the first

place.

This dissertation ends with a summary of all finding. By highlighting how class interacts

with gender and nationality in producing differentiated regulatory practices and multiple

experiences of belonging, this dissertation brings out the complexity of immigrant

belonging in an era of global migration amidst geopolitical tension. Situating the

production and negotiation of these narratives within enhanced economic integration and

shifting geopolitical entanglement between China-Hong Kong and China-Taiwan, the

concluding chapter also highlights the unfortunate alignment of market logic and

nationalist ideology in the formation of discursive national boundaries against

immigrants at geopolitically contentious times.

34

Chapter 2

Gendered Narratives of Belonging:

Chinese Marriage Migrants, Labor, and Immigrant Integration

in Hong Kong and Taiwan

In a flat, know-it-all tone, Ms. Lee, a 35-year-old social worker in Hong Kong welcomed

Chinese marriage migrants to an employment seminar with three questions, “Do you ever

wonder why you are capable, but still can’t get a job? Are you upset, disappointed,

feeling worthless? Has unemployment made you doubt yourself?” It was a rainy Monday

morning and the audience, mostly Chinese marriage migrants, were late to the seminar

after sending their children to school. Without receiving much response, Ms. Lee probed

the questions one more time. Then, in a can-do attitude, Ms. Lee told Chinese marriage

migrants to face the challenge head-on by diving into Hong Kong’s labor market.

Similarly addressing a room of newly arrived Chinese marriage migrants, Director

Wang, the head of an immigration office in New Taipei City, a man in his late-50s

dressed in his white and navy-blue uniform, greeted everyone in a gentle and

grandfatherly voice, “Welcome to Taiwan!” Pleased by the sight of a few babies brought

by Chinese marriage migrants sleeping peacefully in the arms of experienced caretakers,

Director Wang encouraged the group to have more children, “Children are the future of

our country, the assets of our society, and Taiwan’s future relies on you!”

In recent years, state actors in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, such as Ms. Lee and

Director Wang, have actively organized programs to integrate Chinese marriage

migrants— the largest group of immigrants—into Hong Kong and Taiwanese societies.

These integration projects highlight different forms of immigrant women’s labor—

productive labor in Hong Kong and reproductive labor in Taiwan—as defining features

of their belonging.

35

Through an analysis of the social integration programs designed to assimilate Chinese

marriage migrants into desirable citizens in Taiwan and Hong Kong, this chapter

compares how Chinese marriage migrants’ belonging is differentially articulated in both

settings in relation to their labor. Based on 15 months of multi-sited ethnography and 21

in-depth interviews with state actors in Hong Kong and Taiwan, I examine what I call the

“gendered narratives of belonging” in the two contexts to capture the different classed

and nationality-based gendered norms and practices evoked in the constitution of state’s

narrative of belonging. Specifically, I examine the production of gendered narratives of

belonging and delineate its operation as the independent market narrative in Hong Kong

and the deferential familial narrative in Taiwan. In the two narratives, “market” and

“family” refer to institutions through which Chinese marriage migrants’ labor is defined

and discursively regulated; “independent” and “deferential” refer to the gendered norms

and practices against which Chinese marriage migrants are measured.

I show how Chinese marriage migrants’ belonging in Hong Kong and Taiwan, while

both discursively organized around their labor in relation to low fertility, are

differentially defined by state actors based on distinctive interpretations of the

demographic challenge. Understanding low fertility as a crisis of productivity, state

actors in Hong Kong developed an independent market narrative that defines Chinese

marriage migrants’ belonging through their productive labor, subjecting Chinese

marriage migrants under the normative image of disembodied, independent, masculine

worker-citizen. In Taiwan, the patriarchal state understands the demographic challenge as

reproductive crisis and adopts a deferential familial narrative that defines Chinese

marriage migrants’ belonging through their reproductive labor in maintaining

heterosexual family and the nation, subjecting Chinese marriage migrants under the

normative image of middle-class, modern, feminine familial worker-citizen. By

examining the narratives of belonging in two “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983),

I contribute to the critical feminist literature on immigration and citizenship by showing

how national boundaries are drawn through institutionally grounded gendered norms in

social service encounters.

36

1 Gendered Narratives of Belonging

Recent critical feminist literature on immigration and citizenship has moved beyond

family and labor market to examine the pivotal role played by the state in organizing

political projects of belonging (Bloemraad, Korteweg and Yurdakul 2008; Herrera 2013).

The state delineates the boundary between “us” and “them” through organizing political

projects that “aim at constructing belonging to particular collectivity/ies which are

themselves being constructed in these projects in very specific ways and in very specific

boundaries” (Yuval-Davis 2011, 10). Marriage migrant women, who enter host societies

through family reunification, are often considered by different nation-states as “low

quality” immigrants and subjected to restrictive immigration control (Bonjour and Kraler

2015; Chao 2005; Tseng 2006) and integration projects that regulate their bodies and

labor (Choo 2006; Kim 2013).

At the border, ethno-nationalist political projects of belonging often take the form of

restrictive immigration control. The recent resurgence of nationalist identities in various

European countries, for example, have led different states to see Muslim marriage

migrant women and their perceived “uncivilized cultural practices,” such as honor-

related violence and arranged marriages, as a threat to the national value of gender

equality and liberalism (Adamson et al. 2011; Kofman et al. 2013). Different European

states have implemented restrictive admission criteria, such as pre-entry tests, minimum

age of marriage, and income requirement, as a form of border control. In East Asia,

where marriage migrants are mostly women from China and Southeast Asian countries,

states often consider them as a homogenous group of working-class women with low

education credential and suspicious marital motives (Choo 2016; Constable 2004; Suzuki

2003). In Taiwan, where its state sovereignty is unrecognized by China and its

international allies, state actors often held Chinese migrant women’s marriage against the

ideal of love marriage as a means to exert border control, thereby producing “sovereignty

effects” (Friedman 2015, 14) for the precarious state. Yet, as Tseng (2006) argues, this

37

nationalist project of border control is selectively enforced on guest-workers and

marriage migrants from China, but not high-skilled professionals.

Beyond border control, marriage migrant women are subjected to the state’s project of

integration (Cheng and Choo 2015), where their biological and social reproductive labor

are put under state surveillance. Kim’s (2013) study on the integration projects in South

Korea shows that the state requires Filipina marriage migrants to take classes that help

them perform daily tasks at home as Korean wives and mothers, hence upholding an

“ethnicized maternal citizenship” that aims to transform ethnic others into Korean

maternal-citizens. In Hong Kong, state-led social services for Chinese marriage migrants

has organized around the theme of “responsibility” to transform them into “civilized” and

“responsible” mothers that do not depend on the city-state’s welfare (Newendorp 2008).

By delineating what marriage migrants should or should not do as mothers, state-led

integration projects evoke norms and practices imbued with gender, ethnic, and class

meanings in the process of assimilation, reconsolidating what it means to be desirable

citizens.

Building upon critical feminist scholarship, I highlight the need to examine how gender

operates in tandem with class and nationality in shaping normative ideologies underlying

state-led integration projects. As an instance of political projects of belonging, state-led

integration projects provide sites where state actors organize what Korteweg and

Yurdakul (2014, 2) called national narratives of belonging, which refers to “public

discourses that define what it means to belong to a geographical community governed by

a particular nation-state.” As modern states form a partnership with its “satellite” (Haney

2010, 16), such as NGOs, in the implementation of integration programs, national

narratives are not only formulated by national state-actors, but are also reproduced and

contested by “street-level bureaucrats” (Lispsky 1980)—social workers, NGO staff,

volunteers—as they interact with immigrants (Choo 2016; Ong 2003).

Based on Korteweg and Yurdakul’s (2014) framework as well as insights from critical

feminist studies on immigration and citizenship, in this chapter I examine the gendered

38

narratives of belonging, highlighting the different classed and nationality-based gendered

norms and practices evoked in the constitution of states’ national narratives of belonging.

Following Korteweg and Yurdakul’s ideal-typical approach to national narratives (2014,

4-5), I argue that each nation has only one national narrative at the time of my research,

yet the meanings of these narratives are subject to different interpretations at specific

historical moments. I also argue that national narratives contain contradictory discourses

regarding what it means to belong, but such messiness is often organized around a few

overarching concepts. In the contexts of Hong Kong and Taiwan, discursive elements of

narratives of belonging involve defining immigrant women’s labor within a particular

social institution (e.g., market or family) as solutions to low fertility and the ensuing

gendered norms. Contestations over what low fertility means and whether Chinese

marriage migrants’ labor should be mobilized as state’s solution somehow “give them

longevity and structuring force” (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014, 5) in the constitution of

national narratives.

Unlike existing critical feminist studies that focus on integration programs of one nation-

state, my study of Hong Kong and Taiwan offers a comparative lens to explore how

gender operates differently in different states’ regulation of belonging. The cases of

Hong Kong and Taiwan bring important insights to the study of national narratives of

belonging because their nationhood is formally unrecognized in the international political

community. Both Hong Kong and Taiwanese states are subjected to the political

framework of “One China” where the former is a part of, and the latter maintains an

ambiguous relationship with, China. However, the “One China” political and cultural

framework largely departs from local imaginaries, as different cultural and political

histories have shaped the formation of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) and

locals are increasingly identified with the categories of “Hong Kongers” and

“Taiwanese” (Brown 2004; Mathew et al. 2008). By parsing out the gendered narratives

of belonging in Hong Kong and Taiwan, I show how, in contexts with ambiguous and

unrecognized nationhood, national boundaries are expressed through gendered normative

images grounded within a particular social institution.

39

2 Chinese Marriage Migrants in Political and Cultural

Contexts

Since the 1990s, Chinese marriage migrants, mostly women who married men in Hong

Kong and Taiwan, have become the largest group of immigrants in both Hong Kong and

Taiwan. Greater economic integration, enhanced travels, and rapid development of

telecommunication across the regional borders of China-Hong Kong and China-Taiwan

have facilitated the increase in cross-border marriage migration. Between 1997 and 2015,

about 828,000 Chinese immigrants have settled in Hong Kong, among which 98% are

wives and children of cross-border marriage families (Chief Secretary for

Administration’s Office 2015). Most cross-border marriages consist of the union between

working-class men in Hong Kong and working-class women from China. However, in

recent years, there has been an increase in the education level of Chinese marriage

migrants coming to Hong Kong (Chief Secretary for Administration’s Office 2015). In

Taiwan, Chinese marriage migrant women have become the largest group of immigrants

since 1992, soon after the Taiwanese state ended the Martial Law in the late 1980s and

resumed contact with China. Between 1992 and 2018, approximately 322,000 Chinese

marriage migrants have settled in Taiwan (National Immigration Agency ROC 2018),

more than the marriage migrants from Southeast Asian countries, such as Vietnam,

Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

The contested political history of Hong Kong and Taiwan with regards to China have

implications on the social positioning of Chinese marriage migrants in these two

societies. As a former British colony and a Special Administrative Region of China as of

1997, Hong Kong is a “quasi-city state” (Ku and Pun 2004, 2) under the political

sovereignty of China while enjoying limited autonomy in governing local affairs.

Although Basic Law, the mini-constitutional document of Hong Kong, guaranteed that

Hong Kong would maintain its political, economic, and social ways of life after the

handover, many local Hong Kongers worried that the political transition would

40

compromise Hong Kong’s freedom. Taiwan had political tensions with China since 1949

when Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist army lost the civil war to the Chinese

Communist Party and retreated to the island. Since its establishment, Taiwan’s

sovereignty as an independent nation-state remains contested, locally and internationally.

The connection of China with the international political and economic community since

the 1970s makes Taiwan an illegitimate government. Locally, the question of Taiwan’s

sovereignty as an independent state has always been the subject of political debate.

Under such geopolitical histories, immigrants from China are considered as outsiders and

others. The cultural construction of Hong Kong identity is developed in opposition to

immigrants from China in many ways. In media and sensational news reports, Hong

Kongers are portrayed as sophisticated, modern, urban, law-abiding, and hardworking

(Leung 2004) with immigrants from China as backward and unruly country bumpkins

often associated with law-breaking and low productivity (Ma 1999). Due to the ongoing

political tensions between China and Taiwan, marriage migrants from China are

positioned by some Taiwanese state actors as political others posing threats to national

security (Lan 2008). Chinese marriage migrants, especially those who married veterans,

are also considered as the gold-diggers who married for their husbands’ money (Chao

2004).23 In both Hong Kong and Taiwan, Chinese marriage migrants are considered a

potential “welfare burden” that may drain local resources (Leung 2004; Chao 2005). As I

will show in my analysis, some of these presumed national differences informed the

ways in which state actors interact with Chinese marriage migrants at social service

encounters.

Upon their arrival in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Chinese marriage migrants are subjected to

state-led integration projects. Both Hong Kong and Taiwanese states have relied on local

state agencies as well as collaboration with NGOs to organize social services for Chinese

marriage migrants. In Hong Kong, the Home Affairs Bureau collaborates with NGOs

23 More will be discussed in Chapter 3.

41

through subvention systems to offer social services for Chinese immigrants since the

mid-1990s (Provisional LegCo Panel on Home Affairs Hong Kong SARG 1997). After

welfare reform in 2004, Chinese marriage migrants’ services that were previously

provided by New Arrivals Service Centers are now offered by Integrated Family Service

Centers. Welfare reform aims to reduce the labeling of service recipients, but Chinese

marriage migrants are often unsure of their eligibility for services at Integrated Family

Service Centers. Social workers told me that Chinese marriage migrants usually turned to

NGOs where the categories “New Arrivals” or “Immigrants” were indicated as service

users. In addition to Home Affairs Bureau, NGOs also compete for state funding from

the Employment Retraining Bureau (ERB) to organize language courses (e.g., Cantonese,

Mandarin, English) and job training (e.g., beauty industry, child-care, and postpartum

care) for Chinese marriage migrants.

The Taiwanese state has organized integration activities around the category of “foreign

spouse” and “mainland spouse,” referring to marriage migrants from Southeast Asia and

China, or just “foreign spouse” to denote both groups of marriage migrant. State-led

immigrant integration is marked by the administration of Development Funds for

Immigrants (previously known as the Foreign Spouse Care and Guidance Fund) in 2003,

through which the state forms partnerships with NGOs to deliver immigrant-related

social services and to organize immigrant-related public events, such as the Taipei City

Multicultural Festival and Immigration Day. The Development Funds for Immigrants

sponsors over 50 items of social services, including those to enhance family lives and

employment skills (Tsay 2004, 186), with the objective for marriage migrants to

“enhance their adaption in Taiwanese society…and maintain a happy family with

nationals to avoid family and social problems due to poor integration” (National

Immigration Agency ROC 2017, 1). Marriage migrants were encouraged to attend

Vocational Training Centers and to take state-sponsored classes and exams to certify

them as professional service providers. Chinese marriage migrants who married veterans

were also recruited and trained by various Veterans Service Offices to become certified

caregivers to take care of veterans in nursing homes and hospitals (Chao 2015). In

42

addition to Development Funds for Immigrants, each district office also receives annual

funding from the Department of Civil Affairs to organize at least two marriage-migrant-

related activities per year. The Ministry of Labor and Ministry of Interior worked with

NGOs to set up two special windows at each local district’s Employment Service

Stations to serve marriage migrants to enhance their labor market participation. Although

many of these social services appear to be gender and nationality-neutral, as I show

below, classed and nationality-based gendered norms are evoked by state-actors as they

highlight what it meant to belong to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

3 Settings and Methods

This chapter draws upon the ethnographic data from participant observation at various

settings of state-led integration programs. Because the Hong Kong city-state relied

heavily on NGOs to implement state-led integration projects specifically for Chinese

marriage migrants, most of my participant observation was at WeCare.

Compared to Hong Kong, my field sites in Taiwan were more diverse as state agencies

such as immigration offices and local district offices were as much involved as NGOs in

providing services specifically for marriage migrants. While I did participant observation

at both NGOs and local state agencies that provided state-led integration programs, in

this chapter, I mostly draw upon my fieldwork data at the immigration office in New

Taipei City as well as employment seminars organized by the Employment Service

Centers.

I supplement my ethnographic data with 21 in-depth interviews (n=15 in Taiwan; n=6 in

Hong Kong) I conducted with state actors—social workers, NGO workers and directors,

volunteers, immigration officers, and local district officers— that were involved in

organizing state-led integration projects for marriage migrants. My fieldwork experience

allowed me to interact with state actors on a more personal level. Many were eager to

share with me their experiences interacting with marriage migrants and their views on

state-led integration programs. These interviews ranged from one to two hours.

43

Interviews were conducted in Mandarin in Taiwan and in Cantonese in Hong Kong. I use

pseudonyms in this chapter to protect my informants’ identities. I also use archival

documents, including government reports and newspapers regarding the latest population

policy in Hong Kong and Taiwan to situate the narratives within states’ broader

population policy framework.

During my fieldwork, I noticed that many state actors discussed state-led social

integration programs in relation to the demographic challenge of low fertility. Similar

discursive patterns appeared in my interview data. When coding my data, I followed this

thread and focused on how state actors viewed Chinese marriage migrants’ positions in

the two societies; how they articulated Chinese marriage migrants’ labor in relation to

specific understanding of low fertility; how they perceived the state’s integration

program and what they believed Chinese marriage migrants had to do to become “us.” I

also paid attention to how Chinese marriage migrants respond to these narratives in

social service encounters.

4 Independent Market Narrative in Hong Kong

Responding to an angry Hong Kong citizen who expressed discontent against new

immigrants from China as “taking away the society’s resources,” Carrie Lam, the current

Chief Executive, then the Chief Secretary for Administration and the former Chair of

Steering Committee of Population Policy (Steering committee), restated the city-state’s

position that “immigrants have always been the bedrock of Hong Kong population

development,” and their productive labor contributed to Hong Kong’s economic

development:

Hong Kong is having a population challenge. The median age of new arrivals was

36 last year. That’s an active working population, with more training, they can fill

jobs in Hong Kong’s construction, sales, and catering industries. Hong Kong

government has the responsibility to help new arrivals to integrate into the society

(Hong Kong China News Agency 2013).

44

Carrie Lam’s statement was directed to all immigrants from China, including marriage

migrant women and immediate relatives of Hong Kong citizens. Matthew Cheung, the

former head of Labor and Welfare Bureau, later echoed this, arguing “Hong Kong should

not limit the number of immigrants due to its low fertility,” highlighting that “enhancing

immigrant women’s labor market participation through training would be a solution to

the demographic challenge of labor shortage” (Apple Daily 2013).

Underlying Carrie Lam and Matthew Cheung’s statements is the Hong Kong city-state’s

neoliberal ideology in understanding its fertility crisis. The Steering Committee, of which

Carrie Lam was the Chair, defined its low fertility crisis in terms of “shrinking working

population” and a “rising overall dependency ratio” (Legislative Council Secretariat

2014, 4). Such understanding, however, was not established without internal debates.

Early meetings of the Steering Committee debated using pro-natalist policies to

encourage childbirth (The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

2013). However, after weighing the costs and effectiveness of pro-natalist policies in

other countries, the Steering Committee decided not to adopt pro-natalist policies in

Hong Kong as “childbirth” was a matter of “individual choice”:

We need to appreciate that any policy involving government giving out cash

allowances or requiring employers providing increased employee benefits would

involve substantial public money and increased operating costs for enterprises.

Therefore, we need to handle the subject with great care (The Government of the

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2013).

The adoption of a market narrative in understanding and resolving low fertility crisis was

driven by the fear that explicit pro-natalist policies, such as cash incentives and

pressuring employers to provide employers benefits, would transfer the costs of

childbearing to the state and business enterprises, and therefore should be “handled with

great care.” The prevalence of market discourse and the protection of corporations from

shouldering the costs of childbearing reveals a long-standing institutional practice of the

entrepreneur state of Hong Kong, which places private accumulation and market logic at

45

the core of its policy-making, a practice that was historically rooted in the British

colonial governance (Mathews et al. 2008) and continued by local Hong Kong political

elites (Law 2009).

Many state actors who implemented integration programs adopted the market narrative

that defines Chinese marriage migrants’ belonging through their productive labor.

WeCare was one of the main NGOs that collaborated with the Hong Kong city-state in

organizing integration programs. In collaboration with the ERB to organize job training

and language classes, WeCare emerged as one of the biggest social service providers for

Chinese marriage migrants and their children. Located on the ground floor of a private

housing estate in Eastern district, WeCare’s entrance was framed by bulletin boards filled

with regularly updated job postings from the Labor Department. Inside WeCare, posters

of ERB job training programs and state-sponsored language classes were hung alongside

after-class activities (e.g., singing, dancing, drawing) organized for children from

marriage migrant families, sprinkled with notices of volunteer recruitments, group travel

to China, and family outdoor field trips. In response to the state’s initiative to enhance

Chinese marriage migrants’ labor force participation, WeCare also organized a project

called Integrating New Forces, which involves monthly employment talks and

recruitment services.24 These employment talks and recruitment services provided

important settings where Chinese marriage migrants from different class backgrounds

were called on to be not only productive workers but also independent and self-reliant

citizens.

Social workers I met sympathized with the challenges faced by Chinese marriage

migrants who were professionals in China but could not find a decent job in Hong Kong.

24 During this period of my fieldwork, NGOs collaborating with the city-state to enhance Chinese marriage migrant integration did not offer Family Life Education programs discussed in Newendorp’s (2008) study. Thus, while such programs were offered at local welfare offices to all residents Hong Kong during Newendorp’s study, it was not a defining feature in the city-state’s immigrant integration programs compared to labor market integration in my research.

46

However, instead of discussing the structural barriers, such as labor market

discrimination, social workers highlighted individual attitudes as the reasons for their

unemployment. For example, Ms. Lee, the social worker I mentioned in the opening

vignette, sympathetically told a group of Chinese marriage migrants how unemployment

often resulted in “a decline in self-worth.” Knowing that some Chinese marriage

migrants used to be professionals in China, such as Chinese medicine doctors and

accountants, Ms. Lee complimented them as “smart” and recognized that they had a

“glorious past” in China, yet she told the audience that the biggest obstacle to finding a

job in Hong Kong lay in whether or not they could “forget the past and focus on the

present”:

You can’t always think, “I want to be at the top!” That’s impossible. When you

are met with a challenge, do you try resolving it? Or do you just run away? What

happened in the past should remain in the past. If you always dwell on a past in

which you did well, you’ll never be able to see the options ahead of you.

Ms. Lee’s “pep talk” drew upon neoliberal logics of the city-state and individualized

Chinese marriage migrants’ experience of downward mobility as a “personal challenge”

that needed overcoming, rather than a form of structural inequality that required a policy

change. By asking Chinese marriage migrants to “forget the past and focus on the

present,” Ms. Lee diagnosed downward mobility as a result of indulgence in “past glory,”

and offered therapeutic solutions—to move on and “to see the options ahead.” Ms. Lee

used the neoliberal logic to regulate Chinese marriage migrants’ understanding of their

problem into accepting their deskilling in the Hong Kong labor market. Underlying her

gender-neutral speech, I would argue, was a disembodied “male-worker” figure detached

from any childcare responsibility (Acker 1990), which deviated from the lived reality of

many Chinese marriage migrant women, who had difficulty getting a job due to

constraints imposed by their familial responsibilities (Newendorp 2008).

For Chinese marriage migrants from working-class backgrounds, social workers

highlighted the normative ideology “self-reliance” to avoid dependence on government

47

assistance. During an employment talk under the project Integrating New Forces, Ms.

Chan, a 30-year-old social worker at WeCare told a story when Chinese marriage

migrants asked questions about applying to the Comprehensive Social Security

Assistance (CSSA) in Hong Kong:

I had a client who came to me and asked me how to get on CSSA. He’s very

young and he’s a local Hong Konger. He told me dozens of reasons why he

wanted to apply for CSSA. What a shame! After he told me all his reasons, I said

to him, “Are you done? How could you? Get out of my room if you want social

security!” I didn’t teach him how to get CSSA and I asked him to think about

why he needed assistance. He came three times more asking for the same thing

and I continued to do the same. He later told me he wanted social security

because he disliked his jobs. Are you all unemployed because you dislike the jobs

in the labor market?

By telling this story, Ms. Chan not only highlighted the “shame” attached to welfare

recipients in Hong Kong but also evoked the normative ideology of “self-reliance” as the

defining feature of being respectable Hong Kong citizens. Unable to reach such

normative expectations, the working-class “male client” was considered “shameful,”

implying the class privilege of the ideal figure. Working-class Chinese marriage migrants

were also subsumed under this normative ideal and were expected to get a job easily if

they could change their attitude about the job market. In this articulation, Chinese

marriage migrants’ gendered responsibility and class position were completely obscured.

In light of the rising Hong Kong localist movement that depicted mainland Chinese as

“locusts”— a lazy, greedy, and classed “other”— that would drain Hong Kong’s

resources with greed and massive quantity (Sautman and Yan 2015), the independent

market narrative was often promoted by social workers out of good intentions to protect

working-class Chinese marriage migrants from becoming the target of these verbal

assaults.

48

A “silent” operation of the independent market narrative at WeCare was the inattention

to Chinese marriage migrants’ childcare responsibility. State-led integration programs

did not include a budget for childcare arrangements. The Hong Kong city-state’s laissez-

faire approach on family-related matters meant that Chinese marriage migrants relied on

personal networks or the market for childcare arrangements. Social workers at WeCare

sometimes helped with childcare, but these services were voluntary, not institutionalized.

The social workers I met at another NGO that also held state-sponsored integration

programs but with a stronger advocacy bent, had organized Chinese marriage migrants to

demand that the city-state provide more affordable childcare arrangement. Kevin, a 26-

year-old social worker expressed his discontent:

Many ERB training programs are full-time, without an affordable childcare

arrangement, sisters (i.e., Chinese marriage migrants) have to rely on themselves

when it comes to childcare. Their participation in the program is interrupted by

their childcare responsibility. This dilemma will continue when they look for

jobs.

Kevin believed that the current childcare system in Hong Kong, which was heavily

reliant on kindergarten and community volunteers, was unable to meet childcare demand.

Insufficient affordable childcare arrangements have significant implications for Chinese

marriage migrants from the working-class, who did not have the resources to afford paid

domestic work. By organizing Chinese marriage migrants to protest against inadequately

funded public childcare facilities, Kevin also resisted the independent market narrative

that required Chinese marriage migrants to enter the labor market while individually

shouldering the burden of childcare.

In Hong Kong, the ideal image of disembodied, middle-class, independent male-citizens

that state actors held Chinese marriage migrants against resembles the “masculine

worker-citizenship” described by Korteweg (2006, 315) in the American context. Such

narrative differs significantly from the deferential familial narrative in Taiwan.

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5 Deferential Familial Narrative in Taiwan

In New Hometown, New Life, an introductory handbook for Chinese marriage migrants

edited by the Ministry of Interior, the Taiwanese state defines Chinese marriage

migrants’ belonging to the nation through their familial labor:

Chinese marriage migrants come to Taiwan because of marriage. Not only do

they live with our nationals, but they also contribute to the caring, educating, and

earning of family members. The government has the responsibility to help

marriage migrants integrate into the Taiwanese society and to help them create a

happy family (Ministry of Interior 2014, 1).

In Taiwan, Chinese marriage migrants’ position was mediated by their relations to their

husband-citizens and defined through their familial labor, both reproductive (i.e., caring

and educating family members) and productive (i.e., earning family income).

Although the patriarchal Taiwanese state has historically used a familial narrative to

mobilize local women’s labor for economic development (Hsiung 1996), at this historical

moment, the familial narrative of belonging needed to be situated within the state’s larger

discursive framework that understood low fertility as a “reproductive crisis” (Lan 2008)

that could challenge the biological and cultural reproduction of heterosexual family, and

by extension, the nation:

With the change in society, family structure and function have changed, and our

nationals’ family, marriage, and parenting values are different from the past.

Therefore, rebuilding family values and restoring the younger generation’s

relations with family are important issues. We have been encouraging marriage

and fertility through various activities to redirect our nation’s attention to family

and to change the values of delaying in marriage, single-hood, and childlessness

(Executive Yuan ROC 2013, 56)

50

In the face of its unrecognized national sovereignty and struggle for nationhood, former

President Ma Ying-jeou even declared “low fertility as a national security matter”

(Executive Yuan ROC 2013, 9) at the 13th Presidential Financial Report Meeting in 2010,

connecting the declining citizen bodies and family values to national extinction. As such,

even though the Taiwanese state has organized integration activities to “unleash marriage

migrants’ economic potentials” (Executive Yuan ROC 2013, 120), some state actors

continued to adopt a familial narrative in organizing and understanding Chinese marriage

migrants’ belonging.

Held bi-weekly from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in a conference room at an immigration office in

larger Taipei area, the Family Education Program for Foreign Spouses (Family Program)

was an avenue where state actors mobilized Chinese marriage migrants to give birth for

the nation, discursively reinforcing the familial narrative at the social service encounter.

Director Wang of the immigration office, mentioned in the opening vignette, promoted

pregnancy at each session of the Family Program:

All of you cross the ocean to come to Taiwan, but you are not alone, because we

are your natal-family! In Taiwan, we have a very low fertility rate, and this has

become a national security crisis (guoan weiji). Back in the old days, we said,

“One (child) is not too few, two (children) is good enough,” but nowadays, the

fertility rate among Taiwanese couples is 0.9%, even less than one! New

immigrant couples, however, have about 2.3% fertility rate, more than two, so I

hope that you can continue to work hard. Do not let our birth rate get lower!

Children are the future of our country, the assets of our society, and Taiwan’s

future relies on you!”

Director Wang’s claim that marriage migrants were more “fertile” than Taiwanese

women was ungrounded, as scholars have argued that marriage migrants’ fertility rate

was not higher than that of Taiwanese women, only that they tended to give birth sooner

after marriage (Lan 2008; Yang et al. 2012). Adopting the state’s discourse of national

crisis, Director Wang provoked a sense of urgency and legitimacy in his efforts to

51

motivate marriage migrants to serve the country through biological reproductive labor.

Director Wang’s promotion of pregnancy contrasted sharply to the discourse adopted by

other state actors who perceived marriage migrants as “unfit mothers” (Lan 2008, 841)

who were incompetent to reproduce the nation biologically and socially and therefore

had discouraged them from giving birth. Different state actors’ approaches towards

marriage migrants’ pregnancy and motherhood show that while the meanings of familial

narratives that state actors adopted were full of contradiction and dissonance,

reproductive labor continued to be an important element upon which marriage migrants’

belonging was organized. By defining the Taiwanese nation as marriage migrants’ “natal

family,” Director Wang evoked emotions and feelings of shelter and care commonly

associated with one’s natal family (McClintock 2000) to justify the state’s mobilization

of marriage migrants’ bodies for the reproduction of heterosexual families and by

extension, the nation. At integration programs, the notion of “natal-family” was practiced

through providing childcare arrangements, paying each childcare worker not more than

the monthly minimum wage of TWD 22,000 (approx. USD 720) (National Immigration

Agency ROC 2017, 3).

The Family Program was also a site where state actors called upon Chinese marriage

migrants to adopt the normative ideal of deferential, modern, feminine worker-citizen.

Ms. Chen, a 40-year-old senior instructor and the chief organizer of the Family Program

explained to me that she was approached by the immigration office in 2011 to organize

the Family Program because the state wanted to “fix the high divorce rate among cross-

border marriage couples,” which they believed was “two to three times higher than

Taiwanese couples.”25 Ms. Chen believed that the high divorce rate was rooted in

marriage migrant couples’ “money-based” marriages, and she hoped to use the Family

25 The belief that marriage migrant couples were more likely to get a divorce was a misconception, as scholars have pointed out that marriage migrants’ families were no more prone to divorce than Taiwanese couples (Wang 2011).

52

Program to help them understand “love.” As such, her class often involved requiring the

couples26 to “perform intimacy” (Lan 2008, 844). In each class, Ms. Chen would pair up

with another junior teacher from the Family Education Center to teach marriage migrants

concepts derived from American family counseling, such as “love” (ai),

“communication” (goutong), and “listening” (lingting). The notion of “love” was often

defined as romantic love and was associated with white middle-class heterosexual

couples. For example, our handout showed a picture of a white heterosexual couple at

breakfast smiling and enjoying a glass of orange juice. Below the picture was the

instructions “eye contact,” “nod,” and “smile” that Ms. Chen required marriage migrants

(and their husbands, if present) to practice in class. During this exercise, Ms. Chen asked

marriage migrants to sit facing their husbands (or each other, if their husbands were

absent) to share their happiest moment of the week. Pacing, Ms. Chen would chant,

“Maintain eye contact! Remember to nod and smile!” The exercise usually ended with

Ms. Chen asking marriage migrants to share their feelings and request husbands to kiss

their “brides.”

While both Chinese marriage migrants and Southeast marriage migrants were subjected

to the same class materials, teachers delivered the materials differently based upon

nationality-based assumptions. Teachers often considered Chinese marriage migrants as

more “expressive” (shanyu biaoda) and “forceful” (qiangshi) when they spoke, unlike

Taiwanese women who were more indirect (wanzhuan) and gentle (wenrou).27 They

considered this as a “national difference” (guoqing bu tong) and Chinese marriage

26 Ms. Chen understood marriage migrants’ family problem as caused by Taiwanese husbands as well, and she invited marriage migrants’ husbands to her class. Southeast Asian marriage migrants’ husbands usually attended the class to help their wives navigate transportation and to do on-site translation, and the class counts towards the 72-hour education requirement for naturalization. However, Chinese marriage migrants’ husbands rarely attended the class as it is voluntary, and their wives do not have language barriers and naturalization requirements. 27 Teachers considered Southeast Asian marriage migrants as “too submissive” to patriarchal domination, hence susceptible to becoming victims of domestic violence.

53

migrants’ “forceful” characters needed to be corrected because it was not conducive to

maintaining a loving marriage and family.

For example, when teaching the concept “communication,” Ms. Chao, a junior teacher

from the Family Education Centre, told us that communication was the key to trust, an

important element in building solid family relationships. Illustrating this, she showed us

a car advertisement featuring a middle-class Taiwanese couple — a young Taiwanese

woman dressed in an elegant black suit and high-heel shoes exchanging friendly banter

with her husband while driving the family car. Realizing that her husband did not trust

her driving skills, the wife asked gently, “Why don’t you trust me more? How come I

always feel secure when you drive?” “Because I drive better!” “What a patriarchal belief!

No, because I trust you!” The advertisement ended with the husband saying “I love you”

and the couple entering their house with their son. After the advertisement, Ms. Chao

told us that listening was central to building trust. Xiao Yao, a Chinese marriage migrant

in her late 20s from Sichuan, lamented aloud, “Sometimes, I communicated with my

husband, but he didn’t want to change. He always thought that it was my problem and

criticized me for being self-centered.” Xiao Yao went on to explain her conflicts with her

mother-in-law:

When I was pregnant, I still had to cook for my husband and his parents. My

husband only ate and put dirty dishes in the sink. Whenever I argued with my

husband, his mother would side with her son. She did nothing to help me because

now she has risen from the position of a daughter-in-law to a mother-in-law (xifu

ao cheng po)!

Before Xiaoyao could go on, Ms. Chao interrupted her, “You can try to be gentler when

you speak (wenrou dian) to your husband. In front of the mother-in-law, you have to act

in a silly way and to let her get her way.” “But I don’t want to change myself for them!”

Xiao Yao protested. “Do you love your mother-in-law? I love my mother-in-law very

much because, without her, my husband wouldn’t exist, so I’m willing to change myself

for her. Everything is easy when there is love.” Ms. Chao concluded the interaction with

54

her personal experiences.

Here, the national boundary was expressed through the normative image of a middle-

class, modern, feminine, familial, worker-citizen that Chinese marriage migrants were

measured against. As Lan pointed out (2008, 848), the discourse of romantic love as the

sole basis of marriage was “an ideal that the Taiwanese state projects to represent as a

modernized nation” (Lan 2008, 848) rather than a lived reality for married couples in

Taiwan. For Ms. Chen and Ms. Chao, Taiwanese nationals themselves, Xiaoyao and

other Chinese marriage migrants were too “forceful,” an emotion associated with China’s

socialist past (Friedman 2015, 156) that was not compatible with the normative image of

loving, harmonious and modern family that represented Taiwan’s imagined present and

future. By demanding Chinese marriage migrants defer to their husbands and mothers-in-

law using the narrative of “love,” teachers at Family Programs not only reproduced a

familial narrative of the state but also reinforced the patriarchal gender norms of

deference (Wolf 1972) with a modern twist. Xiao Yao’s protest also shows that such a

narrative is not promoted without contestation.

The deferential familial narrative was also reproduced in settings that promoted marriage

migrants’ labor market participation. As marriage migrants’ employment somehow

contradicted the state’s familial narrative, state actors resolved such tension by

reconfiguring the meanings of marriage migrants’ paid work as secondary to, or an

extension of their familial duties. During a recruitment event, Director Li of an

Employment Service Center in Taipei welcomed marriage migrants by recognizing their

contribution to the family:

All of you come to our country because of marriage. At home, you were simply a

family member, but here, you are other people’s wives, mothers, and daughters-

in-law. I admire how you are doing this (mothering) work, taking caring of your

children, and I think that deserves recognition. I know that after taking care of the

family, you’d want to think about how to have personal growth through paid

work, right?

55

Then she introduced Pxmart, a large supermarket chain in Taiwan and focused on the

part-time vacancies available in their company:

I know you are interested in part-time jobs because you want to take care of your

family, but you also want to help your husbands earn some money for the family.

In Pxmart they can provide you with that kind of job.

In her presentation, Pxmart’s representative emphasized part-time vacancies, benefits of

part-time work, and childcare subsidies. For Director Li, paid work was considered as

“personal growth” that came after caretaking and was defined in relation to Chinese

marriage migrants’ wifely role to “help their husbands.” This narrative was reinforced by

the practice of employment service workers, who often introduced marriage migrants to

jobs that allowed them to take weekends off and to have flexible working hours to

accommodate familial duties. Not only did Director Li use the familial narrative to define

women’s paid labor but she also perceived marriage migrants as a homogenous group of

working-class women and reinforced their vulnerability in the labor market by recruiting

them into low-wage flexible service work.

6 Conclusion

This chapter builds upon critical feminist literature on marriage migration and citizenship

to examine the production of gendered narratives of belonging at state-led integration

projects in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I show how gendered narratives of belonging operate

as an independent market narrative in Hong Kong and a deferential familial narrative in

Taiwan. The meanings of these narratives, while incomplete and contested by some,

were organized around the recurring theme of marriage migrants’ labor in relation to the

states’ concerns for low fertility as well as their respective gendered norms. Divergent

understanding of the demographic challenge has informed a different discursive focus

developed in Hong Kong and Taiwan. State actors in Hong Kong understood low fertility

as a productive crisis, thereby discussing Chinese marriage migrants’ productive labor as

the defining feature of their belonging. State actors in Taiwan interpreted low fertility as

56

a reproductive crisis and encouraged Chinese marriage migrants to engage in biological

and social reproductive labor to maintain heterosexual families, and by extension, the

nation. Such difference in articulation is rooted in Hong Kong and Taiwan’s political and

cultural histories—the perpetuation of neoliberal market logic fostered by British

colonial ruling has shaped the prevalence of Hong Kong’s market narrative; Taiwanese

state’s historical practice of defining the nation as the heterosexual family has

perpetuated the familial narrative.

Gender norms operate in tandem with nationality and class differently within these two

narratives. The independent market narrative of Hong Kong is articulated in a gender-

neutral way, where state actors subjected Chinese marriage migrants from different class

backgrounds to the normative image of a disembodied, middle-class, independent

masculine worker-citizen without any childcare responsibility. The deferential familial

narrative of Taiwan is gender-specific, and state actors imposed Chinese marriage

migrants with the normative image of a middle-class, modern, feminine familial worker-

citizen. By highlighting the normative gendered images mobilized in narratives of

belonging, I show how national boundaries are drawn through gendered norms grounded

in specific social institutions such as labor market and family.

The two gendered narratives of belonging, while allowing state actors to uphold local

moral orders, reproduce intersecting inequalities of gender, class, and nationality. In

Hong Kong, state actors’ inattention to Chinese marriage migrants’ childcare

responsibility while upholding the ideal of independence could create emotional and

practical burdens for many Chinese marriage migrants who are full-time mothers. In

Taiwan, highlighting Chinese marriage migrants’ family responsibility while subsuming

their paid work under the notion of “familial work” not only perpetuates immigrant

women’s vulnerable structural location in the labor market (Tang and Wang 2011) but

also marginalizes career-driven Chinese marriage migrants who do not want to be

mothers. However, how Chinese marriage migrants experience these narratives and

57

whether or not these narratives are taken up in the formation of their subjectivities would

require further analysis beyond the scope of this chapter.

The gendered narratives of belonging in Hong Kong and Taiwan not only regulate

Chinese marriage migrants’ sense of belonging and uphold local gendered moral orders

but also allow state actors to draw “national” boundaries against an “imagined China.” It

is noteworthy that while the term “national difference” was explicitly evoked in Taiwan,

it was not a common local repertoire in Hong Kong. This is likely due to a long history

of state-led nation-building efforts in Taiwan (Chang 2015) while the Hong Kong city-

state is “learning to belong to a nation” (Mathew et al. 2008) while upholding a sense of

superiority. By evoking different gendered norms and practices in the narratives of

belonging, state actors in Hong Kong and Taiwan differentially construct “national

boundaries” against imagined “China.” In Hong Kong, the notion of “national boundary”

was drawn by evoking a male figure who enjoyed the class privilege of independence

vis-à-vis working class and immigrant women with presumed dependence. In Taiwan,

the term “national difference” was used and expressed through an image of modern,

deferential femininity against the imagined aggressive femininity that was associated

with China’s socialist past. Despite its intention to eliminate boundaries, state-led

integration projects ironically reproduce and deepen the perceived gendered, classed, and

“national” differences between the image of an ideal citizen and the imagined others. As

Chinese marriage migrants cross two geopolitical contested borders, their integration has

become a site through which boundaries of “imagined communities” of Hong Kong and

Taiwan are drawn.

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Chapter 3

“I’m not a typical dalumei!” Chinese Marriage Migrants,

Gendered Morality, and Classed Belonging in Taiwan

Feng had lived in Taiwan for more than 20 years, but she had very few friends. Despite

taking good care of her veteran husband until he passed, Feng was considered by other

Chinese marriage migrants as a “typical dalumei” (typical mainland little sister) who

married her Taiwanese husband for money. Even a fellow Chinese marriage migrant

hailed from the same hometown in Hubei believed that “she is all about money!”

Contrastingly, Hui Lin, who also married her Taiwanese husband 20 years ago, was

considered by her church group leader as a “good immigrant.” At church, I was told that

Hui Lin was different from the “typical damulei” who came to Taiwan at the early days

because she was “educated” and “met her husband at work.”

I later learned that the expression “typical dalumei” was used to refer to less educated

Chinese marriage migrants whose Taiwanese husbands came from disadvantaged

backgrounds, such as veterans, who struggled to find wives in the local marriage market

and had to resort to cross-strait marriage. As such, despite their similar migration

trajectory from China to Taiwan 20 years ago, Feng and Hui Lin were perceived very

differently by social workers, their Taiwanese friends, as well as the Chinese marriage

migrant community. In this chapter, I ask: How do Chinese marriage migrants from

different class backgrounds experience the discourse of dalumei differently? How do

Chinese marriage migrants narrate a sense of self-worth and belonging in a context that

excludes them as the immoral other?

Building upon insights from critical feminist scholarship on marriage migration, this

chapter examines Chinese marriage migrants’ heterogeneous experiences of, and

responses to, gendered ethnic stereotypes that define them as the immoral other. I argue

that the everyday reproduction of the term dalumei has become a discursive frame

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through which both locals and marriage migrants themselves evaluate Chinese women’s

marriage migration experiences and belonging. I show how class markers, such as

Chinese marriage migrants’ educational backgrounds and work experiences, as well as

their husbands’ backgrounds, were translated into the intention of Chinese women’s

marriage migration to Taiwan. Chinese women with university education and

professional work experiences were considered by social workers, Taiwanese friends,

and the Chinese marriage migrant community as “married out of love” and therefore

“good immigrants.” Chinese marriage migrants who married veterans were considered to

embody the immoral figure of dalumei who married Taiwanese men for money. In the

search for moral acceptance, Chinese marriage migrants also distanced themselves from

the Chinese marriage migrants who were considered dalumei. While all Chinese

marriage migrants I met mobilized the morality attached to their gendered labor as

mothers, wives, and daughters-in-law to narrate themselves as moral figures, more

educated Chinese marriage migrants also drew upon their volunteer labor to refashion

themselves as selfless subjects in the public arena, hence reinforcing the moral

distinction against less educated Chinese marriage migrants. By delving into the

heterogenous experiences of, and responses to, the dalumei discourse among Chinese

marriage migrants, I complicate critical feminist scholarship on marriage migration to

show how class intersects with gender and nationality in shaping migrant women’s

belonging.

1 Marriage Migrants, Gendered Morality, and Classed

Belonging

The rise of cross-border marriages in the 1990s has become a sensational subject in mass

media and public discussion. Media constructions often cast migrant women as the

immoral other, producing an image that goes against ideal womanhood. Within the U.S.,

early discussion of cross-border marriages is fueled by the media discourse of mail-order

brides, where marriage migrant women from Asia are imagined as the poverty-stricken

60

other, who trick men into marriage for green cards or work opportunities (Constable

2003). Similarly in Asia, media also conflates marriage migrants, who are mostly women

from China and Southeast Asia, with the image of sex workers and depicts them as the

immoral other (Choo 2016; Hsia 2007; Lan 2008; Nakamatsu 2005; Plambech 2010). In

Taiwan, the discourse of dalumei renders all mainland Chinese women as “poor, greedy,

cunning, promiscuous, and uncivilized” (Chen 2015, 89) gold-diggers who engaged in

“sham marriage” in Taiwan for work opportunities. These images go against the notion

of ideal womanhood, which is constructed in relation to sexual purity and the

essentialized notion of feminine virtue attached to women’s identities as mothers and

wives.

Critical feminist scholars have argued that marriage migrants are not passive victims of

these “controlling images” (Collins 2000, 76); instead, they actively negotiate with these

stereotypes to claim a sense of belonging. For example, studies have shown how Filipina

marriage migrants in South Korea and Japan drew upon the discourse of love to describe

their marriage (Faier 2007, 2009) and performed local gendered norms of motherhood to

negotiate with the gendered racial stereotypes of gold-diggers (Choo 2013; Kim 2013).

Filipina marriage migrants in Japan performed oyomesan (unpaid care labor in Japanese

ways) to counteract the stigma of Japayuki (Japan-bound) that conflated them with sex

workers (Faier 2009). On a collective level, Filipina marriage migrants also organized

charity events where they deployed images and symbols of respectable womanhood (e.g.,

Christian wives) to win wider social acceptance in both Japan and the Philippines

(Suzuki 2000).

While critical feminist scholarship has fruitfully demonstrated how marriage migrants

negotiate their stigma through performing gendered cultural norms and practices (Faier

2009; Friedman 2015; Newendorp 2008), the focus on the intersection of gender and

ethnic dimensions of exclusion has not yet fully captured how the perception of marriage

migrants could be differentiated by class. In many studies (Faier 2009; Friedman 2015;

Newendorp 2008), class is conceptualized in relation to the national hierarchy that

61

constructs ethnic differences between local citizens and marriage migrants. Such

conceptualizations have unintentionally constructed marriage migrants as a homogenous

group, despite powerfully demonstrating the gendered national boundary drawn between

local citizens and marriage migrants. Paying more analytical attention to the perceived

class difference among marriage migrants and how it translates into their position within

the gendered morality allows us to see the divergent experiences of Chinese marriage

migrants in the face of similar “disciplinary discourses” (Suzuki 2000, 432) as well as the

different meaning-making processes that marriage migrants engaged in to counteract

their stigma. For example, in Newendorp’s study (2008), Chinese marriage migrants

perceived as middle-class may or may not be put under the disciplinary gaze of social

workers who encouraged poor Chinese marriage migrants to adopt Hong Kong parenting

style that was deemed more modern, westernized, and attentive to emotional

development compared to the Chinese parenting style that was considered traditional,

backward, and overly-reliant on physical discipline. Furthermore, if middle-class Chinese

marriage migrants were subjected to a similar disciplinary gaze, what would be their

response? Delving into the perceived class divide among Chinese marriage migrants and

its moral implications open up new questions about the social mechanisms that produce

the boundary of inclusion and exclusion among marriage migrants.

In this chapter, I examine the heterogeneous experiences of the dalumei discourse among

Chinese marriage migrants who are perceived by social workers and the Chinese

marriage migrant community in Taiwan as having different class backgrounds. I also

delve into the different narratives that Chinese marriage migrants developed to forge a

sense of belonging in the face of dalumei stigma. Building on critical feminist

scholarship, I understand marriage migrants’ belonging as an interactive accomplishment

that involves negotiation with “controlling images” (Collins 2000, 76) built upon

constructed notions of gendered morality. “Controlling images” (Collins 2000, 76) or

“disciplining discourses” (Suzuki 2000, 432) serve to regulate a nation’s ethnic boundary

by defining the meaning of respectable womanhood. Writing from the U.S. Context,

Patricia Hill Collins (2000) argues that the “controlling images” of African-American

62

women as “mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mommas” (p. 76) serves to

“transmit distinctive message about the proper links among female sexuality, desired

levels of fertility for working-class and middle-class Black women, and U.S. Black

women’s placement in social class and citizenship hierarchies” (p. 92). Very often,

“cultural practices and beliefs” work with “controlling images” developed on ideal

notions of female sexuality and respectable womanhood to form “criteria of belonging

within a national population and territory” (Ong 1996, 738) and construct the boundary

upon which inclusion and exclusion are negotiated.

I understand class as a form of inscription “that shapes bodies in the making of strata and

behavior” (Skeggs 2004, 12). Using an intersectional approach, Skeggs (2004) argues

that class “can never be made alone” but always intersects with other categories such as

gender and nationality. The process of inscription is an important element in

understanding belonging as it marks the value of particular bodies (p. 17) and its

legitimacy to belong to a nation (p. 19). In the same way as privilege and power are often

considered as ascribed rather than achieved (Bourdieu and Waquant 1992), Skeggs

argues that the working-class does not have to achieve “immorality” or “criminality” but

are often “positioned” with these values (p. 4). Similarly, in my research, the Chinese

marriage migrants who are perceived as working-class are positioned as the immoral

figure of dalumei while those perceived as middle-class are seen as “good immigrants.”

The positioning of such stigma is not fixed, as Chinese marriage migrants actively

narrate a sense of worth based upon their performance of unpaid gendered labor at home

and in the communities.

In what follows, I discuss the representation of mainland Chinese women in Taiwan and

my research methods, before showing the formation of moral hierarchy among Chinese

marriage migrants and the narratives that Chinse marriage migrants developed to

negotiate with the stereotypes that cast them as the immoral figure.

2 Cross-strait Marriage and Representation of Mainland

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Chinese Women in Taiwan

Chinese marriage migrant women have become the largest group of immigrants in

Taiwan since 1992, soon after the Taiwanese state ended the Martial Law in the late

1980s and resumed contact with China. Between 1992 and 2018, more than 322,000

Chinese marriage migrants have settled in Taiwan (National Immigration Agency ROC

2018). Understanding the perceived class differences among marriage migrant women

from China is important, as China’s rapid economic development has led to the

emergence of professionals and middle class (Wang and Davis 2010), which gradually

changed the demographics of marriage migrant women in Taiwan (Friedman 2016).

Scholars have observed that, while early cross-border marriages involved mostly unions

between elderly veterans that came to Taiwan following the Nationalist army in 1949 and

women from their home provinces in China (Lu 2012), in recent years, cross-strait

marriages have diversified, with Chinese women with university degrees marrying

Taiwanese husbands whom they met during their business trips and travels (Friedman

2015; Lu 2012).28 Although more educated, professional Chinese women are also

subjected to the discriminatory labor market after moving to Taiwan, some of them were

able to pursue comparable career trajectories in Taiwan due their educational

background, social networks, and professional ties in China (Friedman 2016).

In Taiwan, Chinese marriage migrants have been depicted by the media as dalumei since

the late 1980s, but the meaning of dalumei is not fixed. Chen (2015) acutely observes a

shift in the meaning of dalumei over the last three decades. In the late 1980s, dalumei

was used to imply a poor and pitiful young female victim trapped and forced into

prostitution by their traffickers. At the turn of the year 2000, however, as the number of

mainland Chinese women in Taiwan increased following the opening of marriage

28 While such scholarly discourse may reflect the demographic characteristics of Chinese marriage migrants and their husbands in Taiwan, as I discussed below, it does not necessarily reflect Chinese women’s own sense of migration experiences.

64

migration between Taiwan and China, perceptions of dalumei changed to refer to all

mainland Chinese women as “mainland gold-diggers” who engage in “sham marriages”

in Taiwan. The discourse of dalumei then depicts Chinese women as “poor, greedy,

cunning, promiscuous, and uncivilized” (Chen 2015, 89). The Taiwanese state’s effort to

combat fake marriage in early 2000 by setting up marital interviews at the Taiwanese

border for Chinese marriage migrants has echoed the discourse of dalumei, further

reinforcing the image of Chinese women as an immoral figure. In a context where its

sovereignty is unrecognized by China and its international allies, scholars argue the

cultural production of marriage migrant women as dalumei is arguably a form of

resistance against China’s political assertion of power over its sovereignty (Friedman

2015; Shih 1998). Such resistance against China’s geopolitical domination, however, is

only applied to Chinese migrant laborer and marriage migration. As Tseng (2006) points

out, Taiwanese policy has gradually opened up to attract educated IT professionals from

China to boost economic competitiveness, showing how neoliberal logic has played a

more important role in shaping immigration policy than nationalist ideology.29

Since 2002, the Taiwanese government has officially advocated multiculturalism to

welcome immigrants. The adoption of a multicultural framework is evidenced in the

expansion of social rights such as easier access to the job market and public health

coverage. During my fieldwork, the Ministry of Interior has also organized large-scale

events, such as Immigration Day, Taipei City Multicultural Expo, and Asia-Pacific

Cultural Day, to welcome immigrants and celebrate the diversity of multicultural family

in Taiwan. At these events, NGOs that received the Development Funds for Immigrants

would set up game booths, where Chinese and Southeast Asian marriage migrants were

both volunteers and participants. As the Taiwanese state invests itself in the project of

29 The effort to recruit IT professionals from China contradicts early restrictions on the importation of migrant laborers from China, showing how geopolitical concern is only selectively placed on working-class Chinese immigrants, and that class has increasingly paid a more important role in shaping immigration policy (Tseng 2006).

65

multiculturalism, it has adopted a more gender-neutral term dalu peiou (mainland

spouse) to describe Chinese marriage migrants. In the news, government officials

sometimes used a less derogatory term dalu xinniang (mainland bride) to describe

Chinese marriage migrants (Friedman 2015). Despite the adoption of these new terms,

the negative stigma against Chinese marriage migrants as dalumei continues to circulate

in everyday interactions. Chinese marriage migrants I met also described negotiating

with the discourse of dalumei in their everyday life.


The Chinese marriage migrants I met in Taiwan were in their mid-20s to mid-70s, and

their length of stay varied from one month to over 20 years. Chinese marriage migrants

in Taiwan came from a variety of locations in China. Some hailed from major cities like

Tianjin, Chongqing, and Shanghai while others originated from villages and cities in

more remote parts of China. Many Chinese women met their Taiwanese husbands at

work as they migrated from villages or inner cities to coastal areas for employment.

Some couples met through friend and family introductions, QQ,30 or commercial

matchmaking agencies; others met during their travels across China.

In everyday interactions, the perception of class was determined by three indicators:

(1) Chinese marriage migrants’ education,

(2) Chinese marriage migrants’ work experiences in China, and

(3) the background of Taiwanese husbands.

Chinese marriage migrants who were perceived as middle-class included Chinese women

with a university degree and professional work experience in China. Some of their

30 QQ is a popular online chatroom commonly used in China.

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husbands held professional, managerial-level job positions; others owned mid-scale

businesses (e.g., education center and factories). This group of Chinese marriage

migrants was often described by social workers, Taiwanese friends, and the Chinese

marriage migrant community as the “recent cohort” of Chinese marriage migrants and

was considered “good immigrants” (see Appendix A).

Chinese marriage migrants perceived as working-class include Chinese women who

married veterans, those without a university degree, and those married to Taiwanese

husbands with entry-level jobs or who owned petty businesses (e.g., low-end restaurants

and betel nut stores). This group of Chinese marriage migrants was described by social

workers, Taiwanese friends, and the Chinese marriage migrant community as the “past

cohort” of Chinese marriage migrants and was associated with the image of dalumei (see

Appendix B).

It is important to note that this class categorization is more perception rather than an

actual representation of Chinese marriage migrant class backgrounds. It oversimplifies

Chinese marriage migrants’ class backgrounds, as Chinese marriage migrants without

university education or professional work experiences who married husbands with

professional jobs or owned businesses are left out in this classification (see Appendix C).

It also assumes that Chinese marriage migrants’ class position is solely dependent on

their jobs in Taiwan or their Taiwanese husbands’ backgrounds, overlooking Chinese

marriage migrants’ material resources in China, which also contribute to their income.

For example, Cai Hong was considered working-class by other Chinese marriage

migrants because she married a veteran, but she was a respectable Chinese medicine

doctor in China and owns two houses in Beijing that give her monthly rent. The

categorization of poor, less educated Chinese women as marriage migrants “in the past”

and professional, more educated Chinse women as marriage migrants in the “recent

cohort” has also simplified Chinese marriage migrants’ own sense of migration

experience. Hui Lin, for example, had a university degree and used to work as a

marketing director in China, but considered herself as the first cohort of Chinese

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marriage migrants because she married her husband twenty years ago.

Chinese marriage migrants I met engaged in all kinds of employment before migrating to

Taiwan. Some left home at a young age to work in the cities as factory workers, service

workers (e.g., salesclerks, beauticians), and restaurant servers. Those who graduated

from high school and university worked in different professions, such as teaching,

marketing, accounting, merchandising, Chinese medicine, and real estate. Some used to

run family businesses, and others opened small businesses with their husbands in China

before moving to Taiwan. Chinese marriage migrants in their sixties and seventies used

to work in state-owned enterprises.

After moving to Taiwan, less privileged Chinese marriage migrants engaged in illegal

jobs (e.g., working in the market, breakfast stores, or as caregivers) to make ends meet

before the relaxation of their work rights in 2009. After obtaining their work rights,

middle-aged Chinese marriage migrants were employed as live-out domestic workers at

various health institutions. Upon garnering enough saving after years of hard work, some

Chinese marriage migrants opened small businesses, such as low-end restaurants and

salons. Chinese marriage migrants with extensive social networks in China became

insurance agents.

Chinese marriage migrants with a university degree and professional work experiences

described a sense of downward mobility after moving to Taiwan, as most employers did

not recognize their educational credentials and work experiences. Many had turned to

volunteer labor as a strategy to increase their social status while avoiding job

discrimination in the labor market.

This chapter draws on my fieldwork and 40 in-depth interviews with Chinese marriage

migrants in Taiwan. I conducted the interviews in Mandarin, at Chinese marriage

migrants’ homes or public areas, such as parks, coffee shops, or restaurants. Despite the

rise in nuclear families (Lan 2008), it was not uncommon to find three generation

cohabitations among immigrant families in Taiwan. More than half of my informants in

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Taiwan were living with their parents-in-law at the time of the interview and some

couples I met lived with all affinal members in a three-story building. Those who lived

apart from their in-laws would visit their in-laws regularly, at least once a week to help

with grocery shopping and house cleaning. In some families, the in-laws had passed

away before the couples were married. Chinese marriage migrants in Taiwan who

married elderly veterans did not have in-laws in Taiwan, as their husbands were low-

ranked soldiers who came to Taiwan alone. When coding the data, I focused on how

Chinese marriage migrants were perceived by others (e.g., social workers, Taiwanese

friends, and other Chinese marriage migrants), how they understood the discourse of

dalumei, how they narrated a sense of self-worth to negotiate their belonging in the

Taiwanese society.

4 Everyday Reproductions of Dalumei Discourse and

the Formation of “Good Immigrants”

Chinese marriage migrants I met in Taiwan were all familiar with the stereotype of

dalumei. Their first encounter with the term usually happened at the market, where they

learned that dalumei was used by locals to refer to “Guangdong lettuce.” Many felt

humiliated and degraded that dalumei—a term that described their country of origin—

were used to refer to vegetables. Hui Lin, the Chinese marriage migrant I introduced in

the opening vignette, told me how the term dalumei angered her:

I first heard of the term dalumei when I came to Taiwan in 1996. I was at the

market, and there was this vegetable, Guangdong lettuce, and they called it

dalumei. I didn’t know that, and I asked the store owner how much it was. He

asked me if I was asking about dalumei and pointed at the lettuce. I was so angry,

and I didn’t know how to respond. It’s like we are just as cheap as a bunch of

vegetables.

Despite its derogatory moral implications, the reproduction of dalumei discourse in

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everyday interaction was not always used to reproduce the negative image of Chinese

marriage migrants (Chen 2015; Friedman 2015). On many occasions, its circulation was

used to produce the category of “good immigrants.” For example, Hui Lin’s Taiwanese

friends often told me how much Hui Lin was different from the “typical dalumei” (yiban

de dalumei). One day after church service, Hui Lin’s church group leader told me that

immigrants like Hui Lin were the “good ones”:

There are many immigrants in Taiwan now, and Hui Lin is one of the good ones.

She’s very different from those women who came in the past. She is not like the

typical dalumei because she’s very well-educated and she used to have a good job

in a big company in China. She met her husband at work. When family problems

arise, she also tries to resolve them rather than running away.

According to Hui Lin’s group leader, “typical dalumei” referred to Chinese marriage

migrants who came to Taiwan “in the past,” who were poor, less educated Chinese

women; but Hui Lin, with her university education and work experience as a marketing

director in Tianjin, a metropolitan city in China, was considered as “different.” Here,

education and job status are class markers that distinguish Hui Lin from the Chinese

marriage migrants “in the past.” These class markers also evoked Chinese marriage

migrants’ position within the hierarchy of gendered morality, indexed by the ways of

meeting their husbands and their ability to maintain a harmonious family in times of

conflict. The formation of “good immigrants” relies on the relational positioning of an

immoral subject, the “typical dalumei,” which is positioned as Chinese marriage

migrants from working-class backgrounds.

Chinese women who married veterans falls under the category of “typical dalumei.”

Social workers at NGOs described their marriages as “abnormal,” or in a more

euphemized term, as “care marriage.” For example, a social worker at an NGO that

provides services to Chinese marriage migrants explained to me:

Cross-strait marriages are very different nowadays. In the past, it’s the poor

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women who married veterans. They engaged in care marriages (zhaogushi

hunyin). In recent years, cross-strait marriage has normalized (zhengchanghua),

[and is] very similar to the Taiwanese ones. Many Chinese spouses have a

university education, and they meet their husbands at work and fall in love before

getting married.

According to this social worker, Chinese marriage migrants who married veterans were

considered as marriage migrants “in the past.” They were believed to be exchanging care

for money, hence “abnormal” in the eyes of Taiwanese who believed in the modern ideal

of love marriage (Adrian 2003; Lan 2008). According to Bonnie Adrian (2003, 80),

romantic love was not associated with marriage until the 1960s and 1970s in Taiwan.

Before this period, marriage was more about family duties while love and individual

desires were experienced by men outside of marriage.31 The dichotomization of love and

pragmatism not only simplifies the complexity of marriage migrants’ desires (Choo

2013; Constable 2003; Lan 2008) but also forms a moral basis that defined immigrants’

belonging. This moral hierarchy that stratifies Chinese marriage migrants is a gendered,

classed, and nationality construct; with more educated Chinese women seen as moral

figures and as more deserving immigrants compared to their working-class counterparts.

The categorization of poor, less educated Chinese marriage migrants as those who came

to Taiwan “in the past,” and professional, more educated Chinese women who came to

Taiwan “in recent years” does not necessarily match with Chinese marriage migrants’

own sense of migration experience. Hui Lin, who was often classified by others as a

Chinese marriage migrant of the “recent” cohort, repeatedly told me that she was among

the “first wave” of Chinese women who came to Taiwan:

31 Lan’s (2008) study of Southeast Asian migrant women in Taiwan also argues that the love-based marriage is more of an ideal than the reality in contemporary Taiwanese society. However, immigration officers often used the ideal of love marriage to determine whether cross-border marriages between Southeast Asian marriage migrants and their Taiwanese husbands were “real” (Lan 2008, 846).

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I was among the very first wave of Chinese spouses who came to Taiwan. I came

here 20 years ago. At that time there were many Taiwanese people who ‘bought’

their wives (maihun) from China. Their marriages were fake, and people called

these women dalumei because they were young, and they were here for

prostitution. At that time, there were very few cross-strait marriages based on

love. I had to tell people that I fell in love with my husband so that they wouldn’t

misunderstand.

Hui Lin’s understanding reveals the conflation between marriage migrants and sex

workers under the dalumei discourse. Marriages arranged by commercial agencies were

considered by both Taiwanese and Chinese marriage migrants as a practice from “the

past” that was deemed illegitimate in contrast to the ideal of modern romantic love. The

misplacement of Hui Lin in the “recent cohort” of immigrants based on her educational

level shows how class markers intertwined with gendered morality in defining marriage

migrants’ belonging in Taiwan. By claiming her marriage as based on “love,” Hui Lin

mobilized the discourse of love to claim a space within the modern marriage ideology. In

doing so, Hui Lin also relegates the controlling image of dalumei to working-class

Chinese marriage migrants and perpetuates the moral hierarchy among Chinese marriage

migrants.

5 Negotiating with Dalumei Discourse and Becoming

“Good Immigrants”

The discourse of dalumei has become a discursive frame through which Taiwanese and

the Chinese marriage migrant community evaluate women’s migration experiences and

negotiate belonging in everyday life. This section shows how such moral hierarchy is

both reproduced and challenged in marriage migrants’ reflexive accounts of their

migration experiences as well as in their everyday interactions. In my analysis, I show

how Chinese marriage migrants drew upon morality attached to the performance of

multiple forms of gendered labor to negotiate with moral hierarchy and to assert their

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belonging in Taiwan.

5.1 Sacrificing Mother and Diligent Worker

Many Chinese women who married veterans had already had children from previous

marriages. They were believed to engage in fake marriages for money. In response to this

stereotype, they mobilized the morality attached to motherhood and paid work to

refashion themselves as moral subjects deserving respect.

Feng, the first Chinese marriage migrants I introduced in this chapter’s opening vignette,

had lived in Taiwan since 1995, through her marriage to Wang, her late husband, whom

she had met in her hometown in 1992. Then a 39-year-old widow, Feng struggled to feed

her daughters from her previous marriage. Born during the Mao era, Feng did not receive

much education as a teenager. While her peasant background was appreciated during

Mao’s revolution, her lack of education put her in a disadvantaged position after China’s

economic reform and after she migrated to Taiwan. Back in 1992, Feng was working in

construction site, earning only RMB 1 (USD 0.20) per day. When Wang revisited his

hometown for the first time after Taiwan resumed communication with China,32 Feng’s

friend introduced them, and they kept in touch by mail. Initially, Wang wanted to keep

Feng as a mistress so that he could have her company when he visited China. Feng

rejected the idea outright and insisted on marriage because she “didn’t want to be the

town’s laughing stock!” Wang later proposed, and Feng agreed, after much hesitation,

believing that Taiwan was a good place to work, which could help her support her

32 The Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Between 1949 and 1987, all communications between Taiwan and China were cut due to the contentious political relations between Taiwan and China. In 1987, Taiwan lifted many restrictions on the mainland, including travels, business investment, and family visits. Many veterans, who followed the Nationalist government to Taiwan alone, took advantage of this policy to visit their hometowns in China.

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daughters’ education in China. However, Feng was unable to work legally before gaining

residency status at that time.33 She then took up ad hoc service jobs illegally, serving

meals and washing dishes at various family-run breakfast stores and she eventually

started to work as a caregiver at a private elderly home and Taoyuan Veteran Hospital,

earning about TWD 20,000 (USD 669) per month. Just as Feng’s work started to gain

stability, Wang became very sick and Feng quit her work to take care of him, explaining:

“We came from the same place of origin, and he is the one who brought me here, we are

each other’s family, if I don’t take care of him, nobody will!” In 2005, Wang died of

kidney cancer, and Feng thought of going back to Hubei to stay with her daughters, but

eventually decided to stay in Taiwan because, as a veteran’s widower, she was eligible to

receive half of veteran retirement fund, about TWD 10,000 (USD 334) per month. Feng

continued to work at a veteran hospital and met Zhao, a veteran who also originated from

Hubei. Zhao liked that Feng was attentive and patient and that she spoke Hubei dialect.

He then requested that Feng take care of him outside of the hospital, instead of receiving

care organized by the Veterans Organization. Zhao was willing to pay Feng half of his

veteran retirement fund, about TWD10,000 (USD 334) per month, on condition that she

took him home. At first, Feng rejected the idea because she “did not want other people to

talk.” However, Zhao was persistent in his request and Feng later relented, because she

felt close to Zhao, who came from the same province. Later, Feng quit her job at the

caregiver center, and took care of Zhao at her home, “just like family.” Although Zhao

and Feng did not get married, Zhao gave Feng half of his retirement fund and let her use

the other half for daily expenses. Feng earned about half of what she had earned at her

job at the hospital.

Despite her financial sacrifices, quitting her job to take care of her husband and then after

taking care of Zhao, Feng was considered a dalumei by fellow Chinese marriage

migrants. Xiao Yan, a Chinese marriage migrant from Hubei, was embarrassed to

33 The Taiwan immigration policy restricted Chinese marriage migrants’ work rights until its amendment in 2009.

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introduce me to Feng: “You don’t need to interview her. I can tell you her story, it’s all

about money! Otherwise, who would marry a man who’s old and frail?” Xiao Yan’s

sentiments show that the controlling image of dalumei is not only externally imposed by

the Taiwanese society, but also works as a distancing mechanism within the Chinese

marriage migrant community. Because “good immigrants” were associated with class

markers such as educational credentials, which indexed an image of a love-based

marriage, Chinese marriage migrants like Feng were imagined as the immoral other,

hence less deserving members of the society.

Feng was aware of the social stigma in the Chinese marriage migrant community.

Although she thought of Xiao Yan as “young and smart” and more educated than herself,

she was assertive about her integrity:

I know what other people think of me. But there is nothing to be ashamed of—I

didn’t kill or rob, I work hard and sacrifice for my daughters!

She also referred to herself as a “hard worker,” doing the dirty jobs at the hospital that

“other Taiwanese people felt were disgusting.” Hoang (2016) argues that Vietnamese

migrant domestic workers in Taiwan often negotiate their motherhood by mobilizing the

narrative of self-sacrifice and endurance, which are at the core values of Vietnamese

womanhood. She argues that when negotiating with the stigma attached to their

migration, migrant women performed a gendered morality of sacrifice and endurance to

“regain their self-esteem and achieve a sense of empowerment” (p. 904). Similarly, by

narrating her self-sacrifice for her daughters, care labor, and work ethics, Feng reasserted

her moral superiority in a world where she was considered as immoral.

5.2 Hardworking Wife and Deferential Daughter-in-law

Chinese marriage migrants also drew upon the morality attached to the domestic labor

they performed at home to detach themselves from the stigma of dalumei. Li Hua, a 38-

year-old working-class Chinese marriage migrant from rural Shandong, met her husband,

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a Taiwanese man 12 years of her senior, through a mutual friend when she worked at a

construction company in Weihai city in Northern China. Following her husband, a tour

bus driver, Li Hua moved to Taiwan after their marriage in 1997. She was living in a

three-story building in Xin Dian with her husband, parents-in-law, two brothers-in-law

and their Taiwanese wives. Although her husband was also from a working-class

background, Li Hua’s background from rural China made her a morally suspect, assumed

to have married for “ulterior motives.” Li Hua told me that, whenever she came home

from grocery shopping, her mother-in-law would watch her interactions with neighbors,

fearing that she would make new friends and run away. Li Hua also recalled frustrating

interactions with her brother-in-law:

He always said to me, “You are so young, why did you marry to our family?

What things in our family are you after? I say you wouldn’t be able to stay here

for more than two years.” This made me really angry, but I told him, “Big

brother, time will tell. I’m not like the typical dalumei, I’m not aiming for your

money!”

To prove that she was not a lazy gold-digger, Li Hua responded by performing both

unpaid and paid gendered labor. Every day, Li Hua prepared three meals for eight family

members. In addition to everyday cleaning, bed-making, grocery shopping, and laundry,

she also prepared snacks for the two brothers-in-law when they invited friends over for

mahjong. Not only did she take up all the household chores, but she also did it the way

her mother-in-law deemed proper—clothes needed to be washed, folded, and put away

every day, the pointed end of chopsticks should go down (not up!) in the chopstick

basket, and slippers should be arranged facing the house entrance. Performing deference

to her mother-in-law required Li Hua to “enact her social locations” (Hanser 2008, 105)

within the family hierarchy, but it also allowed her to resist the dalumei image that her

Taiwanese family imposed on her, as Li Hua told me:

I remember I was washing dishes and my brother-in-law came to the kitchen and

said to me, “I didn’t know you well before, but over these years, I’ve seen the

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contribution you made to this family.” I said to him, “You said I wouldn’t be able

to stay for more than two years but see? I’ve stayed for seven years.”

5.3 Responsible Daughter-in-law and Selfless volunteer

Chinese marriage migrants I met described their difficulties finding decent jobs in

Taiwan because most employers did not recognize their educational credentials. Unlike

their working-class counterparts, who quickly jumped into the labor market to make ends

meet, Chinese marriage migrants who were more educated or whose husbands had a

decent, steady financial income often delayed their employment. They engaged

themselves in community work as they considered community organizations, such as

NGOs or religious groups, a site where they could learn about people and the job market

of Taiwan. This strategy allowed them to take care of their domestic duties while

familiarizing themselves with Taiwanese society and enlarging their social networks,

which eventually led some to find paid jobs.

Hui Lin, the 45-year-old middle-class Chinese marriage migrant I introduced in the

opening vignette, spent the beginning years of her marriage working in Tianjin, her

hometown, together with her husband, so that the couple could pursue their career

together. In 2010, Hui Lin’s husband lost his job, and the couple relocated to Taiwan and

moved in with her mother-in-law. By this time, the revision of the Taiwanese

immigration framework in 2009 enabled Hui Lin to work before gaining residency. Hui

Lin took advantage of this policy change and applied for jobs in marketing in Taiwan but

did not get any response. Hui Lin wanted to learn more about the work environment in

Taiwan and became a volunteer at Rainbow Mothers (Caihong Mama)34 at her son’s

primary school. Hui Lin recalled how her mother-in-law was upset at first:

34 Rainbow Mothers is a volunteer group under the Rainbow Family Organization, a nation-wide faith-based organization developed to promote life education in various kindergartens and primary schools in Taiwan.

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She said to me, “A woman should know her place. You should stay at home to

take care of the family.” But how can I find a job when all I do is stay at home

and cook?

To ease family tension, Hui Lin made sure she did all the housework before she went to

volunteer in the afternoon. Like Li Hua, Hui Lin also deferred to her mother-in-law’s

way of household labor (e.g., making breakfast before her mother-in-law wakes up and

doing laundry every day). At school, Hui Lin’s teaching skills impressed many teachers.

She was later invited by a Chinese teacher to teach Chinese calligraphy in the summer

with pay. As Hui Lin’ s responsibilities at school grew, she was no longer able to do

housework like before. Later, with her savings and some borrowed money RMB 200,000

(USD 31,264) from her parents, Hui Lin bought a new apartment and convinced her

husband to move. Unlike Li Hua, whose financial constraints did not allow her to seek

living arrangements that were independent of her in-laws, Hui Lin was able to

accommodate her new responsibility at school by seeking alternative living

arrangements. After taking the summer job, Hui Lin was constantly invited as a paid

guest teacher at school to teach Chinese arts to primary school students.

In addition to leading to potential paid job opportunities, unpaid community work, a form

of feminine virtue in the public sphere, also enabled Chinese marriage migrants from

more privileged backgrounds to substantiate their moral claims that they were selfless

and caring and in doing so, reinforced the moral hierarchy among Chinese marriage

migrants. As Hui Lin told me:

What’s good about volunteering is that, other people won’t treat you with

hostility, because you don’t get paid, it’s all about selfless contribution. My

Taiwanese friends see me differently, they often said, “Hui Lin, you are different

from other mainland Chinese brides (daluxinniang), the typical ones are very

instrumental (gongli), but you are not.”

Similar to previous studies where scholars found that volunteer labor enabled immigrants

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to combat various form of stigma, such as the idle socialite stigma of expat wives in

China (Wang 2013) and the Japanyuki stigma of Filipina marriage migrants in Japan

(Suzuki 2000; Faier 2009), the moral values attached to volunteer labor allowed Hui Lin

to narrate her belonging in Taiwan through the language of “selfless contribution,” which

earned her respect and acceptance in the local community. However, this narrative of

belonging is nonetheless built upon the continuous otherization of working-class Chinese

marriage migrants who were too poor to perform unpaid volunteer labor and sometimes

had to engage in multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Similar to Hui Lin, Xiao Hua, a 40-year-old Chinese marriage migrant who volunteered

for 12 years as Caihong Mama was also able to gain acceptance at school with her

volunteer work. The headmaster at her son’s primary school even invited her to be a

substitute teacher, not knowing about her immigration history and work restrictions at

that time. Xiao Hua recounted this story with pride:

I was so happy, but I couldn't accept the job because I couldn’t work, so I told the

headmaster, “I can’t work at your school because I’m from China. I haven’t got

my residency yet, so I can’t work. My education credential is not recognized here

in Taiwan, if you hire me you will get into trouble!” He was so shocked when he

heard that I’m from China, he said I was different from the typical dalumei and

thought that I was a local Taiwanese all this time!

Xiao Hua was considered as a “Taiwanese” not only because of her southern Mandarin

accent and the ability to present herself confidently in public but also because of her

involvement in volunteer labor that set her apart from the immoral figure of dalumei.

In the most extreme case, volunteer work has enabled educated Chinese marriage

migrants to rise to leadership positions within the marriage migrants’ community,

allowing them to gain status and recognition in the society at large. Fang Fang, a 45-

year-old Chinese marriage migrant from Shanxi, for example, became a leader in the

marriage migrant community through her volunteer work. Similar to Hui Lin and Xiao

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Hua, Fang Fang volunteered at her daughter’s school as a rainbow mother, through

which she honed her communication skills and public speech performance. After

volunteering for nine years, accumulating 300 volunteer hours in total, Fang Fang

learned about the activities offered by a local district office for new immigrants. After

attending several social integration programs, such as manicure class and computer class,

offered at the Nangang New Immigrant Hall, Fang Fang made friends with other

marriage migrants—including both mainland Chinese and Southeast Asians—as well as

local district officers, who were all impressed by her enthusiasm, determination, and

confidence interacting with strangers. Later in 2012, when the Neihu Local District

Office wanted to sponsor the first immigrant peer-support group in Taiwan, Fang Fang

was invited to be the leader of the group. The Neihu Local District Office provided the

space and Fang Fang, together with a few other members of the peer-support group,

organized weekly events for marriage migrants in the neighborhood. When the peer-

support group was first established, the former director of Taipei immigration office

visited them, and the group gained much publicity in the media. From then on, Fang

Fang became one of the representatives of marriage migrants in Taiwan and was invited

to give presentations at various government departments to help improve immigrants’

social services. Fang Fang’s leadership position was unpaid, but as a leader of the

immigrant group, she gained status and recognition. Fang Fang received an award from

the Department of Civic Affairs in Taipei city for her contribution to immigrants’

activities and was considered a “star” in the immigrant community. Recounting all the

years she spent doing volunteer work, Fang Fang said:

I’m very tired! (laugh) But I have learned a lot and grown a lot too! I’ve devoted

most of my time to community work; it’s unpaid but I’ve benefited in many other

ways. Besides becoming more and more confident and outspoken, I’ve also met

many resourceful people who were willing to help me and my daughter. For

example, my daughter is in a Chinese opera school, and just the other day,

someone connected me with a good instructor!

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Fang Fang’s reputation in the marriage migrant community was later converted into

material gains when she was recommended to host the radio broadcast Happy New

Residents, a government-sponsored project funded by the Development Funds for

Immigrants at National Education Radio together with a few other marriage migrant

women from Southeast Asia. Fang Fang’s recognition peaked when she, together with

the other five radio hosts, won the Best Education and Cultural Radio Hosts in the 50th

Golden Bell Award in 2015.35

Although the community offers a space for marginalized immigrant groups to negotiate

their belonging, it is also a field of status competition that is not immune from class

inequality (Espiritu 2003). Working-class Chinese marriage migrants, who were

disadvantaged in their educational backgrounds and had previous work experience

mostly in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, were less confident to present

themselves in public and had fewer chances of converting their unpaid labor into material

and status gains compared to their middle-class counterparts. Although jobs offered to

middle-class Chinese marriage migrants were temporary and part-time, they saw the

opportunities as a form of “acceptance” and “recognition” that they yearned for but were

often denied in Taiwan’s labor market.

6 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that class intersects with gender and nationality in

producing Chinese marriage migrants’ divergent experiences of the stigma of dalumei

and I have illustrated the meaning-making processes through which Chinese marriage

migrants developed a sense of self-worth and belonging in Taiwan. I have argued that

while the discourse of dalumei renders all Chinese marriage migrants as morally

35 The Golden Bell Awards is an annual Taiwanese television production award organized by the Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development under the Ministry of Culture.

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suspicious gold-diggers, in everyday interactions, educated, professional Chinese

marriage migrants were considered by social workers, Taiwanese friends, and the

Chinese marriage migrant community as “good immigrants” who married out of love,

and were hence morally acceptable under the ideal of love-based marriage in Taiwan. I

have demonstrated that the everyday reproduction of dalumei discourse operates as a

figure of speech to produce the category of “good immigrants” and to construct a

gendered moral hierarchy among different groups of Chinese marriage migrants. The

relational positioning of the dalumei and good immigrants is further reinforced by

educated Chinese marriage migrants, who distinguished themselves from the typical

dalumei, thereby crossing the gendered and national boundary to ally with the

constructed notion of being Taiwanese.

In the face of the reproduction of dalumei discourse in everyday life, Chinese marriage

migrants negotiated their belonging by performing gendered virtue attached to multiple

roles as mothers, workers, wives, daughters-in-law, and volunteers. They narrated

themselves as a sacrificing, diligent, hardworking, deferential, responsible, and selfless

subjects. Both working-class and middle-class Chinese marriage migrants drew upon the

gendered morality attached to their unpaid gendered labor at home, yet they differed in

their public performances. Constrained by their financial needs, working-class Chinese

marriage migrants often jumped into the labor market—sometimes illegally—to make

ends meet. They narrated themselves as diligent workers who contributed to Taiwanese

society; yet, the fact that they were engaged in paid work soon after coming to Taiwan

reinforced the belief that they were dalumei. Contrastingly, Chinese women with more

privileged backgrounds tended to engage in community work to avoid facing the

discriminatory labor market. The morality of selfless contribution attached to unpaid

volunteer labor allowed middle-class Chinese women to, once again, distinguish

themselves from the figure of dalumei and gain moral acceptance in the various

communities, presenting themselves as moral subjects. Community work also allowed

them to enlarge their social networks and to gain recognition which, sometimes,

rewarded them with status and job opportunities. Unlike Southeast Asian marriage

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migrants who have organized themselves to subvert the stereotyped image (Hsia 2009),

Chinese marriage migrants I met did not challenge and disrupt the dalumei discourse on a

collective level. Instead, some mobilized the existing dalumei discourse and values to

distinguish themselves, others resisted the image on a personal level by drawing upon

moral discourse attached to their everyday gendered performance, and in doing so,

perpetuated the local moral order within Taiwanese society.

Situating my research with the critical feminist scholarship on marriage migration, I have

complicated the analysis to show how class intersects with gender and nationality in

shaping migrant women’s belonging. The dalumei discourse homogenized the multiple

social locations that Chinese marriage migrants occupied. Focusing on the everyday

operation and reproduction of dalumei discourse, I have illuminated how class

distinctions are simultaneously produced as local Taiwanese and immigrants demarcated

the “good immigrants” from the “bad” ones. If, like Shu-mei Shih (1998) argues, the

construction of dalumei discourse operates as a form of resistance against China’s claim

of Taiwanese sovereignty, then this study shows such resistance produces uneven effects

for Chinese marriage migrants perceived from different class locations. The divergent

experiences of belonging among Chinese marriage migrants again prompts the question

of “who can be part of us?” (Tseng 2006) in Taiwan, and to whom, among Chinese

marriage migrants, do geopolitical concerns apply.

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Chapter 4

“Aren’t we all Chinese?” Chinese Marriage Migrants’

Participation in Transnational Activities and Reterritorializing the

Hong Kong-China border

Fei Fei used to hate politics. Born in Guangdong, China, she grew up listening to

horrifying stories from her parents who were sent to the countryside at a young age

during the Cultural Revolution. It had never crossed her mind that one day, she would be

involved in any political campaign, especially after marrying and moving to Hong Kong,

a city that she believed would offer a better education for her children. However, as the

debate about Hong Kong’s political reform continued, things took a different turn.

WeCare, the NGO where Fei Fei volunteered, became involved in the Alliance for Peace

and Democracy—a pro-Beijing political alliance established to counter the Umbrella

Movement in Hong Kong and support the government version of universal suffrage.36 It

36 Currently, adult citizens in Hong Kong can vote directly to elect members of the Legislative and Urban Councils. The Chief Executive is elected by the Election Committee, which changes every five years and whose members are elected by different occupational sectors. As the Election Committee mostly comprises of members from the Beijing-leaning pro-establishment political groups, the election of Chief Executive in Hong Kong is often mocked as a “small circle election” that is pre-selected by the Beijing government instead of expressing the wishes of Hong Kong people (Haas 2017). Under the Basic Law, the mini-constitution of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong citizens are promised gradual access to universal suffrage. On Aug 31, 2014, the National People’s Congress released the framework for electing Chief Executive (commonly known as the Aug 31 Framework) by universal suffrage. In 2015, the Hong Kong government proposed a universal suffrage framework for the election of Chief Executive in 2017. In this proposal, candidates need to be nominated and elected by 1200 nominating committee before going to public vote. Pan-democratic parties in Hong Kong rejected this government proposal on two main accounts. First, the 1200 nominating committee represents only 7% of registered voters in Hong Kong. Second, although the nominating committee consists of people from different occupational sectors, the distribution of seats is not proportional to the number of registered voters within a particular sector. For example, the fishing industry has only 154 registered

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was then political mobilization became one of Fei Fei’s responsibilities. One day, Fei Fei

stormed into my English class at WeCare waving a paper in her hand and asked, “Could

all of you sign this? It is to support the government’s 2017 universal suffrage bill!”

Without more explanation, she passed the paper around and instructed Chinese marriage

migrants in my class to sign.

Despite Fei Fei’s disinterest in politics, her political participation—or those of Chinese

marriage migrants at large— in activities organized by pro-establishment political camp

was seen by supporters of localism (buntou)— a political movement in Hong Kong that

emphasizes Hong Kong people’s identity and autonomy (Law 2013) — as Chinese

government’s strategy to dilute Hong Kong population, with the aim to manipulate

elections in Hong Kong and to maintain stability (weiwen) across the China-Hong Kong

borders after the Umbrella Movement. As such, Chinese marriage migrants’ political

participation has become the focal point of social debate in Hong Kong, triggering both

media and scholarly discussion (Standnews 2015; Yep 2016).

Building upon insights from the literature of migrant transnationalism that attends to the

subjective experience of transmigrants—immigrants who “develop multiple relations that

span borders” (Basch et al. 1994, 7)— and their engagement in transnational activities,

this chapter examines Chinese marriage migrants’ participation in transnational activities

and unwraps the meanings that they attach to their political participation amid heightened

political tension between Hong Kong and China. This chapter asks, how do Chinese

marriage migrants understand their engagement in transnational political participation?

How do Chinese marriage migrants narrate a sense of belonging at a historical moment

voters but occupies 60 seats in the committee; meanwhile, the educational sector has 80,000 registered voters but holds only 30 seats in the committee. Also, more than half of the seats in the political sector are allocated to pro-Beijing politicians. Pan-democrats proposed alternative frameworks; some suggested revising the composition of the nominating committee, others called for the public nomination of candidates.

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with rising anti-China sentiments?

Echoing the literature on migrant transnationalism that shows transmigrants used

participation in transnational political activities as a form of resistance against their

discrimination in the immigrant-receiving country, this chapter argues that transnational

political activities have provided a space for Chinese marriage migrants to articulate their

belonging to both Hong Kong and to China at a historical moment where Chinese

marriage migrants are socially denied as Hong Kongers and where their mainland

background is heavily stigmatized. However, unlike previous studies that show

transmigrants have gained status through their engagement in transnational political

activities (Andrews 2014; Itzigsohn and Giorguli-Saucedo 2005), Chinese marriage

migrants in this study did not rise to the role of political leadership. At a historical

moment of heightened discontent against China’s rule, Chinese marriage migrants’

transnational political participation are considered by localist groups as a threat to the

liberal value of Hong Kong. As Chinese marriage migrants mobilized different ethos of

belonging to resist their discrimination and to claim their sense of self-worth, they also

reinforced the wider moral landscape in Hong Kong that produces their marginalization

in the first place.

1 Transnational Activities, Reterritorializing Nation-

state, and Transmigrant Subjectivities

Scholarship on migrant transnationalism has challenged earlier migration scholarship for

narrowly focusing on the integration of immigrants in host societies (Basch et al. 1994;

Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). Instead of abandoning everything in the home country once

they set foot in migrant destinations as described by earlier literature on migration,

transmigrants often maintain multiple relationships across borders. Besides maintaining

family ties, personal networks, and business relations, transmigrants also participate in

transnational political projects organized by immigrant-sending states as well as various

voluntary organizations.

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Through organizing transnational political activities and mobilizing transmigrants’

participation, immigrant-sending states expand their political, social, and economic

borders as part of the nation-building process (Bloemraad et al. 2008; Itzigsohn 2000).

Such mobilization often varies according to immigrant-sending states’ political relations

with the immigrant-receiving states, the characteristics of the migration flow, the profile

of the diaspora, and the ways in which immigrant-sending states position overseas

nationals/citizens in national struggles (Landolt et al. 1999; Margheritis 2011; Portes et

al. 2007; Thunø 2002; Zhou and Lee 2013). Mexican and Chinese governments, for

example, were reluctant to support the development of immigrant organizations in the

U.S. until the 1990s when they realized overseas nationals had sent significant amount of

remittance to the homelands and could be an important source of national economic and

political development (Portes et al. 2007; Thunø 2002, Zhou and Lee 2013). In China,

market reform has transformed the state’s political relations with the U.S. and how the

state perceives overseas Chinese. Once seen as potential spies and traitors during the

Cold War era, overseas Chinese are now considered by the Chinese state as the engine of

economic and national development (Thunø 2002; Zhou and Lee 2013). Since the 1990s,

the Chinese state has adopted proactive policies and measures to develop transnational

ties with overseas Chinese by sponsoring various immigrant organizations to facilitate

remittances, promote business investment, and philanthropic and civic activities across

the borders (Portes and Zhou 2012; Thunø 2002; Zhou and Lee 2013). Partnered with the

immigrant-sending states, immigrant organizations play a significant role in organizing

transnational activities while simultaneously incorporating them into the host societies

(Basch et al. 1994). For example, Vincentians and Grenadians voluntary organizations in

New York have organized cultural, political, and social activities to connect immigrants

to the nation-building projects of St. Vincent and Grenada while at the same time helping

them to integrate into the U.S. society (Basch et al. 1994).

The organization of transnational political participation contributes to the

reterritorialization of the nation-state but also helps reconfigure transmigrants’ identities

(Basch et al. 1994). In many postcolonial immigrant-sending contexts, the pursuit of

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decolonialization and independence movements often produce a series of nation-building

projects that involve reconstruction of race, class, and culture, which could

simultaneously “reject and reinscribe the global meanings of race developed during

European conquest and colonialism” (Basch et al. 1994, 38). For example, political

leaders in St. Vincent and Grenada, Caribbean countries that obtained independence after

more than three centuries of European colonialism, produced another hegemonic racial

construct based on historical and cultural commonalities to forge an image of the

homogenous and autonomous nation as they rejected the racial and class construct from

the colonial era. Such nation-building projects reconfigured self-identification of

transmigrants from St. Vincent and Grenada in the U.S., who started to see themselves as

nationalists with a sense of national pride to counter the discrimination they experienced

in the U.S. (Basch et al. 1994). Thus, participation in transnational political events helps

transmigrants reimagine a nation-state beyond borders and works as a form of resistance

against discrimination in the host societies (Basch et al. 1994).

In addition to the identity dimension of transnational political activities, migrant

transnational literature that focuses on transmigrants’ subjective experience also shows

how transnational political activities have allowed transmigrants to counter their status

loss in the immigrant-receiving countries by advancing their status and class positions in

the sending-countries (Basch et al. 1994). For example, to avoid being assimilated into

the marginal underclass in the U.S., some Mexican immigrant women have returned to

Mexico, where they took up political leadership roles and sought state development

funds to sustain themselves and to support their husbands who had become breadwinners

in the U.S. (Andrews 2014). Similarly, immigrant men from Latin America and the

Caribbean who experienced downward mobility in the U.S. joined political organizations

in their homelands as a strategy to counter their status loss (Itzigsohn and Giorguli-

Saucedo 2005). In sum, migrant transnationalism literature has shown different ways in

which transnational political activities are beneficial to transmigrants— status

enhancement, class position maintenance, or a form of resistance against discrimination.

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Building on the literature on migrant transnationalism, in this chapter, I understand the

social and political activities that Chinese marriage migrant participated in as

transnational activities, as they are organized to facilitate economic exchange as well as

to harmonize political relations across the Hong Kong and China border. However,

unlike most of the American literature on migrant transnationalism that focuses on

postcolonial immigrant-sending contexts that have undergone the process of

decolonialization and political independence, Hong Kong as a postcolonial city was

returned to China, a country that is often portrayed as the opposite of its ethos of

belonging in the local context (Newendorp 2008). After the political handover, as the

Chinese state reterritorializes the Hong Kong-China border through instilling national

pride and Chinese identity, many Hong Kong people feel an encroachment of the

Chinese state’s power and diminishing political freedom, leading to growing discontent

against its rule. Under a historical moment of heightened anti-China sentiments in Hong

Kong, Chinese marriage migrants’ participation in the Chinese state’s nation-building

projects are considered by the localist groups as a threat to Hong Kong’s liberal values.

By examining Chinese marriage migrants’ participation in transnational activities as well

as the meanings they attached to their participation, I show how, despite the

discriminatory discourses against Chinese immigrants’ political participation perpetuated

by the localist groups, Chinese marriage migrants made use of the space offered by

transnational political activities to develop a sense of belonging to both Hong Kong and

to China. These narratives, however, also reproduce the wider political and moral

ideologies organized by the Hong Kong city-state and the Chinese state.

2 The Political and Moral Landscapes of Chinese

Marriage Migrants’ Transnational Participation

It may sound strange to describe “cross-border activities” between Hong Kong and China

as “transnational,” given Hong Kong’s political reunification with China in 1997.

However, unlike the unification of East and West Germany, where two states merged

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into one political and economic system, or other post-colonial states in the Caribbean that

obtained political independence after long history of colonialism, Hong Kong’s legal and

political framework, “one country, two systems,” continue to reinforce the political and

economic differences with China while submerging its political autonomy under the

“One China” national framework (Newendorp 2008).

Compared to residents in China, however, Hong Kong people do have access to civil

rights, such as freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, with a guarantee that

these rights will remain unchanged for 50 years after reunification under the Basic Law.

As Newendorp (2008: 21) points out, such rights not only distinguish Hong Kong

people’s daily life from their mainland counterparts, but also shape a “rights-based

imaginary” political difference apart from China and informs the “ethos of belonging”—

how one should act, think, and behave in relation to the state and the people around

them—in Hong Kong. Although Hong Kong people were promised gradual access to

universal suffrage after the political handover in 1997, a series of government proposals

have triggered an intensification of democracy movements. These include the proposals

to legislate National Security Law (Article 23) in 2003—an anti-subversion law to

constrain political rights— and to legislate National Education in Hong Kong in 2012.

For many Hong Kong people, these government proposals symbolize an encroachment of

Beijing’s political power and a loss of political freedom in Hong Kong.

Mass mobilization of various social movements, such as the annual July 1 pro-

democracy march, Occupy Central, and anti-national education student movement, has

created momentum for the Umbrella Movement in 2014, garnering supporters of pan-

democratic parties to pressure the Chinese government to grant open nominations for the

election of Chief Executive. Meanwhile, supporters of pro-establishment or pro-Beijing

political camps also started counter-movements. One notable movement is the “Alliance

for Peace and Democracy,” a campaign organized by Robert Chow, a pro-Beijing

journalist and media personality, to gather petition from the so-called “silent majority” to

speak up against the Umbrella Movement (Wong 2014). In October 2014, angry scuffles

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broke out between two political camps in different occupied areas, as anti-Umbrella-

Movement groups dismantled barricades and violently disrupted students’ protest. After

about two-and-a-half-months of sit-in, the police cleared the main protest site, bringing

an end to the Umbrella Movement.

Some student protestors turned to localism after the failure of Umbrella Movement in

bringing changes to the electoral system, believing that a more radical approach to

preserving Hong Kong’s identity is needed; some even call for Hong Kong’s

independence. Although Hong Kong localism is historically rooted in the 1970s, then

expressed in a sense of cultural superiority over Chinese, and it prevailed through

movements of heritage preservation during the 2000s, it was only recently that localism

became the foundation of mobilization for electoral politics, with seven localist political

parties established between 2010 and 2016 (Kwong 2016). Key localist publications also

fueled the rise of localism, calling for Hong Kong to become an autonomous city-state

(Chin 2011) and highlighting Hong Konger as a different ethnic group from mainland

Chinese (Undergrad Editorial Board 2015). The rise of such anti-China sentiments has

shifted the stigma against Chinese from “backward” and “uncivilized” in need of help in

the 1970s to “locusts”— harmful predators that act as a group to suck up nutrients of its

host37—in recent years. As Chinese tourists took advantage of the relaxed immigration

restrictions to travel to Hong Kong for daily and luxury goods consumption, Hong Kong

people expressed this renewed anti-China sentiments through online media—such as

37 “Locust” is a racial slur developed by localist supporters in 2011 to refer to mainland Chinese who had taken opportunities of their tourist visa to give birth in Hong Kong hospitals so that their children could be residents of Hong Kong (The Wall Street Journal 2012). In 2011, more than 35000 babies were born in Hong Kong whose parents were not Hong Kong permanent residents (Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau 2018). The term was later expanded to refer to all mainland Chinese, including tourists who came to Hong Kong.

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making the song Locust World38— as well as through organizing a series of “anti-locust”

protests, demanding mainland tourists to “go back to China” (Lam 2015).

In 2015, a year after the Umbrella Movement, the Hong Kong government proposed a

new electoral system, which expanded the nominating committee base from 800 to 1200

members, with the public vote only at the final stage of the election. The proposal was

rejected by Umbrella Movement leaders and pan-democrats, believing that the mere

increase in the number of committee member would not change the electoral system, as

the committee still has the power to screen out candidates at early stages of the election

process (South China Morning Post 2015). The continuous influence of Umbrella

Movement student leaders, as well as the popularization of localism, triggered pro-

establishment groups, such as the “Alliance for Peace and Democracy,” to organize a

nine-day petition to support the government’s version of electoral reform. WeCare, the

NGO where I did my fieldwork, had mobilized Chinese marriage migrants to volunteer at

the campaigns.

At a historical moment of rising anti-China sentiments amid Chinese state’s effort to

reterritorialize the Hong Kong-China border, Chinese marriage migrants’ participation in

transnational activities, especially those organized by pro-establishment groups,39 have

become the focal point of heated debate. Chinese marriage migrants were considered the

target recipients of Se Chai Beng Jung, a local colloquium referring to the provision of

free meals and food in exchange for political allegiance. In light of Chinese

38 The song Locust World was first published on HKGolden forum by localist supporters, which later went viral and become an internet phenomenon (Iloathelilyallen 2012). 39 In Hong Kong, Chinese marriage migrants also engaged in political activities organized by pro-democracy camps. At least one grassroots Chinese marriage migrant group participated in the Umbrella Movement. Their participation was also reported on the news (Apple Daily 2014).

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government’s recent social management efforts40—a coping mechanism for the Chinese

state to manage heightened social tensions in an era of growing inequality and

unprecedented “mass incidents” (qunti shijian) in China (Fewsmith 2012; Lee and Zhang

2013)— localist supporters in Hong Kong developed the “dilution discourse,” claiming

that Chinese immigrants are political tools of the Chinese government (Standnews 2015),

whose immigration and political participation are ways to drain Hong Kongers’ and

Hong Kong’s liberal values. Scholars have critiqued such “dilution discourse,” arguing

that it is based on the unfound assumption that immigrants will blindly support China’s

authoritarian values and pro-establishment political campaigns (Yep 2016). Within this

political context, Chinese marriage migrants’ participation in transnational activities is

heavily stigmatized. In what follows, after discussing the setting and methods of my

research, I describe the transnational activities that Chinese marriage migrants

40 The concept of social management (shehui guanli) involves a three-level management of social unrest, including “building a more “service-oriented” government to “prevent and reduce” the number of social problems; strengthening of “dynamic management” to “resolve the masses’ legitimate and rational appeals;” and strengthening the party-state’s ability to manage the sudden outbreak of public protests (Fewsmith, 2012, 2). In China, social management has become a coping mechanism for the Chinese state to manage heightened social tensions in an era of growing inequality and unprecedented “mass incidents” (qunti shijian)— a government term for collective actions (Fewsmith 2012), contributing to the “micro-foundation” of Chinese authoritarianism (Lee and Zhang 2013). Three mechanisms built such “micro-foundations”: buying stability, bureaucratic absorption, and revamping patron-clientelism (Lee and Zhang 2013). In an era of rising political unrest, protesters and officials in charge of stability maintenance both benefited materially from Chinese government’s stability work— the former received cash and petty employment from the latter in exchange for compliance, and the latter advanced their careers through meeting social stability targets. When bargaining fails, low-ranked officials would incorporate aggrieved citizens into its bureaucratic procedures, buying time through an arbitrary deployment of institutional processes such as litigation and meditation. To identify potential social unrest, grassroots officials also develop patron-clientelist relations with not only Chinese Communist Party members and civil servants to obtain information about complaints and potential protests, but also to cultivate relationships with the elderly through the provision of neighborhood activities, such as dance classes, enticing them to act as liaison between grassroots authority and the wider community (Lee and Zhang 2013).

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participated in and the diverse meanings that Chinese marriage migrants attached to their

participation.


While doing field work at WeCare, I was invited by Chinese marriage migrants who

were core volunteers to participate in transnational activities. After finishing teaching my

English class, I continued to participate in various activities organized by WeCare.

Established in 2010 by a Hong Kong business tycoon, WeCare has emerged as one of the

biggest NGOs in Hong Kong providing social service to Chinese immigrants, with five

offices locating in different districts in Hong Kong. My field site was the office located

in the eastern district, a neighborhood with Chinese marriage migrants from different

class backgrounds. Besides Hong Kong, WeCare also has its mainland chapters in

Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Quanzhou. Although WeCare is registered as an NGO,

Leung Chun-Ying, the former Chief Executive of Hong Kong, and Zhang Xiaoming, the

former Director of Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in Hong Kong,

serving as its Honorary Patrons. WeCare received Hong Kong government funding to

offer social integration programs at various stage of migration, with the mainland

chapters organizing pre-departure training programs and the Hong Kong offices

providing social integration programs— including Cantonese class, computer class, and

employment seminars—for immigrants from China, including Chinese marriage

migrants and their families. In addition, WeCare also received sponsorship from Chinese

government officials—in the form of personal donations—to organize social and

economic exchange programs for Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong, such as those

discussed in this chapter. I participated in most of the transnational activities discussed in

this chapter, except for signing the petition and helping at booths to mobilize support the

Hong Kong government’s universal suffrage bill.

To understand the diverse meanings of Chinese marriage migrants’ political

participation, I supplement my ethnographic data with 19 in-depth interviews with

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Chinese marriage migrants in Hong Kong who participated in transnational activities

organized by WeCare. These interviews ranged from one to two hours and I conducted

them in Mandarin or Cantonese, depending on the preference of my informants. I

conducted the interviews at my informants’ homes, or in various public spaces, such as

parks, restaurants, and cafes. All names used in this chapter are pseudonyms. Among my

informants, eight came from a middle-class background, and 11 came from a working-

class background. They came from different parts of China. Some hailed from major

cities such as Guangdong and Shanghai; others came from rural towns in Sichuan and

Henan. Most of them went through a series of internal migration, mostly for work, before

marrying and moving to Hong Kong. Many Chinese women met their Hong Kong

husbands at work; others were introduced through family and friends. Before moving to

Hong Kong, the Chinese women I met engaged in diverse forms of employment, ranging

from factory worker and boutique salesgirl to merchandizer and postal worker. At the

time of the interview, some of them have in Hong Kong for as long as 20 years while

others had only lived in Hong Kong for ten months. After coming to Hong Kong,

however, most of them engaged in flexible employment: those from middle-class

backgrounds capitalized on their networks in China and worked as insurance agents;

others set up online retail businesses on WeChat and Taobao, selling cosmetics, clothing,

jewelry from Hong Kong to China. Working-class Chinese marriage migrants, on the

other hand, entered the service industry in Hong Kong as live-out domestic helpers, hotel

janitors, and salesgirls.

The theme of transnationalism developed from the open coding I did when I was working

on Chapter 2. Later I did more focused coding on the types of transnational activities that

WeCare organized, as well as on Chinese marriage migrants’ development of a sense of

belonging in Hong Kong through their political participation.

4 Chinese Marriage Migrants’ Participation in

Transnational Activities

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Besides organizing activities that help Chinese immigrants integrate into Hong Kong

society as discussed in Chapter 2, WeCare also organized transnational activities that

aimed to maintain a harmonious relationship between Hong Kong and China, or, to

reterritorialize the Hong Kong-China border, after the Umbrella Movement. Some of

these activities were organized with other WeCare branches in China, such as exchange

trips to China to instill national pride. Others were organized in association with pro-

establishment political campaigns in Hong Kong. Activities included organizing the

Harmony Carnival to construct the discourse of “harmonious Hong Kong society” after

the Umbrella Movement and mobilizing support for pro-establishment political leaders.

Many Chinese marriage migrants are aware of WeCare’s close affinity with the Chinese

government. As one Chinese marriage migrant told me on my first day at WeCare, “this

place is taken care of by the Chinese government,” referring to the financial support

received by WeCare from the Chinese officials through personal donations.

In what follows, I describe different types of transnational activities organized by

WeCare to i) instill Chinese national pride; ii) construct the discourse of “Harmonious

Hong Kong Society”; and iii) maintain the power of pro-establishment political leaders.

Through these activities, WeCare contributes to the reterritorializing processes that

advance the rule of the Chinese government. However, such reterritorializing process is

often incomplete. While some Chinese marriage migrants were well aware of the

political impact of their participation, most of them used the space for socializing

purposes.

4.1 Unanswered Call to Instill National Pride

WeCare organized exchange trips to different cities in China from time to time to

facilitate participants’ national pride through enhancing their knowledge of China’s

recent economic achievements. Social workers described these trips as “members’

welfare,” as most expenses of the trip, including transport, meals, and accommodations,

were sponsored by WeCare. These trips, together with other resources given to new

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immigrants, such as discounts at a specific supermarket, are considered by pan-

democrats as a trade-off for political allegiance. Within WeCare, Chinese marriage

migrants from both working class and middle-class backgrounds welcomed these trips as

they saw them as benefits that would otherwise be unavailable to them. For Chinese

marriage migrants that were active volunteers at WeCare, these trips were perceived as a

reward for their hard work. As Hua, an active member at WeCare, told me, “We’ve

contributed to the organization in so many ways, they should give us something nice in

return.”

In summer 2015, I went on a two-day trip to Guangzhou, a city in China close to Hong

Kong. The trip was one of the six Hong Kong-Guangzhou trips to facilitates exchange

between China and Hong Kong that brought about 250 participants to China. Initially

intended for “teenagers” in Hong Kong, the trip was designed to bring members of Hong

Kong’s younger generation to China to understand its recent economic development and

to enhance their sense of national belonging to China. It was envisioned as an initiative to

“retain the heart of Hong Kong teenagers” after the Umbrella Movement, as social

workers told me. However, since most of the members at WeCare were Chinese marriage

migrants and their children were too young to understand what was going on, most

participants in this trip were Chinese marriage migrants, with a few bringing their

husbands and children.

Despite the mismatch of participants, an introduction to China’s economic

transformation filled our trip. As our tour bus traveled from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, the

tour guide, who worked for the Guangzhou WeCare branch, talked about the

transformation of Shenzhen from a piece of bare land to a metropolitan city. Pointing to a

piece of land 15 minutes away from Shenzhen Bay, the tour guide said:

This used to be bare land but look at it now, it’s so developed, thanks to the

newly launched “Framework Agreement on Hong Kong-Guangdong

Cooperation.” This is the second phase; the other one is the third phase. In the

future, this would serve as a place to give Hong Kong service, logistic, and

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financial support. The second phase is now in its reclamation stage, and the third

project will last until 2020! As we all know, our honorable Deng Xiaoping

opened the China market in the late 1970s. Shenzhen then transformed into a

special economic zone…Shenzhen is attracting a lot of investment, and a lot of

the investment was from Hong Kong. Do you know the drone company DJI? It’s

established by a Hong Kong young graduate from Polytechnic University in

Hong Kong. He’s only 28 years old, and he opened this company in Shenzhen,

which has a market value of 9 billion!

Despite his enthusiasm and energetic pitch, most Chines marriage migrants were resting

on the bus. Some were texting their family members to make sure their children were

okay; others were chatting or watching videos on their smartphones. Fei Fei, the Chinese

marriage migrant I mentioned in the opening vignette, was sitting next to me. As the bus

departed Shenzhen Bay, she expressed her relief of leaving home for the first time in ten

years, “I’ve spent all my time with the children. I’m so happy that I got to join this trip

without my children because I feel so much more relaxed.” Yet, Fei Fei’s mind was all

about her children. In the next hour or so, all Fei Fei talked about was her children,

wondering if they had eaten their meals, done their homework, and taken their naps.

When she received signals on her phone, she called her children; when not calling, she

was looking at the pictures of her children and barely paid attention to the tour guide.

The two-day trip included visits to the headquarter of a pharmaceutical company, an

elderly home complex, a primary school for children with disabilities, and a business

investment seminar at WeCare’s branch in Guangzhou. Besides showcasing China’s

economic growth and its social initiatives, the trip was also meant to encourage business

investment in China. Greeting us as, Gaai Fong, a Cantonese colloquial term that refers

to people living in the same neighborhood, the social worker at WeCare Guangzhou

encouraged Chinese marriage migrants to invest their money in China:

I called you all Gaai Fong because Guangzhou and Hong Kong share a lot of

similarities! I know most of you were originally from China. This is good because

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that means you all have your networks in China. Now that you are in Hong Kong,

you are in an excellent position. Because you can act as a bridge to bring back

things in Hong Kong that have not yet been picked up by people in China. Now

China has opened-up. Compared to the past, Hong Kong has lost its competitive

edge. The more open China becomes the less competitive Hong Kong will be.

However, Hong Kong still has some advantages, like its international connection

and its exposure to information. But remember, your market is always in China,

not Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s not big enough a market to make you successful.

You should all act as a bridge and bring business to China.

In the next hour or so, the social worker invited an entrepreneur consultant to talk about

the trend of online start-up businesses and encouraged Chinese marriage migrants to set

up their businesses in China. Fei Fei was not impressed, “How can we manage a business

when we are so busy taking care of our kids?” The efforts to reterritorialize Hong Kong-

China border were not successful, as it did not address Chinese marriage migrants’

gendered needs of childcare.

At the end of the talk—and every activity of the trip— social workers pulled out a large

banner that read “A Model Project that Enhances Cross-border Exchanges among Hong

Kong and Mainland Teenagers, Explores Business Opportunities in Mainland”

(xianggang qingnian yu neidi qingnian jiaoliu beishang fazhan shifan xiangmu) for a

group photo. A reporter from Wen Wei Po—a pro-Beijing news agency based in Hong

Kong—who had been following us throughout the trip then interviewed select

participants about their experience and their perceptions of China’s economic

development. The day after our trip, WenWei Pao published an article, titled “Hong

Kong teenagers went on an exchange trip to Guangzhou, looking for opportunities and

collaborations.” The news featured interviews with one young-looking Chinese marriage

migrant who talked about how she was impressed by China’s economic development,

how she believed that both China and Hong Kong should further their collaboration to

achieve economic prosperity, and how she hoped to have more exchange opportunities

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like this one. Chinese marriage migrants featured in the news thus became the face of the

“Hong Kong teenager” to reproduce a discourse of harmonious relations across the Hong

Kong-China border.

4.2 Constructing a Discourse of “Harmonious Hong Kong

Society”

In addition to activities that facilitated social exchange, Chinese marriage migrants also

participated in social events organized by WeCare to construct a discourse of

“harmonious Hong Kong society” to reinstate the “culture of depoliticization” (Lam

2004, 221)—a discourse developed by the British colonial government— in Hong Kong

after the Umbrella Movement. Pro-establishment politicians used the discourse of

“violence” to describe the Umbrella Movement (Chan 2014) and adopted the discourse

of “love,” “care,” and “harmony” when organizing community activities to support the

government’s action against the students’ movement. For example, on its fifth

anniversary, WeCare organized a large scale “Harmony Carnival” at Tamar Park41 with

the theme of “Love with Care,” inviting key government officials, such as the former

Chief Executive, the Deputy Chair of Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government

in the Hong Kong SAR government, and the former Chair of Labor and Welfare

Department, to speak at the event.

In July, I was invited to participate in “Harmony Carnival,” together with a hundred of

Chinese marriage migrants and their families. Ah Hong, a Chinese marriage migrant

from Guangdong, was an active member at WeCare and was asked to be one of the group

leaders of this trip. She called me —and other participants in her group— the night

before to remind us about the event and asked us to bring an umbrella “to prevent

41 Tamar Park is a public park adjacent to the Central Government Complex and the Legislative Council Complex in Admiralty in Hong Kong. It is also one of the locations that student activists occupied during the Umbrella Movement.

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sunstrokes” but cautioned us not to bring a yellow one to avoid association with the

Wong Saam Gwan, or the “Yellow Shirt,” as Ah Hong called it, referring to the student

activists in the Umbrella Movement.42 On the day of the event, WeCare social workers

and participants shared a tour bus to go from the WeCare center to Admiralty. On the

bus, Ah Hong moved back and forth, giving each of us a name tag, a bus number, and a

blue jacket—the color symbolizing government supporters during the Umbrella

Movement.

When we were walking to the event site, Ah Hong saw a Chinese marriage migrant

wearing a yellow T-shirt and holding a yellow umbrella. She turned to her and yelled,

“Don’t you know that we were not allowed to bring a yellow umbrella? Now you even

dressed in yellow!” “Yea, what’s wrong with that?” “Just put on the blue jacket and don’t

use the umbrella; otherwise people will think that you are one of those Wong Saam

Gwan! Didn’t your group leader tell you on the phone?” “No, I didn’t get any phone

call.” “Everybody received the call. You are not supposed to bring a yellow umbrella!”

At Tamar, where the Hong Kong government’s building is located, WeCare set up a

stage surrounded by game booths designed by different local branches of WeCare and

other pro-establishment social service agencies. Instant photo booths were also set up,

with a frame that read “Celebrating Hong Kong’s Harmony.” Chinese marriage migrants

as well as ethnic minorities—WeCare’s primary service target— filled the space, most of

them were in their forties; some brought their kids and husbands, others came alone.

Near the harbor front was a large stage with a big screen, where two hosts ran the

program, with singers and dancers backstage waiting for their turn to perform. All seats

were reserved for government officials, who did not come until 4 p.m.

42As student protestors used the yellow umbrella to shield tear gas attacks by the police, “yellow umbrella” and the color “yellow” have become the symbol of Umbrella Movement and its supporters; in opposition to the color “blue” which is used to symbolize the police force and hence the Hong Kong government.

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Around noon, the heat at Tamar became unbearable, and many participants escaped the

sun by standing in the shade away from the stage. Some Chinese marriage migrants

started to get impatient and wanted to leave. “No! You can’t leave yet!” Ah Hong, our

group leader, said as she was changing a diaper for her son at WeCare’s game booth. Her

husband, a grey-haired retired civil servant in his sixties, went to redeem free ice-cream

for them. “We were instructed not to leave until the major event!” Ah Hong explained.

The “major event” Ah Hong referred to was a performance that involved using our

bodies to form the letter “H” to break the Guinness World Record. But some Chinese

marriage migrants no longer wanted to stay. One of them complained, “I have no idea

why I’m here. Actually, what’s today for?” She then told us she was invited to the event

by her neighbor who told her today was a “one-day tour at Admiralty for fun!” Ah Hong

then enticed her with some tickets to redeem free snacks and convinced her to stay

longer. After waiting for another hour, the crowd slowly entered a designated area for the

Guinness Record breaking event. Each of us was given a tag earlier that showed where

we were supposed to stand. By 4:30 p.m., we were instructed to put on the blue jacket

and to form the letter “H,” juxtaposing a banner with a big heart and a letter “K.” Then,

we were asked to look at a drone camera hovering above us for six minutes. A Chinese

marriage migrant next to me complained, “Okay, this is why they want us here. We’ve

been here for two hours, just for six minutes!”

The next day, pro-Beijing newspaper agencies, Wen Wei Pao, published an article with

the title, “Thousands of Hong Kong-loving people breaking Guinness World Record

together by forming a letter!” The article focused on how the Hong Kong government

was trying hard to create a “harmonious” society after the political turmoil, citing the

carnival as an example of how the Hong Kong government was working with non-profit

organizations like WeCare to help new immigrants, low-income groups, and ethnic

minorities in Hong Kong. The article also quoted the Chairman of WeCare, a business

tycoon who was also a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s

Political Consultative Conference, who pointed out that “too much effort was wasted on

political issues” and encouraged “Hong Kong people to shift their focus and resources to

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develop the economy and to care about disadvantaged group to cultivate a harmonious

society.”

Such discourse echoes with “the culture of depoliticization” (Lam 2004, 221) developed

by the British colonial government, which made Hong Kong people to believe that “they

took no interests in politics” while casting Hong Kong as a “stable, secure, and law-

abiding” place (Lam 2004, 221) that could easily be undermined by any political

insurgency (Goodstadt 2005; Newendorp 2008). While Hong Kong people had

consistently challenged “the culture of depoliticization” in different social movements

(Lam 2004), the discourse had been consistently adopted by politicians—including

WeCare—to discourage the political participation of Hong Kong people to maintain the

hegemonic power of status quo.

4.3 Maintaining the Power of Pro-Establishment Political

Leaders

Besides participating in social activities that formed the material basis for the discourse

of “harmonious Hong Kong society,” Chinese marriage migrants were also politically

mobilized by pro-establishment political parties through WeCare. WeCare was one of the

organizations that worked with Robert Chow’s “Alliance for Peace and Democracy”

(The Alliance), a pro-Beijing political alliance established to counter the Occupy Central

movement and to support different Hong Kong government’s initiatives. When the

government proposed the electoral reform after the failure of the Umbrella Movement,

the Alliance organized a nine-day petition to garner public support for the bill. To a

certain extent, any activities held at WeCare could be a potential site for mobilization. As

described in the opening vignette, my English class was sometimes used as a space for

mobilization. A few days after of Fei Fei’s intervention in my class, the Alliance

announced in the news that they had gathered a total of 1.2 million signatures to support

the Hong Kong government’s universal suffrage bill and urged the pro-democratic

legislative council members to adhere to the voice of the public (Li 2015).

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After the defeat of government’s universal suffrage bill at the legislative council,43

WeCare organized a debriefing seminar “Social and Political Focus Group” to appease

its supporters and to mobilize them for future political campaigns. WeCare invited Mr.

Lau, a district council member to talk about the failure of the pro-establishment

legislators to uphold the vote for electoral reform. Dressed in smart casual short sleeve

shirt and light brown pants, Lau explained the recent walk-out of the pro-establishment

political leaders at the legislature meeting, hence failing to vote in supportive of the

Beijing-backed electoral reform. While condemning the democratic party for not voting

for the reform, Lau also called the pro-establishment camp “stupid,” saying what they did

was “a mistake that one shouldn’t make.” He said, “I had spent the last 20 months

lobbying public support for the reform, see, I got so tanned from standing outside of the

legislative council, and they walked out of the room and didn’t vote!”

Ah Hong—our group leader at the Carnival—and her husband, who were both active

members at WeCare, shared Lau’s sentiment and said that they were very disappointed

with the pro-establishment camp. To appease their emotions, Lau said, “Unlike the

democrats, who are used to walking out and are familiar with the flow, it’s the first time

that we walked out of the chamber! Not that I’m giving them an excuse, they really need

to reflect on their mistakes, but it’s true that they weren’t prepared and poorly

communicated.” Lau encouraged the audience to continuously support the pro-

establishment group and asked them to show their support for the next district election in

November. Besides a few attentive audience members, such as Ah Hong and her

husband, however, Lau’s speech mostly fell on deaf ears as most Chinese marriage

migrants were looking at their phones rather than paying attention.

43 On the day that voting for electoral reform took place, 31 pro-establishment lawmakers walked out of the legislative chamber just seconds before the vote, claiming that they wanted to “wait for Uncle Fat” to vote in unity. However, they failed to garner enough council members to stall the voting procedure, and the bill was denied with only eight supporting votes.

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5 Chinese Marriage Migrants’ Narratives of their

Political Participation

Working closely with the Chinese government, WeCare organized activities to

reterritorialize the Hong Kong-China border, mobilizing Chinese marriage migrants and

their families as participants. However, as I mentioned above, such reterritorializing

efforts were often incomplete, as most Chinese marriage migrants used such space for

socializing purposes instead of adhering to its political agenda. In this section, I further

delve into the diverse meanings that Chinese marriage migrants attached to their

participation in transnational activities, particularly in the political activities organized by

WeCare.

Despite their different class backgrounds, their childcare responsibility and unemployed

status produced a similar condition for them to participate in WeCare’s political

activities. While the popular “dilution discourse” (Standnews 2015) often treats Chinese

immigrants as political puppets of the Chinese government, Chinese marriage migrants’

own narratives contain multiple layers of expectation and imagination about how to

integrate into the Hong Kong society. Some Chinese marriage migrants understand their

political participation as a form of community work or as an opportunity to rebuild Hong

Kong while others took it as a process to reconstruct their identities as Hong Konger or

as Chinese. Their narratives are informed by multiple moral discourses of Hong Kong

civility, to be contributive, to be fair, to be law-abiding (Lam 2004; Newendorp 2008),

perpetuated by the Hong Kong city-state as well as Chinese state’s national ideology. By

drawing upon these discourses, Chinese marriage migrants resist the anti-immigrant

discourse developed by the localist movement while simultaneously reinforcing the

wider moral landscape of Hong Kong and Chinese nationalism.

5.1 Developing a Sense of Belonging to Hong Kong through

Community Work

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Contrary to the popular belief that Chinese marriage migrants are used as a political tool

by the Chinese government to “dilute Hong Kong’s values” or to “stabilize China-Hong

Kong relations” (Standnews 2015), many Chinese marriage migrants understood their

participation as volunteer work through which they gained confidence, which allowed

them to contribute to Hong Kong society. It was a way for them to gain a sense of

belonging in Hong Kong.

Hailed from Guangzhou, Ah Shan, a 46-year-old working-class Chinese marriage

migrant, spoke Cantonese, but her mother-in-law asked her not to interact with strangers

so that neighbors would not know her mainland Chinese identity. Ah Shan used to be

very talkative before her migration, but now she felt ashamed of her background. She

used to hide her “two-way permit” (temporary spousal visa) fearing that people would

know about her mainland background and think that she came to Hong Kong to

“compete for welfare,” an anti-mainland Chinese discourse that had gained popularity in

recent years with the rise of localist movement amid anti-China politics in Hong Kong

(Sautman and Yan 2015). The family lived off Ah Shan husband’s retirement fund,

which gave them about HKD 10000 (USD 1270) per month. Even though they were

quite happy with what they had, Ah Shan learned that a job was still important. However,

with only a high school diploma, Ah Shan found getting a job difficult. With no job and

no friends, Ah Shan felt isolated, until she joined WeCare. Ah Shan learned about

WeCare through a local supermarket, where she saw a notice that gave her a discount for

being a member. After she registered as a member, Ah Shan was invited to volunteer to

care for the elderly; later, as she became a core member, she was invited to participate in

the signature drive to support Robert Chow’s campaign for the Hong Kong government’s

universal suffrage bill.

Ah Shan enjoyed helping others, including vulnerable groups such as the elderly, but also

social workers at WeCare, whose transnational activities relied on the participation of

Chinese marriage migrants. When Ah Shan talked about her political participation, she

often conflated her experiences with other volunteer work, such as visiting elderly homes

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and doing membership drives. However, such conflation is not a coincidence. At

WeCare, social workers often described participating in political activities as “volunteer

work.” They also mobilized Chinese marriage migrants during other voluntary occasions

such as visiting the elderly.

Ah Shan was very grateful to be able to participate in various activities at WeCare. Not

only had she made more friends and learned how to speak with confidence, but she felt

like now she had “become part of Hong Kong society.” Ah Shan felt that she had

enjoyed much of Hong Kong’s welfare, such as the public housing that she lived in, and

she wanted to be a “useful person in the society”:

I like being part of a group, and I think helping at WeCare is my contribution to

the Hong Kong society. When I came to Hong Kong from China, I brought here

nothing, yet I have a place to live, a park to visit. I am using Hong Kong’s

resources. Although I don’t have a job, I am still contributing to the society

because I’m helping other people. That makes me feel like I’m more entitled to

the resources that I’m using. If other people questioned that, I could tell them that

I contributed to Hong Kong loud and proud!

The narrative of “contributing to Hong Kong society” echoes with the Hong Kong

government’s independent market narrative described in Chapter 2—a normative

narrative of belonging that emphasizes employment and productive labor as the key for

belonging in Hong Kong society. Since Ah Shan had difficulty getting a job in Hong

Kong, she defined her “contribution” not in terms of paid productive labor, but through

being active in the community. By drawing upon the independent market narrative to

describe her political participation, Ah Shan develops a sense of belonging in Hong Kong

while at the same time resists the anti-immigrant discourse that stigmatized Chinese

marriage migrants as “lazy” and excludes them from becoming “Hong Kongers”

(Sautman and Yan 2015).

5.2 Fighting for Peace

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Unlike Ah Shan, whose narratives were informed by the independent market narrative,

other Chinese marriage migrants drew upon pro-establishment politicians’ visions of

Hong Kong in their discussion of political participation. They talked about their

engagement in politically active terms, through the language of bringing back “peace”

and “harmony” to Hong Kong after the Umbrella Movement.

Before joining WeCare, Yun, a 40-year-old working-class Chinese marriage migrant

from Sichuan, had volunteered at a neighborhood women’s organization, where most

social workers were pro-democrats, or in Yun’s words, “belonged to the yellow-ribbon

camp.” Like Ah Shan and May, Yun wanted to do some volunteer work because she was

unemployed at the time and wanted to meet more friends in her neighborhood. Yun first

helped at a children’s art class, but later, as her communication skills improved, she was

involved in more outreach work, such as organizing membership drives. At the height of

the Umbrella Movement, Yun witnessed a disagreement between a pro-establishment

passer-by and social workers of the women’s organization:

The social workers there were yellow-ribbon supporters. They wore yellow-

ribbon pins and even brought yellow tents to the membership recruitment booth.

Once, there was a middle-aged man who came to argue with them; he’s on the

government side. The social workers didn’t agree with the man, and they started

to point fingers and move their fists…I don’t think social workers should act like

this, but they acted like the violent ones on the news.

Yun’s understanding of the Umbrella Movement supporters as “violent” was informed

by her personal experience but was also shaped by the popularization of the discourse on

violence adopted by the pro-establishment groups as they criticized the Umbrella

Movement (Chan 2014). In actuality, violent encounters, such as the Fishball Riots—a

violent clash between the police and localist groups—also contributed to Yun’s fear. Her

personal experience, news about the violent outbreaks, as well as pro-establishment

politicians’ adoption of the discourse of peace and anti-violence to evoke an image of

Hong Kong as an orderly and lawful city—a legacy of colonial government to

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distinguish Hong Kong’s stability and superiority in contrast to China (Lam 2004)—all

informed Yun’s understanding of the political situation.

However, Yun’s fear of “violence” was further complicated by her anxiety that

volunteering for the pro-democratic camp would jeopardize her immigration status and

her future visits to China:

I was really scared. When I witnessed the fight, the first thing that came to my

mind was, what would happen to my immigration status if the media captured the

fight and the Chinese government officials found out that I’m volunteering at a

pro-democratic women’s organization? Would they prohibit my entrance to

mainland China? Just like what they did to some democrats?

Yun’s fear points to the salience of the state in controlling the movement of people

across borders, especially in the case of China where dissidents are often not allowed to

enter or leave its territories. Frightened, Yun later turned to WeCare, participating in all

sorts of volunteer activities. Believing that the “yellow ribbon group” was “violent,” Yun

frequently sent messages of support on WeCare’s Wechat group, instructing other

volunteers to calm down when they faced confrontation from the opposite camp, “we

need to stay calm because we are fighting for peace!”

5.3 Becoming a Hong Konger

While some Chinese marriage migrants understood their political activities as a form of

community work and a political opportunity to rebuild Hong Kong, others took it as an

opportunity to learn about the political culture of Hong Kong, which is part and parcel of

their journey of becoming a Hong Konger.

May is a 33-year-old middle-class Chinese marriage migrant from Guangdong. After

graduating university, May worked as a merchandiser in Shenzhen, where she met her

husband who, after graduating from a Canadian university, opened a business in

Guangdong. The couple dated for two years, tied the knot, and moved to Hong Kong

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when May got pregnant, believing that Hong Kong was a better place for their children’s

education. May’s daughter was born prematurely and suffered from many medical

complications. To take care of her daughter, May stayed at home full-time and hired a

domestic helper. After her daughter went to kindergarten, May joined WeCare, because

she wanted to make friends and learn more about Hong Kong. Following social workers

at WeCare, May visited the elderly in the neighborhood twice a month. Later, as May

became an active volunteer, she was recruited to help with political activities, including

the petition for Robert Chow’s campaign. May volunteered at the campaign because she

had never experienced it in China:

This is all new to me. I have not experienced this kind of campaign in China, so I

wanted to see what’s going on. I wanted to have the experience. I’m a Hong

Konger now so I should know what’s happening, right?

May understood her participation as gaining knowledge about local political culture in

Hong Kong, which is part of the process of “becoming a Hong Konger.” However, this

does not mean that she conformed to the political view of the campaign. Unlike Ah Shan,

who did not talk about the political dimension of her participation, May was adamant that

she did not support the government’s universal suffrage bill even though she had

participated:

I know the universal suffrage bill was not a true democracy. The government said

it was, but the Hong Kong government nowadays is just a puppet of Beijing. I

volunteered because I was curious about what’s going on.

Contrary to the “dilution discourse” or the “stability discourse” that treats Chinese

immigrants as “tools” of Chinese government political agenda (Standnews 2015), May’s

case shows that participating in the pro-establishment campaign does not necessarily

mean conforming to the political agenda.

In the end, May helped at the petition booth only for four hours and quit after learning

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that all the volunteers could receive remuneration of HKD 50 (USD 6) per hour. May

explained to me that “volunteer work should come from the heart” and believed that such

payment was a form of “bribery.” The remuneration WeCare paid to volunteers to

achieve its political goal reminded May of the unfair treatment she experienced in China

when she was a little girl:

It happened a long time ago, but I can still remember it today. I was in primary

school, and our teacher came to our classroom and asked a student to stand up.

She said, “Chan Xiao Fang, please stand up, I want to know who you are!” I was

surprised because that classmate was not particularly bright. It was not until later

that I learned the student’s father was the secretary of our local government. I

can’t believe that my teacher did that. Our teacher was supposed to teach us

integrity, but that teacher was teaching us to treat privileged people better!

Throughout my childhood, I’ve encountered unfair treatment like this, so I’m

disappointed with China’s system. When I came to Hong Kong, I thought Hong

Kong was different. But it seems to me that Hong Kong’s getting more and more

like China these days!

May’s case shows that Chinese marriage migrants’ political participation is often

complicated by their status as an immigrant as well as their expectations of the host

society. In explaining her withdrawal, May pointed out her expectations of Hong Kong

as being “fairer” compared to a “corrupt” China, a discourse developed during the

colonial era to distinguish Hong Kong’s moral superiority over China (Newendorp

2008). By drawing upon such discourse, May simultaneously reinforced an ethos of

belonging constructed by the British colonial government and Hong Kong people that

highlights Hong Kong’s moral superiority over China through principles of

accountability, fairness, and justice (Lam 2004; Newendorp 2008). The withdrawal from

“corrupt” campaign practice also allowed May to construct a Hong Kong identity that

conforms to the ethos of belonging described by the colonial discourse.

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5.4 Reaffirming Chinese Identity

Some Chinese marriage migrants drew upon the Chinese state’s national ideology that

highlights national unity and homogeneity when talking about their political

participation. For them, participating in political activities organized by WeCare allowed

them to reaffirm their Chinese identity to resist identifying with Hong Kongers.

Ah Hong, a 46-year-old working class Chinese marriage migrant from Guangxi, actively

involved in WeCare’s social and political activities. After dating her husband for a year,

the couple got married and Ah Hong moved to Hong Kong in 2003 to stay with her

husband while waiting for her Hong Kong residency. For five years, she could not go to

work due to immigration restrictions. She read the news every day and learned about the

political debates in Hong Kong and was disappointed that Hong Kong people were

increasingly identifying themselves as “Hong Kongers” more than “Chinese” (Standnews

2017).

After joining WeCare, Ah Hong became particularly vocal in supporting the

government’s electoral reform. She volunteered for Robert Chow’s petition campaign for

the entire week. She also brought other Chinese marriage migrant friends to stand outside

the legislative council to support the government’s policy address:

I wanted to support it because it’s a way to stabilize Hong Kong’s society. Aren’t

we all Chinese? Why do we keep fighting ourselves? Mainland China is our

family. The Hong Kong government should support the Chinese government.

In addition to the pro-establishment politicians’ discourse of maintaining stability, Ah

Hong also drew upon the national ideology that unifies all people in Hong Kong as

Chinese to describe her political participation. By adhering to the Chinese state’s national

ideology and reaffirming her Chinese identity, Ah Hong orients her national belonging

towards China.

At a historical moment where localists defined Hong Konger as an ethnic group that is

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separate from Chinese, Ah Hong’s narrative of national belonging could arguably be a

form of resistance and a challenge to her exclusion. As Ah Hong talked about her

political participation, she recalled a first-hand experience in a shopping mall where she

was asked by a stranger to “go back to China”:

I was bringing my two-year-old son to use the washroom in a shopping mall. He

was just two years old, and he couldn’t go to the men’s room by himself, so I

brought him to the lady’s room. But this woman stopped me and yelled, “this is

the lady’s room!” and then said, “go back to China!” I was so angry! Everybody

is from somewhere else. Maybe she’s born in Hong Kong, but her parents or

grandparents were from China too! Hong Kong is part of China and I don’t

understand why people treat us like this. Those “Yellow Shirts” were aweful, and

they shouldn’t do things like this.

Conflating the stranger with participants in the Umbrella Movement, Ah Hong felt that

Umbrella Movement was to blame for the rise of anti-mainland sentiments in Hong

Kong. By identifying herself as Chinese—instead of Hong Konger—Ah Hong resists the

definition of Hong Kongers as a separate ethnic group from Chinese and reimagines a

reterritorialized Chinese nation-state of which Hong Kong is a part. As Ah Hong

challenges the localist definition, however, Ah Hong also perpetuates the Chinese state’s

nationalist ideology.

6 Conclusion

At a historical moment when Hong Kong’s localism is on the rise and discontent towards

the Chinese state continues to grow, Chinese marriage migrants across different class

backgrounds are mobilized to participate in transnational activities organized by

immigration organizations that have a close tie with the Chinese state. These activities

include trips to China to instill national pride, social events that construct a discourse of

“harmonious Hong Kong society,” and political campaigns that mobilize support for pro-

establishment political parties in Hong Kong. Despite their different class backgrounds,

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Chinese marriage migrants shared a marginal position in the labor market and the

gendered responsibility of childcare. These shaped their unemployed status, which

allowed them to participate in transnational political activities in the first place.

Unlike studies conducted among Mexican and Latin American transmigrants, where both

men and women gained status as they took up leadership positions in transnational

political activities (Andrews 2014; Itzigsohn and Giorguli-Saucedo 2005), Chinese

marriage migrants in this study did not rise to the role of political leadership. At a

historical moment of contentious relations across the China-Hong Kong border, Chinese

marriage migrants’ transnational political participation is considered by localist groups as

threatening to the liberal values of “Hong Kong,” adding to their already marginalized

position in Hong Kong society. Against multiple discriminatory discourses, the

transnational political activities offered a space that enabled Chinese marriage migrants

to articulate their belonging to both Hong Kong and to China. These spaces also allowed

them to enjoy one-off benefits, such as free trips to China and socializing opportunities

with other Chinese marriage migrants and social workers.

While the popular “dilution discourse” often treats Chinese immigrants as political

puppets of the Chinese state (Standnews 2015), Chinese marriage migrants’ own

narratives contain multiple layers of expectations of how to live as respectable citizens in

Hong Kong. Some redefined their political participation as a form of community work;

some saw it as a chance to restore peace and harmony in Hong Kong after the Umbrella

Movement; others took it as a process to reconstruct their identities as “Hong Konger” or

to reaffirm themselves as “Chinese” amidst the localist movement. Their diverse

narratives are shaped by the various ethos of belonging in Hong Kong. Some are

advocated by the Hong Kong government, such as the independent market narrative, the

colonial discourse that prioritizes economic stability over political advocacy. Others are

informed Chinese state’s national ideology which homogenizes all Hong Kong’s people

as Chinese. By drawing upon these discourses, Chinese marriage migrants resist the anti-

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immigrant discourse developed by the localist movement while simultaneously

reinforcing the broader moral landscape of Hong Kong and Chinese nationalism.

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Chapter 5 Conclusion

This dissertation has examined the regulation and negotiation of Chinese marriage

migrants’ belonging in Hong Kong and Taiwan. As Chinese women married across the

two contested borders, their lived experiences are situated within the frontiers of intimate

family lives but also historically grounded political struggles and renewed local

discontent against China’s political encroachment. The struggles of belonging faced by

Chinese marriage migrants illuminates the norms, values, and ideologies upheld by

citizens and the states of Hong Kong and Taiwan. As they yearn to integrate into the

Hong Kong and Taiwanese societies, some Chinese marriage migrants mobilized

hegemonic discourses of belonging to make meanings of their everyday lives, others

contested their exclusion by redefining their identities and in the process, producing new

layers of inequalities against less-privileged Chinese marriage migrants.

Both Hong Kong and Taiwanese states have organized the narratives of Chinese

marriage migrants belonging within institutionally grounded gendered norms. In Hong

Kong, the market logic adopted by the British colonial government continues to shape

how the Hong Kong SAR government understands immigration, how it organizes

immigrant integration programs, and how it defines Chinese marriage migrants’

belonging today. Chinese marriage migrants’ immigration to Hong Kong was described

by the state as a solution to resolve the productivity crisis against the backdrop of low

fertility. At the service encounter, such market logic was translated into a market

independent narrative, positioning Chinese marriage migrants within the labor market

and defined their belonging with their productivity without carefully considering their

childcare responsibilities. As described in Chapter 2, social workers called upon Chinese

marriage migrants to enter the labor market to be “independent” and “self-reliant”

citizens of Hong Kong. For working-class Chinese marriage migrants, this was narrated

through the normative ideology of self-reliance to prevent them from potentially

applying for social assistance. For middle-class Chinese marriage migrants whose

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credentials were not recognized in Hong Kong and who experienced downward social

mobility, social workers encouraged them to swallow their pride and to enter the labor

market without addressing the structural barriers that had constrained their job options.

Outside the integration program, the market independent narrative was adopted by some

Chinese marriage migrants to make sense of their participation in community work,

albeit with a slight twist. As discussed in Chapter 4, for those who were unable to find

employment in Hong Kong, unpaid community volunteer work was understood as their

contribution to Hong Kong society. At a political moment of unrealized democracy

dreams, deteriorating freedom, eroding welfare, and skyrocketing property prices in

Hong Kong, Chinese immigrants had become scapegoats for all sorts of frustrations

against Hong Kong and China’s governance. The adoption of the market independent

narrative by Chinese marriage migrants is arguably a form of discursive resistance to the

anti-immigrant discourse that excludes their belonging on the basis of their being

“locusts” who devour local resources.

In addition to the market independent narrative, Chinese marriage migrants also drew on

the ethos of belonging in Hong Kong in a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiments. As

discussed in Chapter 4, Chinese marriage migrants from both working-class and middle-

class backgrounds participated in transnational activities organized by WeCare, such as

trips to China to instill national pride, carnivals to construct a discourse of “harmonious

Hong Kong society,” as well as political campaigns and seminars to stabilize the power

of pro-establishment political groups. While their political participation could be seen as

a sign of successful integration under the liberal value of Hong Kong, at a time of rising

anti-China sentiments, Chinese marriage migrants’ political participation in fact

marginalized them further, as they were considered by many locals as puppets of the

Chinese government that was intervening in the political affairs of Hong Kong. In light

of various discourses of exclusion, some Chinese marriage migrants mobilized the

culture of depoliticization discourse, a discourse constructed by the colonial government,

to rationalize their political participation to “restore peace” after the Umbrella

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Movement. Others understood their participation as a way to reconstruct their identities

as Hong Kongers or as Chinese. In doing so, Chinese marriage migrants reaffirmed their

sense of belonging on the one hand, meanwhile reproducing the wider moral landscapes

of Hong Kong on the other.

In Taiwan, Chinese marriage migrants were understood by the state primarily as a

solution to resolve the purported “national security crisis” of low fertility. The framing of

low fertility as a “national security” issue is arguably a result of Taiwan’s political status

as an unrecognized nation in the international polity, despite its history of nation-

building. As Taiwanese women went on what has been called a “womb-strike” (Lan

2008, 842), immigration officers turned their focus to marriage migrants, both from

China and Southeast Asia, whom they encouraged to give birth to children to “save

Taiwan’s future.” Such mobilization presented a sharp contrast to other state actors, who

had discouraged marriage migrants from childbearing out of the fear that they would

produce lower the “quality” of Taiwanese citizens, and by extension the Taiwanese

nation (Lan 2008). Despite the dissonance and contradiction of the state’s narratives,

reproductive labor continued to be an element through which the state organized the

belonging of marriage migrants. As discussed in Chapter 2, such familial logic was

translated into a deferential familial narrative in various integration programs. Based on

the assumption that marriage migrants married their husbands for economic reasons, in

the Family Program, Chinese marriage migrants were seen through nationality-based

stereotypes as “forceful” women who needed to learn to be “loving” and “caring” and to

defer to their husbands and mothers-in-law. At employment seminars, Chinese marriage

migrants’ paid labor was described as secondary to, or an extension of, their familial

responsibility as mothers.

When facing the stigma of dalumei that cast them as immoral others in Taiwan, Chinese

marriage migrants’ performance of deference or other gendered morality associated with

their familial duties allowed them to restore a sense of self-worth and to earn respect

from their family members, especially from their mothers-in-law. However, the stigma of

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dalumei is “stickier” for Chinese marriage migrants perceived as being from working-

class backgrounds. As discussed in Chapter 3, class markers, such as educational

background and professional job experience, attributes of middle-class Chinese marriage

migrants, were translated into love-based marriages, which are an ideal in Taiwanese

society. In everyday interactions, middle-class Chinese marriage migrants were seen as

“good immigrants’ who were different from dalumei, who were considered lazy, money-

oriented, and promiscuous. In a context where the Taiwanese state used multiculturalism

as a strategy for nation-building, with programs that welcome immigrants and encourage

immigrant integration, the discourse of dalumei did not fade away but rather was

reworked to form the category of “good immigrants” in everyday interactions while

imposing the stigma on the body of working-class Chinese marriage migrants. As they

searched for moral acceptance, middle-class Chinese marriage migrants also

distinguished themselves from dalumei, thereby crossing the gendered and national

boundary to ally themselves with a constructed notion of Taiwanese.

Similar to Hong Kong, where participation in community volunteer work had allowed

Chinese marriage migrants to develop a sense of belonging, in Taiwan, community work

enabled Chinese marriage migrants, especially middle-class ones, to become and to be

seen as a selfless subject. Unlike working-class Chinese marriage migrants who jumped

into the labor market after migrating to Taiwan, middle-class Chinese marriage migrants

I met often took up community work to familiarize themselves with Taiwanese people

and Taiwanese culture. Because community work is unpaid, the attached morality of

selfless contribution allowed middle-class Chinese women to distinguish themselves

from the figure of dalumei and to present themselves as a moral figure, which, in some

cases, rewarded them with status and job opportunities.

119

1 Differentiated Immigrant Belonging at Geopolitically

Contentious Times

The three chapters in this dissertation show how immigrants’ belonging is a regulated but

also a contested process. In the era of global migration, the state remains an important

institution in defining what it means to belong to a given political territory. In everyday

interaction, the project of exclusion is enacted by various actors, such as social workers,

employers, or family members. Chinese marriage migrants made claims of belonging by

drawing upon the competing ethos of belonging as well as the moral meanings attached

to their gendered labor. The Chinese marriage migrants I met shared gender and

nationality but were differentiated by class. By attending to how class interacts with

gender and nationality in producing differentiated regulatory practices and multiple

narratives of belonging, this dissertation illustrated the complexity of immigrant

belonging in an era of global migration amidst geopolitical tension.

In contemporary Hong Kong, the othering of Chinese marriage migrants represents a

continuity of the historical marginalization of Chinese illegal immigrants in Hong Kong.

Although neither the British colonial government or the Hong Kong SAR government

have proclaimed Hong Kong as a nation, the adoption of liberal definition of “self-

reliance” or “independence” to paint the image of ideal citizens who are always

productive, disembodied, and “enterprising” (Ku and Pun 2004, 7), has produced a sense

of “Hong Kong superiority” over Chinese. Localist groups developed in recent years

have partly taken up such ideology in developing the grassroots nation-building project

of “Hong Kong independence” that exclude Chinese immigrants, labeling them as locusts

who came to Hong Kong to drain public resources. In 2014, when the Equal

Opportunities Commission initiated a public consultation to revise its policies on ethnic

discrimination to include discrimination against nationality and residency statuses, Hong

Kong localist groups vehemently condemned such revisions, fearing that they would

further erode the freedom of speech and that any criticism against mainlanders could

120

potentially be considered as a form of discrimination.44 They were also concerned that

Chinese immigrants would gain access to various resources that are in short supply, such

as housing, before they obtain permanent residency.

The unfortunate alignment of nationalist ideology and market logic has operated together

to form the discursive national boundary of Hong Kong against China. Not only do these

discourses homogenize Chinese marriage migrants’ lived experiences, but they have also

produced different layers of marginalization for Chinese marriage migrants from

different class backgrounds. At the service encounter, working-class Chinese marriage

migrants were constructed as “low-quality” citizens who needed to learn to be

independent; middle-class marriage migrants, on the other hand, were made into “low-

quality” citizens as social workers turned a blind eye to the structural barriers that

constrained their career options. By delving into the different ways in which the

independent market narrative operates for Chinese marriage migrants from working and

middle-class backgrounds, this dissertation illuminates how class intersects with gender

and nationality in producing differentiated regulatory practices of immigrant belonging.

In Taiwan, historically-rooted geopolitical tensions with China together with Taiwan’s

nation-building process have produced the dalumei discourse that defines Chinese

marriage migrants as the immoral other. However, the moral predicament of dalumei are

differentially experienced by Chinese marriage migrants perceived from different class

backgrounds. In the contemporary era, where the Taiwanese state has embraced

multiculturalism, I argue that the discourse of dalumei in everyday interactions is used to

produce the category of “good immigrants.” Combined with the prevalence of market

logic in Taiwanese society, class markers come to define the boundary of “good

44 The article is a collectively drafted document that criticizes the Equal Opportunities Commission’s efforts to revise their ethnic discrimination policies to extend the protection to people who felt discriminated against because of their “nationality” or “residency statuses.” Localist groups saw the revision as a form of “Chinese colonization” and condemned such proposal. See more on https://antichinesecolonization.wordpress.com.

121

immigrants” who are deserving of integration and the “bad immigrants” not worthy of

respect. Working-class Chinese marriage migrants, who lacked the class markers of

education and professional background, were thus positioned as dalumei while middle-

class Chinese marriage migrants were able to rise to a position of worthy immigrants that

are more like Taiwanese. By paying attention to the different experiences and narratives

of Chinese marriage migrants from different class backgrounds in the face of dalumei

discourse, this dissertation illuminates the class aspect of belonging in the era of global

migration under the prevalence of market logic.

Finally, this dissertation also illuminates how national boundaries refer not only a legal

and official territory, but they are frontiers—constructed notions of internal distinction in

a given territory— that are subject to contestation in everyday interactions, given the

geopolitical tensions between the immigrant-sending and immigrant-receiving societies.

Whether it is the mother-in-law who considers her Chinese marriage migrant daughter-

in-law a dalumei who married her son for money, or the social workers who see Chinese

marriage migrants as “forceful” speakers who needed to learn to be more “caring,” they

draw on discursive national boundaries between them as Taiwanese versus Chinese

marriage migrants, despite Chinese marriage migrants’ legal route to citizenship. In

Hong Kong, national boundaries are drawn as localist groups condemned Chinese

marriage migrants’ participation in transnational activities. In response, Chinese marriage

migrants also redraw national boundaries by repositioning themselves within the moral

landscape. From positioning themselves as sacrificing mothers and selfless volunteers, to

redefining their identities as both Hong Kongers and Chinese, not only do Chinese

marriage migrants reposition themselves within the legal national boundary but in some

cases, also reterritorialize national boundaries through their involvement in transnational

activities. As such, the intimate frontiers in which Chinese marriage migrants are situated

is not a fixed boundary but continues to evolve as Chinese marriage migrants interact

with the state, family, and civil society. By examining the intimate frontiers where

Chinese marriage migrants negotiate their regulated belonging in Hong Kong and

Taiwan, this dissertation brings to the fore the significance of historical and ongoing

122

geopolitical relations between the immigrant-sending and receiving societies in shaping

immigrant belonging.

123

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Appendix A

Profile of Chinese marriage migrants and their husbands who were perceived by social

workers, Taiwanese friends, and the Chinese marriage migrant community as middle-

class in Taiwan

Chinese

marriage

migrants’

Pseudonym

Age Place of

origin

Education

background/

Last work

experience in

China before

migrating to

Taiwan

Employment in

Taiwan at the

time of

interview

Taiwanese

Husbands’

employment at

the time of

interview

Fang Fang 40 Hunan Bachelor’s

degree in

Fashion Design/

Secretary at a

design company

Completing a

master’s degree

in Chinese

medicine while

being a radio

host at National

Education

Radio

Manager at

China Airlines

Yang Fan 50 Hunan Bachelor’s

degree in

Chinese

medicine/Chine

se medicine

doctor

Radio host at

National

Education

Radio

Engineer

140

Hui Lin 45 Tianjin Bachelor’s

degree in

Arts/Marketing

manager at a

major paper

company

Life Education

teacher at her

son’s primary

school (Part-

time)

Manager at a

major food

export company

later opened a

grocery store in

Taiwan

Lan Fang 47 Dongbei Bachelor’s

degree in

Account/

Accountant at a

Chinese oil

company

Fruit store

manager; selling

health

supplements on

the side

Accountant

Xiao Mei 34 Hunan Bachelor’s

degree in

Commerce/

Beauty store

owner

Secretary (Part-

time)

Electronic

factory owner in

China

Zi Xin 35 Guangxi Bachelor’s

degree in Arts/

Primary school

teacher

Just received

Certificate as a

travel agent

Toy company

owner in

Taiwan

Shao Min 28 Anhui Bachelor’s

degree in

Tourism/Owner

of a

Commercial

Immigration

Agency

Travel Agent Engineer

141

Ping 58 Changchun Professional

Chinese music

performer

Music teacher

(Part-time)

Manager at a

Taiwanese

Electronic

factory in China

142

Appendix B

Profile of Chinese marriage migrants who were perceived by social workers, Taiwanese

friends, and the Chinese marriage migrant community as working-class in Taiwan

Chinese

marriage

migrants’

Pseudonym

Age Education

background/ Last

work experience in

China before

migrating to

Taiwan

Employment in

Taiwan at the time

of interview

Taiwanese

Husbands’

employment at the

time of interview

Li Fei 70 Junior high

school/state-owned

factory

Retired Veteran

Mei Yan 43 Junior high school/

make-up artist

Dance teacher and

make-up artist

Veteran

Jin Yan 71 Primary

school/state-owned

factory

Part-time caregiver Veteran

Feng 61 Primary

school/construction

worker

Caregiver at a

government hospital

Veteran (passed

away)

Yu Jie 40 Primary

school/electronic

factory worker

Electronic factory

worker

Veteran

Xiao Lan 49 Primary

school/electronic

factory worker

Cleaner at private

homes and

commercial

buildings

Veteran

(passed away)

143

Chen Yan 60 High school/ state-

owned gun factory

worker

Homemaker

Veteran

Cai Hong 45 Diploma in Chinese

medicine/Chinese

medicine doctor

Unemployed due to

illness

Veteran

Zi Yue 34 High

school/Assistant in a

biotechnology

company

Homemaker Small business

owner in China

Li Hua 38 High school/office

assistant at an

architecture

company

Low-end boutique

store owner

Tour bus driver

Yao Hong 40 Primary school/hair

stylist at low-end

hair salon

Low-end hair salon

owner

Small business

owner

Wang An 35 High school/ no

working experience

as she got married

soon after

graduation

Homemaker Technician at an

electronic factory

Xiao Yan 46 High school/ family

restaurant business

Low-end restaurant

owner

Small business

owner

Jiao Bao 45 High

school/Secondary

school teacher

Low-end dumpling

restaurant owner

Low-end dumpling

restaurant owner

144

Huang Fang 30 Primary

school/electronic

factory worker

Low-end dried-food

stall owner

Technician at an

electronic factory

Xiao Yao 27 Junior high school/

toy factory worker

Homemaker Truck driver

Xiao Chan 33 High school/sales at

a beauty store

Electronic factory

worker

Account assistant at

a psychiatric

hospital

Lan Lan 36 High school/sales at

a furniture store

Electronic factory

(Part-time)

Small business

owner

Tang Juan 35 Junior high school/

sales at a low-end

boutique store

Golf club worker

(Part-time)

Betel nut store

owner

Xiao-li 40 High school/ toy

factory worker

Korean restaurant

owner

Korean restaurant

owner

Yu fen 48 Primary school/

state-owned steel

factory worker

Caregiver at private

homes

Unemployed due to

illness

Fu Juan 38 High

school/Waitress

Sales at a watch

company

Unemployed due to

illness

145

Appendix C

Profile of Chinese marriage migrants I met in Taiwan who do not fit into the class

categorization

Chinese marriage migrants’ Pseudonym

Age Place of origin

Education background/ Last work experience in China before migrating to Taiwan

Employment in Taiwan at the time of interview

Taiwanese Husbands’ employment at the time of interview

Mei Lin 52 Hunan Diploma in Commerce /Electronic factory worker

Insurance agent Supervisor at a Taiwanese electronic factory in China

Ming 33 Sichuan Junior High school/Property sales agent

Homemaker Interior Designer

Xiao Hua 40 Zhuji Junior high school/ Toy factory worker

Top sales at a major shopping mall

Car component company owner

Fu Hua 26 Dongbei High School/Primary school teacher

Homemaker Manager

Rui Lai 34 Fujian High School/ Assistant at a Pharmaceutical company

Dancer in an immigrant dance group (Part-time)

Official in Taiwanese Marine Corps

Fang 36 Hubei High School/ Electronic factory worker

Mid-range Ceramic store owner

Mid-range Ceramic store owner

Lin Shen 40 Henan High school/Electronic factory worker

Jewellery store owner

Former manager at an electronic factory in China; currently unemployed due to illness

146

Mu Yin 27 Sichuan Junior high school/ Property sales agent

Temporary worker at Government Labor Department

Owner of a reputable education centre

Min Yue 43 Sichuan High school/Owner of a mid-range shoe store

Chained Braised Dishes Store owner

Chained Braised Dishes Store owner

Yao Lin 30 Suzhou High school/Secretary

Secretary at her husband’s company

Owner of an electronic company in Taiwan

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