A New Starting Point: The Factors That Made Taiwanese Professional Baseball Players Migrate to Mainland China After the 1997 Match-Fixing Scandal

Abstract

This study aims to identify and analyze the factors of the migration of Taiwanese professional baseball players after the 1997 match-fixing scandal. It focuses on the case of the migration of the ex-China Times Eagles players implicated in the scandal who represented the first wave of China-bound Taiwanese baseball players (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005).Interviews and a document review were conducted to collect data for analysis and verification. The results show the juxtaposition of 'pull' factors, such as financial benefits, employment opportunities, similarities in language and culture, and self-actualization, and 'push' factors, including institutional regulations, a salary gap, and a lack of opportunity for career development, that characterized this specific China-bound migration context.

Globalization or Glocalization? The Emerging Scholarship on Sport Match-Fixing in Light of Asian Context

“…In the international sports field, while most studies on match-fixing have focused on European sports, the geographical and social context of Asia appears to have recently become of interest [9]. With respect to the global match-fixing phenomenon in sport, an Asian investigation has shown incremental growth in the following countries: Bangladesh [26], China [27][28][29], India [30,31], Indonesia [32,33], Japan [34,35], Malaysia [36,37], Pakistan [38]; Singapore [5,36,37], South Korea [8,14,17,18,[39][40][41][42][43][44], and Taiwan [9][10][11][21][22][23][24]45]. Except for Canadian expert Hill's investigation in Malaysia and Singapore, and Duggan and Levitt's [34] study in Japan, the rest of the scholarship comes from Asia itself and involves region-based match-fixing case analyses.…”

“…In addition to the above Korean case studies, a series of sports corruption studies focusing mainly on match-fixing and paying specific attention to scandals in Taiwan have also been published recently [9][10][11][21][22][23][24]45]. Using approaches based on governance theory and strategic relations analysis, Lee's [24] study launched an empirical evaluation of the behavior of actors in the corrupt governance of the professional baseball system in Taiwan.…”

“…The study concluded that the inability to detach from personal relationships is founded on the historical and cultural characteristics of baseball, and these relationships have instead constructed a network for illegal activities. Lee, Ko, and Huang's [10] study identified and analyzed factors of the migration of Taiwanese professional baseball players after the 1997 match-fixing scandal. They claimed that a combination of various push and pull factors, such as economic, social, cultural, institutional, personal, and political factors, were at work and closely interrelated in players' migration.…”

Causes and Consequences of Iranian Elite Athletes’ International Migrations

“…Among these issues, we can mention financial issues, lack of meritocracy, problems in international laws and world federations, social freedoms, immigration laws of immigrant-receiving countries, the neglect of the athletes' conditions by the federations, the existence of non-sports managers, the indifference of officials, the inefficiency of managers and the lack of spiritual support. Also, Chao Lee, Mei Ko & Han Huang (2021) showed in their research that the combination of "attractive" factors such as financial benefits, job opportunities, similarities in language and culture, and self-improvement and "repulsive" factors, including institutional regulations, salary gaps, and lack of opportunities for career development, have driven the migration of Taiwanese professional baseball players.…”