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

Abstract

The opening of China’s economy has attracted an inflow of Taiwanese migrants, including student migration for higher education. Taiwanese migrants in China have created a ‘transnational social field,’ which is simultaneously an exceptional space of sovereignty and a liminal terrain of identity. Based on in-depth interviews with 61 Taiwanese students in China, this article looks into the paradoxes between nationalization and globalization at the intersection of state policy, migration trajectory, and identity politics. The Chinese government has offered Taiwanese citizens exceptional membership and privileged access to college admission, in order to uphold China’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan and promote the agenda of reunification. Taiwanese students capitalize on such institutional privilege and cultural ties to facilitate their transnational mobility and flexible capital accumulation. They also develop different strategies to negotiate their ethnic or national identification: assimilating as Chinese, reasserting a Taiwanese identity, and claiming a cosmopolitan identity.

Educating China on the move: A typology of contemporary Chinese higher education mobilities

“…There has also been an emerging trend of bi‐directional flows between Mainland China and other greater China regions, including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan (Gu & Tong, ; Gao, ; Xu, ,b, ,b, ; Lan & Wu, ). While the scope of such bi‐directional flows is less substantial when compared with other internal student mobilities, this type of mobility occupies a strategic position owing to the political and ideological distinctions of these regions.…”

“…It has been found that top universities in Hong Kong have been attracting academically high‐achieving students from well‐off middle‐class backgrounds who continue to reproduce privileges through various forms of capital conversion, exchange and re‐evaluation (Li & Bray, , ; Xu, ,b, 2017a). Meanwhile, working‐class students of lower academic calibres from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan capitalise on the preferential university admission policies to access prestigious top university resources on the mainland (Lan & Wu, ). It is found that social inequalities along the axes of class, rural and urban divide continue to be reproduced through such cross‐border student mobilities (Li & Bray, , ; Lan & Wu, ).…”

“…Meanwhile, working‐class students of lower academic calibres from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan capitalise on the preferential university admission policies to access prestigious top university resources on the mainland (Lan & Wu, ). It is found that social inequalities along the axes of class, rural and urban divide continue to be reproduced through such cross‐border student mobilities (Li & Bray, , ; Lan & Wu, ).…”

Claims to a nation, dressing the part and other boundary making strategies by skilled migrants in response to ethnic categorization

“…Other case studies take the class status of migrants into consideration but exclude the stigma of racialized ethnicities. The viability of 'passing' as a member of the majority (Lulle & Balode, 2014, on Latvian women in Finland; Lan & Wu, 2016, on Taiwanese students in China) or benefiting from positively viewed difference (Guðjónsdóttir, 2014, on Icelandics in Norway) are strategies that are not available to migrants with racialized ethnicities. However, some studies have dealt directly with skilled migrants with racialized ethnicities.…”

‘Diaspora at home’: class and politics in the navigation of Hong Kong students in Mainland China’s Universities

“…Indeed, although Lin (2011) has acknowledged the economic motivations among the Taiwanese migrants, the potential impact of class on their diasporic experiences has not been fully explored. In Lan and Wu's (2016) research on Taiwanese students' experiences in mainland universities, they highlighted how these students were made more aware of the contrasting political values between themselves and their mainland counterparts, leading some of them to cherish the democratic progress made in Taiwan more.…”