Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan

Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan PDF

Author: Beatrice Zani

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-25

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1000485633

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This book, based on extensive original research, explores the lives, the migratory experiences and the social, economic, and emotional practices of Chinese migrant women during their migrations and mobilities in China, from China to Taiwan, from Taiwan to China and in between the two countries. It illustrates how women on the move experience social contempt, misrecognition and economic marginalisation; how women migrants seek autonomy, economic independence, upward social mobility and modernity, but discover the Chinese inegalitarian social order and labour regimes which produce obstacles and impede their ambitions; and how old and new forms of subalternity are reproduced. Overall, the book emphasises what it feels like for the women migrants as they negotiate their way at the crossroad between subalternity and resistance, between subordinated labour and independent, digital entrepreneurship, and between an inegalitarian labour market and new, online opportunities for business and commerce.

Migration to and From Taiwan

Migration to and From Taiwan PDF

Author: Kuei-fen Chiu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 113512793X

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Migration has transformed Taiwanese society in the last 20 years. The main inflows have been temporary workers from Southeast Asian countries and female spouses from Southeast Asia and China marrying Taiwanese husbands. The main outflow has been migration to China, as a result of increased economic integration across the Taiwan Strait. These changes have significantly altered Taiwan’s ethnic structure and have profound social and political implications for this new democracy. As large numbers of these migrants take Taiwanese citizenship and their offspring gain voting rights, the impact of these "new Taiwanese" will continue to increase. This book showcases some of the leading researchers working on migration to and from Taiwan. The chapters approach migration from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including international relations, sociology, social work, film studies, political science, gender studies, geography and political economy and so the book has great appeal to scholars and students interested in the politics of Taiwan, Taiwanese society and ethnic identity as well as those focusing on migration in East Asia and comparative migration studies.

Exceptional States

Exceptional States PDF

Author: Sara L. Friedman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0520286227

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"Between 10% and 20% of marriages in Taiwan involve the union of a Taiwanese national with a Chinese immigrant, with as many as 13,000 cross-Strait couples registering new unions each year. Exceptional States examines new configurations of marriage, immigration, and governance emerging in an increasingly mobile Asia where Cold War legacies continue to shape contemporary political struggles over sovereignty and citizenship. This book poignantly and respectfully documents the struggle of these immigrant Chinese women as they seek belonging, acceptance, and recognition in their new land. The women's experiences parallel Taiwan's own desire to receive recognition from the international community as a sovereign nation-state. By tracing these political parallels, the book shows how Chinese marital immigrants are affected by Taiwan's own uncertain political status in relation to China in ways that marital immigrants from other Asian countries are not. Exceptional States illustrates the social, political and subjective consequences of immigrants who are living with this exceptional status. The book concludes with a discussion of how Chinese spouses' efforts to create a sense of belonging for themselves across the fluid waters of the Taiwan Strait offer possible insights into solving Taiwan's current sovereignty challenges"--Provided by publisher.

Global Cinderellas

Global Cinderellas PDF

Author: Pei-Chia Lan

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-04-03

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780822337423

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Migrant women are the primary source of paid domestic labor around the world. Since the 1980s, the newly prosperous countries of East Asia have recruited foreign household workers at a rapidly increasing rate. Many come from the Philippines and Indonesia. Pei-Chia Lan interviewed and spent time with dozens of Filipina and Indonesian domestics working in and around Taipei as well as many of their Taiwanese employers. On the basis of the vivid ethnographic detail she collected, Lan provides a nuanced look at how boundaries between worker and employer are maintained and negotiated in private households. She also sheds light on the fate of the workers, “global Cinderellas” who seek an escape from poverty at home only to find themselves treated as disposable labor abroad. Lan demonstrates how economic disparities, immigration policies, race, ethnicity, and gender intersect in the relationship between the migrant workers and their Taiwanese employers. The employers are eager to flex their recently acquired financial muscle; many are first-generation career women as well as first-generation employers. The domestics are recruited from abroad as contract and “guest” workers; restrictive immigration policies prohibit them from seeking permanent residence or transferring from one employer to another. They care for Taiwanese families’ children, often having left their own behind. Throughout Global Cinderellas, Lan pays particular attention to how the women she studied identify themselves in relation to “others”—whether they be of different classes, nationalities, ethnicities, or education levels. In so doing, she offers a framework for thinking about how migrant workers and their employers understand themselves in the midst of dynamic transnational labor flows.

Factory Girls

Factory Girls PDF

Author: Leslie T. Chang

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2009-08-04

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0385520182

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An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China. China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta. As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation. A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

China's Left-Behind Wives

China's Left-Behind Wives PDF

Author: Huifen Shen

Publisher:

Published: 2012-09-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

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In China's Left-Behind Wives, Huifen Shen tells the extraordinary story of an overlooked group of women who played an important role in one of the largest waves of migration in history. For roughly a century starting around 1850, large numbers of young men from southern China travelled to Southeast Asia in search of work. Some were married and others returned to marry, but they routinely left their wives in China to handle family affairs. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival materials, local gazetteers, newspapers and periodicals, the author describes the experiences of left-behind wives in the Quanzhou region of Fujian from the 1930s to the 1050s, a time when war and political change caused customary practices to break down. Migrant marriages were nearly always arranged, and girls rarely met their husbands before the wedding. Normally a bride lived with her new husband for just a few weeks or months, after which he went abroad. The circumstances in the 1940s and 1950s were such that many of these young women rarely, or never, saw their husbands again. When the Pacific War cut off communications, the loss of remittance money meant that they faced a difficult struggle for survival. The war's end brought a brief respite, but the communist ascendency led to further difficult adjustments. Ultimately, the experiences of the left-behind wives drew them into public life and business, and as Overseas Chinese policies, and attitudes towards women, changed in China, they came to play an increasingly significant part in the processes of development and modernization.

Chinese Diasporas

Chinese Diasporas PDF

Author: Steven B. Miles

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1107179920

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A concise and compelling survey of Chinese migration in global history centered on Chinese migrants and their families.

Diaspora’s Homeland

Diaspora’s Homeland PDF

Author: Shelly Chan

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2018-03-16

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0822372037

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In Diaspora’s Homeland Shelly Chan provides a broad historical study of how the mass migration of more than twenty million Chinese overseas influenced China’s politics, economics, and culture. Chan develops the concept of “diaspora moments”—a series of recurring disjunctions in which migrant temporalities come into tension with local, national, and global ones—to map the multiple historical geographies in which the Chinese homeland and diaspora emerge. Chan describes several distinct moments, including the lifting of the Qing emigration ban in 1893, intellectual debates in the 1920s and 1930s about whether Chinese emigration constituted colonization and whether Confucianism should be the basis for a modern Chinese identity, as well as the intersection of gender, returns, and Communist campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. Adopting a transnational frame, Chan narrates Chinese history through a reconceptualization of diaspora to show how mass migration helped establish China as a nation-state within a global system.

Living across connectivity

Living across connectivity PDF

Author: Beatrice Zani

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1839988878

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This volume fills a major gap in publications on migration and digital media worlds by bringing information and communication technology (ICT) to the fore of our understanding of migrants’ experiences in, and practices of, connectivity and mobility. During recent decades, migration within and from East Asia has become paradigmatic of the changing substance and patterns of global mobility. Focusing on migration within and beyond East Asia, a region defined by its global migration and its leading role in ICT use and development, this volume explores the pervasive use of smartphones as an everyday reality for East Asian migrants, advocating the necessity of understanding how they live their lives both online and offline. In this respect, the originality of this volume lies in its interdisciplinary analysis of migrants’ activities at the crossroads between physical and digital spaces. Our theoretical innovation and empirical findings will open an avenue to investigate the novel shape and scales of contemporary connectivity and mobility.

Chinese Working-Class Lives

Chinese Working-Class Lives PDF

Author: Hill Gates

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1501719912

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Taiwan’s working class has been shaped by Chinese tradition, by colonialism, and by rapid industrialization. This book defines that class, explores that history, and presents with sensitive honesty the life experiences of some of its women and men. Hill Gates first provides a solid and informative introduction to Taiwan’s history, showing how mainland China, Japan, the convulsions of twentieth-century wars, and the East Asian economic expansion interacted in forming Taiwanese urban life. She introduces nine individuals from Taiwan’s three major ethnic groups to tell the stories of their lives in their own words. The narrators include a fortuneteller, a woman laborer, and a retired air force mechanic. A former spirit medium and a janitor are among the others who speak.