ABSTRACT
This chapter examines China's preferential policies to recruit Taiwanese students as part of the political project of unification and paradoxical consequences upon the Taiwanese students whose transnational mobility leads to an assertion of their national identity. It compares the case with Chinese students in Taiwan, who are embedded in distinct policy framework and yet experience similar identity reconstitution. The chapter investigates the following questions: How has China's policy of recruiting Taiwanese students transformed over time? What kinds of rationality stand behind the exceptional membership and opportunities for Taiwanese students? It includes policy documents and news reports concerning relevant policy regulations in China and Taiwan and 61 semi-structured interviews with Taiwanese students who were studying or had studied in China. Student migration across the Taiwan Strait demonstrates a paradoxical intersection between deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. The journey of migration, crossing the geographic and social divides, renders people reflexive about their ethnic and national identities and pressures to constantly calibrate their subject positions.
