ABSTRACT
Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in China and in Taiwan, including over a hundred interviews, this chapter discusses the new link between gender, migration, digital platforms, entrepreneurship, and the transgression of borders. Through the empirical case study of Chinese women’s marriage migration to Taiwan, it investigates how women’s mobility paths are constructed by crossing internal and external spatial, social, professional, and marital borders, which place women in a condition of subalternity. After cross-border marriage migration to Taiwan, Chinese migrants perform unpaid reproductive labour at home and precarious jobs in an inegalitarian labour market. By taking a close look at women’s solidarity practices and entrepreneurial activities, this chapter shows how when the physical world becomes oppressive, Chinese migrant women take refuge inside virtual worlds, where they carve a niche of their own. In the digital age of migration, by using the digital social media platform WeChat, women transgress the rigidity of material and moral borders and produce online e-commerce and digital entrepreneurship. These digitalised and transnational economic practices transgress and transcend the borders between China and Taiwan and constitute an effective tool to achieve social autonomy and economic independence.
