ABSTRACT

The rise of China in the past two decades and its impact on the rest of the world have caught the attention of scholars from various disciplines. One of the most important issues is the extent to which China, with its investment and development aid, can affect the politics and economy of other countries (Alden 2007; Brautigam 2011; Monson 2009; Roett and Paz 2008). Some scholars have argued that China’s investments and aid help the receiving countries (Powles 2010; Tarte 2010; Zhang 2010); others are concerned that the rise of China will generate more conflict in these countries (Izumi 2010; Porter and Wesley-Smith 2010). However, most of these studies examine the situation from the perspective of political economy, and few pay attention to the viewpoints of the people in these countries: how they perceive China and whether their perceptions have changed in the past two decades are issues that have rarely been subject to analysis. Taiwan, a country with strong historical connections to China and facing serious disputes with China over its political status, feels the China impact more strongly than other countries in the region. Given that more than a million Taiwanese people have moved to China, it is crucially important to understand how these people, especially their children’s generation who have been raised on the mainland, perceive China in order to predict how Taiwan might be affected by China in the future.