ABSTRACT
China, as a job-generating machine, has caused large numbers of Taiwanese to migrate, searching for better jobs or greater job diversity. Regulations have gradually loosened for Taiwanese people to work in China. According to a newly revised act passed in 2005, the Taiwanese can work in any sector as long as they are proven to be healthy, to be between 18 and 60 years old and to have entered China legally (Ministry of Commerce of People’s Republic of China 2005). As a result, the Taiwanese enjoy favourable residency and employment rights that are unavailable to other foreigners. According to the 2010 Chinese census data, there were already over 700,000 Taiwanese migrants or settlers in the greater Shanghai region alone at that time (Lan and Wu 2011). Moreover, surveys have found that the majority of Taiwanese migrants in China have a tertiary education background (Lee and Peng 2009). This profile makes the Taiwanese one of the largest migrant communities of skilled labour in the world. There have been two distinctive waves of migration from Taiwan to China. The first wave that occurred in the late 1980s was associated with the relocation of manufacturers seeking to reduce labour costs in the shoe-making, garment and houseware sectors. Migrants of this type included key personnel sent by their parent companies as well as small business owners who closed down their operations in Taiwan and moved to China to manage their new factories. The majority of them were male, and they tended to move alone, without the other members of their families (Shen 2005). The second wave of migration began around 1998, when some of the powerhouses of Taiwan’s high-tech industries expanded their manufacturing sites to the greater Shanghai area. At about the same time, the business service and retail sectors targeting the China market began to invest in China. This wave of investment was mainly Shanghai-bound, to take advantage of the booming economy of Shanghai and its position as a regional hub in the Yangtze River delta (Ken 2002).
