Marriage Migration of Women from China and
Southeast Asia to Taiwan*
Ching-lung Tsay#
* To be published as Chapter 7 in (Un)tying the Knot: Ideal and Reality in Asian Marriage (edited by Gavin Jones and Kamalini Ramdas), National University of Singapore Press (forthcoming in August 2004).
# Professor at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Tamkang University, and Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, both in Taipei, Taiwan.
Marriage Migration of Women from China and Southeast Asia to Taiwan
Ching-lung Tsay
Introduction
In the past few decades, Taiwan has experienced dramatic changes including demographic transition, economic liberalisation, political democratisation, and social diversification. The national transformation has been particularly remarkable since the mid-1980s when the forty-year-old martial law was lifted in 1987. As a result of the changes, the island-state has become more and more involved in the process of globalisation, one major aspect of which is human interactions with the rest of the world through migration, especially the inflows of foreign workers and the immigration of spouses married to Taiwanese.
Foreign workers entered Taiwan through clandestine migration in the 1980s and through the officially managed labour importation schemes since the early 1990s. The number did not reach 100,000 until 1993, but surged to its peak of 330,000 in 2000. The current volume in 2004 is around 290,000. In addition, there are irregular migrants of unknown number, mainly from China, working in Taiwan. Slightly more recently, there has been an increasing number of Taiwanese who married foreigners and brought their spouses to Taiwan. In early 2004, the total number of marriage immigrants went over 300,000. The majority of them are women (93 per cent), mainly from China and Southeast Asia. Both the immigrant spouses and the migrant workers have become significant groups in Taiwan in the past decade.
While there are a substantial number of studies on foreign workers, research on the immigrant spouses in Taiwan has so far been very limited. The existing academic papers tend to focus on a particular group of “foreign brides,” such as Chinese (Chen, 2000), Indonesian (Hsia, 2003, 2000) and Vietnamese (Chang and Wang, 2002; Tan and Tsai, 2000; Wang, 2002). The studies tend to look at marriage migration from the perspective of economic globalisation. The (female) spouses are portrayed as deserving sympathy because they are disadvantaged in the internationalisation of capital and trade. Others examine the adjustment and assimilation problems of the new group of population in Taiwan (Chiu, 2003). What is lacking is an overview of the trend in marriage migration to Taiwan as a whole. This paper aims to provide some information along this line. Following this introduction, the significance and characteristics of the immigrant spouses will be investigated. Subsequently, the relevant issues and the responses from the government and the public will be discussed before the conclusion.
Significance and Trend
Historically, Taiwan is a migratory society with most ancestors of the population having moved from southern China since four centuries ago. In the past half century, however, the population was almost closed to immigration due to the unique political environment. Consequently, the number of foreign nationals in Taiwan has been rather small – only a few thousand before 1970 and reaching
23,000 only in 1981. The number surged rapidly in the 1990s with the start of the opening up of the Taiwanese labour market to Southeast Asian workers through importation schemes. The number was further increased by the influx of spouses from China and Southeast Asia.
To reveal the significance of marriage migration to Taiwan, Table 1 presents the most up to date information on the composition of the total number of foreigners and foreign spouses who have recently been naturalised. In May 2004, the total volume of foreigners (including the naturalised spouses, for the purpose of this study) was close to 630,000. Among them, 31 per cent (195,000) came from China through marriage. The size of foreign population from countries other than China is around 410,000 (65 per cent). Among them, 280,000 are imported contract workers, 90,000 are immigrant spouses who have not yet been naturalised, and the other 41,000 are foreigners of other statuses. The number of immigrant spouses from countries other than China who have become citizens of Taiwan is 22,000 (20 per cent of a group of 111,683).
Insert Table 1
For the immigrant spouses as a whole, the volume is 306,700, accounting for a half of the total foreign population (49 per cent) in Taiwan. Among them, almost two-thirds (195,000) came from China and the remaining third (111,700) from other countries (mostly Southeast Asian nations). The total number of immigrant spouses is bigger than the population of at least three of Taiwan’s 23 administrative sub-divisions (i.e. Taitung and Penghu Counties and Chia-I City) and only slightly smaller than two others. Adding the number of contract workers (280,000 from Southeast Asia) to all the immigrant spouses, the total number is about 587,000. This volume is significantly larger than the size of the indigenous population of Taiwan (430,000), which is the fourth biggest ethnic group of the country (next to Holo, Hakka, and Wai-seng). Furthermore, the sum of the immigrant workers and spouses is larger than the population of 11 out of the 23 cities and counties in Taiwan. It is clear that marriage migration, along with labour importation, has had a significant impact on the demographics of Taiwan.
Table 1 additionally indicates that the foreign population in Taiwan has a high proportion of females (73 per cent). The groups of immigrant spouses are distinctive in having a very high female component of over 90 per cent. The data implies that the majority of the immigrant spouses are brides, regardless of their places of origin. The following discussion will thus focus mostly on the marriage migration of women from China and Southeast Asia to Taiwan.
Table 2 presents the trend data of the size of foreign population by type and sex for 1992-2004. It should be noted that the immigrant spouses from China are not included in this table due to the lack of information for most of the early years. The statistics show that the number of foreign nationals increased almost ten times in the 12 years, from less than 45,000 to over 410,000. The importation of contract workers evidently played the most important role in shaping this increasing trend. There has, however, also been a substantial increase in foreigners other than contract workers, including mainly immigrant spouses. The rise was especially clear in the late 1990s, when numbers tripled from 41,345 in 1995 to 130,505 in 2004. Table 2 further shows an obvious trend towards feminisation of the foreign population, both the contract workers and others.
Insert Table 2
The feminisation process of foreign nationals in Taiwan can be observed in Figure 1. For the group of other foreigners, the number of females surged rapidly from 1999. This finding is consistent with the big increase in the number of Taiwanese men married to Southeast Asian women in the past few years, which is evidenced by Table 3. The last column shows that the number of registered marriages with foreigners other than Chinese increased from less than 15,000 in 1999 to over 21,000 in 2000, and then levelled off at 20,000. The pattern of increase in the case of marriages with Chinese is continuous and more rapid. It doubled from 17,589 in 1999 to 35,473 in 2003.
Insert Figure 1
Insert Table 3
Table 3 additionally indicates the increasing significance of international marriages in Taiwan. In 1998, 16 per cent of the 145,976 Taiwanese registered marriages were with foreigners (8.5 per cent with Chinese and 7.2 per cent with other foreigners). The proportion doubled to reach 32 per cent in 2003. In the case of marriages with Chinese, the contribution increased continuously from 8.5 per cent in 1998 to 20.7 per cent in 2003. Unlike the Chinese case, the contribution made by marriages with other foreigners increased in the first two years, but has stabilised at the level of 11 per cent since 2000. For the whole period of 1998-2003, one-quarter of the registered marriages were international marriages, slightly more of them with Chinese than with other foreigners. In terms of trend, the category of marriages with Chinese has been gaining more and more importance as compared with the marriages with foreigners from other countries.
Characteristics
As stated earlier, the majority (92 per cent) of the 306,700 immigrant spouses in Taiwan are females, mostly from China (two-thirds) and Southeast Asia (one-third). The following discussion will focus on major characteristics such as age, education and spatial distribution of the Chinese and Southeast Asian brides. Based on the 2003 marriage registration information, Table 4 reports the number and age composition of both brides and grooms by nationality. For Taiwanese, there are 42,495 more males than females married in 2003, indicating a gender imbalance. Furthermore, the age distribution of Taiwanese grooms is skewed more towards higher ages than that of their female counterparts. Consequently, grooms have a mean age at marriage five years older than brides (33.7 vs. 28.3).
Among the brides, Chinese are very different from Southeast Asians in terms of age composition. About a half of Chinese brides were 30 years or older when they got married in 2003, while almost 90 per cent of Southeast Asian brides were aged less than 30. As a result, the mean age at marriage is 31.3 and 23.6 for Chinese and Southeast Asians, respectively. The data confirms the tendency for Taiwanese men at older ages to marry Chinese women in their 40s or older. Some of these older males are retired military servicemen who moved from China to Taiwan in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Others include such disadvantaged groups as workers, farmers, and fishermen in rural places, the handicapped, and the underemployed or unemployed, who had difficulties in getting married at younger ages.
Based on the marriage registration records of 2001, a special tabulation of the age difference between grooms and brides was made for the three major groups of brides by nationality (Table 5). For the group of Taiwanese brides, almost 60 per cent of them are 0-4 years younger than their husbands, and another 22 per cent 5-9 years younger. This distribution of age difference is very different from the two cases of Chinese and Southeast Asian brides. In the Chinese case, over a half (55 per cent) of the brides are ten or more years younger than their grooms (36 per cent 10-19 years younger, 13 per cent 20-29 years younger, and 6.4 per cent 30 or more years younger). This finding confirms the fact that older Taiwanese men tend to marry women from China, as stated in the last paragraph.
A similar but less skewed distribution was found for the group of Southeast Asian brides. 67 per cent of them are ten or more years younger than their partners. In most cases, however, the age difference is within 10-19 years (51 per cent). Only two per cent of the Southeast Asian women married Taiwanese men who are 30 or more years older. It is clear that the husbands of Southeast Asian brides are relatively younger than the grooms of Chinese women, given that the Southeast Asian brides are much younger than the Chinese women. Only nine per cent of the Southeast Asian brides married Taiwanese men who are 0-4 years older than them. This share is far below that of Taiwanese brides (57 per cent). Assuming that 0-4 years is an ideal age difference between spouses, Southeast Asian women seem to have sacrificed themselves by marrying Taiwanese men who are substantially older than them.
Table 6 reports data on educational composition of grooms and brides by nationality. For Taiwanese, brides clearly have a higher level of educational attainment than grooms. This finding confirms the “slope hypothesis” in marriage theory that men tend to marry women who are younger, less educated, and of lower status. Among brides, Chinese and Southeast Asians are not significantly different from each other in educational distribution, but in both cases their education is much lower than Taiwanese. The table suggests that the less educated Taiwanese men tend to get married with women from China and Southeast Asia.
As indicated above, women from Southeast Asia and China tend to marry disadvantaged groups of men in Taiwan. This point is also evident in the spatial distribution of foreign brides by nationality as shown in Table 7. The data reveal that Chinese brides are relatively more concentrated in cities and their surrounding urban areas (e.g. Taipei City, Taipei and Taoyuan Counties, and Kaohsiung City and County), as well as in places where facilities for retired military servicemen are located (e.g. Hualien County). By contrast, Southeast Asian brides are more widely spread out into rural places in Taiwan. This distinction in geographic distribution between the two groups of brides reflects the difference in socio-economic status of their husbands.
To reveal the relative importance of international marriages, Table 7 also presents the percentage of marriages with foreign brides in the total marriages at the city/county level. In 2003, 28 per cent of the 171,483 marriages in Taiwan were made with foreign brides. The Chinese brides accounted for two-thirds of these, while brides from other countries (mainly Southeast Asian nations) covered the remaining one-third. At the sub-divisional level, the percentage of international marriage is highest in the most remote rural part of Taiwan (i.e. Eastern Region, 40 per cent), while low in the more developed Northern and Central Regions.