Seminar-
Mainland Brides, Taiwanese Daughter-in-laws or Chinese Whores? Politics of cross-strait marriages in Taiwan

Date: 11 February 2009
Time: 3pm- 4.30pm
Location: Research Clusters Meeting Room A, The Shaw Foundation Building, Block AS7 Level 6, FASS, NUS (Kent Ridge Campus)
Chairperson: Professor Brenda Yeoh, Department of Geography, FASS, NUS

• Jointly organized by the FASS and Asia Research Institute Migration Clusters, NUS

Since the late 1980s, the number of cross-strait marriages has increased rapidly. Currently there are 261,000 mainland Chinese spouses, constituting 65% of the “foreign” spouses in Taiwan. Although “foreign brides” and “mainland brides” (as termed by the media) are both seen as the “inferior others”, the mechanisms of social exclusion of mainland spouses in policy and popular images are distinctive. Compared to the huge scholarly interest concerning the “foreign brides” and their children, the issue of cross-strait marriages receive much less attention.

This presentation will discuss the political and social citizenship of mainland spouses in the context of cross-strait interaction, changing national identity and the influx of migrant labourers and wives in Taiwan. I will analyse the construction of images of mainland spouses in the media and the political debates on the policies regulating different aspects of the life of cross-strait families by examining the positions of different political and non-governmental social actors. The debates before the mid-1990s show that the cultural concept of the family union overrides the concerns for national security and identity. In the later part of the 1990s the dominant concerns are the social integration and social rights of mainland spouses. However, since 2000 under the DPP regime, the popular images of mainland spouses have taken a negative turn. In the midst of the political hostility against China and growing Taiwanese nationalism, mainland Chinese spouses are not treated as the “enemy others”, rather they are increasingly associated with prostitution and bogus marriage. I argue that the criteria of the mainland spouses’ citizenship are based on their gender roles as mothers, daughters-in-law and care-givers, hence the image of bad women is used to discredit them. Mainland spouses have also actively adopted these gender roles as Taiwanese daughters-in-law and Mothers of Taiwanese sons  to win the acceptance of Taiwanese society in their collective action.

About the speaker:

Dr. Melody Chia-wen LU is a research fellow and coordinate a research project Gender, Migration and Family in East and Southeast Asia at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), the Netherlands. She obtained her PhD from Leiden University, the Netherlands in 2008. She is the co-editor of the book “Asian Cross-border Marriage Migration: Demographic Patterns and Social Issues” (forthcoming, with Yang, Wen-Shan, Amsterdam University Press). Prior to her academic involvement she had worked at various NGOs in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines on the issues of gender and migration in Asia.


Registration

Admission is free. Persons interested in attending the workshop should email their name, affiliation and email address to: Ms Sharon Wok (fasswe@nus.edu.sg)