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Trouble and strife: Taiwan's imported
brides
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI
- A tragedy involving people-smuggling has woken Taiwan
up to what some believe is a demographic time bomb.
 The tragedy happened on August 26 when a
Taiwanese boat suspected of smuggling illegal immigrants
from mainland China into Taiwan ran afoul of the
latter's coast guard. In an effort to escape, the
smugglers forced their human cargo into the sea. Of the
22 women involved, six drowned because they could not
swim.
The sheer barbarism of the case shocked
Taiwanese, who were not impressed when President Chen
Shui-bian used the incident as an opportunity to score
cheap propaganda points against China. More usefully, it
focused the spotlight on one of Taiwan's more curious
phenomena, its apparently insatiable appetite for young
foreign women.
Not all of the women being
smuggled are illegal immigrants. And not all of them, by
any means, are destined, as the women who drowned were,
for work in Taiwan's thriving sex industry. Strangely,
it is legal immigrants, who outnumber illegals by at
least a factor of 10, whom the incident has put under
the spotlight.
Two statistics: Last year 25
percent of marriages involving a Taiwanese male, some
40,000 according to government statistics, were to a
foreign woman, while 30,000 babies, 12 percent of all
children born in Taiwan, were the result of such mixed
marriages. Currently, according to the Ministry of the
Interior, there are some 280,000 foreign women in Taiwan
married to Taiwanese nationals. This includes some
190,000 from China and 90,000 from Southeast Asian
countries, of which 40,000 were from Vietnam and 10,000
from Indonesia.
To put that 280,000 into
perspective, it is equivalent to the number of foreign
workers in Taiwan or, even more significant, the number
of non-ethnic Han Aborigines - the ethnic-Malay original
inhabitants of the island.
The phenomenon of
wedding "foreign brides" as they are known in Taiwan is
so recent - the phenomenon only really took off around
2001 - that meaningful statistics on divorce are scant.
But Ministry of the Interior figures show that some 10
percent of those mixed marriages recorded in the past
four years have already failed.
For Taiwanese
men, the appeal of a marriage to mainland Chinese or
Southeast Asian women can be summed up according to
availability and their spouses' low expectations. Taiwan
has a demographic imbalance of 106 males to 100 females.
So even if every woman were the marrying kind, some men
would be left on the shelf. But not all women are.
One of the most interesting, yet rarely studied,
phenomena of Taiwan's modernization is the greater
economic and social independence of women and their
reluctance to jeopardize this freedom through marriage,
especially in a country where the legal resolution of
marriage problems usually favor the husband. Long gone
is the idea of marriage in one's early 20s; Taiwanese
women - who tend, in any case, to be better educated
than their male counterparts - are increasingly moving
into their 30s with little interest in tying the knot.
As a result, those women who are available tend
to set their sights high, looking in a prospective mate
not just for a high educational level, a good income and
an urban lifestyle, but often for a more Westernized
concept of what marriage should be about, such as a
willingness to share housework, recognition of the
wife's career goals and understanding a wife's
reluctance to live, as is the tradition with newly weds,
with her in-laws.
What all this means, of
course, is that rural, poorly educated males in
lackluster jobs, possibly with unsociable hours and with
conservative views on what marriage should be, are a
drug on Taiwan's marriage market. It is these men who
are looking to mainland China and Southeast Asia for
their prospective spouses.
Marriage brokering
has become big business in Taiwan, with organized tour
groups regularly being whisked off to the mainland and
Southeast Asia by matchmakers. For a fee ranging between
NT$250,000 and NT$400,000 (US$7,400-US$11,840), brokers
in Taiwan will set up a marriage. They fly clients,
often in a group, out to China or Southeast Asia, where,
usually in an apartment, eligible girls are paraded past
them, usually three at a time, until the men find one
they like. A romantic experience is neither promised nor
expected.
One of the reasons marrying foreign
brides has taken off in Taiwan is simply that it faces
little regulation. Once a marriage is registered as
legal by the Taiwanese representative office in the
country in which it took place, it is easy to get a visa
and to reside in Taiwan. There are few of the formidable
hurdles that many developed countries put in the way of
mixed marriages, especially when it comes to interviews
to see if the marriages are genuine and to see how well
the couple know one another.
Until recently,
Taiwan has seen itself as a place people are more likely
to want to leave than as a magnet for economic migrants,
which is in effect what the foreign brides are. In
Taiwan, most of the work that elsewhere would be carried
out by a fully constituted immigration department is in
fact done by the foreign affairs departments of the
local police, who, understandably, tend to be interested
only in legal formalities and paperwork rather than, for
example, grilling couples about their motives for
marriage.
A system of such openness lends itself
to abuse, and although hard figures are lacking,
anecdotal evidence suggests that the level of abuse is
not small. As well as the illegal immigrants involved in
the underground brothel scene, the entertainment and bar
areas of Taiwan's major cities are full of "married"
Chinese and Vietnamese bar girls, so full in fact that
Taiwanese bar girls complain of competition from the
younger and cheaper immigrants. Many of the marriages
are the result of Taiwanese gangsters paying amenable
men to marry girls specifically to allow them to come
and work the bars in Taiwan.
The fake-marriage
phenomenon has now come to the attention of the
government, and plans are afoot to make the process of
registering a marriage with a foreign spouse
significantly tougher. Already, specifically as a result
of the drowning of the six illegal immigrants at the end
of August, the government has begun interviewing Chinese
spouses to make sure marriages are genuine rather than a
pretext to come to Taiwan for work in the sex industry.
So far the failure rate on first interviews by couples
providing inconsistent information is running at 50
percent. But the Taiwanese government plans to go beyond
this sole measure and establish a proper department of
immigration under the Ministry of the Interior. The law
to establish this action is currently awaiting
legislative approval.
Dealing with illegals is
one thing, the impact of genuine marriages on Taiwanese
society is another. There are problems with foreign
brides integrating into Taiwanese society, and there are
also worries about the demographic effects of these
marriages, both socially and, in the end, politically.
For wives from Southeast Asia, language presents
a particular problem. Surveys show that most of them are
quite willing to learn Mandarin; the problem is that
their husbands are often unwilling to pay for them to go
to school to do so, and often the language their
husbands prefer to use is the far more difficult to
learn Minnan, spoken only in Taiwan and China's Fujian
province.
Obviously for wives from China
language is far less of a difficulty. But all wives tend
to face social prejudice in Taiwan. They are often seen
simply as commodities, sexual and domestic servants,
even by their husbands. They also tend to have an even
lower standard of education than their husbands, often
primary school only. This makes it difficult for them to
navigate Taiwan's bureaucracy if they have to, difficult
to seek legal redress if they are ill-treated and
difficult to educate their children. Educational
theorists now accept the central role of a mother's
educational level in the schooling of her children, and
the question that is beginning to be asked in Taiwan is
whether the children of foreign brides might develop as
an educational underclass.
The sheer number of
these children also poses something of a worry. With the
exception of the Aborigines, who have not only been an
underclass for centuries but also have been
geographically isolated, Taiwan is a pretty homogenous
society, its main antagonisms being historical and
political among different groups of Han Chinese
settlers. Taiwan is not a multicultural society by any
means and it has a strong racist streak. What the effect
of so many mixed-ethnicity children might be is
something that few people have even begun to consider.
Within five to 10 years the complexion of school
classrooms is likely to change considerably. And how
much prejudice will these mixed-blood offspring face
when they try to join the job market in some 20 years'
time?
These are long-term questions that
Taiwanese have barely begun to ask. What some in
government circles are more concerned about is simply
the increasing number of Chinese wives in Taiwan and
their effect on the reunification-independence debate.
Actually few of the wives, perhaps only 30,000, have the
right to vote in Taiwan and it is hardly foreseeable
that any major election is going to be so marginal. But
some in the independence camp are concerned that a
decade hence there might be as many as half a million
Chinese spouses, unificationists to a man, or rather
woman, and this will certainly have an impact.
Given the problems with the assimilation of
foreign brides and their offspring, as well as political
worries, it is not surprising that questions are
beginning to be asked about whether Taiwan is "weakening
itself". This sounds like a rather unpleasant regression
to outdated theories of eugenics, but in fact it is more
a reflection of educational concerns about low achievers
marrying even lower achievers. But as the Alliance of
Justice and Fairness, an umbrella group of social
non-governmental organizations, pointed out in August,
given that Taiwan's birthrate has fallen to 1.3 children
per couple, well below the rate of replenishment, Taiwan
is a rapidly graying society. The proportion of people
over 65 will rise from about 9 percent now to 20 percent
by 2025.
What is needed, the Alliance says, is
more children and, if possible, more young adults
willing to have them. Looked at like this, foreign
brides should not be hindered from coming to Taiwan but
positively encouraged, and the government should ease
restrictions of their working as well as provide more
educational opportunities for them. The stigma attached
to being a "foreign bride" also needs to be removed; the
Alliance proposes calling them "new female immigrants".
Since foreign brides now outnumber Aboriginals, whose
second-class status the government has worked hard in
the past few years to ameliorate, is it not about time
that serious resources were devoted to these newcomers?
Rather than a social problem, says the Alliance,
Taiwanese should look on these young women as potential
saviors.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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