TAIPEI - When Tom Chiu joined a
matchmaking tour in 2006, he was given 10 minutes
to meet 35 women in a run-down hotel in Guilin,
China. After years of being a bachelor and unsure
how to pick the right woman, the Taipei City
public parking lot employee brought his mother and
aunt along for help.
"I was so dizzy I
couldn't sleep that night," said the 37-year-old.
By the next day, Chiu had found the right one.
"I had a good feeling about her," Chiu
said of his wife, Angela Tao, who has since
immigrated to Taiwan and in November gave birth to
the couple's first child.
Men like Chiu,
who want to get married so desperately that they
are willing to pay as much as NT$300,000
(US$9,375) for
matchmaking services, and
matchmaking agencies are helping to drive the
biggest wave of immigration Taiwan has seen since
the late 1940s, when refugees flocked to the
island at the end of a civil war between China's
nationalists and communists.
Since 1987,
when Taiwan lifted the ban on mainland Chinese
visiting the island, the number of mainland
spouses immigrating has steadily increased,
ballooning in the past decade to the current
estimated 250,000.
The trend is driven by
an increasing number of Taiwanese men traveling to
China for tourism, business or marriage. The
demand for mainland wives is also booming due to a
gender imbalance in Taiwan and a growing
preference among Taiwanese women to stay single.
While some Taiwanese men look for wives in
Southeast Asian countries, the majority prefer
Chinese women due to similarities in culture and
language.
But China's brides pose
challenges for Taiwan, a small island with a
population of 23 million still considered by China
to be part of its territory. Governments on the
two sides routinely engage in rhetorical warfare,
and hundreds of Chinese missiles aiming at the
island underscore Beijing's resolve to attack if
the island formally declares independence.
The influx of large numbers of mainlanders
makes some people in the Taiwanese government and
certain social sectors uncomfortable, partly
because over time the mainland spouses could
change Taiwanese people's views about mainland
China and play an important role in drawing the
island closer to China, as some analysts view it.
While mainland migrants will not likely
make a big difference in the March presidential
election, the potential political impact of large
numbers of mainland spouses - many of whom at
least initially accept Beijing's view that Taiwan
is an inalienable part of China - is cause for
concern for some people in Taiwan.
Uneasy
with the mainland immigration wave, Taiwan has
restricted the number of temporary residence
permits issued to Chinese spouses - the vast
majority of whom are wives, not husbands - to
12,000 a year. This is far less than the
approximately 23,000 cross-strait marriages
authenticated by Taiwanese authorities in 2006. No
limits are put on foreign spouses from countries
other than China.
In 2006, the government
launched a tough crackdown against matchmaking
agencies like the one Chiu used, banning the
operation of such for-profit services.
The
crackdown reduced the number of agencies to 300
from more than 900 in 2006, and data released in
November suggest that such measures may have put a
dent on cross-strait marriages - only 14,000 were
authenticated by Taiwan in 2007.
Taiwan
also strictly controls the number of permanent
residency permits - required for a Taiwan identity
card - issued to mainland spouses to 6,000 per
year. No such quotas are placed on spouses from
other countries. Mainlanders also do not qualify
for an identity card card until after they have
lived here for eight years, whereas foreign
spouses are eligible for a card and citizenship
after three years.
As a result, more
foreign spouses - 59,906 by the end of November,
mostly from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines
and Thailand - have been granted citizenship than
mainland spouses, only 44,493 of whom have
identity cards, even though there are almost twice
as many mainland spouses here than foreign
spouses.
Without an ID card, the mainland
spouses cannot vote. It is impossible to open a
checking account, register a business under their
name, get a home loan, obtain a passport or even
make a wire transfer at major banks.
Work
restrictions also make many mainland spouses feel
they are not treated equally. While Southeast
Asian women married to local men can work within
four months after entering Taiwan, most
mainlanders with temporary residency permits
cannot work legally unless they meet low income
requirements or have been here for at least six
years.
"We've been urging them to relax
the rules. We tell them 'Why don't you treat them
like people from every other country? They're the
same race as us, the same kind, why don't you let
them work here'?", said Ko Yu-Chin, president of
Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing
Services (CARES), one of the few Taiwanese
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helping
mainlanders. "They say our unemployment rate is
high, but that's no reason. If that's the case,
why not limit foreign wives too?"
Strained
relations between Taiwan and mainland China is the
key reason for the differential treatment by the
government, analysts said.
"[They] would
rather Taiwanese men marry Southeast Asian women
because they do not pose any political threat to
Taiwan," concurred Liu Yia-Ling, a sociology
professor at National Cheng-chi University.
Taiwanese authorities argue there is a
need to treat mainlanders differently, due to the
unique circumstances of cross-strait relations.
They also point out that many of the marriages are
ones of convenience. For example, government
officials noticed dramatic rises in the number of
marriages in the few years before 2003 and in 2003
began requiring interviews before allowing the
spouses to enter Taiwan. This new requirement
caused the number of marriages per year to drop
from as high as 30,000 to the current 14,000.
"We feel the marriages of foreign wives
and mainland wives are not very stable," said
Te-Shun Liu, vice chairman of Taiwan's Mainland
Affairs Council, the government office in charge
of formulating policy towards the mainland.
"The marriages occur very quickly. One
mainland wife told me she married her husband
after knowing him for only 20 minutes," Liu said.
"They want to get married to improve their
family's situation, that's why they want to come
to Taiwan."
Officials also cite the 5,000
to 6,000 fake marriages with mainlanders the
government has uncovered in the past few years.
Divorces are also frequent. While around
14,000 cross-strait couples registered their
marriages in Taiwan in 2006, another 7,057 filed
for divorce.
Attracted by the chance to
come to Taiwan, and unaware of the work
restrictions, many women agree to marry men they
know little about or who are much older than them,
sometimes serving more as a caretaker than a
spouse.
Qin Qin, from Xiamen in Fujian
province just across the Taiwan Strait, is stuck
in an unhappy marriage, like a number of mainland
spouses. She only discovered after moving here
that her husband was mired in heavy debt.
"I had no job, no money when I first came
here, but he didn't give me anything to spend.
Later when I found work, I ended up paying 100,000
Taiwan dollars of his debt," said Qin. "I'm
considering getting a divorce, but I have nothing
back in China. Taiwan provides me many things I
need. Its social system, laws, health insurance
and culture are a lot better than the mainland's."
Other Chinese brides have fared far worse.
CARES has provided shelter to some women and their
children abandoned by their husbands. Others
suffer from domestic violence, but are forced by
regulations to stay with violent or unfaithful
husbands because if they get a divorce before
gaining residency, they must leave Taiwan, unless
they are granted child custody, which is rare due
to their lack of income. Unable to work, they are
completely dependent on their husbands.
As
their numbers increase, Chinese brides have become
more vocal in criticizing such policies, with some
joining small street protests and starting a web
site to commiserate. In recent years, proposed
changes to legislation have prompted mainland
spouses, who normally shy away from high profile
activities due to society's prejudicial views
against them, to demonstrate. More than 100
spouses protested a legislative proposal to extend
their waiting period for an identity card to 11
years from eight years in 2003. The proposal was
later dropped. Smaller protests have occurred more
recently, mostly to lobby for equal rights.
"We are willing to scrub toilets for a
living. Why does Taiwan hire hundreds of thousands
of foreign workers but refuse to give the jobs to
us?" asked one wife at a seminar, referring to the
more than 300,000 Southeast Asian maids and other
foreign laborers here.
After years of
inaction, the government in 2005 pledged to spend
US$300 million a year on services for mainland and
foreign spouses, including health care, job skills
training, lessons in the local Taiwanese dialect
and family counseling.
"We feel the
government is also changing its views on this
issue. Now they are putting aside money to help
the spouses," said Ko.
But critics,
including some Taiwanese media, argue the
government continues to view mainland spouses with
suspicion. The Ministry of the Interior last year
commissioned a study by academics who concluded
the government should reduce the number of
mainland women allowed into Taiwan, citing the
high divorce rate. Critics blasted the findings,
arguing the divorce rate among Southeast Asian and
native Taiwanese were also high.
"The real
reason is that the authorities don't want more
Chinese brides to come to Taiwan," said an
editorial in The China Post about the study.
"Taiwan needs to regulate immigration," the
editorial said, but "the reduction has to be made
across the board, regardless of the countries from
which immigrant spouses come".
Despite
quotas, differential treatment and the crackdown
on matchmaking agencies, cross-Strait marriages
are expected to continue at a high rate, at least
until Chinese people's living standards near the
level of Taiwanese peoples.
"You can't
limit people-to-people contact," said Ko, the
CARES president. "We speak the same language and
share the same culture. It's the most natural
thing for people from both sides to want to marry
each other."
While it is unclear whether
the mainland spouses will influence cross-strait
politics, most maintain close personal ties with
China. Many of the women and their husbands travel
frequently to the mainland to visit relatives or
to do business, especially around this time of
year - Chinese new year. Even if they do not
support unification, most strongly favor improved
relations with China, which could directly benefit
them, bringing about fewer restrictions on travel
and business transactions between Taiwan and the
mainland.
Their children also could have a stronger
understanding of China compared with other Taiwanese
children, whose parents would be reluctant to take
them to China.
Meanwhile, at least some
marriages - like Chiu's - are working out just
fine. Chiu and his wife Tao said they will teach
their child about China as well as Taiwan. "We
will teach our child about Taiwan, as well as
mainland China. After all, China is our roots,"
said Chiu.
Cindy Sui is a
freelance journalist based in Taipei.
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