• Date: October 22nd, Tuesday, 2019 12:00-13:00
• Location: Asia Square (3rd Floor), SNUAC (Bldg. 101)

Mainland Spouses Speak: Taiwanese Nationalism and Political Movement of Mainland Spouses

Speaker: Kyung-yun Moon (SNUAC Visiting Scholar)

This study deals with two events in 2014~15 that served as a momentum for the Mainland Spouses to take to the streets. Mainland Spouses (大陸配偶) refer to marriage immigrants from China, living in Taiwan. Since the cross-Strait opening in 1987, they have migrated to Taiwan through ‘marriage’ as a route. As the history of migration is long, the Mainland Spouses are not only already members of the Taiwanese families but also members of civil society in Taiwan, through endless struggles and compromises with the Taiwanese government. Nonetheless, the Taiwanese government had been endowing different legal-institutional citizenship to the Mainland Spouses, apart from marriage migrants from other countries, depending on how the ruling party recognized ‘China’. Especially, the movements in 2014~15 in Taiwanese civil society to establish a ‘New Taiwan’, such as the Sunflower Movement, have inculcated a sense of crisis in the Mainland Spouses. The Mainland Spouses end up taking to the streets to let the ‘New Taiwan’ be aware of their existence as well as to participate in the anti-Sunflower Movement. This study seeks to take the citizenship equality movement and anti-Sunflower Movement of Mainland Spouses as cases to think about the China-Taiwan relations as well as the political movements of migrants. It will especially focus on how the Mainland Spouses use these two events/movements to appropriate/subvert the images given upon themselves.

During lunch on October 22nd, there was a brown bag seminar at Asia Square on the 3rd floor of SNUAC. This seminar consisted of a presentation on ‘Mainland Spouses Speak: Taiwanese Nationalism and Political Movement of Mainland Spouses’ by Dr. Kyung-yun Moon (Anthropology), who had been selected for the 2016 SNUAC Dissertation Writing Fellowship and is now a visiting scholar at SNUAC, and was proceeded by Eunyoung Nam (Senior Researcher in Human Resource Development, SNUAC).

‘Mainland Spouses’ refer to marriage immigrants from China, living in Taiwan, and the presentation focused on the political movement of Mainland Spouses, which took up Chapter 4 of Dr. Moon’s dissertation. She explained the recognition and background of cross-strait marriage and the identity of Mainland Spouses that differ from regular international marriage and international spouses in Taiwan, and talked about the Sunflower Movement and Anti-Sunflower Movement in 2014-15 Taiwain and how the political movement of Mainland Spouses seemed to contrast with the Taiwanese civil society in their process of fighting for equal civil rights.

After the presentation, there were question-and-answer session and discussion on various topics such as the relationship between civil organizations and Mainland Spouses, the background of 1st and 2nd generations of Mainland Spouses, the phenomena of political movements attacking the minority, and the Taiwanese society’s recognition on welfare policies. Dr. Moon is set to give another presentation at a brown bag seminar next year on the cross-strait relationship examined through Taiwanese young adults’ startup businesses.