PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 2- Conceptual frameworkcountries. This literature investigates factors that facilitate the relocation of Taiwanesemigrants and job-seekers to Mainland China, and also addresses Taiwanese peoples‘integration into local Chinese society. As Lin (2007) argues, despite the fact thatTaiwanese people have the ability to move easily across the Taiwan Strait, it is still hardfor them to feel settled and integrated in China due to the gap between the reality thatthey experience in Mainland China and their pre-migration perception of the reality. Asa result, Taiwanese people still tend to live in Taiwanese bubbles, contributing to theemergence of substantial Taiwanese communities or enclaves in major Chinese cities(Clark 2002; Tseng 1997). This understanding of Taiwanese migrants‘ livedexperiences as evidenced in their residential preference and forms reveals the extent ofTaiwanese migrants‘ integration into the local society while at the same timeencouraging us to consider their emotional lives and processes in their migration andresettlement.Given that the social and cultural analysis of overseas Chinese migration has indicatedthat the overseas Chinese migrants‘ identity is no longer attached to stable culturalentities (Ong and Nonini 1997), but instead is the result of construction and negotiation(see, for example, Ghosh and Wang 2003; Mitchell 1997b, 2004; Nyiri 2001), thediscussion of identity is consequently useful and important in understanding Taiwanesemigrants‘ grounded lived practices. Although migrants‘ ethnic and cultural identity isoften re-invented in overseas Chinese practices to foster entrepreneurship and businessnetworks for their successful operation in the global economy, identity practices andnegotiations are nevertheless complicated by this group of migrants‘ other references ofidentity. Kong‘s (1999a, b) studies on Singaporean elite migrants in China demonstratethat national identity and Singaporean-ness are reaffirmed and upheld. In the same vein,intra-ethnic interactions between different national overseas Chinese migrants‘ identities61