Working Abroad as a Career of the Future? Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean Expatriates in China

The rapid speed of globalization, especially the economic globalization, brings not only the rapid growth of foreign direct investment but also the effect of flows of people. More and more people move across the territorial boundaries and search for a job outside of their home county. Studies on the flows of people to date have tended to focus on the unskilled or semi-skilled migrants from developing countries to well-developed areas.

However, the movement of expatriates with an opposite direction, usually from a developed country to developing areas, has remained much less explored. This is not because this type of movement lacks academic importance or research interests, but is mainly due to expatriates being viewed as “privileged migrants” who lead “boundaryless careers.” This session tries to challenge the above notions of the highly skilled and analyzes migration experiences of Taiwanese expatriates in China, arguing that skilled migration is not about the mobility of boundaryless careers (nor can these migrants be seen as cosmopolitan), but rather it is a mobility with its own costs and constraints.

Instead of the perspective of cosmopolitan, this session argues that Taiwanese expatriates would be better described as “transmigrants,” whose main character lies in their transnational lives; most of them stay “permanently temporarily” in China. In comparison to Taiwanese expatriates, however, Japanese and Korean expatriates show different types of transnational carrier and social embeddedness in China.