Permanently Temporary: Taiwanese Business Nomads as Reluctant Migrants by YenFen Tseng Department of

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Permanently TemporaryTaiwanese Business Nomads
as Reluctant Migrants by Yen-Fen
TsengDepartment of SociologyNational Taiwan
University
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Business Expatriates On Their Own

• The migration of Taiwanese small manufacturers
  and their key personnel to China and Southeast
  Asia has been phenomenal since late 1980s.
• The number of such capital-linked migration is
  difficult to tally since most of them are on
  temporary visitors visa.

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Permanently Temporary Migrants

• These migrants consider themselves to be economic
  nomads. This is because their business operations
  are highly flexible they switch manufacturing
  sites according to the dictates of global
  capitalism.
• Their moving around and being temporary residents
  is taking a permanent feature.

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Settlement or Re-sojourning?

• My article focuses on analyzing Taiwanese
  expatriates in Southeast Asia.
• I first analyze the macro forces driving
  Taiwanese capital-linked-migration, focusing on
  their economic role in global capitalism. Then I
  discussed their migration patterns and the impact
  on family life, home formation, and possible
  displacement.

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Data

• This article is based on data collected from a
  series of research on Taiwanese business
  relocation to Southeast Asian countries including
  Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, from 1998 to 2002.
• We conducted in-depth interviews with business
  owners and key expatriates of Taiwanese firms
  relocated to these countries. Interviewees were
  identified from the Directory of Taiwanese Firms
  Abroad published by Ministry of Economic Affairs
  in Taiwan. In this paper, I relied on fifty-seven
  interviews relevant to the migration issue.

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Transnational entrepreneurs from Taiwan
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• Taiwanese out-migration associated with foreign
  direct investments can be best understood as
  transnational entrepreneurs, a concept proposed
  by Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt (1999).
• In contrast to immigrant entrepreneurs who
  simply settled abroad and became progressively
  integrated into local ways, transnational
  entrepreneurs are those who are cultivating
  their networks across space, and traveling back
  and forth in pursuit of their commercial
  ventures

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• Like other newly industrialized countries in
  Asia, Taiwan has invested far more capital in
  East and Southeast Asian countries than in the
  rest of the world.
• Taiwanese favor Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and
  Vietnam as manufacturing sites because of their
  language affinity with the local Chinese who
  speak the same dialect as they do

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• Capital export has triggered a new wave of
  Taiwanese out-migration to other Asian countries
  and has helped build several prominent Taiwanese
  communities in these capital-receiving countries.

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Flexible Capital, Disposable Sites
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• Taiwanese small manufacturers fill economic niche
  as manufacturing contractors for buyers in Europe
  and North America. They have gradually lost much
  control over where they produce things.

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• Price competition erodes the pricing power and
  profit margin of firms. This is especially the
  case among export-oriented industries that have
  accounted for the economic growth of most NIEs.
• One of the most important adjustment mechanisms
  for maturing export industries in Asian NIEs is
  the process of triangle manufacturing, which came
  into being in the 1980s, but increased in
  prominence in the 1990s .

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• During the past several decades, constraints in
  production factors (labor shortage, high wages
  and high land prices) and external pressures
  (currency revaluation, tariffs and quotas) have
  led to the industrial relocation of Taiwans
  export industries such as electronics, textile,
  garment and footwear.

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• The export industries of Taiwan are incorporated
  into a broader process of regionalization in
  which the organization of production and trade
  networks have become more and more
  transnationalized within Asia.

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• In the basic operational pattern of triangle
  manufacturing, overseas buyers place their orders
  with the NIC manufacturers who later shift some
  or all of their production process to affiliated
  offshore factories in one or more low-wage
  countries (e.g. China, Indonesia or Vietnam).

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Triangle Production

• Big Buyers in U.S. and Europe
• Taiwanese Overseas
• Manufacturers Operations

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• The most important factor attracting capital
  investments in triangle production sites is their
  cheap and controllable labor.
• However, labor can never remain cheap and
  controllable in one site. The wage rises along
  with the rise of living standards. Many Taiwanese
  businesses are ready to abandon production sites
  that are no longer supplied by cheap and
  controllable labor.

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All that is solid melts into air

• Manufacturing sites become as temporary and
  disposable as the other materials in the triangle
  arrangements. Marx and Engels used to predict
  that in capitalism, all that is solid melts into
  air, they probably did not imagine that even
  production sites in late capitalism can also melt
  into air.

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Conditions for re-sojourning

• Although they are willing to renew their
  residency as long as their businesses continue to
  operate, these business-linked migrants consider
  themselves to be business nomads who cannot
  predict how long they will be able to keep their
  businesses in operation in the same country.

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Throwaway and Runaway

• In the realm of commodity production, the primary
  effect has been to emphasize the values and
  virtues of instantaneityand of disposability.
  The dynamics of a throwaway societymeans more
  than just throwing away produced goods.., but
  also being able to throw away values, lifestyles,
  stable relationships, and attachments to things,
  buildings, places, people, and received ways of
  doing and being. (David Harvey, 1990 286)

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Life Impact
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Stratified Expatriates

• Transnational Taiwanese business entrepreneurs
  are highly stratified and they have very
  different outlooks of their work and life abroad.
  At the top are business elites who enjoy what
  Aihwa Ong calls flexible citizenship. They are
  either business owners of medium-sized firms or
  executives working for medium to large firms.

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Flexible Elites

• I use the term flexible citizenship to refer
  especially to the strategies and effects of
  mobile managers, technocrats, and professional
  seeking to both circumvent and benefit from
  different nation-state regimes by selecting
  different sites for investments, work, and family
  relocation. (Aihwa Ong, 1999 112, emphasis
  original)

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Adjusting to Survive

• In the middle and bottom level are transnational
  entrepreneurs who own small businesses and who
  try everything to lower costs in order to
  survive. Their status as flexible citizens is
  more a matter of adjusting to the fluctuating
  demands of global capitalism.

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• I moved my business operations first to China,
  and then to Indonesia. But now I am not sure for
  how much longer I will be here (Indonesia),
  because the production cost has been going up
  here and I am thinking to move to Cambodia. But
  Cambodia is probably my last stop. I would be too
  tired to move anywhere and the buyers would be
  too tired to locate where I am. (Interview
  notes)

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Globalization is a way of leaving home?
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Home and Away

• For Taiwanese transnational entrepreneurs,
  globalization can mean different ways of
  transforming the meaning of home depending on
  their class background.

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Strangers at home

• Transnational entrepreneurs in lower and middle
  positions have less resources for relocating
  their families. Unaccompanied by their families,
  their way of leaving home paves a rocky way back
  home. Their infrequent presence at home had
  relegated their family role to the background.

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Westernizing in non-western societies

• The executive class in general, possesses more
  resources for relocating their families including
  their children.
• Business executives send their children to
  international schools because they do not want
  their children to become assimilated into a
  culture that is considered parochial and
  backward. These kids are later sent to
  Australia, England or North America

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Globalizing Citizens
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Globalizing Nation

• Even if transnational Taiwanese entrepreneurs may
  have gradually drifted away from their homeland,
  Taiwan state has been actively incorporating them
  into its nation-building project. Taiwan
  considers Taiwanese business migrants a symbol of
  national pride and it has been implementing
  policies to win their loyalty and sense of
  belonging.

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Symbols of National Strength

• The Taiwanese identity discourse in
  nation-building is closely tied to the
  globalization of Taiwanese capitalists, since
  flows of capital have been heavily vested with
  symbolic meanings related to the Taiwanese
  national image (Wang Horng-Leun 2000103)

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Reluctant Migrants
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• It is difficult to categorize the business nomads
  described in this chapter according to the
  conventional framework that differentiates
  long-term immigrants and transients by studying
  their migration intentions.

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• Aside from this, in todays global economy,
  immigrants are also more capable of maintaining
  transnational networks that keep their options of
  coming and going flexible.
• As small producers for world market, Taiwanese
  business migrants hinge their choices over
  manufacturing sites and their migration on
  changes in production factors.