Mixed Marriages and Multiculturalism in Taiwan

The Taipei Times reports that the number of marriages involving brides from China has risen 56.3% year-on-year, according to figures from the DGBAS.

The number of marriages involving brides from China in the first five months of this year was up sharply from the year-earlier level, the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.

According to DGBAS tallies, one out of every 4.9 marriages during the January-May period were intermarriages, with Chinese brides making up the lion's share of foreign spouses.

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Among the new foreign spouses, Chinese nationals accounted for 5,737 and those from other countries totaled 6,845. The number of Chinese brides rose 56.3 percent from the figure for the same period last year.

Taiwan is doing a middling job of handling the influx of foreign brides. One thing that is fascinating to watch is how marriage trends are turning Taiwan into an even more multicultural state, something that got little recognition under the old KMT regime, which posited Taiwan as an idealized Chinese society. One of the bright spots of DPP policy is this recognition, however awkwardly, that Taiwan hosts more than one view of the world. But it seems society at large is ill-prepared, and has been ill--prepared by its leaders, to accept all these kids whose mothers come from other societies. Looking at the above stats, more than one in five marriages now involve a foreigner, and one in three births last year was to a foreign mother.

This article from two years ago brought up some other issues involving foreign mothers and babies in Taiwan, pointing out that:

A recent study indicates that babies born to immigrant mothers from Vietnam are more likely to be underweight than those born to Taiwanese mothers.

According to records collected from 1998 to 2002, roughly 30 percent of babies born to Taiwanese mothers weighed less than 3kg, while the corresponding figure was more than 40 percent for babies born to Vietnamese mothers.

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Indeed, according to the Ministry of the Interior's records from last year, Taiwanese women get married at an average age of 28 while immigrants from Southeast Asia get married around the age of 23. In addition, only five percent of Taiwanese women marry between the ages of 15 and 19, compared with 32 percent of immigrants from Southeast Asia.

Two years ago a hospital established a service center for pregnant foreign brides, almost a third of whom are under 20. It seems incredible that the government is permitting the marriage of brides so young. It will be interesting to see, given the massive shortage of females in China, how Taiwan's demand for women will play out there as a political issue (note that less than 6,000 marriages in the period above involved Chinese women) or whether it will even show up on the radar.

Technorati: [Taiwan]