Marriage and Women in Taiwan

The Taipei Times had a short article today arguing that females in Taiwan remain unconvinced by marriage. Unhappy marriages abound, apparently, and Taiwan leads industrialized Asia in divorce, despite everyone in Taiwan getting married on a lucky day....

Of the females, 50.1 percent said they would not be happier if they were married, while only 39.5 percent thought married people are happier than those who stay single.

The phenomenon of women not getting married is in fact an issue all over East and SE Asia. Taiwan is manifesting a region-wide phenomenon.

I ran some searches in Google Scholar today and it is actually surprising how little interest there appears to be in this topic; I think people treat it as something that is easily understood. Hopefully there's a lot out there and I just missed it. One thing that I would like to see more research on is mother's attitude -- many of my female students have told me privately that their mothers have told them either they don't care whether their daughters marry, or have discouraged it.

This paper on the marriage market observed:

In recent years, the discussion on marriage issues, especially the research about the foreign brides, mainly focuses on foreign brides’ adaptation (Hsia, 2002), transnational or interethnic marriages, and the domestic labor market (Wang, 2002). These studies have concentrated on the issue of marriage market and discussion on “the supply” of foreign brides. However, they neglect problems of “the demand” in Taiwan’s marriage market. Due to the immigration of foreign brides to Taiwan, the number of men who face the marriage squeeze problem has greatly declined, and for them, the problem appears ‘solved.’ But this has placed women in a similar predicament which appears to be worsening, especially for women with lower education, living in rural areas, or belonging to the lower classes, with less opportunity for upward mobility. We argue that this problem will get worse if the foreign brides keep entering Taiwan. In the near future, Taiwanese males will have better spousal availability in the marriage market as the situation unexpectedly changes to a surplus of marriageable women. This will affect females’ possibility of finding a marriage partner in the Taiwan marriage market.

In many of the articles I have read the unmarried young woman is typically portrayed as a sort of Taipei Career Girl independent, with her own income. However, authors above note that the reality is more prosaic -- the epidemic of non-marriage is silent and rural, the class that doesn't appear interviewed by researchers or in the media. Foreign brides aren't filling a gap but displacing Taiwanese women at the bottom of the ladder.

The article notes that the government is implementing a pre-marriage education policy, among its many other policies to encourage marriage and fertility.

I think all these papers miss a key point: the really serious problem of having hordes of unmarried young women around is the demand for the obnoxious, should-be-shot-on-sight poodle lapdog rat-things that they like to keep as pets, Canis familiaris only by a technicality. Surely the government can do something about that.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Satuday musings

Passed around a script from the TV show friends in class the other day for the students to translate and perform. One group called me over to discuss one of the pages, and after a few moments, I explained that Janice was dumping Ross, whom she had a fling with. Couldn't penetrate the problem they were having until, after I explained a bit more, several of them chorused: "What? Ross is a man?" Yes, never having see the show, reading his lines, they thought he was a girl....

FT got itself spanked over a loony comment in an otherwise good article on the US and Taiwan. It said:

"In recent weeks US officials, including Barack Obama, the president, have publicly repeated a long-held US policy stating that Taiwan and Tibet are part of China."

The comments appeared in a piece from April 7, and were written, said FT in replies to people who wrote them, by a reporter based in Beijing. I have often observed that Beijing reporters write awful stuff on Taiwan. Just another bit of evidence....

WSJ had a really excellent and wide ranging piece on the foreign bride/children issue in Taiwan...

Fear among some conservative Taiwanese of an overwhelming wave of mixed-nationality children has faded; studies show that most mixed-nationality couples have one or two children, in line with their all-Taiwanese counterparts.

"It's actually kind of disappointing for demographers," says Dr. Lan.

Today, conservatives are more likely to fret about the lack of newborns than the nationality of the mothers. Taiwan's birth rate is among the world's lowest. With prosperity and education, more Taiwanese women have embraced the freedom of single life, leaving more men casting around overseas for wives. In the 1990s marriage brokers began organizing trips for single men, mostly to Vietnam, Indonesia and mainland China.

Articles on the foreign bride issue often argue that locals select foreigners because those women still want to have kids, but it is not female preferences but economics that shapes family size. Until the government lowers the cost of having children, gives women more rights over their children, and makes the island more kid-friendly, Taiwanese will continue to shun child-rearing. Note that Montlake's position, which is a commonly heard one, blames the changes in females -- those irresponsible, freedom-embracing femmes who won't stay properly barefoot, preggers, and in the chufang, not the economic costs of having children, for Taiwan's low fertility rate. The fact that females in Taiwan largely make the same choices irrespective of national origin or economic status simply indicates that the problem is not any particular group of females, per se, but some structural factor in Taiwan. Montlake's article thus contains the evidence that refutes its own gender biases.

It's interesting that the mail-order bride phenomenon is invariably regarded as a phenomenon worthy of reportage, but the incredibly large number of foreign males married to local females is taken for granted by everyone and is never explored in the media as a phenomenon worthy of reportage. It seems to be a kind of Orientalization of Taiwanese females in which when the Other marries into Us, this is deemed so normal and understandable that it need not be contemplated, but when Others marry each Other, it is a thing well worth discussing. I suspect gender bias as well; Taiwanese males marrying foreigners is inherently interesting; Taiwanese females marrying foreigners is inherently dull. Females marrying "up" is normal, after all....

Harvard's awesome Michael Porter, boy wonder of business strategy, appeared at a forum in Taipei the other day and pushed Taiwan to adopt ECFA. It was Porter's Competitive Advantages of Nations that first got me interested in Taiwan's economy. Porter clearly knows little about cross-strait politics or about ECFA (if no one knows the contents of ECFA, how can Porter?) or about the effect of China on the nations around it or on China's habit of not honoring its agreements. He was simply voicing theological commitments to the "free trade" position in a forum where they would not be challenged. In B-schools in Taiwan strategy study has the highest status, which means that Porter's voice carries special weight.

Also on tap: Shadows in the Cloud: the investigation into cyber attacks on India and Tibetan activists. Read that and the recent accounts of Chinese cyber attacks on Indian targets, and of course, the Google experience in China, in which attacks on Google originated from Chinese government sources, against Porter's purblind enthusiasm for an ECFA with that nation.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Mail Order Brides

Ralph Jennings, Reuter's man in Taipei, talks about the mail order bride phenomenon here in Taiwan...how many brides are here? Vietnamese brides are the island's largest non-Chinese immigrant group...

The story of women such as Nguyen has prompted Taiwan and Vietnam -- whose 75,000 nationals are the island's largest non-Chinese immigrant group -- to get tougher on cross-border marriages to stop fraud and illegal residency following break-ups.

Taiwan men looking for "mail-order brides" are partial to Vietnamese women who they consider to be particularly submissive, matchmakers say. Often left on the shelf by local women, these men are looking for wives willing to have babies and help their aging parents, the matchmakers add.

Men often enlist friends and business contacts in their wife search. But the popularity of Vietnamese brides is so great that there is now a prime time television show that broadcasts photographs and biographical data of prospective wives.

Those who prefer a more personal approach use the services of about 300 marriage brokers operating in Taiwan who organize wife shopping trips to Vietnam at costs that range from $900 to $10,000 for stays up to one week.

The article goes on to describe some of the legal changes the system is going through to prevent the abuses. As this article from a Washington state paper notes, it is a problem in the US as well.

The mail-bride industry is especially popular in rural areas of Washington, where foreign wives who speak little English can be isolated and kept from knowing their rights and options. "Aside from anecdotes about abuse, we don't yet know the scope of the problem. It's only when someone gets murdered that we hear about it," Basu said.

But even in cities fear is a controlling factor. When the Women's Center held its first on-campus conference, the grieving parents of Anastasia King spoke. And, afterward, Basu said six young women -- like Anastasia, all tall blondes from Eastern European countries -- told her they, too, were in abusive relationships they couldn't escape. One was a UW medical student.

They all told Basu they were afraid to come forward partly because they claimed that the Russian mafia controls the brokerages that brought them here. These businesses boast of shining "95 percent success rates" they don't want tarnished. So, if they divorced, the women feared reprisals against family members still at home.

Just type "mail order brides" in Google. Frightening.

[Taiwan] [Vietnam]