Bridging across or sandwiched between? The political re-socialisation of Chinese immigrant women and their encounter with Taiwanese identity

Abstract

This paper presents the ambiguous and complex political re-socialisation of Chinese immigrant women and their encounter with Taiwanese identity. Contrasting their conceptions before and after migration along a central-peripheral conceptual hierarchy, this paper elaborates how their nationalistic curiosity and understanding of democracy confronted Taiwanese identity in their everyday life. These daily, sometimes mundane, experiences manifested the contradictions between the conceptual hierarchy and the ethnic divide and partisan politics in Taiwan. Their political re-socialisation proved that this conceptual hierarchy was inadequate to deal with the Taiwanese-Mainlander divide and the anti-China sentiment. Political re-socialisation gained through daily life gradually fed into their reaction to the Taiwanese identity. Situated amongst the antagonism between Taiwan and China, they were locked in an in-between form of tension and their subjective identification would therefore be challenged by the mutual suspicion and exclusion of both sides which demand their singular and undivided loyalty.