More Taiwanese people are leaving China to go home

China’s COVID-19 measures, economic hiccups may be prompting some Taiwanese citizens to return home

For Taiwan marketing director LiMin Kao, Shanghai was the big leagues. She spent four years in China’s commercial capital where the salary and career opportunities outshone anything in her hometown of Taipei.

But in 2019, Ms. Kao moved back to Taiwan to take care of her aging father, and, in retrospect, counts herself lucky to have missed draconian COVID-19 lockdowns in China.

Would she move back to China again? “I’m not sure,” she says.

Ms. Kao, 40, is one of hundreds of thousands of ambitious Taiwanese who leave home for mainland China and all the career benefits that come with a US$18-trillion economy.

She formed part of a diaspora the Chinese government has hoped would help it win hearts and minds in Taiwan, a self-ruled island since 1949 that Beijing seeks to annex in the name of “unification.” In August, China encircled Taiwan with warships and fired missiles over the island to express its displeasure at U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting Taipei – what Beijing sees as foreign interference in an internal matter.

Unfortunately for China, the numbers of Taiwanese chasing careers in mainland China has dropped significantly. One measure of this is the Taiwan government’s annual statistics on its citizens living in China. In 2015, 420,000 Taiwanese were working in China. By the end of 2020, according to Taiwan’s Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, that number had fallen to 242,000. It’s the latest data available.

Tzu-Ting Yang, an associate research fellow with the Institute of Economics at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, said a big part of the drop can be blamed on the lockdowns and quarantines that followed from China’s zero-COVID strategy. He said some Taiwanese working in China would previously commute from Taiwan on weekdays and return home on weekends.

He said he could see some Taiwanese returning if China unwinds its COVID-19 policies.

But Mr. Yang thinks the trend of Taiwanese leaving China might continue because economic opportunities there are waning amid a crisis in the Chinese housing market, supply chain problems and a continuing trade war between Beijing and Washington. This trade conflict has made it unattractive for some Taiwanese companies to operate export-oriented businesses from China.

Ms. Kao found working in Shanghai, with its population of 26 million, exhilarating. It was more cosmopolitan than Taipei and more ambitious. “People in China, especially younger people, are more positive than in Taiwan. And they work harder to be successful,” she said.

“Taipei is very small.”

Her first job was with a company that provided analytical tools for betting on sports. But new restrictions by China on internet gambling ended that venture. Ms. Kao later moved to an “aesthetic medicine” company, where services include cosmetic surgery.

She found Chinese people friendly, saying the biggest enmity among Shanghai residents seemed to be their dislike of people from the country’s capital. “People living in Shanghai hate people living in Beijing.”

Ms. Kao isn’t opposed to Taiwan joining China one day. She expects it will eventually happen, but she hopes “we get together peacefully, not by war.”

Her viewpoint is a minority position in Taiwan, where an August, 2022, poll by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, an independent and non-partisan organization, found 50 per cent of respondents favoured independence, 25.7 per cent backed the “status quo,” and 11.8 per cent favoured “unification” with China.

Mark Hsu, like Ms. Kao, also returned home from a career in China. The Taipei native, 33, spent three years working in Hangzhou, the capital of e-commerce in China, where he helped Taiwanese companies with the logistics of shipping to the mainland.

The traffic and the air quality were awful, but he said his threeyear stay made him more sympathetic to China. He had no problem with the surveillance, for instance.

“In the past there has been a lot of crime, people get kidnapped or robbed on the street easily. But now with the surveillance cameras, robbers or thieves can get caught in 10 minutes,” he said. “It gives people a sense of security.”

Mr. Hsu, who previously supported Taiwan’s independence, said he certainly feels closer to China now. “I’m not saying that I support unification now, but I am less opposed to the idea.”

He also liked China’s hustle culture.

“They are willing to invest in improving the equipment, whereas in Taiwan, people tend to use the same equipment without upgrading until the day it can no longer be used,” Ms. Hsu said.

He said he found Taiwan’s products and talent are not as sought-after in China as they once were.

“Back 20 years ago, China would hire Taiwanese for management level jobs. Now there’s no room for Taiwanese unless you are really good.”

During his tenure in China, Mr. Hsu was perplexed to find demand for Taiwanese goods was dropping. One day in 2017, he came across an e-commerce ranking that listed the most popular products for online Chinese shoppers. Eighty per cent were from Japan and South Korea and Western countries, including health supplements, beauty products and milk formula. Twenty per cent of sought-after items were from Taiwan and Thailand.

“I knew at the moment that Taiwanese products are no longer competitive in China,” Mr. Hsu said. “The purchasing power of China’s consumers is rising and they are willing to pay more to get high-priced products from Japan, South Korean and Western countries.”

In the end, it was family matters and falling demand for Taiwanese products that drew Mr. Hsu back home. He said he’d go back to China, were it not for family obligations.

“To be honest, after working in China for these years, it did change how I view China.”