Sat, Jan 13, 2024 page3

• 2024 Elections: The perspective from Chinese in Taiwan on the elections

  • AFP, TAIPEI
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  Meeting voters, visiting temples and touring the streets in an open-top truck, Li Zhenxiu (李貞秀) is campaigning hard for today’s election in Taiwan, just like hundreds of other candidates.

  However, Li is highly unusual: She is originally from China, one of only two candidates running for Taiwan’s legislature to hail from across the Taiwan Strait.

  Li is a legislator-at-large candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).

  

  A picture taken on Monday shows Wooper, a Chinese student who studies in Taiwan.

  Photo: AFP

  She is fighting for the rights of the 360,000 spouses of Taiwanese citizens who like her, are from China, and to “make her small contribution to ease the misunderstandings” between the two sides.

  “I feel very unhappy when I see mainland nationalists criticize Taiwan, but I am also not comfortable when Taiwanese politicians and media criticize the mainland,” she said.

  Asked if she hoped that China could one day be a democracy like Taiwan, she said it would depend on what Chinese wanted.

  “If people in the mainland like their current way of life, we should not interfere, but if people’s minds change and they want democracy, we are happy to see that,” she said.

  “It’s not our business whether people eat with chopsticks or forks. We should just do our best for our own things.”

  Taiwanese voters are to elect a new president and lawmakers today in a ballot closely watched around the world, as it would determine Taipei’s future ties with an increasingly bellicose Beijing.

  People like Li, living in Taiwan, but with family in China, find themselves caught between the two countries’ political tussle.

  Chinese spouses have to wait six years to apply for citizenship in Taiwan — twice as long as those from other countries.

  “We don’t want compassion, we just want to be treated fairly,” said Li, who moved to Taiwan 30 years ago and now runs her

  own business.

  However, if Chinese spouses face a long wait for citizenship, it is at least an option for them — and they are allowed to work in the meantime.

  For Chinese students studying in Taiwan, their prospects are much tougher, with no right to apply for central government scholarships and no right to find jobs locally after graduation.

  “Mainland students are just like locals, but we don’t get the same treatment. I think it’s unfair,” said Wooper, a Chinese student in Taiwan.

  “This unfair treatment is based on political considerations,” he said, asking to use a pseudonym as he was worried about the repercussions of him speaking with international media.

  Students from China were first allowed to apply to Taiwanese

  universities in 2011 when the China-friendly Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was in power, with numbers peaking above 40,000 in 2016.

  However, in 2020, Beijing banned Chinese students from applying for degree-seeking study in Taiwan, and by October last year, there were barely 2,000 degree-seeking students left.

  When he came to Taiwan in 2016, Wooper thought he would adapt to local society easily, but eight years on, he says he feels only like an “observer” as “mainland students are separated from Taiwanese life, especially political life.”

  Wooper hopes the new government would improve conditions for students like him, and allow him to live and work in the nation after graduation.

  In addition to barring students, Beijing has also blocked its citizens from coming on holiday to Taiwan.

  Beijing refused travel permission to Taiwan starting in August 2019, so only Chinese living abroad are able to visit the nation as tourists.

  Jenny Feng, a restaurant owner in China’s Hunan Province, hopes the rules are eased — as a fan of Taiwanese music, she is keen to visit places mentioned in song lyrics. “I hope the relationship between the two sides can go back to a period when we can travel to Taiwan,” she said.
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