Research Focus
Over the past few decades, approximately 600,000 women from Southeast Asia and Mainland China have migrated to Taiwan through marriage. As the children of these transnational unions are coming of age, their presence is reshaping Taiwan’s demographic and identity landscape. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 77 second-generation adult children, Borders of Identities investigates how they navigate questions of belonging and membership in response to state-driven multicultural policies and evolving geopolitical tensions.
This book develops the concept of geopolitical multiculturalism to explain how pro-immigrant programs can serve purposes beyond inclusion, including national development and geopolitical security. Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy, introduced in 2016, provides a revealing case. It aims to strengthen trade and diplomatic relations with Southeast Asia while reducing its dependence on the Chinese market. This policy reframes Southeast Asian immigrants as valuable cultural assets and transnational bridges, offering institutional resources as rewards for differences and encouraging their children to embrace a bicultural identity. By contrast, immigrants from the People’s Republic of China are considered a threat of similarity – their cultural proximity to Taiwanese further heightens political suspicion. Their children consequently encounter a contested terrain of identity and face geopolitical stigma and suspicion of political loyalty.
Dr. Lan is working on the manuscript under contract with University of California Press. Bridging global politics and personal identity struggles, this timely book offers valuable insights about immigration and multiculturalism in East Asia and beyond, engaging in theory building by introducing a boundary framework that deepens the analysis of immigrant incorporation and national identity.
Dr. Lan co-edited a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, "The Emerging Second Generation in Asia," with Minjeong Kim, which Routledge also published as a book monograph. This special issue/edited volume presents six case studies from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, exploring how geopolitical contexts and state policies influence second-generation children's senses of belonging and membership. It also analyzes the distinct manifestations of transnationalism in Asian contexts, blurring the traditional distinction between “sending” and “receiving” countries in the life trajectories of the second generation.
Banner image: Cover of the book Becoming the New Second Generation: Children of Cross-border Marriages Navigating Multiculturalism, by Dr. Pei-Chia Lan.
