A group of men enjoys an afternoon cup of Myanmar milk tea at a tea shop on Huaxin Street, in New Taipei City, on August 12. (Allegra Mendelson | Frontier)

A world apart: Myanmar-Chinese find a home in Taiwan

A Myanmar-Chinese community has long thrived in Taiwan but shifts in the island’s national identity has made emigrating more difficult, even as people are more desperate than ever to leave Myanmar.

By ALLEGRA MENDELSON | FRONTIER

Every Tuesday and Friday morning, elderly men and women convene at the corner of Zhongxiao Street and Huaxin Street in New Taipei City. 

They come for different reasons. Some need help filling out insurance forms or completing death certificates for relatives. Others simply need guidance on how to change their cell phone backgrounds.

The Myanmar Overseas Chinese Association, which hosts these twice-weekly meetings, was established in 1965 and is based in the heart of what is known as “Little Burma”, a hub of Myanmar restaurants and shops in the municipality that surrounds Taiwan’s capital Taipei.

Mr Qu Fa Quan, a 28-year-old Myanmar-Chinese man who recently started working as a secretary at the association and goes by the name Nara, told Frontier that the group’s office serves as a one-stop shop for the Myanmar community in the city.

“If they don’t know how to do something, or if they don’t speak Chinese, we’ll help them,” said Nara. “Maybe their parents died and they need help getting insurance. Some people have family who want to move from Myanmar to Taipei; there are many different reasons they come to us.”

On one Tuesday morning in early August when Frontier visited the office, Nara was preparing to give the dozen or so men and women gathered there a crash course on photography and photo editing. But first, each had their blood pressure taken. One by one, they presented their Taiwan identification cards to Nara who then slipped on the pressure cuff, recorded the figures and confirmed whether they were within a healthy range.

“They are elderly, so we need to check their health. If their blood pressure is too high, we send them to the doctor,” he said, explaining that some of the members live far from a clinic and it’s easier for them to get checked at the association’s office.

Many of the association’s members are Myanmar-Chinese who have lived in Taipei for decades, moving to the island in the 1980s and 1990s while Myanmar was in the midst of political turmoil and at a time when Taiwan was encouraging overseas Chinese to immigrate.

Members of the Myanmar Overseas Chinese Association meet for a course at the organisation’s office on Huaxin Street on August 13. (Allegra Mendelson | Frontier)

But despite this history, the Myanmar community along Huaxin Street remains distinctly Myanmar. Most restaurants serve traditional Myanmar food, advertised in Burmese script, and greet customers with a cheery mingalabar. On any given day, the street is lined with Myanmar patrons sipping traditional laphet yay (milk tea) and eating samosas and sanwei makin (semolina cake).

While the community developed thanks to a relatively open immigration policy, it has become significantly more challenging to move to Taiwan in recent years. The shift has come at an inopportune time for those in Myanmar looking to flee the country after the 2021 military coup, many for the same reasons as the generation that left decades earlier.

Push and pull

The military coup in Myanmar in 1962 ushered in decades of authoritarian rule and destructive economic policies. By 1988, Myanmar had become one of the poorest countries in the world and protests were breaking out against military rule, culminating in a mass uprising in August that year.

Daw Thandar Myint, who goes by the English name Judy, left Myanmar in 1988 when she was just 13 years old, because her family wanted to escape the “economic turmoil and political crisis”. Now 49, she runs one of the many coffee and tea shops on Huaxin Street.

Anti-Chinese sentiment has also long plagued Myanmar, at times erupting in violence, such as the riots in 1967 that saw attacks on Chinese schools, business and media offices that left over 30 dead. Myanmar-Chinese are also not one of Myanmar’s officially recognised indigenous ethnic groups, severely curtailing their political rights, although some related groups like the Kokang are accepted.

“Chinese people in Burma were like second-class citizens; we were a minority. We wanted to move somewhere where we would no longer be second-class,” said Mr Irvin Lin, a 64-year-old Myanmar-Chinese migrant who moved to Taiwan in 1997.

Between 1982 and 2007, more than 20,000 Chinese from Myanmar settled in Taiwan, according to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Council. For many of them, Taiwan offered a safe haven away from the strife in Myanmar as well as opportunities for socio-economic mobility.

“There were so many programmes, mainly for education, where you could come over to study here and then afterwards you could get a job and bring the rest of your family over,” said Mr Frank Lai, a Myanmar-Chinese migrant who moved to Taiwan in 1999, and whose family runs a grocery store selling Myanmar food products on Huaxin Street.

Myanmar-Chinese immigrant Frank Lai at his family’s grocery store on Huaxin Street on August 12. (Allegra Mendelson | Frontier)

One significant employment opportunity arrived on the island in 1970 in the form of a factory run by Texas Instruments, an American semiconductor company. The factory’s location, a short walk from the northern tip of Huaxin Street, helped create “Little Burma”, explained Ms Analeigh Yao. Yao isn’t Myanmar-Chinese, but with a Myanmar-Chinese friend co-founded the Sanji Teahouse, a restaurant and event space for the Myanmar community at the northern end of Huaxin Street.

Yao, who also co-founded the Mingalapar Culture Studio, a multimedia platform aimed at sharing the stories of the Myanmar community in Taiwan, explained that Texas Instruments preferred to hire Myanmar-Chinese migrants who, at the time, had “higher English proficiency than most Taiwanese people”. 

But migrants from Myanmar also settled in other areas of Taipei and New Taipei City, as well as in the nearby Taoyuan City and the southern port city of Kaohsiung.

Part of the pull for Myanmar-Chinese people was the ease with which they could get residency and citizenship in Taiwan. Judy told Frontier that when her family moved to the country it took them “only one week” to get residency. Lin and Lai also said the process was very quick, taking their families about a month.

The Kuomintang, a republican political party that ruled most of China starting in 1928, retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war to the Chinese Communist Party. The KMT planned to use Taiwan to launch an offensive to retake mainland China, but this never materialised, while the CCP has long threatened to forcibly annex the island.

Many KMT soldiers fled to Myanmar, where they mounted unsuccessful incursions into China’s southern Yunnan province, and subsequently to northern Thailand, where they helped the government to combat communist insurgencies. Thousands of KMT troops were later repatriated to Taiwan, with most settling in Zhongzhen village in Taoyuan city, just south of the capital.

“The KMT was fighting an insurgency and occupying parts of Myanmar at the time, they then felt that they had an obligation to bring back the soldiers and their families to Taiwan,” explained Dr Enze Han, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong who has researched the history of the KMT in Southeast Asia.

While the KMT had a presence in Myanmar, some troops intermarried with Myanmar-Chinese, and other Myanmar-Chinese joined its fighting force. Then, in the 1960s the Taiwanese government began competing with Beijing to win support from overseas Chinese. As part of these efforts, Taipei made it easy for Myanmar-Chinese to move to Taiwan to study and work, promoting it as a safe and welcoming “motherland” to which they could return.

A Myanmar-Chinese woman prepares breakfast at her restaurant on Huaxin Street on August 13. (Allegra Mendelson | Frontier)

Stricter processes

But the immigration process has changed in the decades since. The country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1990s and the centre-left Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency in 2000, ending 55 years of KMT rule.

The DPP won its third election in a row this year, and is generally seen as more defiant of China’s aggression and wary of its efforts to influence domestic politics than the modern-day KMT. While KMT previously competed with Beijing as the true representative of China, and made overtures to overseas Chinese, the DPP’s political platform advocates for a Taiwanese national identity distinct from China.

Yao said it’s still easier for overseas Chinese or “people who have family in Taiwan” to get residency “compared to other migrants”, but the process has become more complicated and takes much longer than it used to.

Aside from political reasons, Yao said Taiwan has also grown economically since the migrations of the 1950s and 60s. “Since then, the economic and social needs of the whole society have changed and the workforce has changed; they no longer need as many people coming to Taiwan,” she said.

When the KMT first retreated to Taiwan, they faced economic pressures from high prices, limited foreign trade and a small fiscal budget. But by the turn of the century, Taiwan had moved from an agriculture-based economy to a highly-industrialised one, with the country’s GDP jumping up from less than US$50 billion in 1982 to over $330 billion in 2000.

Koko Thu, a Myanmar-Taiwanese building contractor and the founder of the information-sharing platform Taiwan Alliance for Myanmar, has tried to support Myanmar people looking to move to Taiwan by working with human rights organisations on the island, but the process, which used to take months, can now take years.

“I reported more than 20 people to the Taiwan government, but till now – more than one and a half years – they have not yet approved even one person because Taiwan is very careful and strict,” said Koko Thu.

The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Myanmar didn’t directly address whether it’s more difficult to get a visa now, only saying “the procedure of visa application to Taiwan has become more convenient since we started our service in Yangon in 2016”.

The Myanmar Trade Office, which is registered as a company in Taiwan instead of a diplomatic office given that the two countries don’t have official relations, also hasn’t been much help, said Koko Thu. While the office, which was established in 2015, is the closest thing to a Myanmar embassy on the island, it does not handle consular matters and has downsized since the coup.

In fact, it has become so inactive that Koko Thu told Frontier he thought it had closed down entirely. Frontier confirmed it’s still open during a mid-August visit to the office, which is located in the basement of a corporate building. But it doesn’t appear to have a full-time representative and mostly handles support for bilateral trade and investment opportunities for Myanmar businesses in Taiwan.

“It is useless,” said Koko Thu. “It is not for Myanmar people – not for visa applications or to help … It is just for trade and trade mostly for the military.”

Koko Thu at the Sanji Teahouse on August 13. (Allegra Mendelson | Frontier)

In response to Frontier, MTO said via email that “due to the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, the political and economic situation has become highly unpredictable” and it is “not accepting any interview requests”.

But while the immigration process may be stricter now, this hasn’t stopped people from trying, especially since the 2021 coup. Conflict has broken out across Myanmar, businesses and schools have been forced to close and the kyat has depreciated to record lows.

Anti-China sentiment has also once again reared its ugly head, with many slamming Beijing for supporting the military, including through new arms shipments. In the early days of the crisis, misinformation spread that China had directly supported the coup and even sent soldiers to assist the military, culminating in Chinese businesses being attacked.

“There are a lot of people coming now because the government of Myanmar is getting worse and the politics are not stable. I have seen a lot of newcomers, but they’re here on tourist visas …They can come here to visit, but they can’t stay long-term,” said Lai. 

Those in Taiwan, many of whom still have family and businesses in Myanmar, have watched the situation unfold helplessly. While most used to travel to Myanmar once a year, many haven’t been back since the COVID-19 pandemic and the coup.

“I want to travel but not right now because it’s so dangerous. I’m too scared to go back,” said Judy.

‘The China Factor’

Along with stricter immigration laws, Taiwan also lacks an official refugee policy. While the Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing Services offers some assistance to refugees from mainland China, limited help is available when it comes to people fleeing conflict in places like Myanmar.

A draft refugee law has been sitting in parliament for 16 years. The bill has stalled due to a debate over whether refugees from mainland China, Hong Kong and Tibet – the majority of those seeking asylum in Taiwan – should be considered foreigners or citizens, related to the DPP’s efforts to forge a more distinct national identity.

Dr Kristina Kironska, an advocacy director at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies, described this logjam as the “China Factor”, an overarching “sensitivity” over whether there are one or two Chinas that permeates Taiwan’s domestic politics and foreign relations.

Immediately after the Chinese Civil War, both the government in Taiwan and the one in mainland China declared there was only one China – and both claimed dominion over it. But while Beijing continues to use this phrase to assert ownership of Taiwan, more recently Taipei has sought to preserve the delicate status quo – de facto independence without a formal declaration and with no designs on seizing CCP territory.

A poster calling for the release of ousted state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi at a restaurant on Huaxin Street on August 13. (Allegra Mendelson | Frontier)

In Myanmar, the One China debate has affected Taiwan’s relations with both the military and the National Unity Government – a parallel administration appointed by elected lawmakers deposed in the coup – as both sides have been intent on courting Beijing.

The junta, which receives crucial arms shipments from China, regularly meets with high-ranking Chinese officials, although it also takes a dim view of Beijing’s support of some ethnic armed groups. The NUG, on the other hand, has signalled to China that a democratic government in Myanmar need not be a threat to Beijing’s interests. But many revolutionary activists and foot soldiers view the CCP with suspicion over its arms deals with the military, and see it as fundamentally incompatible with the pro-democracy movement.

The NUG has publicly ordered its armed forces to avoid attacking Chinese infrastructure projects, and even promised in a statement in January that “the One China principle will be upheld and supported”. Left out in the cold of this geopolitical jockeying is Taiwan, which at first glance may have seemed a natural ally to Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement.

For Koko Thu, who has led numerous fundraising campaigns in support of the NUG from Taiwan since the coup, this positioning was a disappointment.

“After I saw the statement, I immediately sent a complaint to the NUG foreign affairs ministry,” he said. “I asked them why they would do this”

He said the NUG replied by pointing out that the National League for Democracy government that was deposed during the coup had also supported the One China Policy and it was simply staying on course. When Koko Thu told the parallel government that this would make it harder for him to raise funds in Taiwan for the Myanmar democracy movement, no one answered.

He also noted that no NUG officials have visited Taiwan since the coup, fearful that it could jeopardise relations with Beijing.

“China is Myanmar’s most influential neighbour, so it is not surprising that whoever rules/attempts to rule Myanmar would want to have as best relations with China as possible,” explained Kironská.

The NUG declined to comment further, referring to the January statement as its “official policy on China”.

“This is one thing I don’t like about the NUG,” said Koko Thu. “The NUG cares a lot about China. I try to work very hard to fight for Myanmar democracy, but the NUG isn’t giving me 100 percent because of mainland China.”

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