The govt has been making significant strides over the last few years to make it easier for foreigners to 1) come here to work 2) remain long-term with their family.
There are still big gaps, biggest one is the lack of permanent residency for blue collar labourers. It’s really stupid that they kick these guys out who have already adjusted to life here and they take their savings back to their home countries. Also they have a desperate need for farm labourers right now!!
The other gap is how difficult it is to get citizenship, again some strides have been made, but not enough.
The business community has been pretty hopeless and mostly concerned about preventing competition from overseas I feel. Many Taiwanese companies and bosses are happy with cheap labour and compliant workers, low NTD and less competition for resources.
You have hit on what I think is a problem for most foreigners, that is the difficulty in adapting to the work culture in Taiwan, or mian zi. I have only been studying here a short time, and have never worked here so am not an expert on these matters but am interested in what locals and long term expats think. I find this really interesting from a social psychology perspective, in addition to the international relations angle.
Mian zi exists in different forms in all of East and South East Asia, but it seems to be taken to extremes here. This is why I wonder whether this is one of the reasons why young people are leaving Taiwan. Economics will always incentivise people, but I also don’t think I would want to work in an environment where this type of passive aggressive ideology is pervasive.
Is this the case, or is it just about money regarding the brain drain? _
Definitely agree, I hide my personality a lot at the office, even though there’s a few foreigners in my workplace we are all a lot more subdued since non-conformance to the work culture is somewhat frowned upon.
There reply was, “Thank you for your input” and included a log-winded response explaining that absolutely nothing was going to change. Feedback forms are for show at this fine school apparently.
There have been many reports of Taiwanese kids graduating from Taiwan and working in South East Asia for double or triple what they are offered here. So they are leaving for greener pastures.
