What is the point of all of that?
The fact is that hundreds of thousands (a few million?) Taiwanese are making good career moves and saving big bucks on the mainland
Itâs in the order of tens of thousands to one hundred thousands. That figure you want to quote is always bloated due to the inherent need of boom-town marketing. You know, like how the Chinese property bubble is always bloated. I think to be fair, most people who go live in China voluntarily made the right or wrong decision for themselves only. It doesnât mean that just because he can make a good living in China (for now) proves that he can make a good living in China tomorrow, or that others should do the same. Obviously, most people donât want to live in China. Also the wealthy Chinese people are leaving China at an unprecedented rate. They and their money.
By the way if you want to teach English in China, you can probably make more money teaching English in Perth, in Auckland, or Vancouver. If you have stayed in these cities and bought a property a decade ago, the property boom caused by influx of Chinese money and Chinese immigrants probably well exceed what you can make in China anyway.
Only tens of thousands to one hundred thousand over the last 20-30 years? I believe itâs in the millions by now. Someone correct me if Iâm wrong.
Teaching English? Whatâs this all about? Some big employment transformations happening in the in the world Iâm not aware of?
Property marketsâŚthatâs a whole other discussion. By the way, Chinese money is a big factor but not the only factor. Can you tell me the percentage of Americans buying homes in Canada and vice versa compared to Chinese doing the same? You might be surprised!
People come and go as you know. Most people who failed their business tend not to tell you about it.
Some Americans buy Canadian properties, and some Canadians buy American properties, sure. Believe it or not, itâs largely dependent on US-CAN dollar exchange rate.
Do you know that prime rate in China is 4.5%,
Do you know that growth in China is 6.9%?
So assuming youâre just the average money-making genius, and assuming youâre just doing whatever you are doing in China, youâll be making 2.4% (return) yearly. Youâll probably make less than 2.4% because you are not a CCP party secretary and you will not have access to prime rate borrowing. Now the question is, given your talent, do you think you can make 2.4% or more elsewhere around the world?
If you think you can, then China is not that attractive.
Some?? Canadians are largest group of home buyers in US now.
I agree about not wanting to buy property in China. No need to convince me on that one.
2.4% heyâŚ
Arenât tens (hundreds?) of millions of Chinese making 3-5% fixed on WMPs? This ties into that huge debt you mentioned. Itâs not the 300% debt-to-GDP that scares me the most.
Can give you that 5% because your fund manager has special means to take your money (among 100 other individualsâ money) out of China, and flip properties in US / CAN /AUS /NZ. You on the other hand is just a salary man and you are stuck in China.
How this is related to the 300% Debt to GDP ratio is that hundreds of thousands of party secretaries and party members have easy access to free cash and theyâre moving large amount of that cash to US / CAN /AUS /NZ /UK (these are final destinations).
Make sure you sign a contract. And good luck enforcing that contract in China.
âAccording to the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), 58 percent of all Taiwanese working abroad were based in China in 2015, which accounted for 420,000 Taiwanese citizens out of a total of 724,000 working overseas.â This is not counting businessmen, company owners and their families. The general estimate is between 1 and 2 million Taiwanese in China.
My point was not to tell you what your identity is. My point was to tell you that your Britain-Normandy analogy doesnât fit.
If you go to Canada you can find people who are exactly the same number of generations removed from England/Scotland/etc. as your family is from Fujian/etc. You can also find people who were born on the other side of the water, the last major wave of migration having been in the 1940âs when there was no distinct citizenship, and both sides even used the same flag â sound familiar?
The number of Canadians who identify with their British heritage and the extent to which they identify with it keep shrinking, but the phenomenon still exists in a way that canât be dismissed with just a wave of the hand. (If it could, the Queen wouldnât still be the head of state.)
Normandy is a much older story, so it would make a better comparison with the Song dynasty. Thatâs not to say that no Britons identify with their Norman heritage or that no Taiwanese identify with Song or even Tang dynasty China (or the very earliest Chinese civilization whenever that was, or for westerners ancient Greece or the Garden of Eden or the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat), but you canât expect the connection to be as fresh after one thousand or several thousand years as after a shorter period of time.
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Perhaps I should clarify. My original statement was not meant to be an absolute statement that all Taiwanese have strong ties personally to todayâs fujian province in China. But that due to many like my family who came here from there more than 200 years ago. Some even less like @yyy mentioned. The two places would naturally still have cultural and business ties. And not all Taiwanese migrated from fujian. I by no means consider myself as fujianese, but I looked into my own families recorded history and family tree and we migrated from fujian. I believe Iâm the 8th generation since the migration. Iâm simply acknowledging that it wouldnât surprise me that the two places would still have ties business and family wise.
You might not personal have have any ties the area of fujian. But a lot of these migrations from there wasnât that long ago that even with the separation that The two places have lost all ties.
Just because the majority of Taiwanese speak Taiwanese, it doesnât mean the majority of the Taiwanese were decedents from âsettlersâ. Your North American analogy is invalid. Iâve gone over this at length in another thread previously on this forum. You can check the census record conducted by the Manchurian Imperial Court and see your presumption quickly dismissed.
The âmajority Taiwanese-speaking groupâ has in their lineage composed of mostly native Formosans who never went anywhere. Take any given member of this group of Taiwanese, and trace who and where their ancestors were 200 years ago, there were 2 to the power 7 = 128 of them. Youâd be lucky if this person can tell you he or she knows for sure 1 out of these 128 ancestors sailed across the strait and arrived at Taiwan.
1 out of 128 of your ancestors who lived around the same time (200 years ago) migrated from Fujian. What happened to the other 127 of them ?
Were they Korean or Vietnamese, or were they Taiwanese?
Again, Iâm not telling you what your identity is. I donât even think my analogy is very useful because the history of Asia is quite different from the history of Europe/NA, but itâs less useless than the one you made about the Normans (which would in turn be less useless than the one Rowland or Jotham might make about the Saxons if they cared to).
Whether youâre 99.2% aboriginal or not is another question.
You are not reading the report correctly as I expected.
The figure counts all who work abroad regardless of the number of days.
Working overseas from 90 days to 180days : 36.8%
Working overseas overseas for more than 180 days: 63.2%.
58% work in China (including HK)
Therefore the real number is 724K* 58% * 63.2% =264 thousands âlivingâ in China, Max. Because, half of that 58% would not even be working in China for more than 180% days, which means in those cases they live in Taiwan even though partially during the year theyâre in China.
Also, it is incorrect to interpret this figure as a cumulative figure. This figure is taken with respect to all citizens of Taiwan, in a given year. You donât add this yearâs figure to previous yearâs figure. Also itâs nonsense to automatically multiple it by a family of 4.
reference
Itâs not a matter of my identity but the overestimation of closeness between Taiwan and Fujian. The Britain-Normandy province of France analogy helps you understand the proper relations between Taiwan and Fujian province of China. Just because lingua franca and institutions are imported across the strait and imposed, it doesnât mean that we should retroactively assign a new lineage to the general population of Britain and Taiwan.
I donât have numbers at hand, but Iâm willing to bet the percentage of Taiwanese who consider themselves to have significant cultural or family ties to Fujian or elsewhere in China is closer to the percentage of Canadians who believe the same thing about the the British Isles or (for francophones) France than to the percentage of Britons who believe the same thing about Normandy.
Feel free to prove me wrong.
is this is what he is saying? surely thats provable as falseâŚby eye alone.
Sorry but it is  the common sentiment in Taiwan to elevate Fujian above any other part of China . If thereâs any affinity, itâs Shanghai, Hong Kong that stand out the most, not Fujian.
In terms of politics, I think Chinaâs President Xi misled himself to believe that Fujian holds THE key to assimilate Taiwan into China. He was assigned to be the Premier of Fujian and he may have seen some ethnic similarities because heâs of a Northern Chinese stock. He already revealed his scheme in pushing for the âService Trade Agreementâ, which was really a bi-directional Fujian-Taiwan population swap scheme disguised as âservice tradeâ. The Sunflower Movement thwarted his plan.
Trust me on this one.
The âmajority Taiwanese-speaking groupâ has in their lineage composed of mostly native Formosans who never went anywhere. Take any given member of this group of Taiwanese, and trace who and where their ancestors were 200 years ago, there were 2 to the power 7 = 128 of them. Youâd be lucky if this person can tell you he or she knows for sure 1 out of these 128 ancestors sailed across the strait and arrived at Taiwan.
I read ânative Formosansâ as aboriginals. 
1/128=0.78125%
127/128=99.21875%
Sorry but it is  the common sentiment in Taiwan to elevate Fujian above any other part of China . If thereâs any affinity, itâs Shanghai, Hong Kong that stand out the most, not Fujian.
Or elsewhere in China, as I said.
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Your eyes do not deceive you but your ignorance probably does.
A key to remember is that the various Formosan tribes on the western plain of Formosa were not the same genetically as the Aboriginals of the central/eastern mountainous region, who were closer to the Filipinos and the Malays. The peoples of the western plain of Formosa were genetically close to Fujian, Canton and parts of Indochina However weâre talking bout the time scale of the last ice age. 19th century European account of the western plain Formosan described that they were indistinguishable from the Chinese in terms of physical appearance.
Take any given Taiwanese-Taiwanese alive today, and if only one great grand parent indeed sailed from Fujian, then Iâm afraid mathematically his Chinese lineage is 6%, whereas his Formosan heritage is lineage 94%. This is not to diminish or trivialize his Chinese identity. If he is proud of his 6% then good for him. Objectively speaking he is 94% of Formosan ancestry.