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This report highlights and offers reflections on three unique features of the fourth World Congress of Taiwan Studies (wcts4) held in Seattle in June 2022. First, following the covid-19 pandemic, wcts4 was one of the first large-scale conferences in the field of Taiwan studies to be held in hybrid mode. Second, although three previous editions have taken place since 2012, wcts4 was the first to be held in the United States. Third, it is the first Congress to launch a major new publication, the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Taiwan Studies. Most media coverage of wcts4 has emphasised only that it was held in the United States. This report goes further, focusing on why it was held in the US, and why Seattle in particular, and on the Congress’s importance more generally to the global field of Taiwan studies.

In the digital age of migration, Chinese migrant entrepreneurial activities are increasingly undertaken online. Drawing on a case study of e-commerce developed by Chinese marriage-migrant women in Taiwan, this article investigates the digitized and emotional dimensions of entrepreneurship. It examines Chinese women’s innovative use of the online social media platform WeChat in developing transnational networks and virtual commercial circuits to achieve their economic goals while adapting to their new host society. It considers the role of the emotions in business formation and in the commercialization of “contested” commodities whose circulations transgress trading rules and borders. This study contributes to the empirical literature on the transformation of migrant entrepreneurship, specifically by diasporic Chinese. Theoretically, the empirical case of digital entrepreneurship among Chinese migrant women invites us to consider the growing use of both virtual platforms and emotions in the making of migrants’ commercial activities.

e-book published, 26-11-2021Prix Mobilthèse 2021- Forum Vie MobilesPrix de thèse Lumière Lyon 2- 2021; International audience; This book, based on extensive original research, explores the lives and the social, economic and emotional activities of Chinese migrant women during their migrations and mobilities in China, from China to Taiwan, from Taiwan to China and in between the two countries. It illustrates how women on the move experience social contempt, misrecognition and economic marginalization; how women migrants seek autonomy, economic independence, upward social mobility and modernity, but discover the Chinese inegalitarian social order and labour regimes which produce obstacles and impede their ambitions; and how old and new forms of subalternity are re-produced. Overall, the book emphasises what it feels like for the women migrants as they negotiate their way between subalternity and resistance, between subordinated labour and independent entrepreneurship, and between an inegalitarian labour market and new opportunities for business and commerce.

A l’ere du numerique, les pratiques entrepreneuriales et economiques des migrants investissent des espaces nouveaux : ceux du numerique. A partir du cas d’etude des mobilites des proletaires migrantes de la Chine a Taiwan, cet article montre un nouveau lien entre migration, entrepreneuriat et plateformes digitales. En Chine, puis a Taiwan, les jeunes ouvrieres migrantes chinoises font face a des situations de mise a distance sociale et familiale, ainsi que d’exploitation au travail et d’exclusion du marche de l’emploi. Pour y repondre, elles trouvent refuge dans les mondes digitaux. Elles s’approprient des espaces numeriques dans la mise en place de pratiques d’entraide, qui menent au developpement d’entrepreneuriat digital et d’e-commerce. En quete d’un revenu stable, d’un emploi et d’autonomie economique, a travers l’application en ligne WeChat, elles mobilisent des reseaux sociaux transnationaux et dessinent des circuits economiques peu visibles ou des marchandises faiblement legitimes et « contestees » sont commercialisees. Le dispositif numerique favorise l’invisibilite des transactions marchandes, l’evasion fiscale et le contournement des restrictions douanieres. La cartographie des economies digitales montre une juxtaposition entre biographies migratoires et geographies commerciales, connectant les spatialites et les temporalites des migrations.

Compte rendu de lecture de : "A New Era in Democratic Taiwan: Trajectories and Turning Points in Politics and Cross-Strait Relations, edited by Jonathan Sullivan and Chun-Yi Lee (2018)", paru dans International Journal of Taiwan Studies

International audience

International audience; Drawing on the ethnographic work conducted inside the digital platform WeChat, this article contributes to the ongoing discussion about the multi-sited ethnographic tools and the digital methods available for investigating virtual worlds and online practices. It analyses the communications, interactions, sociality, and economic activities produced on the application WeChat by Chinese migrant women, together with the same practices constructed offline in Taiwan. Taking a close look at the offline context from which these digital practices are generated, the article shows that when studying online practices, it is essential to understand what corresponds to them in the offline worlds. By updating the four Goffmanian interactionist fieldwork sequences, this research provides some reflections on the necessity to mix and merge online and offline ethnographic techniques in order to apprehend the new practices and scales of interaction at the crossroads where online and offline social spaces intersect. Virtual ethnography cannot be exclusive. Rather, it needs to be designed and performed in dialogue with ‘physical’ observations.

International audience; "In the digital age, in the frame of a compressed modernity, this article considers the creative mobilities of migrants, commodities, and emotions on digitalized economic trails. Through multi-situated and virtual ethnography, based on the case study of Chinese women’s e-commerce in Taiwan, it shows how entrepreneurship, economies and markets can be socially and emotionally constructed by a combined action of multiple social networks and affectional ties operating on and through online applications. Specifically, online socializations, emotions, and digitalized practices of reciprocity and mutual help amongst migrants sustain the making of online business, e-commerce, and transnational economies. A typology of multipolar economies – of melancholy, of ambition and of responsibility – illustrates how entrepreneurship is entangled with social ties, affectional networks and emotions. On digital and hidden back-roads, migrant women, commodities and emotions’ mobilities draw new geographies of globalization."

Through multi-situated and virtual ethnography, this article investigates the link between mobilities, subalternity, emotions and digital economies. Drawing on the case study of Chinese migrant women’s digital labour and e-commerce in Taiwan, it elucidates the social and emotional construction of translocal virtual markets, which connect online and offline the different temporalities, spatialities and emotions of women’s mobilities. In Taiwan, Chinese migrants contest a local condition of social, economic and cultural subalternity by exploring physical and digital, material and emotional markets. Setting sail through local consumption and translocal logistics, through the online application WeChat an emotional petit capitalism is socially and emotionally produced within women’s daily microcosmos of experiences and practices.

International audience

International audience

How do Chinese migrant women fight against economic and social disqualification to find their place in Taiwanese cities and in the Taiwanese labour market, after a double migratory ordeal firstly within China and then from China to Taiwan, where they face situations of double-discrimination? This empirical study of three urban spaces and one rural village in Taiwan shows the capacity of those women to face domination by developing creative strategies of survival and resistance. The plurality of the economic activities women can produce proves the emergence of transnational economic spaces between the Chinese society of departure and the Taiwanese society of arrival that contribute to bottom-up globalisation.