The Making of A Transnational Taiwan Capitalist Class in China.

By investigating how Taiwanese business people and their families establish and negotiate their privileged transnational capitalist class status and interest in coastal Chinese economic zones, this paper concerns with the formation of a transnational capitalist class in the process of the global economy. Since the early 1990s, Taiwan has become one of the major foreign investors in China. As a result, a large number of Taiwanese business investors and managerial professionals have worked and resided in China. This paper analyzes how the daily arrangements of food, social space, maid services, language, transportation, network and factory management are the crucial sites in which Taiwanese construct and maintain their relatively economic position of advantage in China. I focus on those moments, processes and strategies that produced and negotiate the class meaning, boundary, and relation between Taiwanese business people and the Chinese within specific cross-Strait political economy. I conclude this paper with three points. First, the process of constituting a transnational Taiwanese capitalist class in China is socially situated within the contexts of cross-Strait economy and politics, and within the different social and geographical locations in China. Second, Taiwanese business people?s negative perceptions and assumptions of Chinese women and men as social and economic Others set up the cultural foundation for them to construct difference and the relations of domination between themselves and the Chinese. Finally, the process of establishing and maintaining specific patterns of transnational Taiwanese capitalist class status in China has created and reinforced boundaries, tension, and uneven power relations Taiwanese business people and their families and the Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]