China views marriages between Chinese and Taiwanese as the perfect metaphor for national unification. In Taiwan, their status is more ambiguous. An explosion in numbers during the 1990s led to fears of Chinese colonisation by stealth. Although tighter regulations introduced in 2004 led to a rapid fall, the legacy of that period is a large number of mixed-marriage households in Taiwan, mostly of Chinese women married to Taiwanese men. Alternatively referred to as “mainland spouses” (lupei) or, increasingly frequently, simply as “Chinese spouses” (Zhongpei), they are periodically at the centre of public debate over national security.
Ten days ago, news that a Chinese social media influencer is facing expulsion brought mainland spouses into the spotlight yet again. Resident on a family visa and active online as “Yaya in Taiwan,” the woman had her visa revoked after she was revealed to have posted an online video in which she supported China’s use of military force to achieve unification. As of 15 March, she had ten days to leave the island. Among the roughly 380,000 Chinese spouses — mostly wives — of Taiwanese residents, she is reportedly the first to be expelled.
A day after this story broke, it was pushed off the front pages by a major statement on national security from president Lai Ching-te. In it, Lai identified seventeen measures designed by his government to strengthen Taiwan’s defences in response to increasing pressure by China’s military and influence operations by its United Front.
The statement has drawn more than the usual amount of attention internationally because it includes a reference to China as (in the official English translation) a “foreign hostile force.” The phrase outraged the government in Beijing. Drawing deeply on the special reserve of quaint English vocabulary it uses with reference to Lai Ching-te, China’s state-owned media denounced him as a “vile character” harbouring “evil designs,” his words “oozing with clear malice.”
Locally, Lai’s proposed revival of military courts, abolished in 2013, has attracted the most attention. Although the plan is designed to deal with disloyalty within the military, critics fear it might open the way for a possible return to martial law, which would threaten the independent judiciary, freedom of speech and of the press, and democratic political system that make Taiwan distinctive.
But the statement also bears on Yaya’s case. Noting the timing of the national security meeting from which it emanated, the “pan-blue” (unification-leaning) newspaper United Daily News sardonically enquired whether it was not just a reaction to the “mainland spouse” revelation, and accused Lai Ching-te of policy on the run in response to online pressure. Regardless of timing, the defence statement reflects the government’s concern with United Front work in Taiwan. Yaya’s online promotion of unification with China is generally deemed to fall into that category.
Who exactly is Yaya? Her face under the trademark baseball cap has become well known. Her full name is Liu Zhenya, she is a native of Hunan province resident in Taipei, and she is apparently married to a Taiwanese. She has three children — a resource valued by a small country that is racing South Korea to the bottom of the fertility league table. She describes herself as an ambassador for cross-straits exchange with Heilongjiang, a province very far from Hunan where she once filmed her daughter on a cross-straits visit, bringing lollies from semi-tropical Taiwan all the way to China’s snowy north. Despite a strong online presence evident in her 400,000-plus followers on the Chinese platform Douyin, little else has emerged about her circumstances.
After news of her cancelled visa went viral, rumours about her migration to Taiwan began to circulate. According to these rumours, Yaya had in the first instance divorced her husband in China to marry a Taiwanese. Then she waited till she could secure a residence permit, divorced the Taiwanese husband, remarried her original Chinese husband and came back to Taiwan with him, her parents, and two children. In this way, it was said, one Chinese woman with a residence permit was able to introduce six Chinese into Taiwan, all of them desiring to take advantage of Taiwan’s excellent medical insurance.
This rumour might simply reflect Taiwanese anxieties over infiltration from China if not for the fact that the story of Yaya’s serial marriages has circulated in China, too, and more probably reflects the simple attractions of fake news. Responding on video, Yaya declared she had been married only once. All her children were born in Taiwan and her parents were back in Hunan. They had just visited Taiwan just twice, she said, each time to help their daughter after childbirth. She had used her healthcare card only for those births. Her account has been verified by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council.
Although Yaya’s online life includes few other details about her real life, it does show that she was seriously engaged in propaganda for the unification of China and Taiwan. In this respect, the offending video was not a one-off. A remarkable feature of her videos is the use she makes of her small daughter, Xiaodanggui (Little-Must-Return), a rather scary child with an awesome capacity for churning out slogans along the lines of “we must never, ever forget we are Chinese!” and “in the whole world there is only one China!”
In one post, Yaya shows her visiting Mao Zedong’s birthplace Shaoshan to pay her respects to “beloved Chairman Mao.” In another, she interviews her about whether she would like to go to school in China. The child replies stoutly: “I’d really like to go back to the mainland for school, but if every person who loved Taiwan chooses to leave, then who would there be to protect our Taiwan [women de Taiwan]?”
It is unclear whether Little-Must-Return will return to China with her mother, or whether she will be left behind in Taiwan to carry on the struggle.
Taiwan is not like China. Freedom of speech is not only a law but a practice. The Taiwan People’s Communist Party has come under investigation on suspicion of accepting funds from China, but it is nonetheless free to raise the Chinese flag in Taiwan and call for unification with China, as it did on Chinese New Year this year.
Discussion of Yaya’s pending expulsion has focused on this issue. What does freedom of speech mean if someone like Yaya, legally resident in Taiwan, isn’t free to voice her political opinions? In a widely reported response to this question, interior affairs minister Liu Shyh-fang said that “freedom does not fall from the sky” and could not be used to advocate the military unification of China and Taiwan.
In terms of political impact, Yaya pales into insignificance alongside another “mainland spouse,” He Jianhua, formerly prominent in the Women’s Federation in China and extremely active as an organiser of Chinese women in Taiwan. He Jianhua did end up in court in 2017, but the case against her failed, with the judge ruling that there was no evidence of her “pulling knives or drawing guns,” or encouraging anyone else to do so, and hence no criminal activity.
Yaya, however, went a step too far. Asserting that Taiwan is China’s sovereign territory was one thing. When she added that this was sufficient reason “for the mainland to reunify Taiwan by force” she created grounds for revocation of her visa. Yet she appears shocked by the cancellation of her visa. In the video she made to correct the rumours about her marriage, she also protested her love of Taiwan and her appreciation of Taiwanese society. Having for so long conducted propaganda with impunity, she probably didn’t realise there were legal limits to what could be said.
Since the Yaya case surfaced, attention has turned to other Chinese spouses with online accounts. Enqi in Taiwan, originally from Anhui, is one. Her mission has been to introduce Taiwan’s people and customs to her family back home, via video, and to introduce all the wonders of the vast mainland to her Taiwanese “compatriots.” Another is Xiaowei, from Guizhou, who runs a Douyin account called Husband, Wife and Three Kids in Taiwan Province. Like Yaya, she has done her bit for Taiwan’s population, and again like Yaya she is raising her children as Chinese nationalists. After Yaya’s visa was cancelled, Xiaowei appeared online to pay tribute to her as a wonderful mother. Both Enqi and Xiaowei have been summoned for interviews by the Bureau of Immigration.
All of this is creating difficulties for what is a singular minority in Taiwanese society. Even before the Yaya case, this group of immigrants was often in the news. Early last year a debate about reducing from six to four the number of years a Chinese immigrant needs to wait before applying for Taiwanese citizenship was opposed by noisy demonstrators crying out against “population cleansing.”
For cross-strait families, the process of gaining legal residence is burdensome, with repeated applications for extension of residence necessary over the course of the six years and a minimum period of six months per year residence in Taiwan to advance to the next stage. A reduction in the number of years would mean less paperwork and greater freedom of movement for the applicant. (The bill proposing the reduction to four years was reintroduced in January this year. The Yaya case makes the change unlikely.)
Many nevertheless choose to remain long-term residents. Like Chinese permanent residents in Australia, Taiwan’s mainland spouses confront a dilemma: their Chinese passports and household registration cards enable them to move easily back and forth between Taiwan and China, managing a mix of family and economic matters. With a Chinese passport and a renewable Taiwan residence permit, they can have the best of both worlds. This appears to have been Yaya’s calculation. Had she progressed through the naturalisation system to secure Taiwan citizenship, she would not have been deported.
Others again, a large minority, are now citizens with voting rights and Taiwanese children. But evidence of integration into Taiwanese society is not necessarily a protection. Although their everyday interactions with the host society seem harmonious, they feel under attack from the media because of their supposed pro-China sympathies.
Xu Chunying, chair of the Cross-Straits Marriage and Family Alliance and a Taiwan People’s Party candidate in the 2024 election, resigned her candidacy because of the smear campaign against her. And yet — as an older woman who feels Chinese with a daughter who feels Taiwanese — she is fairly typical of pan-blue voters in Taiwan. The stereotype of mainland spouses like her is that they are want Taiwan to “return” to the Chinese fold, but even among those of them who do favour “one China,” few believe that this means unification under a single central government in Beijing.
For China, however, these women are all potential agents for United Front ideological and social work. Under its current czar Wang Huning, the United Front emphasises people-to-people, Fujian-to-Taiwan relationships in its Taiwan operations. Attention to cross-straits marriages has intensified, with officials sponsoring, attending and addressing group weddings and congratulating the couples on their embodiment of the ideal of national unification.
This activity shows the route by which brides can be recruited for United Front work. Whether China actually needs them is a moot point. On 18 March Taiwan reported fifty-nine Chinese planes, six ships and two balloons within its defence zone in the twenty-four hours to 6 am that day. Huge amphibious barges capable of disgorging troops and tanks deep into the island are rolling off the docks in Guangzhou Shipyard, less than four hundred nautical miles from the Taiwan coast. If war does happen, Little-Must-Return’s piping voice will be lost in the thunder of artillery. •
