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3 This 2005 estimate is from the Straits Exchange Foundation, a semi-governmental agency that represents Taiwan in negotiations with the Chinese government. See http://www.seftb.org/mhypage.exe?HYPAGE=news_old_content.asp&idx=175, accessed 18 August 2008. Other estimates of this group vary, however, ranging between 750 thousand and one million. See Tsai, Ming-Chang and Tzeng, Rueyling, “Ershi nian lai liang'an shehui jiaoliu” (“Social interflows across the Strait in the last two decades”), in You, Ying-Long (ed.), Jin ershi nian liang'an guanxi de fazhan yu bianjian (The Development and Change of Cross-Strait Relationships in the Last 20 Years) (Taipei: Straits Exchange Foundation, 2008), pp. 269–95.Google Scholar

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45 Tian-lin Lu, “The effects of trade activities across the strait on Taiwanese labours (in Chinese),” The Labour (2006), http://enews.url.com.tw//archiveRead.asp?scheid=40758, accessed 26 October 2006.

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48 Palloni et al., “Social capital and international migration.”

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50 Since the dependent variable is measured on ordinal scale, the ordered logistic regression technique is used to capture the ranking order in response (Long, J. Scott, Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997)Google Scholar). Table 3 is modelled using the same method.

51 While life cycle is proposed as a potential factor affecting migratory behaviour (Stephen Castles, “The factors that make and unmake migration policies,” in Portes and DeWind, Rethinking Migration, pp. 29–61), its most relevant measures (wife's employment status and number of minor children) were not determined as significantly affecting our analysis.

52 Three measures were used to represent human capital: education, employment position and tenure. Education was categorized as junior high school or below (22.0%), senior high school (33.9%), university or college (37.8%) and graduate degree or higher (6.3%). The first group was designated as a dummy reference.

53 As the migrant workers are expected to benefit from labour market demands and compensation according to their skill, expertise, and/or financial capital levels, we expected to find a strong association between employment position and willingness to work outside Taiwan, and that respondents who owned production facilities or equipment would be more likely to move. We therefore established three categories for business ownership: firms with six or more employees (2.9% of the sample), firms with five or fewer employees (5.1%), and self-employed with no employees (9.9%). Respondents who described themselves as employees were classified as managers (6.2%), highly skilled professionals (outside supervisory positions) (8.4%), semi-skilled technicians (19.1%), clerical (22.7%) or lower-grade (manual) workers (25.7%). The last group is used as reference in dummy design.

54 Since the public sector in Taiwan provides better job security and benefits, our expectation was that employees in government offices and public enterprises (12.2% of the sample) would be less likely to consider migration than those in the private sector. A dummy variable was established to capture this difference. We also predicted that employees with more work experience would be more reluctant than those with less to migrate for work purposes, and therefore added number of years with paid employment to our analysis.

55 We also examined data from unemployed respondents and found that they were not more likely to migrate.

56 We coded these five categories as dummy variables in our regression model to investigate the influence of each.

57 Hong-zen Wang, “China's skilled labour on the move.”

58 The exclusion of indigenous residents of Taiwan reduced the sample size by approximately 2%.

59 We speculated that a combination of ethnicity and social connections would generate greater motivation to seek employment in China, with Mainlanders especially able to mobilize their social connections. To examine this combined effect, we introduced an interaction variable using a Mainlander dummy and a social connection as its elements (Tables 2 and 3). The results did not identify any statistically significant effects for these variables (not shown to save space).

60 We conducted another specification check by analysing data from respondents who had not worked in China. Results from a regression estimation showed similar outcomes (Tables 2 and 3) (data not shown). The key factors of human capital, social connections and ethnic politics only produced similar results when potential emigrants were considered.

61 We provide two relevant interviews to show how ethnic identity can be mobilized to reduce the psychological distance between a would-be Taiwan migrant and mainland China, in contrast to the hesitation in associating with China as observed in the late 1980s. “I am a wai-sheng (“outside the province”) person, my grandfather, grandmother, grandfather-in-law are KMT members. My parents are influenced by them and work in the government. All my family members support me to come to mainland China to develop [career]” (male in his late 20s, working in China after obtaining a degree from a prestigious university in the US). (Shi Wei, “Zai Beijing dabing de rizi: san ge Taiwanren zai Beijing shenghuo de suan tian ku la” (“The days of working hard in Beijing: the sweet and sour of three Taiwanese living in Beijing”), Nihao Taiwan wang (How Are You Taiwan Net) (2008), http://www.am684.cn/jl/jlzt/jldt/200805/t20080504_351622.htm, accessed 13 April 2009). Such attachments with mainland China can be mediated via personal identify and passed down to younger generations: “In the beginning, I came to mainland China for a try. My knowledge of mainland China is mainly from books I read when I was little or from what I heard from elders. Because my parents were from mainland China, I have relatively more feeling for it, so I guess I should come over and see it” (male, mid-30s, with a PhD in law from a university in China, decided to stay and currently teaches in a college) (Xiang Xi Luo, Xunzhao lixing: Taiwan zhengyao mingren fangtan lu (Searching for Rationality: Interviews with Political and Social Celebrities) (Hong Kong: China Review Academic Publishers, 2006), http://www.chinareviewnews.com/crn-webapp/cbspub/secDetail.jsp?bookid=3959&secid=4026, accessed 13 April 2009).

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