In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC).
Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912.
Part of Taiwan’s government since 1949, the agency has in recent decades been caught in the nation’s tug of war over identity, with the first “C” in its English acronym changing three times as the government shifted between Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT administrations. For the agency’s first 80 years, this “C” stood for “Chinese,” but in 2006 the DPP changed it to “Compatriot.” The KMT briefly reverted it back to “Chinese” in 2012, before finally settling on the current “Community.”
Photo: David Frazier
Two decades ago, nearly all of the 140 Chinese-language schools in Thailand’s Yunnan villages were supported by Taiwan through the OCAC. But following Taiwan’s power shift from the KMT to the DPP in 2000 and China’s heavily funded outreach initiatives to overseas Chinese communities from later that decade, at least 44 of these village schools have broken with Taiwan to align with China.
EITHER/OR DECISION
For the schools, this has become an either/or decision.
Photo: David Frazier
If Thailand’s Yunnanese “make statements that downgrade Taiwan, or say Taiwan is part of China, then we cannot accept this. Only those schools that support the Republic of China and genuinely love Taiwan, those are the ones we serve,” OCAC deputy director Roy Yuan-Rong Leu (呂元榮) told me last year.
According to Leu, the OCAC currently supports 99 Yunnan village schools with a total budget of NT$10 to NT$20 million (US$300,000 to US$600,000) a year, and will remain at this level for the foreseeable future.
It is not a great sum, but it covers textbooks (produced mostly at National Taiwan Normal University), scholarships to study in Taiwan and volunteer teacher and teacher training programs. At the same time, more scholarships are provided by the Ministry of Education, and several NGOs help recruit volunteer teachers.
Photo: David Frazier
The Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing Services (CARES, 中華救助總會), the charity founded by Soong Mayling (宋美齡), known to much of the world as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, in 2023 also provided NT$1.1 million (US$34,000) in scholarships to the villages, but the organization’s future is now in jeopardy. The courts in 2023 upheld an earlier decision that declared the charity to be a “KMT affiliate organization,” an arm of the political party rather than an independent body.
Under a law for reclaiming “ill-gotten party assets,” Taiwan’s courts have since 2021 stripped CARES of NT$1.3 billion (US$40 million) in real-estate holdings, and the organization’s revenue has decreased by 90 per cent.
“I remember when that happened,” recalls Lee Yueh-lin (李岳霖), a 32-year-old Taiwanese teacher in Bangkok. He was referring to the government’s initial CARES audit in 2016. At the time he was volunteering as a teacher in a Thai village in Chiang Rai Province, which remains a stronghold of loyalty to Taiwan.
“It was in the middle of a meeting at the Chiang Rai Yunnan Association, and the chairman suddenly stopped. There were tears streaming down his face,” he said. “He asked, ‘How can the Relief Association suddenly be taken away?’”
The Chiang Rai association and its numerous village schools however did not waver in their loyalty to Taiwan, which continued to offer some government support and aid from the private sector.
TUG OF WAR
Interviewees throughout northern Thailand nevertheless described a tug-of-war, where the Taiwanese and Chinese government are in regular contact with schools on both sides.
Taiwan’s strategy is not to engage in a bidding war for the loyalty of the Yunnan villagers, Leu said.
“China’s foreign policy is all about dumping money on everything,” Lee said. “Taiwan’s government knows it can’t keep up.”
“I don’t feel that we are in a competition with China,” Leu said. “I always say the OCAC is like the stars in the night sky. You don’t always see them, and sometimes they are not bright, but I tell you, we are always there.”
In the numbers game, China however appears to be winning. Taiwan-backed Huaxing School sent five or six students to study in Taiwan last year, while the China-affiliated Jiaolian School was sending up to 70 students a year to study in Chinese universities before COVID.
When asked how difficult it was to get scholarships from China, Jiaolian principal Wang Mingming (王明明) said, “If we need it, we just ask and they will give it.”
‘BORDERLINE HUMAN TRAFFICKING’
While China’s financial muscle weighs in its favor, so do Taiwan’s failings. Over the last decade, Taiwan’s scholarships have increasingly funneled village students into programs that treat students, some as young as 16, as migrant laborers. A recent investigation by CommonWealth Magazine described the situation as “borderline human trafficking.”
In recent years, around 20,000 overseas Chinese students from Thailand and throughout southeast Asia have been recruited to Taiwan for a “3+ 4 program” of three years of high school and four years of vocational college. Last year, around 6,200 overseas Chinese students from Thailand and elsewhere were enrolled in Taiwan’s universities.
Thai students as young as 16 have on arrival been sent directly to work in factories or grocery stores in programs that alternate between three months of classes and three months of “work-study.” Many have had their passports withheld by school administrators.
The vocational colleges which recruit them are mostly obscure private colleges that are struggling to survive owing to shrinking enrollments — a byproduct of Taiwan’s declining birthrate. These private colleges, which receive government subsidies for each student, reportedly pay brokers NT$10,000 to NT$30,000 per student, according to the CommonWealth investigation.
While the OCAC actively participates in recruiting Yunnan village students to these low tier colleges, it forbids brokers from the process. Under Taiwan’s “Anti-Human Trafficking Act,” it is illegal to use brokers to recruit persons under 18 years of age.
David Mao (毛維翰), a controversial figure who has been labelled an “unlawful broker” by the OCAC, however said that student recruitment has evolved into a system of quasi-brokerages orchestrated directly through kickbacks from Taiwanese universities to Thai high schools. There are further deals between Taiwanese colleges and local corporations faced with labor shortages — another side effect of Taiwan’s aging society — he said.
I first met Mao last year by chance in a noodle shop in a Thai border village. Recently, he denied to me that he is a broker, insisting that he acts as a “consultant” to Thai schools and Taiwanese universities. He’s been involved with Thai village schools for more than a dozen years and last year made 14 trips to Thailand.
“Many of Taiwan’s private universities are in danger of closing, so they need these students in order to stay alive,” Mao said.
“But this work-study system is bad for the students, and bad for Taiwan,” he added.
The situation presents a stark departure from previous decades, when overseas Chinese produced Taiwan success stories like Peter Chou (周永明), founder of tech giant HTC. Chou was born in a KMT village in Myanmar and in the 1980s came to Taiwan on scholarship to study electrical engineering. At the time, overseas Chinese students were placed in public Taiwanese universities based on their scores in the Joint College Entrance Examination like Taiwanese students.
Taiwan’s evolving work-study hybrid also poses a stark contrast to China’s scholarships, which often offer tuition, lodging and stipends — around 10,000 Chinese yuan (NT$41,570) annually, according to Mao — while forbidding students from taking jobs.
The situation has some parents in Arunothai, the largest of Thailand’s Yunnan villages, hedging their bets as they chose between the village’s two main high schools, the Taiwan-aligned Huaxing School and the China-aligned Jiaolian School.
Lee Yung-hsing (李永星), an Arunothai mother who runs a shop selling Chinese religious wares, said she is sending two of her three children to the Taiwan-aligned Huaxing School and one to the China-aligned Jiaolian School.
She said she has become skeptical of the Taiwan scholarships.
“If my children go to Taiwan, everything will be pre-arranged — the choice of college, dormitories, uniforms, everything. Their opportunities there will be limited,” Lee said.
“But if they study in China, they can use that education to come back and build careers in Thailand. Right now, that might be the better opportunity,” she said.
PRIVATE SECTOR
If Taiwan has one trump card to play, it is the largely apolitical support from private philanthropists.
Before I visited the Huaxing School, the only photos I could find online showed cramped, packed classrooms with scarred whitewashed walls and exposed wooden beams holding up pitched, tin-sheeted roofs. The noise during heavy rains would be deafening.
When I walked into the Huaxing kindergarten, I found these raggedy classrooms, built in 1979 with funds from Taiwan, still in use for the kindergarten and elementary school. But before long a teacher told me, “this is the old campus. You’re looking for the new campus.” He then pointed me down the road.
Less than a kilometer away, arranged around a vast, open dirt courtyard the size of at least eight football pitches, sat five sparkling new Qing Dynasty style imperial halls, decked out with blue ceramic-tiled roofs and vermilion pediments. One, designed with enough pomp for a banana republic, housed a massive meeting hall with three-storey ceilings, a trio of crystal chandeliers, and a 50-seat wood-finish conference table. Its external walls were built of custom-made bricks with the Chinese character zhong (中) or “China,” raised in relief.
While Taiwan’s government has taken a maintenance-mode approach to Thailand’s Yunnan villagers, Taiwan’s private sector has stepped up in a big way.
On the veranda in front of the grandiose meeting hall, school leaders bragged that the entire complex cost 40 million Thai baht (NT$36.7 million).
“That building, five million baht (NT$4.6 million), paid for by CARES,” said Kuang Ti-wei (匡體位), a senior instructor, pointing to one housing several classrooms. “This conference hall, 10 million (NT$9.2 million), a donation.”
He said it came from the philanthropist Pan Si-yuan (潘思源), a former CEO of one of Taiwan’s largest property developers, the Pacific Construction Group (泛太平洋集團), who later gave another five million baht for the computer center. Two more buildings were paid for by funds raised from the community and other donations.
“We will add two more buildings there for the kindergarten and elementary school,” says Kuang. “And we’ll plant trees there,” he said, sweeping his hand across the northern perimeter marking the Thai border with Myanmar. “In the middle here, we’ll add sports fields and grass.”
“In the past few years, mainland China has been attacking us, asking us to take the Chinese path,” Kuang continued.
By “attacking,” he meant financial coercion to break ties with Taiwan. “They said that if we take the route of mainland China, they will build these buildings for us. But we can never be ungrateful. We say, before you drink the water, remember its source.”
Despite new campuses at both the Huaxing and the Jiaolian schools — one backed by Taiwan, the other by China — teachers still use white chalk to write on green slate boards, and there is no air conditioning, just ceiling fans and the breezes blowing through metal grated windows. Both also share in a similar struggle — as they face the fourth generation of a diaspora, they want to keep their sense of Chinese culture, language and identity alive.
When asked about the division between the two schools, Kuang said, “We still consider each other old friends. They took one direction and we took another. It’s just not easy to talk about.”
But in describing the Yunnan villages’ conflicted loyalties, perhaps it was a tea seller, Mr. Zhou, a second-generation villager in Mae Salong, who put it best. “Whether it is the KMT, the DPP or China, we are happy to have their help,” he said.
This is part four in a five-part series on Thailand’s Chinese diaspora and its shifting relationships between Taiwan and China.
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