Mainland Universities Keep Opening Their Doors to Taiwanese Students. Five Post-90s Students on Studying and Working There

As more Taiwanese students come to the mainland, what they learn studying and working here naturally becomes the story the next batch of students hears.

“Taisheng” means a student who has come from Taiwan to study on the mainland.

Liu Ailin, 22, is one of them. As of September this year, she has been studying on the mainland for exactly four years. She says she plans to stay indefinitely, with no intention of going back to Taiwan any time soon.

That is not what she expected when she came.

In September 2014, Liu was 18 and had just left Hualien Girls' Senior High School in Taiwan. She scored 60 on the General Scholastic Ability Test — the GSAT, or xuece — out of a maximum of 75. That was not enough for her first choice, National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, or for the law department at Soochow University, so she landed in her second choice: political science at Soochow.

That March, Taiwan was in the middle of the Sunflower Student Movement, and some of the students in the Soochow political science department she might have joined were out protesting. Her parents warned her: don't study political science, and don't join social movements the way everyone else is.

Her parents had also long hoped she would apply to schools on the mainland. “My parents still feel sentimental about the mainland — they go back every year to see relatives, so they wanted me to go,” Liu said. Her family still has relatives in Xiamen, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou who did not cross to Taiwan with the rest of them in 1949.

Liu says she was torn at the time. “When I decided to come, some of my friends were waiting to see me fail. They figured I'd last a year or two at most, that the place wasn't any good. Plenty of people thought going to the mainland was a waste of time. Even teachers wouldn't encourage you.”

But she still wanted to study law. She read up on mainland university rankings and departments online, asked around about the state of Taiwan's legal profession, and decided her chances were better on the mainland. “Wages in Taiwan have basically been frozen for years. On the mainland you can still get a raise every year or so, but Taiwan is stuck — the economy just isn't growing the way it used to.”

Liu used her GSAT score to apply to Xiamen University and Wuhan University. Xiamen, being closest to Taiwan, draws more Taiwanese applicants, and she didn't get in. She was admitted to the law department at Wuhan University.

Students admitted the way Liu was are called “exam-exempt students” on the mainland.

In 2010, China's Ministry of Education first let Taiwanese students apply with a GSAT score in the “top band,” and in 2011 lowered the bar to the “front band.” This year it dropped the bar again, to the “average band.”

Taiwan's GSAT sorts scores into five bands: the “top band” is the top 12% of students, the “front band” the top 25%, the “average band” the top 50%.

Opening the door to the “average band” meant that half of everyone who sat the exam in Taiwan that year could apply to a mainland school. According to one count, nearly 70,000 Taiwanese test-takers qualified in 2018.

Before GSAT scores were accepted, Taiwanese students reached mainland schools mainly by four other routes: the joint entrance exam for Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan students; the mainland gaokao; admissions run by individual schools; or applying as a trial student with a college degree already in hand. The joint entrance exam and individual school admissions were the most used.

Liu was in one of the first cohorts of “exam-exempt students.”

An alumna from her high school had studied in Nanjing, which Liu felt gave her at least one channel for finding out what to expect. Even so, she was uneasy when she arrived. She took a leave of absence from Soochow rather than withdrawing, keeping her place there so she would “have a way back.”

The moment she got to Wuhan University she felt the difference. The most immediate shock was the weather.

Hualien County, where she grew up, is one of Taiwan's main tourist destinations, known above all for sitting between the mountains and the sea. She had visited coastal cities like Xiamen, but had never lived inland for any length of time. She says she got frostbite her first winter.

Liu still brings up differences like “students here really push themselves” and “on weekends you have to queue to get into the library” — things she had known only through Taiwanese media, and was now checking against life.

“Taiwanese like us, who come straight over after high school, are actually at a disadvantage. The first and second years are when the coursework is heaviest, and on top of that you have to adjust to the place and learn how to talk to the classmates here. It's hard to do both.” Beyond the gap in the academic environment there were the daily details, like the open communal bathhouses you rarely see in Taiwanese dorms, and hot-water cards that only work at set hours.

Liu thinks most Taiwanese students who come right after high school go through a bad stretch; the only difference is whether they will say so. “A lot of people who can't adjust drop out and go home. It happens every year.”

She doesn't deny that in her first year the thought “why didn't I just stay in Taiwan” surfaced more than once. “If you have upperclassmen to show you the way, you really do adjust better. For those of us in the early cohorts, it was harder.”

Unlike the students who couldn't adjust and went back to Taiwan, Liu gave herself more time. She says that may have come from refusing to be beaten.

This September she was admitted to the master's program at the law school of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and moved from Wuhan to Shanghai. She likes to describe studying on the mainland as “clearing levels in a video game.”

Still, when she talks about the setbacks she hit along the way, she can't hold back tears. “Actually, maybe a life that's too easy isn't a good thing. If someone is willing to step out of their comfort zone, it means they aren't satisfied with things as they are — they want to change, to see something different. Not everyone who comes here does well right away, like they've instantly found a second home.”

1.

According to Taiwan's Ministry of Education, the number of Taiwanese who go to the mainland each year for “higher education” — undergraduate, master's and doctoral programs — has stayed at around 2,000 for the past five years, and never much more.

Over that same stretch, applications to mainland universities from Taiwan have clearly risen. On July 5, 2018, Huang Wentao, director of the exchange bureau at the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, said applications from Taiwanese students to mainland universities were growing explosively this year. The report gave no growth figures, noting only that Central South University in Hunan and Zhengzhou University in Henan, neither of which had ever enrolled Taiwanese students, admitted 100 and 80 respectively this year.

That “explosive growth” starts from a small base.

Take Wuhan University, where Liu and Liang Tingzhen studied. In 2013, 17 Taiwanese applicants were pre-admitted through the exam-exempt track; by 2018 the figure was 42. Being admitted is not the same as enrolling, but even the application numbers show the increase.

Li Zhong, admissions director at the Xiachao Association, which runs the Hong Kong test site for the joint entrance exam for Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan students, told QDaily that both test-takers and inquiries have grown between 2011 and 2018. Among undergraduate applicants, the number sitting the exam rose from 57 in 2011 to 136 in 2018.

Li stressed that this covers only the Hong Kong site, not Beijing, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Guangzhou or the others, and that now that mainland universities take GSAT scores directly, many students skip the joint entrance exam altogether.

“Look at the numbers: 57 test-takers to 136. That's more than double, but it really isn't many. I think the biggest change in Taiwanese students coming to the mainland isn't quantity, it's quality. Even if a thousand Taiwanese come to study on the mainland today, that's nothing against the tens of thousands who go to the United States — the ratio is lopsided. But in the past we often saw parents pushing their children to come. Since about 2010, more and more high schoolers have come to ask about it themselves.”

2.

Liang Tingzhen, 21, was a year behind Liu at both their high school and their university. Unlike Liu, she settled early on studying on the mainland.

Part of that came from hearing that the children of her parents' friends who had studied on the mainland seemed to be doing well — one even got into a graduate program at UC Berkeley. She also thought coming as an undergraduate rather than for graduate school would give her a head start, or at least a clearer sense of how things work.

She also described a vaguer feeling: a lot of mainland film and television left her with the sense that the place was developing fast. She thought it might let her do something different.

Liang's GSAT score landed her right on the front band. She used it to apply to journalism at Sichuan University and law at Wuhan University, but her father, once a media executive in Taiwan, vetoed journalism. “My dad's friends in the news business kept telling him, don't let her study journalism.”

So she ended up in law as well. She didn't argue much, but she did notice the campus atmosphere. “The political atmosphere on campus here is heavy, a very different feel from Taiwan. Every school has posts like Youth League branch secretary and Party secretary, and a lot of things have to be approved.” She added: “It's like wearing a turtleneck. Your neck itches, it's a bit uncomfortable, but it isn't going to strangle you.”

Liang says she does wonder what life would have been like at a university in Taiwan. “But I'm pretty happy as it is, I'm not especially envious. I know I don't have the power to change anything, so all I can change is my own attitude.”

Her older brother, Liang Yixiu, came to study architecture at Zhejiang University in 2014, the same year as Liu. Getting there was far less smooth than his sister's route — half-forced, even.

Liang Yixiu scored 71 on the GSAT that year, inside the top band, a good result.

It still wasn't enough for certain top departments, such as architecture at National Cheng Kung University. He got into civil engineering at Cheng Kung instead, which was not his first choice.

At first he hadn't considered the mainland at all. His parents told him that if he stayed in Taiwan they would not pay his tuition — he would have to take out a student loan himself. That left him stuck.

“Civil engineering at Cheng Kung was never my first pick. As for architecture, some friends thought it looked grim — they said if you study architecture and stay in Taiwan, there may not be much of a future. I figured if I came to the mainland, getting into an architecture program wouldn't be bad, so part of it really was my own decision.” He applied to architecture at Zhejiang University, Tongji University and Nanjing University, and was admitted at Zhejiang.

His thinking has shifted since. “Those of us who came early, especially in coastal cities like where I am, watched the whole process from no subway to a subway, and Hangzhou hosting the G20 summit — we were part of that too. The city and its buildings changed a lot because of those things. Classmates who came later only saw the later stage, the more urbanized one.”

After his undergraduate degree Liang Yixiu planned to sit the graduate entrance exam, but first had to go back to Taiwan for his compulsory military service. Once that was done, he decided to stay on the mainland for graduate school.

3.

In 2015, Gao Jingxin (a pseudonym), a graduate of Ming Chuan University, was admitted to the Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan master's program at Peking University's School of Software and Microelectronics. Her life has had roughly two turning points, and graduate school was one. “I did think about looking for work at a big company in Taiwan, but I had no confidence I could compete with students from more prestigious schools. With the degree I had, the job I wanted would have been hard to get.”

She had considered studying in Europe or the United States, but after weighing the tuition and the language, she decided a mainland graduate program was the better bet.

The other turning point was entering the world of internet and tech companies. After moving to Beijing she interned at Baidu, Didi and ByteDance in turn. She now works at iQiyi.

Gao is practical about job-hunting. “Taiwan has some well-known internet companies too, but they're mostly small offices there. And the work I'm interested in is strategic analysis, which a lot of people in Taiwan still aren't familiar with — there aren't many jobs in it. So the job I want would be harder to find in Taiwan.”

Because of that, her plan to go home has grown less certain. She originally meant to return after turning 30, but lately she has also been thinking about Hangzhou. Her answer, in the end, is unsurprising: “I'll see as I go.”

The speed and scale of mainland internet companies have “captured” a lot of people.

In 2016, Lin Yizhen, then studying economics at National Taiwan University, came to Beijing for the first time. She had just landed an internship at Uber.

“If you want to work in the internet industry, it's hard to ignore what this crowd in Beijing is working so hard on. I did think I might come work in Beijing later, but I was afraid I wouldn't adjust, so I tested the water with an internship first.” Lin calls it a “soft landing.”

Her internship happened to fall the month before Didi acquired Uber. It came so suddenly that her three-month plan fell apart, and she switched to a two-month internship at another data analytics company in Beijing.

Across those three months she had little trouble adjusting. But because she cared about the video business, after graduating she took a job first at the Taiwanese video platform KKTV. Six months later the company ran into trouble and went through a round of layoffs.

Lin wasn't on the list, but it shook her. “In the video business, buying content matters enormously — it can eat half your costs. At that point what counts is whose pockets are deeper. When I was at KKTV in Taiwan, our biggest enemy was iQiyi's Taiwan site. We thought they threw money around, and we'd joke that they were ‘phan-á’ (Hokkien for a sucker, someone who spends freely).”

Lin had planned to work in Taiwan for two years before moving to Beijing; the layoffs made her go early. She is now a data analyst at iQiyi.

She has also noticed real differences between mainland and Taiwanese work culture, from the unwritten rules of how you write an email reporting to a superior, to management styles shaped by sheer company size.

4.

Insider or outsider? That contradiction seems to sit in the mind of every Taiwanese student who comes to the mainland.

This past summer Liang Tingzhen interned at Mengniu, which sets aside some internship slots for Taiwanese. “Sometimes I think having a special status isn't such a good thing — I'd rather be treated as one of them. But it's a contradictory feeling. Take this internship: if I weren't Taiwanese I probably wouldn't have had the chance at all. So I'm enjoying the benefit and at the same time sometimes feeling tripped up by it.”

Liu brought up an internship interview at a law firm. She sounded rueful: “Honestly, being Taiwanese doesn't necessarily help you practice law here. There are a lot of restrictions, and people readily doubt your professional ability. Think about it: would someone here hand a case to a mainlander or to a Taiwanese? Which means you have to work very hard to keep climbing. But since I did my undergraduate degree here, I have more contacts than others do. I think contacts are themselves an advantage.”

“Compared with the United States, our relationship with the mainland is complicated. There's this in-between state of being one of them and not being one of them, and a lot of contradictions nobody wants to poke at. So for Taiwanese, going to the United States and going to the mainland aren't equivalent choices. Not that one is better — they just feel different,” Lin said.

According to public figures from Taiwan's Ministry of Education, 13,887 Taiwanese students went to study in the United States in 2017, against 2,567 who went to the mainland.

“Come, come, come to National Taiwan University; go, go, go to America” was a line repeated across Taiwanese campuses in the 1980s. Taiwan once sent the largest share of foreign students in the United States, which is another way of saying how Taiwanese students then pictured and defined the road to success. That “American dream” is still lodged in the minds of many Taiwanese students today.

But as more Taiwanese students come to the mainland, what they learn studying and working here naturally becomes the story the next batch of students hears.

Meanwhile, higher education in Taiwan has run into problems of its own. Before August this year, three private universities had already closed for lack of students.

Lai Ting-ming, the former president of Shih Hsin University, told the Taiwanese magazine CommonWealth that Taiwan's falling birth rate would produce a “toppling east and west, tilting south and north” effect — meaning private schools would start closing one after another from 2016.

Reality outran the forecast. On February 24, 2014, Kao Fong College of Digital Content shut down, the first of Taiwan's roughly 160 colleges and universities to stop operating. The news meant Taiwan's higher education was facing the pressure to change sooner than expected. Taiwan's Ministry of Education also set out criteria, listing schools short of students and preparing an exit mechanism for some of them.

When universities face a crisis of transformation, the shock runs through the whole education system — institutions, teachers and students alike.

And students' choices about where to study are already more varied and more open than they were a few years ago.

More than 300 mainland universities now recruit in Taiwan, and Taiwan's Ministry of Education has been gradually widening the list of mainland degrees it recognizes; it now accepts degrees from 155 mainland universities.

Once more Taiwanese students come to study on the mainland, their internship and work experience will circulate among students. More people will then take up options they might never have considered. Everyone, after all, is trying to find the best opportunity going.

Cover image from MD Duran on Unsplash