Written by Ai Ke
Image credit: Participants gathering at the annual ERCCT summer workshop barbecue in Tübingen. Photo by Ai Ke.
How Geopolitics Became a Research Question
I began with a curiosity about how geopolitics is lived. Having lived in Taiwan, I became interested in the experiences of younger-generation Taiwanese professionals who moved to mainland China for work, professional development, and possible futures. Their mobility seemed to offer an unusual vantage point for examining how geopolitical relations enter ordinary life—not only through explicit political discussion, but also through accents, social interactions, career decisions, intimate relationships, and expectations about the future.
If Taiwanese professionals who choose to pursue their careers in mainland China are still considered Taiwanese—and the qualification itself is revealing—then their experiences should surely form part of what we seek to understand about contemporary Taiwan. Yet they have remained marginal to knowledge production on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
In Taiwan, this relative absence has several sources: political discomfort with certain forms of cross-Strait mobility, academic frameworks that privilege more visible political actors, and the practical difficulty of conducting ethnographic research in mainland China, especially in recent years. In China, meanwhile, the population may appear too small to attract sustained attention, while research on Taiwan is often subsumed under the politically demarcated category of “Taiwan-related studies.” In both settings, the ordinary complexity of these migrants’ lives can be obscured by the political significance ascribed to their movement.
I initially approached identity as something my interlocutors actively negotiated and worked upon. My research began with accent as an identity marker and with the social and emotional interactions that followed its recognition. Yet I gradually found that I, too, was repeatedly required to perform identity work. Interviewees were curious about my positionality; conference audiences—and sometimes even students in my classes—asked where I stood politically. European scholars researching cross-Strait relations were rarely asked the same question.
These encounters reminded me that the national frame had not disappeared from intellectual inquiry. If it remained so persistent in how my research was received, how could it be unimportant to the Taiwanese professionals whose everyday lives unfolded within it?
Their aspirations were strikingly ordinary: better employment, professional development, the possibility of building a career, and a future in which work and life remained viable. It was precisely this ordinariness that made the geopolitical conditions surrounding them intellectually urgent. How is geopolitics lived when it enters linguistic habits, workplace encounters, intimate relations, and imagined futures? How do people attempt to live a liveable life within a transnational space that is at once historically intimate and politically exceptional? Once I had begun to see the question in these terms, it became difficult to look away.
Searching for an Intellectual Location
The question travelled with me across several academic and geographical settings. My project is a multi-sited ethnographic study of younger-generation Taiwanese professionals living and working in mainland Chinese cities, examining how mobility, identity, emotion, and geopolitical conditions become entangled in everyday life. European academic institutions offered me legitimacy and protection to pursue it. At the same time, its position at the intersection of migration studies, linguistic anthropology, emotional geographies, and area studies made it difficult to locate within Europe’s disciplinary landscape.
Beginning with accent, I was led towards linguistic anthropology. Following the people who carried those accents led me into migration and mobility studies. Attending to the frustrations, attachments, pride, and ambivalence generated through everyday encounters brought me into conversation with emotional geographies. I presented parts of the research at conferences in these fields, as well as at meetings concerned with creative writing and critical theory. I discussed it at a China studies conference in Taiwan and at Taiwan studies conferences in the United States. None provided an obvious intellectual home.
Yet the failure to identify a ready-made niche did not leave the project without direction. On the contrary, moving between these conversations helped me more clearly identify the intellectual questions that held the project together. I became less concerned with neatly locating the project within a single area-studies or disciplinary category, and more certain that I wanted to understand how mobility, geopolitical conditions, professional aspirations, and the effort to sustain an ordinary life become entangled.
Intellectual connectivity, I came to realise, does not necessarily mean finding an established academic home. Sometimes it means carrying a question across different sites until it becomes recognisably one’s own.
When an Idea Returns
I first encountered the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT) through Professor Gunter Schubert’s studies of Taiwanese businesspeople in mainland China. Although my scholarly background and ethnographic orientation differed from his, I found in this work an intellectually honest inquiry that influenced both how I framed my project and how I perceived its empirical world.
Of particular importance was Gunter Schubert’s proposal to distinguish a kua’an (“trans-strait”) analytical perspective from the dominant liang’an (“cross-strait”) perspective in Taiwan studies. “Cross-Strait” directs attention to a politically defined relationship between Taiwan and mainland China. “Trans-Strait,” by contrast, creates space for examining the social relations, movements, and lived experiences that pass through and sometimes exceed that geopolitical frame. The distinction did not make politics disappear. It made it possible to ask more precisely how political conditions are reproduced, negotiated, or unsettled in people’s lives.
Over time, the idea moved into my research and changed as it did. My fieldwork led me to consider the Taiwan Strait as a site of contested proximity: a condition in which linguistic and cultural familiarity does not dissolve difference but can make moments of misrecognition and asymmetry more palpable. Proximity is not the opposite of geopolitical tension. It is one of the forms through which people live that tension.
“Returning” to Tübingen for the ERCCT summer workshop therefore felt like completing a circle. The workshop’s small scale and concentrated format allowed participants to discuss each project in unusual depth, while their different disciplinary and geographical backgrounds brought divergent assumptions into the room. More personally, it gave me the opportunity to discuss my research with scholars whose work had influenced it years earlier.
The experience changed what academic connectivity meant to me. Years earlier, the distinction between “cross-Strait” and “trans-Strait” had helped me approach Taiwanese mobility to mainland China as more than movement contained within a bilateral political framework. My fieldwork complicated this insight: linguistic and cultural proximity did not necessarily dissolve boundaries but could make asymmetries of recognition especially perceptible—a condition I came to describe as “contested proximity.” Presenting this argument in Tübingen and discussing it with scholars whose work had shaped my original question allowed me to return that idea in an ethnographically reformulated form. Academic connectivity thus became more than an institutional ideal or an expansion of one’s professional network; it described a process through which an idea could be encountered, tested in another empirical world, transformed, and brought back into the conversation from which it emerged.
I also began to imagine academic life differently. As an early-career researcher, I often attended conferences hoping for recognition or reassurance that my questions belonged somewhere. In Tübingen, I felt that I was not only seeking entry into an existing intellectual community. I was gradually becoming capable of contributing an empirically grounded perspective of my own. Years of fieldwork with younger Taiwanese professionals had allowed me to examine how the distinction between cross-Strait and trans-Strait relations operated in ordinary decisions, encounters, and aspirations, rather than only at the level of political or institutional analysis. Returning to Tübingen, therefore, did not simply mean repeating an established distinction. I was bringing it back after testing its possibilities and limitations against the experiences of people whose lives unfolded across the Taiwan Strait.
Understanding without Romanticising Dialogue
What needs to be resisted is the assumption that bringing people into conversation will, by itself, produce understanding or consensus. Across interviews, classrooms, conferences, and workshop discussions, I have seen how dialogue can reproduce the national frames and unequal expectations it seeks to examine. Researchers working across Taiwan and China may still be expected to declare a political position before their questions are fully heard. Disagreement, asymmetry, and occasional discomfort therefore do not disappear simply because an intellectual space has been created.
This situation does not make dialogue futile. It clarifies what dialogue can—and cannot—be expected to accomplish. Scholarship cannot resolve geopolitical conflict, nor should it conceal substantive disagreements beneath a comforting language of connectivity. What it can do is prevent political categories from exhausting our curiosity about people whose working lives, relationships, and futures unfold within and across them.
Understanding does not guarantee reconciliation, but its value exists independently of that guarantee. Reconciliation, perhaps, belongs to God. Understanding remains a human responsibility—and, for scholars, a professional one.
Ai Ke is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Warsaw. Her doctoral research draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork to examine mobility, identity, and affect among younger-generation Taiwanese professionals living and working in mainland China. Her broader research interests include lived geopolitics, migration, language, and everyday life.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Connectivity: Tübingen ERCCT Taiwan-Europe Workshop.