South Koreans in Taiwan: From the Kaohsiung Korean International School to the Daily Network of Mobile Screens

Image: Master Mao Mao Da Shao Ye, "Kaohsiung Skyline 2020," Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Original file and license page see ¹.

30-Second Overview: South Koreans in Taiwan did not suddenly appear after the rise of short videos. The Kaohsiung Korean International School, local Korean Associations, the Working Holiday system, international students, and transnational families have long embedded Korean life into the Taiwanese city. Recent influencers have made this community easier to see, yet they also remind us: those who are visible are never the entirety of the people.

In 2013, the afternoon class at a Korean school in Kaohsiung had only 20 students. In the mornings, the children attended elementary school in Taiwan, and at 1:00 PM, they returned to classes in Korean language, Korean culture, and Samulnori (four-item percussion music).² By 2024, there were 2,418 South Korean students studying in Taiwan.³ The same phrase "South Koreans in Taiwan" actually encompasses children in a small school, youth coming to Taiwan for exchange, families settling in the south after marrying Taiwanese, and creators who explain Korea to Taiwanese people daily on their mobile phones.

If you only look at South Koreans in Taiwan through YouTube, the easiest answer you get is bright and fast: they are Wei Suan Ren (Stomach Acid Man), Jin Zhen Gu (Enoki Mushroom), and Mei Ling Han Mai (Meiling Han Sell), people who film daily differences into videos. But this answer lacks a dimension of time. South Koreans in Taiwan did not suddenly appear after the rise of short videos. Reports from 2013 already showed the Kaohsiung Korean International School had been operating for 51 years, and local Korean Associations played an intermediary role in the Immigration Agency’s rights advocacy and cultural activities.^{4 2}

📝 Curator’s Note
The South Koreans Taiwanese people see most easily are influencers on screens, but the earliest daily traces of South Koreans in Taiwan are not in algorithms, but in a school where children enter Taiwanese elementary schools in the morning and return to Korean language classes in the afternoon.

Four Entries, Four Types of Life in Taiwan

"South Koreans in Taiwan" can be understood through at least four entries. These are not mutually exclusive identities; some people move from students to workers, and some families simultaneously face schools, residency, and content creation. The table below only organizes life paths directly supported by sources, avoiding the projection of individual cases as representative of all South Koreans in Taiwan.

There is no natural ladder between these four paths. Official documents categorize people by visa, residency, or study purposes, but life often causes these different purposes to overlap. The article chooses to list them side-by-side to avoid "South Koreans coming to Taiwan" becoming just one immigration story.

One School, Two Calendars

The story of the Kaohsiung Korean International School begins with a schedule. Reports state that students enter general Taiwanese elementary schools in the morning, attending classes with Taiwanese classmates, and from 1:00 PM to 5:30 PM, they go to the Korean school to learn Korean language, Korean culture, and Samulnori. The school also holds classes on Saturdays, allowing students who cannot attend on weekdays to retain opportunities to contact Korean.²

This is not placing two cultures in separate rooms. Children spend half the day in the rhythm of the Taiwanese school system first, then return to another language and festival cycle. The curriculum even includes "Kimchi Day," allowing students to actually make Korean food.² A child must switch between two school systems in the same day; cross-cultural life thus falls onto a schedule that requires self-memory.

Behind the afternoon schedule lies the weight of reality. Children must remember homework, class times, and languages from both sides; parents must rearrange shifts between school, family, and transportation. The report does not write this life as a romantic dual-cultural advantage, but instead points out that bilingual and bicultural learning is a challenge for children, with parents particularly worried about workload.² "Retaining mother tongue" is therefore not just a slogan; it requires a school, an afternoon period, and families willing to bear the costs of pickup and curriculum.

Principal Kim Jin-sub (Kim Jin Seop) discussed in the report that language is the key to connecting culture. He also believes that working in a cross-cultural environment requires maintaining a positive attitude, an open mind, and accepting the uniqueness of local culture. These words sound like a principal’s workplace principles, but placed in Kaohsiung’s afternoon classrooms, they resemble a daily technology: first letting children live in Taiwan, then ensuring they do not lose their Korean as a result.

The scale of this school also reminds us not to misread "South Koreans in Taiwan" as a huge and homogeneous group. The 20 students in the 2013 afternoon class and the 2,418 Korean students studying in Taiwan in 2024 represent two different entries: family education and higher education. The former cares about how children retain their mother tongue; the latter cares about degrees, research, and future work. These two numbers can be placed on the same table, but the lives behind them are two different arrangements.^{3 2}

Kaohsiung is Not an Accidental Background

In 2016, the Southern Joint Service Center of the Executive Yuan reported that the Immigration Agency and the Kaohsiung Korean Association held an exchange on the rights and interests of foreign residents at the Kaohsiung Korean International School. At that time, there were 402 Korean侨 residents in Kaohsiung City, ranking 4th nationally among all counties and cities, and the Kaohsiung Korean Association had 120 members.⁴

This number is already a historical slice from 2016 and cannot be directly used as today’s demographic statistics. What it can point out is that Korean life in Kaohsiung simultaneously involves restaurants, tourism, schools, local organizations, and administrative services. After these nodes intersect, a local network where people can find each other is formed. The Korean Association assists in connecting resources, while the Immigration Agency explains residency and stay rights in activities.⁴

Immigration systems usually categorize people by documents. Life, however, brings people to finer questions: where do children learn their mother tongue in the afternoon, who do parents ask about residency extensions, how does the community hold a New Year’s Eve party, and can one find familiar people when encountering legal or administrative issues? The Kaohsiung case turns "community" into visible institutions, not just a nationality column in demographic statistics.

The Ministry of the Interior’s Immigration Agency now publishes foreign resident statistics by month and continuously updates downloadable data.⁷ This data is suitable for answering population questions like "how many foreign residents are there," but cannot alone answer how they live in the city. To understand South Koreans in Taiwan, one must place the statistical tables together with schools, local associations, families, and work experiences.

📝 Curator’s Note
Demographic statistics will tell you which country’s passport someone holds; the 1:00 PM bell of the school will tell you how a community lives identity into daily routine.

Short-Term Life Starting from Working Holiday

Official explanations from the Bureau of Consular Affairs state that the Taiwan-Korea Working Holiday visa was implemented on January 1, 2011. This system focuses on youth long-term vacation, making work an incidental arrangement to pay living expenses, and therefore not every South Korean youth coming to Taiwan intends to settle. Korean applicants must be aged 18 to 34 and can only use this program to enter Taiwan once.⁵

Official explanations simultaneously draw institutional boundaries. The main purpose of applicants entering the country must be long-term vacation; legal work is merely an incidental purpose to raise travel funds. Applicants may not bring spouses, dependents, or children.⁵ These conditions separate a person temporarily moving to Taiwan from a family living in Taiwan for family reunification, study, or work reasons into different institutional paths.

But for youth, short-term systems may leave long-term memories. Working holiday participants need to find housing themselves, buy transportation tickets, and handle language friction; they also encounter Taiwanese accents and rhythms in workplaces. The system writes "exchange" in the visa description; true exchange occurs in a schedule, a rental group chat, or an administrative window whose translation is unknown.

Therefore, South Koreans in Taiwan should not be dichotomized only as "immigrants" or "tourists." Some come with degrees, some with families, some with one-year limits, and some decide whether to stay only after the limit expires. The Ministry of the Interior’s guidelines for permanent residency applications even list the institutional text of "South Korean侨 residents approved for long-term residence through special projects by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."⁸ This explains that residency identities have different paths and reminds us not to write every South Korean in Taiwan into the same story.

Universities Open Both Directions

A 2025 report from the Ministry of Education provides another entry. Hanyang University in South Korea has established sister-school relationships with 34 universities in Taiwan, with 107 Taiwanese students studying at Hanyang University at that time. The Ministry of Education simultaneously announced that in 2024, a total of 2,418 Korean students came to Taiwan to study, while 2,150 Taiwanese students went to Korea to study.³

Within these numbers lies an easily overlooked symmetry: among Korean students coming to Taiwan and Taiwanese students going to Korea, both sides have people temporarily treating another society as their classroom. Student exchange does not necessarily become immigration, but it brings the other’s language, school system, and lifestyle habits back to the original place.

The Ministry of Education places the scope of cooperation in engineering, medicine, industry-academia cooperation, and talent cultivation in the same report.³ This differs from Taiwan-Korea exchanges that only discuss K-dramas or K-pop. When Korean students come to Taiwan for degrees, research, or internships, the fields they face shift from cultural consumption to laboratories, hospitals, campus administration, and peer relationships. Understanding between Taiwan and Korea also slowly forms in these scenes unsuitable for cutting into thirty-second videos.

Research on international students at National Cheng Kung University reminds us that transnational learning should be understood in the context of student mobility and educational systems, rather than treating foreign students merely as exotic scenery on campus.⁹ For Korean students, Taiwan may be a research site, a Chinese learning environment, an exchange experience, or a next step without answers yet.

Image: Heeheemalu, "Taipei Skyline 2018," Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Original file and license page see ¹⁰.

Why South Koreans on Screens Become Familiar

Image: Jorge Cancela, "Taipei - Skyline Sunset," Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Original file and license page see ¹¹.

A 2022 report from The Taiwan Banker turned the lens to Wei Suan Ren (Stomach Acid Man), Jin Zhen Gu (Enoki Mushroom), and Mei Ling Han Mai (Meiling Han Sell). The article records that Wei Suan Ren graduated from the Department of Economics at National Taiwan University and has naturalized as a Taiwanese citizen, while Jin Zhen Gu graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at National Taiwan University.⁶ Their fame has transformed South Koreans in Taiwan from minority figures in the city into content that Taiwanese audiences may actively click on daily.

The turn here is not just "South Koreans starting to be YouTubers." The report mentions that Wei Suan Ren once reflected on the unfriendliness caused by the severance of diplomatic relations between Taiwan and Korea and international sports competition, believing that after the rise of the Korean Wave, Taiwanese attitudes toward South Koreans changed significantly.⁶ A person’s visibility in Taiwan thus overlaps with bilateral relations, pop culture, and platform algorithms.

The report writes the collision of two daily politenesses in a moment of just arriving in Taiwan. At that time, the interviewed South Korean still had the habit of standing straight and bowing when encountering teachers, but saw Taiwanese students greeting teachers with high-fives and even eating chicken cutlets in class.⁶ These details cannot be used to draw conclusions about all South Koreans or Taiwanese, but they give cultural differences action, rather than a string of adjectives like "Koreans are stricter, Taiwanese are freer."

Meiling Han Mai’s experience brings the视线 back to the Tainan family. The report points out that before marrying her Taiwanese husband, she had neither studied nor worked in Taiwan, directly entering a large family in southern Taiwan after marriage. Her family background also spans several positions: Chinese Korean ethnicity, Chinese language schools, work in Seoul, and marriage in Taiwan.⁶

This story cannot be summarized only as "Korean daughter-in-law integrating into Taiwan." Before arriving in Tainan, she already possessed Chinese language education experience and a cross-regional family history. Post-marriage life only adds fruit, hot weather, motorcycle traffic, parenting, and group buying.⁶ Foreigners coming to Taiwan often do not start from blank; they bring earlier language, family, and mobility experiences together.

📝 Curator’s Note
Influencers allow Taiwanese people to hear certain South Koreans’ lives for the first time, but being heard does not equal being represented. What is most worth preserving are often those experiences that refuse to be cut into a single identity.

The End of Comparison: Who Can Adjust

The Taiwan Banker’s interview places differences in concrete life: respondents discuss Korea’s requirements for age, seniority, and honorifics, and also discuss how Taiwanese workplaces more often use English names, and how supervisors and employees can sometimes joke with each other.⁶ These descriptions are the respondents’ observations, not the statistical average of every person in two countries, and thus can only be read back into their life positions.

Respondents also discuss southern Taiwan’s fruit, hot weather, and motorcycle traffic. For those familiar with Seoul’s public transport, motorcycles bring mobility but also risk.⁶ Adapting to a city relies on daily choices: whether to ride a bike, how to cross the road, how to buy things in the market. These repetitive small decisions slowly grow into a feeling for a city.

Research on Taiwanese public perceptions of Korea and Taiwan-Korea relations turns the lens back to Taiwanese society, analyzing different demographic variables and perceptions of Korea through questionnaires.¹² The value of such research lies in reminding us that South Koreans’ lives in Taiwan are also affected by Taiwanese people’s existing impressions. Some see the Korean Wave first, some think of historical competition first, some first see the other as colleagues, classmates, or neighbors.

Therefore, Taiwan’s "tolerance" toward South Koreans cannot stop at self-praise. It appears in whether schools can catch bilingual children, whether administrative windows can clearly explain residency rules, whether workplaces can allow foreign professionals to work, and also appears after a South Korean’s nationality is recognized, whether they can still be understood by their complex experiences.

Putting Korea Back into Taiwan’s Daily Life

Returning to that school in Kaohsiung, children learn Korean in the afternoon and attend classes with Taiwanese classmates in the morning. Returning to the family in Tainan, Korean, Chinese, Korean ethnicity background, and Taiwanese relatives coexist. Returning to universities, 2,418 Korean students came to Taiwan to study in 2024, while on the other side, 2,150 Taiwanese students went to Korea.³ Returning to mobile screens, several South Korean creators in Taiwan film politeness, weather, politics, and fruit into stories Taiwanese audiences can understand.⁶

These entries are different from each other, yet together they change the imagination of "South Koreans in Taiwan." This theme cannot be placed only in news about foreigners coming to Taiwan, nor only in the K-pop consumption market. What is more worth seeing is how a community retains its language, then rearranges life in local schools, Taiwanese universities, families, and workplaces.

Administrative systems will continue to categorize by nationality, visa, and residency purpose. Cultural activities will continue to recognize each other through Korean Day, kimchi, music, and festivals. Platforms will continue to push certain people’s lives to more Taiwanese people. What truly needs attention is that these three systems can only illuminate part of the picture.

If you ask what South Koreans have left in Taiwan, the answer is not necessarily fixed Korean-ness, but closer to a repeated ability to translate: translating between two schedules, between different honorifics, between family and administrative documents, and translating themselves in front of and behind the lens. Taiwan sees South Koreans; South Koreans also relearn how to explain Taiwan on this island.

Further Reading

• Kaohsiung City — The urban background of the city where the Kaohsiung Korean侨 School and local Korean Association are located.
• Taiwan’s Education System — Understanding the institutional context of Taiwanese schools, international students, and bilingual education.
• Taiwan New Resident Food Fusion — Extending understanding of how cross-cultural communities settle in Taiwan through food and family life.

References