Taiwanese Overseas: From Exiled Students to Silicon Valley Engineers, a Diaspora Map of Two Million

30-second overview: Approximately two million Taiwanese citizens live abroad, across the United States, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Japan. What makes this group distinctive: Taiwan has no absentee voting system, so every election, anyone who wants to vote must buy an airline ticket and fly back to their household registration polling station. This map of the diaspora spans the political exiles of the 1960s, the World Federation of Taiwanese Associations founded in Vienna in 1974, the grassroots lobbying organization FAPA born in Los Angeles in 1982, and the knowledge return-flow of Silicon Valley engineers — layered over the identity confusion of second-generation Taiwanese abroad, forming a hidden cross-section of Taiwan's democratic history.

On September 18, 1960, a young man from Taiwan boarded a flight to the United States to study American party politics at the University of Tennessee.¹ His name was Chai Trong-rong. He did not know that he was leaving for more than two decades, or that he would one day become one of the central figures in an overseas lobbying force that helped crack martial law.

In that era, leaving Taiwan was not difficult. What was difficult was saying "I am Taiwanese."

Two Million People: Where Are They?

Today, an estimated two million Taiwanese citizens live abroad. Based on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bureau of Consular Affairs overseas registration statistics:²

This distribution is itself a modern Taiwanese history: those in the United States mostly belong to the wave of students from the 1960s onward; those in Southeast Asia are mostly Taiwanese businesspeople who went south following the investment wave of the 1990s; those in Europe and Australia include more recent technical migrants and students. The China-Hong Kong-Macau figures are politically charged — the methodology of counting them is itself contested.

Curator's note
Taiwan's overseas population statistics face a structural problem: overseas registration is voluntary, and actual numbers are almost certainly higher. Statistics from the immigration agency, the Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission, and academic research often diverge substantially. "Two million" is the median figure most commonly cited.

The Foundation Built by Political Exiles

Understanding Taiwan's overseas community requires starting from a counterintuitive fact: a significant share of the seeds of Taiwan's democratization were planted in American university dormitories and classrooms.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Taiwan was under martial law, and the dangwai (outside-the-party) opposition movement had almost no room to survive on the island. But Taiwanese students who went to the United States discovered that there, saying "I am Taiwanese" would not get them arrested.

The severing of U.S.-Taiwan relations in 1979 was a key turning point. American quotas for Taiwan-origin immigration faced reduction, and a group of Taiwanese Americans began learning to use the tools of American democracy to push back — grassroots lobbying.³ In that group were Chai Trong-rong, Chen Tang-shan, Peng Ming-min, and Wang Kuei-jung, who had all crossed the Pacific.

On September 7, 1974, the World Federation of Taiwanese Associations (WFTA) was founded in Vienna, integrating Taiwanese community organizations from the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America.⁴ This was the first attempt to organize the Taiwanese overseas community across continents.

Los Angeles, 1982: The Birth of FAPA

On February 14, 1982, the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) was founded in Los Angeles, with Chai Trong-rong as its first president.⁵

FAPA's founding was not coincidental. The backdrop: the KMT government's propaganda machinery monopolized Taiwan's channels of external communication, while Taiwanese overseas were one of the few groups who could still speak openly in democratic countries. FAPA chose a tactic that proved highly effective in the United States: direct engagement with the Washington congressional lobbying system.

Results came quickly. In 1987, under sustained pressure from FAPA and pro-Taiwan American legislators, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Taiwan Democracy Resolution (H.R. 1777), calling on the Nationalist government to end martial law and lift the ban on opposition parties.⁶ That same year, martial law was lifted. The causal connection is complex, but FAPA's lobbying demonstrably applied external pressure at the right moment.

Today, FAPA encompasses 84 Taiwanese-American associations and 10 Taiwan centers across the United States.⁷ From a small office in Los Angeles, it grew into a network spanning the whole country — over forty years.

Silicon Valley: The Homeward Effect

Another axis of the Taiwanese diaspora story runs toward the concentration of engineers in Silicon Valley.

Between the 1970s and 1980s, large numbers of Taiwanese science and engineering graduates went to the United States for graduate school and stayed to enter the American technology industry. Initially they faced glass ceilings in Silicon Valley that blocked advancement into senior management; eventually the Taiwanese government's outreach changed the trajectory.

K.T. Li, then serving on the Executive Yuan Science and Technology Advisory Group, began flying across the Pacific to speak to these engineers: "You've hit a glass ceiling in the United States. But if you return to Taiwan, you can start companies — the government will provide labs."⁸

These returning engineers became the backbone of Taiwan's semiconductor industry. A 1998 study found that 109 of the 222 Taiwanese companies in the Hsinchu Science Industrial Park had been founded by returned overseas Taiwanese.⁹ They brought back technology, and also brought back an entire system of Silicon Valley thinking and networks.

Today, the air corridor between Silicon Valley and Hsinchu is the highest-density commercial exchange route in the entire Taiwanese diaspora. Organizations such as the North American Taiwanese Engineering and Science Association (NATEA) remain important nodes in this two-way knowledge flow.¹⁰

Did you know?
TSMC founder Morris Chang is himself the emblematic case of this wave of returning engineers: before returning to Taiwan in 1985, he had worked at Texas Instruments for nearly three decades. When he saw a complete wafer-foundry business model taking shape in Silicon Valley, he brought that idea back to Taiwan — and from it, TSMC was born.

The Taiwanese Business Network in Southeast Asia

In the 1990s, as labor costs in Taiwan rose, another emigration wave swept toward Southeast Asia — this time businesspeople, not students.

Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia successively became concentrations of Taiwanese business. Indonesia's Taiwanese community (approximately 210,000 people) is the largest in Southeast Asia, concentrated mostly in Jakarta and surrounding industrial zones, primarily in manufacturing and textiles.²

These Taiwanese businesspeople faced entirely different identity dilemmas than the North American students. They typically appeared in Southeast Asian societies as "foreign business owners," spoke Taiwanese or Mandarin as their mother tongues, and integrated into local society with varying degrees. Between Taiwan and Southeast Asia, a distinctive "frequent-flyer" culture thus formed — weekdays abroad, weekends home in Taiwan, children enrolled in school in Taiwan while parents earned money overseas.

The Second Generation's Identity Maze

The hardest layer of the overseas Taiwanese experience to describe is the second generation.

Second-generation Taiwanese Americans who grew up in the United States are typically American citizens — they cannot use a Taiwan passport, have no household registration, and must enter Taiwan through the foreigner lane. But their living rooms are where Taiwanese is spoken, their refrigerators hold tangyuan and fishballs, and their mother's temple-festival photographs hang on the wall.

Researchers have found that the Taiwanese identity of the second generation often "freezes" in the year their parents emigrated.¹¹ Their parents left Taiwan in the 1970s, when many people were still uncertain whether they were "Chinese"; but the identity landscape on the island has shifted dramatically since then, while overseas second-generation Taiwanese may still be interpreting their roots through the framework their parents' generation used.

This identity gap also shows up in language. First-generation Taiwanese in the United States worked hard to make their children learn Chinese; the children of the second generation (the third generation) often speak Chinese haltingly and Taiwanese is nearly extinct. Taiwanese-ness dilutes with each generation, but the label "Taiwanese" has in certain American cities — Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Queens in New York — become a potent force for ethnic political mobilization.

Contested point
The label "second-generation Taiwanese" is itself contested. Some parents are Taiwanese-born benshengren (original inhabitants); others are waishengren (mainlanders) who came from mainland China after 1949. Their definitions and boundaries for "Taiwanese identity" often diverge sharply, and sometimes produce sharper tensions within American Taiwanese communities than are visible on the island itself.

Flying Home to Vote

Taiwan still has no absentee voting system.

This means: a Taiwanese citizen living in San Francisco who wants to vote in the 2024 presidential election must book a flight, book a hotel, and fly back to their polling station in whatever county holds their household registration to cast that vote.¹² Round-trip airfare plus accommodation can easily exceed NT$10,000 per vote.

Despite this, every election cycle sees thousands of overseas Taiwanese choosing to "fly home to vote." Before the 2024 presidential election, overseas offices around the world received more voting-related inquiries than in 2020.

This phenomenon of "traveling a thousand miles to vote" has produced a distinctive form of civic participation among overseas Taiwanese — casting a ballot becomes a deliberate ritual. The moment you buy the ticket, you have already declared yourself.

The government and academics have both discussed the feasibility of electronic or absentee voting, but every discussion stalls at the same question: how do you prevent Beijing from interfering with overseas voting? As of late 2025, Premier Cho Jung-tai explicitly stated that overseas electronic voting was "completely unfeasible."¹³ For now, buying a ticket remains the only option.

An Unresolved Question

One line through the overseas Taiwanese community nobody can clearly trace: the relationship between new and old emigrants.

The waves of Taiwanese who left in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s arrived abroad with stronger Taiwanese identities, and sometimes have a cultural gap with the older emigrants from the 1970s, whose identities were still in an ambiguous period. The old Taiwanese associations are still there; the new Taiwanese congregate in Facebook groups, Discord servers, and Threads — the same "Taiwanese" label carrying completely different weight across different generations.

If someone in 2050 wants to understand what Taiwanese people cared most about in the early twenty-first century, those boarding passes for the flight home to vote might tell the story more clearly than any policy document.

Further Reading

• FAPA official website — Formosan Association for Public Affairs, history and current status
• Taiwanese American Heritage Center — Digital archive documenting the history of Taiwanese Americans
• Taiwan Insight — Taiwanese Americans — Academic commentary and analysis

References