外交資源としての外国人労働者-台湾の事例分析-

二〇世紀アジア広域史の可能性

抄録

International labor movement in the Asian region has become widely recognized as an important factor giving potentially multi-level and complex socio-economic impacts on sending as well as receiving countries. Conventionally, today's cross-border activity is understood in the context of economic globalization embodied as expanding multidirectional foreign trades and direct investments, and also interpreted as a natural consequence of the differentials in job opportunities and income levels among separate regions. This article, however, demonstrates that the international movement of labor is not a simple function of the globalizing market economy, nor one driven merely by industrial forces. Rather, it states that, in some instances, the causes and effects of accepting foreign workers, become unavoidably political and even highly diplomatic in nature.
In the late 1980s, Taiwan began to import low-skilled labor from neighboring countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, intending to solve serious labor shortages in construction, manufacturing, and, more recently, care industries. Afterward, economic downturns and sociocultural frictions between migrant workers and the host society led Taiwan to employ a more restrictive policy toward foreign labor. In spite of the policy changes, Taiwan acquired new exporting countries: Vietnam in 1999 and Mongolia in 2004.
Taiwan's labor importing policies are conditioned by the particular international political contexts in which the island has been placed. Taiwan has been desperate for low-skilled labor from abroad in order to avoid a decline in its industrial competitiveness and thus economic performance, which is believed to be a key to Taiwan's international status. However, it had to be achieved without recourse to the rising economy of People's Republic of China, which may threaten the autonomy of the Taiwan polity itself. Under these constraints, policy towards foreign workers in Taiwan has been gradually recognized as not only a temporary measure to mediate the labor shortages, but a diplomatic component of Taiwan's “Go South” policy.
Throughout the case of the air dispute with the Philippines (1999-2000), the denial of an senior Taiwanese official visit to Thailand (2002), and many others, these examples show that foreign labor was utilized as Taiwan's diplomatic resources to enhance foreign relations or as bargaining chips to give Taiwan an advantage in diplomatic negotiations. Suspending, or hinting at an intention to suspend, the import of workers from source countries has contributed to Taiwan's self-interest in several instances. Despite the unclarity of Taiwan's international legal position and the difficulty of evaluating the actual effects of this diplomatic resource on Taiwan's external relations, this case analysis indicates the logic of how labor movement across borders can be turned into a crucial variable of the contemporary international political economy.