The Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC) held the 2017 Ceremony of Awards for Theses and Dissertations on the Topic of Overseas Compatriot Affairs on December 29, 2017. The event was attended by five award winners and two advisors. Minister Wu Hsin-hsing presented the awards, accompanied by Vice Minister Roy Leu Yuen-rong and Chief Secretary Chang Liang-min.

Wu stated that the subjects of the winning theses included immigrant communities, Chinese language media, dialect research and overseas compatriot education, with the countries studied including the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar and the US, mostly the target countries of the government’s New Southbound policy. The suggestions and discourse of these theses will serve as future reference in the management of overseas community affairs by the OCAC, he said, commending the authors for their contribution to overseas community research.

Advisor Bo-Wei Chiang, professor of Department of East Asian Studies, National Taiwan Normal University has previously studied Chinese society in Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia and knows the extent of the Kinmen diaspora; taking Brunei for example, one-fifth of the population is ethnic Chinese and around 80,000 people originated from Lieyu Township, also known as“Little Kinmen,” giving Kinmen a key role in the New Southbound policy. 

Master of the Graduate Institute of International Politics, National Chung Hsing University, Mei-Ling Wu won by the thesis titled“National Identity of Ethnic Chinese in Myanmar”.  Interviewing Chinese in Myanmar and Chinese Myanmar in Taiwan, she found that their national identity does not come from nationality, but is mainly based on economic factors and personal security, she said. 

Another winner, Hsiu-Hua Hsu, Master of the Graduate Institute of International Politics, National Chung Hsing University, wrote a thesis “The Plague Incident in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Correspondence of Overseas Chinese at the Turn of the 20th Century”. She said that the starting point of this study was a seldom-used historical viewpoint, the thesis discussing the unfair treatment meted out to overseas Chinese and compatriot communities during the Chinese exclusion period and the interaction between and actions of China and the US at the time.