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Determining 'truth' at the border: immigration interviews, Chinese marital

migrants, and Taiwan's sovereignty dilemmasSara L. Friedmana

a Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

Online publication date: 26 April 2010

To cite this Article Friedman, Sara L.(2010) 'Determining 'truth' at the border: immigration interviews, Chinese maritalmigrants, and Taiwan's sovereignty dilemmas', Citizenship Studies, 14: 2, 167 — 183

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13621021003594817

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621021003594817

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Determining ‘truth’ at the border: immigration interviews, Chinese

marital migrants, and Taiwan’s sovereignty dilemmas

Sara L. Friedman*

Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

(Received 14 August 2009; final version received 30 October 2009)

As Taiwan transitions from an immigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving country,

it struggles to build an immigration bureaucracy while its status as a sovereign nation-

state is not recognized by much of the international community. Taiwan’s largest

immigrant group, marital migrants from China, are perceived as posing the greatest

challenges to border control due to longstanding political tensions between the twocountries and governmental and societal suspicions about Chinese spouses’ marital

motives. Based on research conducted with immigration officials and during

immigration interviews at the border, this article interrogates the status of ‘truth’ in

official efforts to determine definitively immigrants’ marital intentions. It analyzes

such truth demands in relation to Taiwan’s anxieties about its national standing and the

ability of an immigration bureaucracy to generate ‘sovereignty effects’.

Keywords: immigrant; borders; gender; legitimacy; state; practice

How is it that in Western Christian culture the government of men demands, on the part of those who are led, not only acts of obedience and submission but also ‘acts of truth’, which

have the peculiar requirement not just that the subject tell the truth but that he tell the truth

about himself, his faults, his desires, the state of his soul, and so on? How was a type of

government of men formed in which one is required not simply to obey but to reveal what one

is by stating it ? (Foucault 1997, p. 81, emphasis added)

For Foucault, truth in Christian societies is an obligation, a duty embodied most concretely

in the confession which linked truth and faith through practices of self discovery and

knowledge central to the construction of modern subjectivity (Foucault 1997, pp. 177–

178). In the epigraph above, however, Foucault also calls attention to modes of power that

extend beyond the confession, including governing practices that operate preciselythrough the expectation that subjects speak the truth about themselves and their desires

(Foucault 1980, pp. 131–133, 1997, pp. 177–178). In this article, I examine how such

truth demands are formulated in a context that we might call the confession’s double, the

immigration interview. I build on Foucault’s insights into the relationship between

truth and power to examine the significance of truth demands in a governing practice

that requires immigrants to disclose intimate details about themselves and their

marriages and requires of bureaucrats that they hone the ability to distinguish truth from

falsity.

ISSN 1362-1025 print/ISSN 1469-3593 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13621021003594817

http://www.informaworld.com

*Email: [email protected]

Citizenship Studies

Vol. 14, No. 2, April 2010, 167–183



Mark Salter identifies this ‘confessionary complex’ as a key technique of border

surveillance that establishes ‘the fundamental relationship between sovereign and subject,

between the body politic and a particular body’ (2006, p. 168). In fleshing out this

connection between truth demands and sovereignty, I underscore how the immigration

interview creates a generative model of sovereignty, both by producing ‘sovereigntyeffects’ that support claims to independent national status and by promoting a specific

vision of family and nation to shore up that national standing. By focusing on a context

where state sovereignty is unstable and insecure, I show how border practices that

mobilize truth and power also potentially create the effect of sovereignty itself.

The concept of sovereignty employed here has two interrelated components. The first

is its face value, which is premised on mutual recognition in an international system and

the legal framework that undergirds that system. The second component is the practices

that give the appearance of both sovereign recognition and sovereign claims, and that give

substance to an international legal armature. Any state that fails to engage in these

practices invites the impression of failed or inactive sovereignty. Not surprisingly, nearly

all states utilize these practices in order to protect and instantiate claims of sovereignty,

including when challenged by forces of globalization (Wonders 2006). Moreover,

sovereignty practices assume heightened importance in cases where sovereignty itself is

acknowledged as being unstable or uncertain.

This state of uncertain sovereignty best characterizes Taiwan (also known as the

Republic of China), an island nation off of China’s southeast coast that enjoys de facto

independence but which China views as a renegade province. Since the 1970s Taiwan has

gradually lost most forms of international recognition that it obtained after 1949 when it

was recognized as the legitimate government of all of China: today a mere 23 small,

marginalized countries retain official diplomatic relations and China has effectively

blocked Taiwan’s efforts to join or rejoin all major international bodies.1

Despite thisunstable international status, Taiwan made a peaceful transition to democratic governance

in the 1990s. Recent decades have witnessed renewed ties with Mainland China and closer

economic and societal links between the two countries, although the sovereignty issue

remains unresolved.

Taiwan engages in border practices that look very similar to those employed by other

states – vetting immigrants, regulating border flows, checking documents – but here they

have the added result of generating a sovereignty effect in the absence of external

recognition. Through attention to the interactions and anxieties that comprise these border

practices, I show how they produce sovereignty effects not only in times of crisis or

challenge (Doty 1996, Mountz 2004), but also as part of the normalized routine of borderwork. Recognized sovereign states can produce these effects through practices inside

borders and abroad, and much recent literature has successfully unfixed our understanding

of borders by exposing zones of graduated sovereignty and security-based governance

practices that enable states to extend policing beyond national borders (Ong 2000, Coutin

2003, Mountz 2004, Bigo and Guild 2005, Pratt 2005, Salter 2006, Sassen 2006, Rajaram

and Grundy-Warr 2007). Yet not all states have the liberty or capacity to stretch or

manipulate their borders in the same way. China’s efforts to block Taiwanese sovereignty

prevent Taiwan from re-spatializing national governance and practices of border

regulation, thereby intensifying bureaucrats’ anxieties about the effectiveness of their

border practices.

I focus here on marital immigration interviews conducted at the border with the

Chinese spouses of Taiwanese citizens. Chinese spouses represent the largest group of

immigrants to Taiwan and they number nearly twice as many as all other foreign spouses

S.L. Friedman168



combined (262,701 as of the end of 2008).2 They are the largest group of Chinese citizens

resident in Taiwan and with a few exceptions, they are the only Mainland Chinese eligible

for naturalization.3 Given that marriage to a Taiwanese offers the only widely recognized

path to naturalized citizenship in Taiwan, this influx of Chinese spouses poses numerous

problems for an immigration bureaucracy that seeks to balance family reunification withborder control and national security concerns. Chinese spouses literally embody the

contradictions inherent in contemporary cross-Strait relations – including China’s

challenges to Taiwanese sovereignty – and they bring those tensions into their interactions

with immigration bureaucrats. Here national security becomes framed not in a language of

potential spies masquerading as marriage partners, but as doubts about Chinese spouses’

marital motives (specifically the fear that they are using marriage to enter the country for

purposes of sex work or economic improvement) and hence the integrity of their marriages

(Chao 2004).

When bureaucrats encounter Chinese spouses for the first time at the port-of-entry

interview, their charge is to weed out those with questionable marriage motives by

discovering the ‘truth’ of their marriages. This process of determining truth is fraught with

numerous pitfalls, including bureaucrats’ lack of consensus about the status of truth itself

and its unstable relationship to sovereign legitimacy and state power. Attention to these

concerns with marital authenticity shows how dominant paradigms of security and

policing in border regulation and immigration also shape the contours of intimate life and

relationships (Luibheid 2002, Bigo and Guild 2005, Pratt 2005).

Images of the anxiety-producing immigration interview circulate globally in both

immigrant-sending and immigrant-receiving countries, and the intimate knowledge

required of immigrant spouses has become fodder for popular culture portrayals (as in the

Hollywood film, Green Card ) and the focus of Internet discussion boards for those

contemplating transnational marriages (Constable 2003). In most cross-border marriages,the immigrant spouse must pass an interview on home soil before receiving a visa to

reunite with the citizen spouse. This system presumes that the destination country operates

a consular office where such interviews can be conducted. In the case of cross-Strait

marriages, however, these consular offices do not exist precisely because China does not

recognize Taiwan as an independent, sovereign state.4 Hence marital interviews are

perforce pushed to the port of arrival, which for Chinese spouses is usually one of

Taiwan’s two international airports.5

The content and structure of marital interviews at the airport do not look very different

from those conducted by other states and, in fact, Taiwan has sought guidance and training

from US, Australian, and Canadian consular officials. By examining in detail themotivations for and results of these practices in a context where sovereignty is insecure,

however, I elucidate processes that construct sovereignty even in recognized states, where,

as Doty argues, the foundations of sovereignty ‘are inherently ambiguous, fragile, and

always evolving’ (1996, p. 123, see also Doty 2007, p. 132). Taiwan’s heightened

attention to its border practices in the context of contested relations with China shows how

those practices generate a form of sovereignty that functions as more than a ban on

admission. Interviews also school marital immigrants in appropriate roles as spouses,

parents, and future citizens, and subsequently create a particular model of the family and

nation that undergirds the sovereignty work performed by border practices themselves.

In the discussion to follow I introduce the most recent wave of cross-Strait marriages

and examine the truth regime that has emerged around these marriages through the

bureaucratic interventions enacted by Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency (NIA) and

its predecessor institutions. I focus on the airport immigration interview and analyze its

Citizenship Studies 169



form and content with an eye to how truth demands are formulated in this encounter and

with what results. Through an in-depth discussion of an especially contentious interview, I

highlight the limitations inherent in airport interviews as a means to determine marital

authenticity. In concluding, I consider the sovereignty effects generated by both the

immigration bureaucracy and the interview system and discuss whether these are sufficientto overcome the uncertainties that define Taiwan’s current standing in the international

community.

The material presented here derives from a larger project on cross-Strait marital

immigration that incorporated marital immigrants and their families, non-governmental

organizations in Taiwan, and Taiwan officials and bureaucrats in the NIA and related

government entities. To study the interview system, my research assistants and I traveled

on nine occasions over the spring and summer of 2008 and summer of 2009 to Taiwan’s

main international airport in Taoyuan. There, in the enclosed control zone, we spent hours

observing immigration processing and interviews with Chinese and Taiwanese spouses

and discussing the interview system with NIA officials and interviewers both formally and

informally. We held semi-structured interviews with officials who had instituted the

interview system in 2003, some of whom worked at the airport and others who had

positions in other offices of the NIA. Approval for our access to NIA bureaucrats and the

interview process came through two channels: high-level endorsement within the NIA

(which fluctuated over time) and support from bureaucrats at the airport who sought to

improve the image of the interview system, which they felt had been badly maligned

by the press. Many interviewers welcomed our participation and told us eagerly about

their experiences; some, however, were nervous about our observing interviews, although

they generally grew more at ease over time. To protect immigrants’ privacy and in

accordance with NIA guidelines, we did not collect identifying information on inter-

viewees or contact them after the interview. In interactions with couples already inTaiwan, however, we did ask about their interview experiences and perceptions of the

interview system.

Taiwan as a marital destination

The most recent wave of marriages across the Taiwan Strait began with the opening of ties

between Taiwan and Mainland China in 1987 following nearly 40 years of military

conflict and a ban on all contact. At first, these unions involved elderly veterans who had

fled to Taiwan from China in 1949 with the Nationalist army. When they visited families

in China not seen in some 40 years, single veterans also looked for wives who would returnwith them to Taiwan and care for them as they aged. These men tended to marry middle-

aged women who were themselves divorced or widowed, many of whom came from

veterans’ home provinces. In 1992, the Taiwan government began to allow small numbers

of Chinese wives to ‘reunite’ with their new spouses through a tightly controlled

immigration process.

Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, cross-Strait marriages have

diversified beyond elderly veterans to encompass younger men disadvantaged on the

domestic marriage market and middle-class men and women who travel to China for

tourism or business and meet potential spouses there. Although some of these couples

include Chinese men married to Taiwanese women, over 95% of them involve Mainland

Chinese women and Taiwanese men (Nei Zheng Bu 2004). For younger women

especially, cross-Strait marriages are often part of broader patterns of mobility that have

encouraged millions of Chinese to leave their home communities for work and educational

S.L. Friedman170



opportunities in inland cities or along the booming coast. Regardless of age or gender,

however, Chinese spouses now come from all areas of China, urban and rural, and

represent a diverse cross-section of educational and occupational backgrounds.

Cross-Strait marriages contribute to a larger trend of marital in-migration that has also

brought growing numbers of Southeast Asian women to Taiwan. As Table 1 shows, the

percentage of all yearly registered marriages in Taiwan in which one spouse is notTaiwanese grew from nearly 16% in 1998 to a high of 32% in 2003 and then declined in

subsequent years to a low of 14% in 2008. Over this decade, 50–60% of all new unions

with non-Taiwanese were cross-Strait marriages. As a percentage of all newly registered

marriages in Taiwan, cross-Strait unions ranged from a yearly low of 8% to a high of over

20% in 2003. 2004 manifested the sharpest decline in the number of marriages with

Mainland Chinese as the effects of the interview system began to be felt. Since then,

roughly 10% of all marriages per year have included a Mainland Chinese spouse, although

figures for 2008 show a decrease in the number of all marriages with non-Taiwanese,

reflecting the marital consequences of Taiwan’s economic decline.

In order to better regulate the growing number of marital immigrants and labormigrants, Taiwan formally established a National Immigration Agency on 2 January 2007.

Under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior, the NIA assumed responsibility for tasks

that previously had been distributed among six different government entities: border

control, immigrant services and regulation, and combating illegal immigration and human

trafficking.6 Planning for the NIA had been ongoing for several decades and was delayed

by heated negotiations over the agency’s mission and the distribution of responsibilities,

personnel, and resources. Its inauguration established an unprecedented bureaucratic

reorganization that, for the first time, charged a single government agency with monitoring

both ‘foreigners’ and Mainland Chinese in Taiwan.

The NIA is responsible for conducting airport interviews with Chinese spouses; their‘foreign’ counterparts are interviewed on home soil by foreign service officers in Taiwan’s

de facto consular offices. These border interactions between NIA bureaucrats and Chinese

Table 1. Registered marriages with non-Taiwanese spouse, 1998– 2008.

Year

Total number of registered mar-

riages (couples)

Number of foreignspouses1 (persons and

as % of total regis-

tered marriages)

Number of MainlandChinese spouses (per-sons and as % of total

registered marriages)

Percentage of totalregistered marriageswith one non-Taiwa-

nese spouse (%)

1998 145,976 10,454 (7.2%) 12,167 (8.3%) 15.71999 173,209 14,674 (8.5%) 17,288 (10.0%) 18.62000 181,642 21,338 (11.8%) 23,297 (12.8%) 24.82001 170,515 19,405 (11.4%) 26,516 (15.6%) 27.12002 172,655 20,107 (11.7%) 28,603 (16.6%) 28.42003 171,483 19,643 (11.5%) 34,685 (20.2%) 31.92004 131,453 20,338 (15.5%) 10,642 (8.1%) 23.82005 141,140 13,808 (9.8%) 14,258 (10.1%) 20.12006 142,669 9,524 (6.7%) 13,964 (9.8%) 16.82007 135,041 9,554 (7.1%) 14,721 (10.9%) 18.32008 154,866 8,957 (5.8%) 12,274 (7.9%) 14.0

Source: Neizheng Bu, Huzheng Si (Department of Household Registration, Ministry of the Interior)Note: 1. Foreign spouses include those from Southeast Asia and other foreigners (excluding spouses from HongKong, Mainland China and Macau) whose marriage to a Taiwanese is registered in Taiwan.




marital immigrants constitute an important site for producing Taiwanese sovereignty.

Salter contends that the relationship between sovereign and citizen produced by the border

examination is more powerful than that between sovereign and alien, precisely because the

sovereign decision made at the border either recognizes a citizen’s participation in the

state’s legal contract or bans the traveler from entry and hence ‘undoes’ her verycitizenship status (2008, pp. 369, 374–375, Chalfin 2008). This emphasis on the sovereign

‘ban’ elides two important features of border decision-making in the case of cross-Strait

marriages. First, I argue that it is the decision to admit or exclude Chinese marital

immigrants that functions as a threshold of Taiwan’s sovereign power, precisely because

their status straddles the citizen/foreigner divide and their very presence calls into question

the claim of Taiwanese sovereignty. Each instance of border-crossing decision-making

offers the potential to (re)produce national sovereignty in the face of Chinese spouses who

embody PRC challenges to that sovereign status. Second, as bureaucratic border

performances, immigration interviews also generate a sovereignty effect with productive

consequences: they define what constitutes an authentic marriage and a desirable

immigrant/citizen, and in so doing, create a particular model of family and nation to

undergird those sovereignty claims.

The sovereignty effects generated by immigration interviews are by no means

guaranteed, however. The search for truth that motivates the interview reaffirms Taiwan’s

conformity to international standards for vetting marital immigrants, yet these truth

demands are made in a setting that also reinforces Taiwan’s uncertain nation-state status

(for bureaucrats must wait until immigrants are already at the door, so to speak, before

they can interview them). Their location at the border heightens interviewers’ insecurities

about their capacity to accurately determine truth and falsity, and further undermines

confidence in the ability of Taiwan’s immigration bureaucracy to police and produce both

sovereign status and legitimate paths to citizenship.

Truth demands

Compared to citizens, the personal lives of immigrants are subject to a much greater

degree of state scrutiny, especially in the relationships (such as marriage) that make

immigrants eligible for naturalization. To gain entry, immigrants must prove the validity

of their bonds according to standards set by the admitting nation-state. With regard to

transnational marriages, these standards create an ideal of ‘real marriage’ ( zhen jiehun) to

which non-citizen spouses are expected to conform.

Truth demands are made at the moment when a person in power seeks to distinguishthose in ‘real marriages’ from those in ‘sham marriages’ ( jia jiehun). In the course of

distinguishing these two categories (‘real’ and ‘sham’), this person fills them out, gives

them content and a face or stereotype with which others can identify. Put another way,

there is no absolute, immutable definition of what constitutes a ‘real’ or ‘sham’ marriage:

those categories come to life in a particular moment of discourse that constitutes marriages

as real or fraudulent. In the process of constructing meaning, then, this person also makes

truth demands – that immigrants speak the truth about their intimate relationships in ways

that conform to the expectations for one of those categories. Hence the demand for truth

and the expectation that statements take a certain form are already embedded in power

relations that deny to those who must speak the truth the ability to define the content of the

categories themselves.

By couching their interview objectives in a language of truth and falsity, Taiwanese

bureaucrats conform to an international immigration discourse that presumes officials

S.L. Friedman172



have the ability to determine immigrants’ ‘true’ motives; in doing so, they reproduce the

power relations that structure truth demands. Foucault reminds us of this point when he

argues that truth

induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of

truth: this is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; themechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements,

the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value

in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

(Foucault 1980, p. 131)

By claiming a position as arbiters of truth (‘those who are charged with saying what

counts as true’), immigration interviewers arrogate to themselves the power to define and

know what is true and, simultaneously, affirm the existence of a broader regime of truth

supported by a sovereign Taiwan state. Interviewers will sometimes say to marital

immigrants, ‘speak the truth and I won’t send you back’.7 This statement generates power

effects on two levels. One, it asserts the ability of the individual bureaucrat to determine the

truth and to decide on that basis who may enter the country. Chinese spouses themselves

participate in this construction of truth as transparent by reassuring those nervous about an

upcoming interview that if they simply ‘speak the truth’ they won’t have any problems.8

Two, the interviewer’s statement conjures up a sovereign state power that legitimizes

bureaucrats’ decision-making ability and backs up such decisions with force, if necessary.

Conversations with immigration officials themselves, however, reveal uncertainty

about the status of truth in relation to the purpose of the port-of-entry interview. During a

meeting at central NIA headquarters in Taipei with former police officials turned NIA civil

servants, I encountered Mr Zhang, a mid-career bureaucrat who had been a key player in

the initial planning for the interview system and who himself had conducted many

interviews.9 Although Mr Zhang now had a desk job in the Agency’s central office, he had

been instrumental in developing an interview system that aimed to weed out what officials

saw as rampant exploitation of cross-Strait marriages for the purpose of importing sex

workers from China.10

In his instructions to interviewers, Mr Zhang explained, he stresses that their goal is not

to determine the truth or falsity of the marriage (hunyin de zhenwei). Instead, in his eyes,

the goal of the interview is to discover whether after entering the country, the immigrant

spouse is likely to engage in illegal activity – principally sex work, but also any

employment without a work permit.11 This rhetorical distinction draws a fine line between

the authenticity of a marriage and the intentions (yitu) of the immigrant spouse. The most

important question interviewers aim to answer is whether the immigrant spouse is, as

Zhang phrased it, ‘using marriage to enter the country’ (yong zhege jiehun jin lai),

especially when economic motivations appear to outweigh commitment to the marriage

itself. As they determine marital intentions, then, interviewers also evaluate whether those

intentions conform to their own assumptions about proper marital roles and

responsibilities.

Until this point in our conversation, I had found Mr Zhang’s distinction between truth

and intention persuasive. His authoritative bearing, honed through years of police work

and immigration control, coupled with his compelling manner of speech, combined to

create an image of a competent bureaucrat committed to transmitting his knowledge and

experience to his subordinates. At the end of his exegesis, however, he suddenly uttered aremark that undermined the careful definitional work he had performed up to that moment.

Turning to his senior colleague as if for confirmation, Mr Zhang concluded: ‘Because as




soon as you see it, you know that it is a sham’ (yinwei neige na chulai yi kan, kan le jiushi

jiade).

Zhang repeated this statement as we continued our discussion and I began to see it

emerge in conversations I had with other immigration officials. We might sum up its core

claim as: ‘I know a sham marriage when I see one.’ The signs are obvious: the attire andbearing of an immigrant spouse who is really a sex worker,12 the absence of information

about courtship experiences, or a very short interval between a first meeting and

registering the marriage.13 As many experienced interviewers claimed, if you do this kind

of work long enough, the minute the person walks into the room you know whether their

marriage is real or fake. The signs of authenticity index shared social understandings about

what constitutes conventional marriage practices (how one courts and decides to marry)

and proper deportment and appearance for a married woman. From this perspective,

Zhang’s claim that interviews do not determine the truth or falsity of the marriage appears

less straightforward. If the interviewer ‘already knows’, then the interview process does

not provide access to the essence of the marriage as much as it reaffirms existing power

relations that undergird dominant discourses about gender, marriage, and family.

Interview findings both draw on and reproduce a deeper level of shared social knowledge

about what a real marriage should look like, as evidenced in the other commonly repeated

assertion by interviewers, ‘it didn’t conform to convention’.14

The bureaucracy of entry

The immigration interview is only one step, albeit a critical one, in the highly

bureaucratized process of marital immigration. Before a Chinese spouse may apply for

entry to Taiwan, the couple must first register their marriage in China after meeting

China’s domestic marriage requirements. Their marriage certificate must be notarized byChinese authorities and then mailed for verification to the Straits Exchange Foundation,

Taiwan’s unofficial body for interactions with China. Once this paperwork is completed,

the Taiwan citizen-spouse schedules an interview at the local office of the National

Immigration Agency’s special operation brigade, the investigative arm of the Agency. If

the citizen-spouse passes the interview, he or she may apply for an entry permit for the

Chinese spouse.

The entry permit does not guarantee admission, however, for the couple must go

through another round of interviews at the port of entry before the Chinese spouse can

clear immigration. Delaying the immigrant-spouse interview until the port of entry

exacerbates the pressures placed on immigration officials and spouses alike. Because theconsequences of failing the interview are severe (immediate deportation), interviewers

find the experience very stressful. Moreover, interviewers lack the ability to schedule

interview sessions at a manageable pace; they are typically given only a few hours’ notice

of a Chinese spouse’s arrival (and sometimes no notice) and must complete interviews

with all who arrive before 10pm. This situation can lead to a frantic interview pace when

many arrive on back-to-back flights, with no rest breaks for interviewers and long waiting

periods for the interviewees. Chinese spouses are often exhausted after a day of traveling

and nervous about what the interview will entail. These conditions create fragile nerves

that can enhance the perception that an immigrant spouse is uncertain about details or

unwilling to share information with the interviewer, intensifying suspicions about the

authenticity of the marriage itself.

Most Chinese spouses arrive at Taoyuan International Airport on late-afternoon flights

from Hong Kong or Macau. Before passing through the normal immigration channel, they

S.L. Friedman174



first present their travel documents at a counter designated specifically for Mainland

Chinese. If they are seeking entry for the first time, their information must be entered into

the computer and each finger carefully fingerprinted using a digital sensor pad. On

subsequent arrivals a quick check of their thumbprints will be used to confirm their

identity. Then they take a seat in the rows of plastic chairs off to the side and wait,sometimes for one to two hours, to be interviewed.

NIA teams at the airport are staffed with 15 to 20 personnel, but only six to eight of

these will have the requisite civil service rank to conduct interviews. Clerks working the

counter receive regular faxes from the Hong Kong airport office of China Travel Service,

Taiwan’s unofficial consular entity, which list the names of Chinese spouses on the flights

destined for Taipei. The clerks print out relevant information available on these spouses

from the NIA computer system, including transcripts of the citizen-spouse’s NIA

interview and the couple’s dates and places of birth. They flag issues of concern (for

instance, multiple NIA interviews, a large age gap between spouses, or several past

marriages with Taiwanese) and may track down additional information they feel would

assist the interviewer. Once the spouse arrives, these materials are placed in an envelope

together with her travel documents and stacked in the interview queue. Interviewers are

supposed to select the envelope at the front of the queue, although some intentionally skip

‘difficult’ cases, preferring to leave them for more experienced interviewers.

The interview is not a clearly contained event but spills out beyond the boundaries of

formal questioning. The interviewer calls out the name of the Chinese spouse and

accompanies her/him across the arrival hall to a door marked ‘interview rooms’. In this

short space of a few minutes, the interviewer may ask the Chinese spouse informal

questions about her marriage in order to begin classifying it in her mind (young couple

with a child, marriage to a Taiwanese businessman resident in China, marriage to an

elderly veteran, etc.). This informal questioning continues as the interviewer selects one of six starkly furnished interview rooms and begins entering basic information into the

computer.15 Often several minutes pass before the interviewer signals that the ‘formal’

interview has begun by reading aloud a list of disclaimers about the interview procedures

and the consequences of falsifying information, pausing after each item to ask the spouse

to acknowledge verbally that she understands the content and, finally, that she consents to

the interview.

The Chinese-spouse interview typically lasts an hour and is followed by a shorter

interview with the Taiwan spouse, either in the same room or outside the control zone if

the couple has not traveled together. The interviewer asks detailed questions about how the

couple met and courted, how often the Taiwan spouse visited China, material exchanges(bridewealth payments of money and jewellery to the bride and/or her parents, other gifts

to parents and family members of either spouse, support payments after the marriage), how

and with whom they celebrated the wedding, and what the Chinese spouse knows about

the Taiwan spouse’s job, family, and life in Taiwan. The same interviewer then asks the

Taiwan spouse a subset of those questions in order to compare responses. Interviewers

intentionally switch quickly between topics (to prevent recitation of a memorized

narrative) and follow up on small details that they can use when comparing the two

accounts. They pay close attention to the consistency and coherence of interviewees’

responses, and look for a clear chronology that holds up under repeated questioning.16

When an interviewer perceives the case to be straightforward (for instance, a young couple

returning briefly to register the birth of their child), the interview may be brief and pro

forma; when personal or marital histories appear complicated, the questioning grows more

specific and intense, resembling an interrogation more than an interview.




The interview creates an administrative conception of marriage and intimacy, a

consequence, I suggest, of its reliance on a mode of questioning that demands certain kinds

of truth statements from the interviewee. Interviewers’ assumptions about what constitutes

a ‘real’ marriage emphasize norms of conduct over emotional bonds.17 Interviewers rarely

elicit statements about marital emotions; instead they structure interview questions toemphasize norms of conventional behavior as the essence of the relationship, a

consequence of assumptions about a similar cultural heritage shared by Chinese and

Taiwanese. It is not that interviewers are deaf to expressions of marital intimacy (and some

praise it when they encounter it), but they do not rely on affective performances to

determine marital authenticity.18 The interview itself becomes what Shuman and Bohmer

term a ‘cultural performance’ (2004, p. 410), and yet it is not always clear that interviewers

and interviewees share cultural expectations about marital norms.

Interview questioning generates a particular understanding of a ‘real’ marriage and its

component parts that creates an essentialized construction of Chinese marriage rooted in

material exchanges and social and bureaucratic rituals. This construction reflects what

Taiwanese interviewers think they know about Chinese spouses’ marital motives and the

conditions of their lives in China, despite the fact that most interviewers have never been

to China and only interact with Chinese citizens in their professional roles. The

assumptions about a shared cultural heritage that they bring to the interview and the stance

from which they initiate questioning (suspicion versus trust) also shape their definitions of

truth and falsity. Ultimately, the significance of the interview derives from its generative

effects as a specific kind of border practice – how it constructs a standard of normative

Chinese marriage practice, how it disciplines cross-Strait intimacy through imposing

specific truth demands on cross-Strait couples, and how it (re)produces Taiwanese

sovereignty both by regulating border movement and through promoting a model of

gendered family roles as the basis for national inclusion.

The difficulty of determining truth

In February 2008 I observed an airport interview that displayed some of the difficulties

inherent in utilizing port-of-entry interviews to determine beyond reasonable doubt the

authenticity of a marriage. On this visit, a senior airport bureaucrat ushered me into a room

where a middle-aged female interviewer was intently questioning a Chinese woman in her

thirties from rural Hunan province. The interviewer looked up as we entered and remarked

to her superior that the case was ‘complicated’ ( fuza). The marriage was a second one for

both spouses and the timing made the interviewer suspicious. Both had divorced withindays of one another and then remarried a week or two later. The husband’s first wife had

the same surname as his new spouse, and the woman admitted that they hailed from the

same village. The interviewer had yet to prove her suspicions that the marriage was not

authentic, however, and continued her line of questioning about the sequence of events

preceding the couple’s marriage, while the Chinese spouse replied in a subdued voice

looking nervously around the room.

The senior official suddenly interrupted the interview, throwing a slip of paper on the

desk in front of the woman and demanding in a loud voice that she write down her parents’

names. He then left the room and when he returned, his attitude toward the interviewee had

obviously changed. In a harsh tone he accused her, ‘your husband’s first wife is your older

sister, right? Why didn’t you tell us?’19 The woman replied that it didn’t sound good

( jiang bu hao), and the official accused her of trying to fool them. The senior official and

the interviewer began to interrogate the woman with rapid-fire questions: Did her sister get

S.L. Friedman176



divorced on purpose? Did her sister still live together with her ex-husband? Did the three

of them collude to intentionally hide the truth? At various points the senior official made it

known that he did not approve of the couple’s actions, describing them as a mess (luan qi

ba zao), a condemnation both moral and practical. Both she and her sister were married

with children, and yet she had begun an affair with her sister’s husband. When he askedagain why she had lied to them about her sister, she replied, ‘it wasn’t an honorable thing

[to do]’ (bushi hen guangrong de shi), admitting the moral questionability of her actions

while continuing to assert that her current marriage was ‘real’ (shishi).

The interview proceeded in stages: after the first stage when the ‘truth’ about the

woman’s sister was discovered, the interviewer and senior official sent her to ‘cool off’ in

the office area and instructed her to think hard about what she had done and then ‘tell us

what really happened’ (ba shishi gaosu women). This demand for truth was rooted partly

in information that the senior official already controlled. Based on data collected from the

NIA’s computer system, he knew there were significant gaps in the woman’s account. She

claimed her older sister was not a Taiwan citizen, but access to national household

registration records revealed that she had already obtained Taiwanese citizenship (thus

enhancing their suspicions that this was a divorce of convenience since it would no longer

affect the sister’s status in Taiwan). Equally damning was the information the official

learned from a former classmate who headed the NIA’s special operation brigade in the

husband’s city of residence. During the interview the official had phoned his classmate

asking him to investigate whether the husband still resided with his first wife (the new

spouse had claimed he did not), and the classmate called back later to report that the first

wife did still live at that address. This information buttressed immigration officials’ status

as the holders of certain ‘truths’ about the relationship that reaffirmed their position of

authority vis-a-vis the Chinese spouse. Yet the burden of disclosing whether the marriage

was real or sham was placed on the couple themselves.After a second bout of questioning the Chinese spouse, the officials called in the

Taiwanese husband. The latter clearly had guessed what had transpired because he

admitted immediately that the two wives were sisters. His attitude was at once contrite

and accommodating, and the details of his account accorded closely with those of his

wife. There were some discrepancies, however, especially concerning the details of the

wedding banquet and the couple’s activities during the three days they resided in the

provincial capital after registering their marriage. Yet overall the picture each painted

was largely similar: they admitted that what they had done was not ‘honorable’, but also

explained that they had been unhappy in their first marriages and were simply following

their hearts.This interview shows how the confessionary impulses of truth examinations encourage

border crossers to expose intimate details about both their status and character (Salter

2007, pp. 59–60). And yet submission may not work to the same degree in both cases.

Here both spouses confess readily to character faults (not being honorable or moral), but

not to status defects, refusing to admit that their marriage is fraudulent. This willingness to

confess to faults of character but not to a fraudulent marriage creates what Coutin (2001,

p. 84, n. 19) terms a ‘plot gap’ in the interview narrative itself, one that exposes both

domination and contestation at the heart of bureaucratic immigration practices.

In the end, the interviewer and senior official decided to allow the Chinese spouse to

enter the country but required the couple to submit to a second in-country interview within

30 days. The female interviewer was torn about this decision: ‘This one should be sent

back’, she said to me, to which the senior official replied, ‘forget it’. He admitted that he

had been swayed by the husband’s frankness, but allowed that a stricter interviewer might




have judged their accounts to have ‘significant discrepancies’ and therefore deported the

woman. According to the standards of the past when he himself had worked as an

interviewer, she likely would have been sent back to China.

What struck me about this case was the mutability of the ‘truth’. Despite many hours of

repeated questioning, in the end immigration officials were unable to determine without adoubt that the marriage was a sham. They did find that it deviated significantly from their

recognized standards of morality and convention and they were deeply suspicious about

the couple’s motives. Yet the interview process itself failed to provide the proof they

needed to support those suspicions. Despite repeated demands that the Chinese spouse

speak the ‘truth’, her narrative failed to satisfy interviewers’ need to know the essence of

the marriage. Nor did the information she provided conform to the framework for

evaluating marital authenticity created by the Agency’s interview guidelines. Hence they

had little choice but to pass the responsibility for deciding truth on to the next interviewer

in the immigration bureaucracy.

Sovereignty effects and the bureaucratization of truth

Airport interviewers recognize the power they wield at the border and most claim they do

not make their decisions lightly, preferring if possible to recommend a follow-up interview

rather than immediate deportation. Table 2 shows figures on interview outcomes from

Taoyuan Airport which suggest that the vast majority of spouses passed the interview and

were granted entry and a visa extension. Deportation is most likely in cases of clear-cut or

overwhelming evidence, such as proof of forged documents or surgically altered

fingerprints, a faked pregnancy, or dramatic discrepancies in basic facts (for instance,

which province the Taiwan spouse flew to when the couple married). Yet across the board,

interviewers repeatedly voiced anxieties about their ability to know ‘the truth,’ hinderedby their liminal position at the border and by limitations on the quality and breadth of

information to which they had access as a result. Feelings of insecurity and powerlessness

certainly are not unique to Taiwanese civil servants (Gilboy 1991, Bouchard and Carroll

2002, Mountz 2004), although in recognized sovereign states they are more frequently

expressed in times of crisis. This case underscores, by contrast, how vulnerability and

insecurity permeate immigration bureaucracies precisely because of the uncertainty of

sovereignty itself.

These anxieties reaffirm that, tidy official statistics and the formal rationales cited by

interviewers aside, interview decisions are arbitrary and personal, resting on perceptions

Table 2. Chinese spouse interview outcomes at Taoyuan International Airport.

YearTotal no. of interviews

Visa extensiongranted (% of total)

Follow-up interviewrequired (% of total)

Immediatelydeported (% of total)

2003(1 Sept. – 31 Dec.)

4,248 69.1 17.0 13.8

2004 16,572 90.9 7.4 1.72005 12,431 82.5 13.0 4.52006 10,224 81.2 14.0 4.72007 10,391 91.0 7.4 1.52008 11,142 90.3 8.2 1.5

Source: Statistics provided to author by Taoyuan International Airport National Immigration Agency BorderAffairs Corps.

S.L. Friedman178



of convention, common sense, and normality; gut instinct and experience; and stereotypes

about gendered marital motives and the circumstances of life in China. This discretionary

decision-making is not a deviation from legally condoned administrative practice, but

functions as a productive form of governmental power that is often built into policy

implementation, especially in arenas such as immigration that are seen as too politicallycontentious for in-depth legislative debate (Gilboy 1991, Heyman 1995, Bouchard and

Carroll 2002, Pratt 2005, Salter 2008). At stake here is how interviewers’ discretionary

power both draws upon and reproduces sovereignty itself (Pratt 2005, Salter 2006).

Taiwanese border officials exercise discretion not only in their interview outcome

decisions, but also in the multiple roles they adopt over the course of marital interviews:

parental, pedagogic, and therapeutic, as well as investigative and disciplinary. These

diverse roles shape interview interactions in ways that build modes of identification into

discretionary power, with the result that interview decisions subsequently reinforce social

conventions and gendered family relations that shore up an independent Taiwanese nation-

state and the place of new immigrants within it.20

NIA interviewers and officials also emphasize how the actual formalization of

Taiwan’s immigration bureaucracy under the NIA constituted a powerful sign of state

sovereignty. ‘Only with the establishment of the NIA could [we] proclaim that Taiwan is a

sovereign, independent nation-state (zhuquan duli de guojia)’, one senior airport official

argued as we chatted in the office area behind the Mainland arrivals processing desk. And,

he continued, ‘only when the Entry/Exit Immigration Police was elevated to the level of an

agency could [we] effectively manage our duties with respect to Mainland Chinese’

(interview, 20 March 2008). These statements at once claim that bureaucratic

normalization creates recognized sovereign status and underscore the importance of

bureaucratic practices in generating this sovereignty effect. Moreover, this productive

power is felt especially keenly in the contested realm of cross-Strait migration, for, as thisofficial suggests, only with NIA regularization have bureaucrats been able to effectively

regulate Mainland Chinese citizens.

The interview system creates this sovereignty effect both in its role as a concrete

border practice and through the ways it instantiates state power. Immigration interviews

conducted at the airport literally produce the relationship of the state to citizens and non-

citizens alike. These border interactions interweave border crossers and their intimate lives

with the workings of state power and the officials who embody that power in the moment

of the bureaucratic encounter. The state is not an abstraction in this case; it is a lived

experience of human contact between individuals situated very differently with respect to

the privileges and power of citizenship status and bureaucratic entitlement. Chinesespouses encounter the Taiwan state for the first time in the person of the interviewer who

literally embodies state power in the interview moment. One long-time interviewer-

turned-official asked rhetorically where a Chinese spouse felt the government was when

she arrived in Taiwan. ‘When she is face to face with me,’ he proclaimed, ‘ that is the

government!’ (interview, 4 March 2008). As the instantiation of state power, the

interviewer not only aims to control who may cross the border and begin the path to

citizenship, but simultaneously produces an effect of national sovereignty in the ostensibly

neutral space of the airport control zone.

At the same time that the interview system reaffirms the NIA’s sovereignty effect,

however, it also underscores the limitations generated by Taiwan’s uncertain sovereign

status. State-granted recognition as a legal marital immigrant is premised on bureaucrats’

ability to know minute details of an intimate relationship. Yet, as I have shown,

interviewers often lack access to the depth and kind of knowledge they desire, precisely




because of their position at the border. As one immigration official admitted to me, ‘many

thoughts buried deep in [people’s] heart of hearts can’t be discovered through the

interview. One hour at the airport isn’t sufficient to fully comprehend their married life and

shared interactions’ (interview, 13 June 2008). Interviews merely elucidate the tokens of

intimacy, the signs of authenticity. Those signs derive from a culturally specific formulafor what constitutes a real marriage: how one meets a spouse, how one ritually and

bureaucratically formalizes a marriage, what kinds of material exchanges one engages in,

and what kind of appearance befits a married woman. By demanding that Chinese spouses

speak the truth about their marriages, interviewers at most hope to elicit a shared

performance of this formula that satisfies their own definition of what, in this context,

constitutes marital authenticity.

The uncertainties expressed by interviewers and marital immigrants alike suggest that

the interview is not an all-powerful disciplinary moment. On the one hand, border

interviews affirm Taiwan’s conformity to bureaucratic norms and practices espoused by

recognized sovereign states. They literally perform Taiwan’s desired status as a modern,

sovereign nation-state. On the other hand, they do so in a setting, the airport, that both

reflects the limits to Taiwanese sovereignty and undermines the effectiveness of the

interview itself, or so bureaucrats contend. The demand that immigrants speak truthfully

about their marriages places interviewers in an awkward position: What constitutes the

‘truth’ of an intimate relationship? Does the interviewer always recognize truth and falsity

accurately? The result, in effect, is a bureaucratization of truth through the specific shaping

of truth demands and the evaluation of responses. By sidestepping the messy

inconsistencies of intimate life, interviewers redefine the signs of marital authenticity to

make them accessible given their liminal position at the border.

At the same time, the truth demands and confessionary complex that constitute the

immigration interview also generate a productive concept of sovereignty as agovernmental mode of power. Bureaucratic practices such as the marital immigration

interview constitute the border ‘not as merely a negative instrument of exclusion but as a

heterogeneous and “artful” accomplishment that contributes to the production of citizens

and national identities and the regulation of the population’ (Pratt 2005, p. 213). Even in

contexts of uncertain sovereignty, this ‘artful accomplishment’ includes a gendered model

of family and nation that shores up sovereignty effects, even as it is produced by them. It is

not clear that the productive effects of such border practices are sufficient to consolidate

this performance of sovereignty and overcome the uncertainties and anxieties generated by

Taiwan’s unstable international status. These sovereignty struggles will likely continue in

the absence of formal recognition by China, shaping the terrain of border examinationsand the intimate life choices of cross-Strait couples.

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was conducted in 2007– 2008 and in the summer of 2009 with funding fromthe National Science Foundation (grant #BCS-0612679), the Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological Research, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International ScholarlyExchange. I am grateful to the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica for sponsoring my stay inTaiwan and to the many Taiwan government officials and bureaucrats who generously shared theirtime, thoughts, and experiences with me. I sincerely hope that this article contributes to bridginggaps between official governmental concerns and immigrants’ own aspirations in Taiwan. Earlier

versions were presented to the Department of Anthropology at National Taiwan University, theSociology Institute at National Tsinghua University, the Department of Anthropology at theUniversity of Oslo, and the Department of Anthropology and the Council on East Asian Studies atYale University. I thank the organizers and audiences at those venues for insightful questions and

S.L. Friedman180



comments that helped me clarify my arguments. I am indebted to Li Zhang, Brenda Weber, andGardner Bovingdon for invaluable feedback on previous drafts. The three anonymous reviewers forthe journal provided very helpful comments and suggestions that have made this a much strongerarticle. I, of course, remain responsible for any errors or inadequacies.

Notes

1. The ROC lost its UN seat in 1971. The only major international body of which Taiwan is a fullmember is the World Trade Organization. In May 2009 China agreed to grant Taiwan observerstatus at the WHO’s annual assembly under the name Chinese Taipei.

2. Most foreign spouses come from within Asia, especially Vietnam, Indonesia, Hong Kong andMacau, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Japan, and South Korea (in descending order).The total for all foreign spouses combined was 139,248 as of the end of 2008. Availablefrom: http://www.immigration.gov.tw/aspcode/9712/

.doc [Accessed 5 February 2009].3. Other Mainland Chinese eligible for naturalization would be those with a direct lineal tie to a

Taiwanese citizen (typically a parent or a child) or a spouse from a pre-1949 marriage.Channels of appeal exist for exceptional cases and a small number of Mainland Chinese haveobtained residency rights on those grounds.

4. All official communications take place between technically non-governmental bodies, andcitizens who travel between Taiwan and China do so not on their passports but on special traveldocuments that sidestep the sovereignty question.

5. In Taiwan, the very status of the airport as an international border is open to debate, especiallysince July 2008 when direct flights to the Mainland began. In addition to the two internationalairports, two ‘domestic’ airports now also handle direct Mainland flights. This blurreddistinction between domestic and international borders has encouraged some Taiwanese tooppose direct air links. Only in June 2009 were Chinese spouses permitted to fly directly ontheir first visit and the numbers are still small due to the greater expense.

6. Mainland Chinese had been regulated by the Entry/Exit Immigration Police (ru chu jing guanliju), a unit within the National Police Agency.7. Airport interview, 13 June 2008.8. The Internet discussion board, Mainland Spouse and Family Discussion Forum (dalu pei’ou

jiating luntan) is a popular site where Chinese and Taiwanese spouses compare interviewexperiences and seek information and advice. Participants reinforce the state’s truth regimethrough repeated injunctions to speak truthfully and through reaffirming their own participationin ‘real’ marriages. Available from: http://www.ccff.idv.tw/forum/cmps_index.php.

9. All personal names used in this article are pseudonyms. Interview, 4 February 2008.10. Prior to the establishment of the NIA, interviews were conducted under the auspices of the

Entry/Exit Immigration Police, but interviewers were drawn on an ad hoc basis from differentgovernment agencies.

11. Prior to August 2009, Chinese spouses were not permitted to work legally in Taiwan until they

received a residence permit (typically two years from first entry), and some did not qualify for awork permit until six years after first arrival.

12. Mr Zhang and his superior then mimed for me the appearance of a sex worker, drawing theirhands up their legs in an exaggerated fashion to demonstrate the height of the slit in her skirtand sweeping their hands across their chests to portray a revealing neckline. This exampleconfirms Salter’s concerns about a border regime of bodily confession whereby ‘the bodycomes to testify or confess for the subject without the consent or even perhaps knowledge of the subject’ (2006, p. 185).

13. Limited or no courtship experiences do not automatically disqualify couples, however.Interviewers claimed they could not discriminate against couples who had met throughmarriage brokers or matchmakers (especially given how accepted such practices were in thepast), but they simultaneously viewed such arrangements with suspicion.

14. As a senior bureaucrat described to me during an interview at the airport, ‘if the [Taiwanspouse’s] income is normal, work is normal, family is normal, then the chance of [the marriage]being fake is very small. Actually, the content of the interview itself isn’t that important’(interview, 22 Feb. 2008). ‘Normality’ is clearly what counts here, but what constitutes




normality remains unquestioned and unspoken. Pratt identifies a similar appeal to instinct andshared knowledge in Canadian government refusals to define terrorism (2005, p. 155).

15. The rooms are equipped with a computer and video and audio recorders. The white walls areunadorned except for a photocopy or two of newspaper articles documenting the dangers of sexwork or domestic violence that potentially await Chinese women in Taiwan.

16. Unlike the standard ‘tale’ feared by US officers evaluating asylum cases, Taiwaneseinterviewers view conformity to established norms positively (Coutin 2001, Shuman andBohmer 2004).

17. These norms emphasize material exchanges, timing, and place: interviewers expect couples toknow the details of bridewealth (how much money, what currency and denomination, whatkind of jewellery, how it was presented, when and where), wedding banquets (the time andlocation, the number of tables, who attended, whether alcohol was served), and the sending of support funds (the amount, frequency, and method of transfer). Interviewers contended that allChinese spouses were especially attuned to financial arrangements and hence should be able torecall with ease the specifics of monetary exchanges.

18. See Lan’s discussion of an interview with a Vietnamese spouse at Taiwan’s de factoconsular office in Hanoi where the interviewer did request a performance of maritalintimacy, even though the official also claimed not to take such expressions seriously (2008,p. 847)

19. The official had discovered this information by comparing the names of this woman’s parentswith those listed by the first wife on her immigration documents. These materials wereavailable to him through the NIA’s computer system.

20. See Chalfin (2008) on the role of identification in border practices.

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