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

migrants, and Taiwan's sovereignty dilemmas
Sara 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 marital
migrants, and Taiwan's sovereignty dilemmas', Citizenship Studies, 14: 2, 167 — 183
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13621021003594817
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 Citizenship Studies
Vol. 14, No. 2, April 2010, 167–183

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-
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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 two
countries 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 precisely
through 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.

*Email: slfriedm@indiana.edu

ISSN 1362-1025 print/ISSN 1469-3593 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13621021003594817
http://www.informaworld.com
 168 S.L. Friedman

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 ‘sovereignty
effects’ 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
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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 this
unstable 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 border
work. 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
 Citizenship Studies 169

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 with
border 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).
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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 the
motivations 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
 170 S.L. Friedman

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 sufficient
to 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
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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 in
Taiwan, 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 return
with 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
 Citizenship Studies 171

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

Number of foreign Number of Mainland Percentage of total

Total number of spouses1 (persons and Chinese spouses (per- registered marriages
registered mar- as % of total regis- sons and as % of total with one non-Taiwa-
Year riages (couples) tered marriages) registered marriages) nese spouse (%)
1998 145,976 10,454 (7.2%) 12,167 (8.3%) 15.7
1999 173,209 14,674 (8.5%) 17,288 (10.0%) 18.6
2000 181,642 21,338 (11.8%) 23,297 (12.8%) 24.8
2001 170,515 19,405 (11.4%) 26,516 (15.6%) 27.1
2002 172,655 20,107 (11.7%) 28,603 (16.6%) 28.4
2003 171,483 19,643 (11.5%) 34,685 (20.2%) 31.9
2004 131,453 20,338 (15.5%) 10,642 (8.1%) 23.8
2005 141,140 13,808 (9.8%) 14,258 (10.1%) 20.1
2006 142,669 9,524 (6.7%) 13,964 (9.8%) 16.8
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2007 135,041 9,554 (7.1%) 14,721 (10.9%) 18.3

2008 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 Hong
Kong, Mainland China and Macau) whose marriage to a Taiwanese is registered in Taiwan.

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 not
Taiwanese 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 labor
migrants, 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
 172 S.L. Friedman

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 very
citizenship 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
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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 distinguish
those 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
 Citizenship Studies 173

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; the
mechanisms 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
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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 a
remark 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
 174 S.L. Friedman

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 and
bearing 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
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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 by
Chinese 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 the
consequences 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
 Citizenship Studies 175

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
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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.
 176 S.L. Friedman

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 to
emphasize 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
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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 within
days 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
 Citizenship Studies 177

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 asked
again 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
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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-à-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
 178 S.L. Friedman

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 a
doubt 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
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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,’ hindered
by 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.

Total no. of Visa extension Follow-up interview Immediately
Year interviews granted (% of total) required (% of total) deported (% of total)
2003 4,248 69.1 17.0 13.8
(1 Sept. – 31 Dec.)
2004 16,572 90.9 7.4 1.7
2005 12,431 82.5 13.0 4.5
2006 10,224 81.2 14.0 4.7
2007 10,391 91.0 7.4 1.5
2008 11,142 90.3 8.2 1.5
Source: Statistics provided to author by Taoyuan International Airport National Immigration Agency Border
Affairs Corps.
 Citizenship Studies 179

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 politically
contentious 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
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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 this
official 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. Chinese
spouses 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
 180 S.L. Friedman

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 formula
for 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
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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 a
governmental 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 examinations
and 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 from
the National Science Foundation (grant #BCS-0612679), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly
Exchange. I am grateful to the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica for sponsoring my stay in
Taiwan and to the many Taiwan government officials and bureaucrats who generously shared their
time, thoughts, and experiences with me. I sincerely hope that this article contributes to bridging
gaps between official governmental concerns and immigrants’ own aspirations in Taiwan. Earlier
versions were presented to the Department of Anthropology at National Taiwan University, the
Sociology Institute at National Tsinghua University, the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Oslo, and the Department of Anthropology and the Council on East Asian Studies at
Yale University. I thank the organizers and audiences at those venues for insightful questions and
 Citizenship Studies 181

comments that helped me clarify my arguments. I am indebted to Li Zhang, Brenda Weber, and
Gardner Bovingdon for invaluable feedback on previous drafts. The three anonymous reviewers for
the journal provided very helpful comments and suggestions that have made this a much stronger
article. 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 full
member is the World Trade Organization. In May 2009 China agreed to grant Taiwan observer
status at the WHO’s annual assembly under the name Chinese Taipei.
2. Most foreign spouses come from within Asia, especially Vietnam, Indonesia, Hong Kong and
Macau, 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. Available
from: http://www.immigration.gov.tw/aspcode/9712/
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.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 have
obtained residency rights on those grounds.
4. All official communications take place between technically non-governmental bodies, and
citizens who travel between Taiwan and China do so not on their passports but on special travel
documents that sidestep the sovereignty question.
5. In Taiwan, the very status of the airport as an international border is open to debate, especially
since July 2008 when direct flights to the Mainland began. In addition to the two international
airports, two ‘domestic’ airports now also handle direct Mainland flights. This blurred
distinction between domestic and international borders has encouraged some Taiwanese to
oppose direct air links. Only in June 2009 were Chinese spouses permitted to fly directly on
their 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 guanli
ju), 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 interview
experiences and seek information and advice. Participants reinforce the state’s truth regime
through repeated injunctions to speak truthfully and through reaffirming their own participation
in ‘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 different
government 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 a
work permit until six years after first arrival.
12. Mr Zhang and his superior then mimed for me the appearance of a sex worker, drawing their
hands up their legs in an exaggerated fashion to demonstrate the height of the slit in her skirt
and sweeping their hands across their chests to portray a revealing neckline. This example
confirms Salter’s concerns about a border regime of bodily confession whereby ‘the body
comes 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 through
marriage brokers or matchmakers (especially given how accepted such practices were in the
past), but they simultaneously viewed such arrangements with suspicion.
14. As a senior bureaucrat described to me during an interview at the airport, ‘if the [Taiwan
spouse’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
 182 S.L. Friedman

normality remains unquestioned and unspoken. Pratt identifies a similar appeal to instinct and
shared 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 are
unadorned except for a photocopy or two of newspaper articles documenting the dangers of sex
work or domestic violence that potentially await Chinese women in Taiwan.
16. Unlike the standard ‘tale’ feared by US officers evaluating asylum cases, Taiwanese
interviewers view conformity to established norms positively (Coutin 2001, Shuman and
Bohmer 2004).
17. These norms emphasize material exchanges, timing, and place: interviewers expect couples to
know the details of bridewealth (how much money, what currency and denomination, what
kind of jewellery, how it was presented, when and where), wedding banquets (the time and
location, 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 all
Chinese spouses were especially attuned to financial arrangements and hence should be able to
recall with ease the specifics of monetary exchanges.
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18. See Lan’s discussion of an interview with a Vietnamese spouse at Taiwan’s de facto
consular office in Hanoi where the interviewer did request a performance of marital
intimacy, 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 parents
with those listed by the first wife on her immigration documents. These materials were
available to him through the NIA’s computer system.
20. See Chalfin (2008) on the role of identification in border practices.

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