Vietnamese People in Taiwan - Matchmaking and Marriages

Matchmaking and Marriages

International matchmaking services flourish in Vietnam despite their illegality; 118,300 Vietnamese women, largely from the south of Vietnam, were married to Taiwan men as of 2005. As early as 2001, Vietnamese women composed 49% of all foreign brides in Taiwan. Their average age was between 25 and 26 years old, while that of their grooms was 36; 54% came from Ho Chi Minh City. 73% were of Kinh ethnicity, the majority group in Vietnam, while the remaining 27% were of Chinese descent. 72,411 (60%) of all Vietnamese brides in Taiwan as of 2005 had married within the past ten years. Vietnamese women married to Taiwan men composed 85% of the 11,973 people who naturalised as Republic of China citizens in 2006. The Vietnamese government established a variety of regulations on international marriages between 2002 and 2005, including prohibiting some marriages where the age gap was too large, and also requiring marriage partners to have a common language of communication. The Republic of China government also seeks to limit the amount of spousal migration, but unlike the Vietnamese government, the only tool with which they can effectively control it is visa policy. Their implementation in this regard has changed over the years; they originally conducted individual interviews for spousal visas, changing to group interviews in 1999; in 2005, they imposed a limit of 20 visa interviews per day. By 2007, the number of new brides had fallen off from a peak of around 14,000 per year to just one-third that size.

According to statistics of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an estimated 3,000 Vietnamese women formerly married to Taiwan husbands have been left stateless after their divorces; the women had given up Vietnamese nationality to naturalise as Republic of China citizens at the time of their marriage, but then returned to Vietnam following their divorces and gave up their Republic of China nationality in the process of applying for restoration of Vietnamese nationality. Their children, who hold only Republic of China nationality and have never previously been Vietnamese nationals, are ineligible to enter publicly supported schools in Vietnam.