Welcome to this very special SOSM of Tower Studies book launch. Today we're going to be launching the publication of migration to and from Taiwan that came out in late December of last year, but we wanted to wait for the launch way until Isabella had fully recovered from childbirth, so we got delayed in a little bit. What we're trying to do in this book is to look at how migration, both to and from Taiwan, has really been transforming Taiwan's politics, economics and society. We wanted to shed some light on some of the really amazing trends that we've been seeing over the last couple of decades. One of the things we had was that, to a large extent, the mainstream literature on Taiwan, cross-strait relations, even domestic politics, was really neglecting some of these really dynamic trends. If we just think about some statistics, we get some sense of the way that Taiwan has been transformed. We've got an adult population of something like 18 million in Taiwan. On top of that, think about something like 1.5 to 2 million Taiwanese living and working in China. That's a huge proportion of the adult population, so that should have some significant political implications. Similarly, if we think about migration into Taiwan, we're looking at really significant numbers here. If we think, for example, about the numbers of contract workers, we're talking about something like half a million, the numbers of marriage spouses. Again, if we combine the numbers of mainland spouses and Southeast Asian spouses, again we're talking in terms of half a million people. This means that some of these population groups are actually exceeding, for example, the numbers of aboriginals or the number of first-generation mainlanders. It means that the standard ethnic groupings that we think about, when we think about modern Taiwan, the white-and-white Kurds, the little neat distinctions, needs some revision because of these new migration groups. In this book, what we try to do is to look at this issue of migration to and from Taiwan from a huge, from a very diverse range of disciplinary methods. If you look carefully through the index for this book, you can see we've got field studies people, education, sociology, social work, international relations, political economy, anthropology. And geographers. It's a real diverse bunch, but we needed a few things to bring it all together. We had a couple of key themes. The key themes are identity, politics, and belongs. To what extent are these trends making Taiwan a multicultural society? What kind of identification trends are we seeing among these groups that are moving out of Taiwan and the groups that are moving into Taiwan? So it's a real diverse collection. One of the things I had when I was starting to get a feel of this topic was that politics of migration was really being neglected, and that was one of the reasons why we pushed that side quite hard. Now, how does a kind of electoral and party politics person get into this topic of migration? For me, it's really been an eye-opening process to kind of get a grip of this, and I really feel like I've learned a huge amount from this project. It all started out back in mid-2010 when Limping and Chilwife and myself were kind of getting together, and we wanted to try and find some topic that we could do together. But because we're from such diverse areas, Chilwife is a film, literature person, Limping isn't really an anthropologist in politics department. So what could we do together? The common feature we had was Isabel, who was my PhD student at this point in time. After a number of years of struggling together, I thought that maybe this would be a good topic that we could kind of develop. In many ways, the first question I should really thank for this project I think is Isabel, who was my PhD student in our lecture at Portsmouth. I mean, in theory, a supervisor is supposed to influence their student, but in many ways, I think Isabel has probably influenced me far more. One of the examples of this is that I even teach migration now in my comparative politics class, so it shows the impact that you've had on me. OK, now practically how did we organise this? What we did was to organise two conferences. We had one conference in George Hain University's Waston Forest Campus, a real idyllic kind of mountain forest location. We had about ten papers in that first conference, and then we had a follow-up conference in the summer of 2011, where all five of us were there at that conference. This is only the second edited volume that I've actually done. Of course, a lot of what I did in this project was learning from working together with Dumbi on an earlier book. One of the big lessons I had from that project was that you've got to have too many chapters, and then you can narrow it down. Of course, what we found was that very few papers from the first conference actually got into the final version. But I think with only one exception, all the papers from the second conference are actually in the volume. I mean, there's so many people I need to thank for this, and of course, I should say a few words about the funding for this conference. We received, Mali, from Johnston University, Taimon Foundation for Democracy, that was mainly for the first conference. For the second conference, our major funder was the Jenging Hall Foundation. We also got support from the Taipei representative office. For example, on the second day of our conference, we had a strike. What could we do? Cancel the conference? No, we moved our second day of our conference to the Taipei representative office's meeting room. And we carried on discussing there. Of course, I should thank Cardina Oledo for playing a key role in organising the event. And of course, my book editor, Daniel Mojahidi, who I know a number of you know, who worked on editing the book. Now, the order we're going to do this is... I'm not going to talk about every chapter. What we're going to do is we'll just get the chapter authors, to talk a little bit about their own research. And hopefully, we should have a fair amount of time for Q&A. And I'll let me just say a little bit about who's who. Okay, I've said quite a bit about Isabel, who's now a lecturer at Portsmouth, so another, like me, another SOF graduate. Next along, we've got Lidwet Yi from Norningham University's China Centre. School of Chinese Studies. And then we've got Don Yuqin, who's finished your PhD in Sociology and Ethics and now is doing some teaching at Sociology and Ethics. And then finally, we've got Professor Anthony Fielding, who's originally from the Geography Department in Sussex. And he was the wonderful accident about this conference. But because he heard about the conference on a migration mailing list and sat through two days of Taiwan, he's a Japan migration specialist and really enjoyed the event. And then at the end of the conference, because he'd been listening to so much and he'd read all the papers. And then we asked him just to have a very short talk on his comparative insights for comparing Japan and South Korea. And again, this had a big impact on my future teaching, but that talk at the end of the conference became his wonderful chapter, which of course we use in our Northeast Asia clock. Okay, so without further ado, Juni, over to you. I believe we'd like to first, like Stephanie to put, this wonderful book, large event for all of us. And also I remember quite vividly two years ago of the conference in Seoul. That was such a hot debate. And for me also, it was a eye-winding experience because right at my chapter now, here it was presented then as a conference paper. And the reason I remember vividly because my discussion very dignified to ask me, are you sure the data you got is rare? Are you sure you got the right answer? Because actually what I'm dealing with in my chapter is Taiwanese businessmen, their identity fluid or changed in the process of their investigation. So they started, in my chapter I mentioned, at the beginning they started their investment in the early, well in the 1980s and then they started, now it's over 30 years, three decades. At the beginning their identity was more for Taiwanese and also they were quite looked down, a Chinese identity because they didn't want to integrate. So through my field work and my interviews with my interviewees during my two field work trips, one in 2005 and one in 2009, I realized that their identity actually changed. They kind of more integrated, if you like, into the Chinese society. Except more that their identity are Chinese rather than only Taiwanese. Which I kind of put many interview notes, I quote it a lot in my chapter. Well this is the reason that many of my, well if you read my chapter you also would think that why that would be the case, we always would presume that the Taiwanese people would have a strong identity in China. My chapter kind of against this argument because, that is rightly because my interview group are Taiwanese businessmen and they are owners of the factories, they are chairmen of enterprises, they have to be more integrated into society. So this try to actually reflect a particular group of people, Taiwanese people in China for their economic interests in China. It's kind of in a way economic interest inference, their acknowledgement of identity. Of course at the end of the day, we won't be able to know in their deep heart whether they do really more for Taiwan or more for China. That would be nobody would be able to answer that question. But I do realize that in the process of their investment, especially during Taiwan's economic kind of, as we go on the decline and after the financial crisis, they do kind of touch more into the Chinese society. Again, as Stephie mentioned at the very beginning, this is a book combined with different perspectives. So maybe all the chapters would have different perspectives rather than my perspective from the business people. I just start from here because I know that this is just a very brief introduction. And please also welcome all your questions, if you want to discuss more about Taiwan's business identity in China. One of the things I would add is that I think a lot of defines that are dependent on the actual groups that we are interviewing. So for example, livings looking at mainlanders that have moved to China. And these defines are also quite different. Similarly, Chinese firms work on single professionals again. I think you're right there. But I think that's why your findings are really interesting actually. Anything was my discussion, that's the reason. But that's again, it's a combination of different perspectives. This is what I think. I think one thing I did forget to say is one of the things I found really eye-opening about both conferences is that migration in Taiwan. But a lot of us actually met for the first time in these conferences. Because people who are working for example on film didn't know the work of people who are working on politics of migration. So that was one of the things I found really enjoyable about both those events. But yeah, over to you Isabel. Thank you for inviting me here. Every time I come back to you, there was always a feeling, can I say, that Chinese was a hui niang xiang As of someone who lives in this country alone you feel like this is your spiritual home. So it's always feeling very homely to come back. But as someone who speaks about his own research it's probably one of the first times that I can say this is my chapter. I remember I read someone's book saying oh right finish your book it's like giving a birth. Now I have things to do with giving birth. So I'm more or less concerned about the process. And every time I talk about my research I always feel very passionate. I'm more because I feel that I'm reliving the experiences of my interviewees had in Taiwan since they came to the small island from China, South East Asia, mainly from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. So the title of this chapter is Homegoing or Homemaking. By 2010 there have been 26,551 Indonesian women. But how wide to that open this chapter by saying they are unknown. They are not unknown of course. They are known as Indonesian brides. They are known to their teachers, neighbours, government officials that they are brides. But to me they are unknown to be Indonesian Chinese. Their Chinese ethnicity was largely unknown. It's not that people don't know that they are Chinese. It's just somehow in the research that their Chinese ethnicity is not being flagged up. Exceptions that they are known as Hakka. There has been a specific research about how the Hakka women in West Kalimandang being sort of sought particularly by the Hakka community in Taiwan as ideal brides. But largely their Chinese ethnicity is unknown. So if they were unknown how can I know them? I have just said the very first interview that I have heard. Her name given to me is Siu Die. I still remember very well in her very dark small flat in Tucheng. She was telling me how she grew up that her father from Fuzhou didn't allow her to go to Indonesian state school. She had to go to Chinese language school and she called the indigenous Indonesian as Huanah. Anyone who could speak Taiwanese know that Huanah means savages or barbarians. So for her she still used this kind of turn as opposed to the Indonesian people called Chinese China. These are two very derogatory terms. And there's a lot about her experiences growing up in Indonesia as ethnic other. I heard a lot about these stories from and took this question away from her home. I was thinking what exactly she was telling me I didn't understand. I didn't really understand. After doing a lot of more reading I realised that she was brought up She and a few other ladies I interviewed were brought up in the era where the Chinese have split their identity supporting the commonest China or Republic China which is Horminta. And also there's a clash, ethnic clashes between the Chinese and the indigenous Indonesians when usually very violent including decapitation. A lady who tells me how her mum was horrified to see Chinese men had been chopped off and had been carried by the indigenous Indonesian man. So this kind of thing were how they grew up with and that is how I say they have a dysburi Chinese identity. They also belong to the era where their loyalty towards China or Taiwan was really critical political assets in a way that it has to be competed by both governments across the Taiwan Strait. Hence the part of Taiwan's government easier access to citizenship was given to these Chinese. Apart from these other ladies, I also have younger ladies who told me not quite similar stories. They got along well with the Indonesian people. They had adopted Indonesian names. They went to Indonesian state school. They brought up in the official nation building project known as Indiversity We Are United. So this is two different groups of Indonesian ladies I met as a wide younger one elder. So what did they tell me? This kind of ethnic background was largely ignored by people who studied about migrants in Taiwan. So I came up with three questions. Did the Chinese identity play a role in the decision of migration? How did they express their Chinese identity in their everyday life and how they enacted it? And also how did their Chinese identity interact with the society of Taiwan? Because let's not forget when they came to Taiwan, Taiwan has started to assert its own identities separated from the Chinese identity. So these are the three big questions I have. My findings are that indeed the Chinese identity had a role to play in their decision to migrate. Three things I could summarize. First of all, they came to Taiwan for the aspiring belonging. One lady told me, two ladies, one said that in order to go back to China we came to Taiwan. You may find this rather strange, but she was talking about the recovery in China as the real home of Chinese. Although everyone knows that Taiwan is not a geographical home of their ancestors. But the other lady said, I only feel safe, feel no threat to my life when I came back to Taiwan. They'll use the word came back or returned. Another thing is they came to Taiwan for the pursuit of safety and dignity. This particularly referred to the Indonesian in May 1998. There was an anti-Chinese riot. Lots of, I don't know the exact number, but there had been reported quite a few cases of Chinese UMB raped. Hence, one lady told me, her parents told her the reason why they wanted her to marry off to Taiwan is if our entire family was killed at least one of our daughters died well in Taiwan. For this kind of stories did not pick up by other researchers, but for me this says strongly about their Chinese identity. So how did this kind of identity interact really with their daily life then? I found citizenship is a good, is a very useful context for us to see how their identity could be enacted. One of the ladies got really, she came to Taiwan in 1983 as a student. She felt that she was well treated by the government of Taiwan and she was also got citizenship. And that is a strong contrast to another lady who came to Taiwan much later being regarded as a foreigner. So she had to go through the process of applying for citizenship and for her that show she'd been rejected by her parents. She was specifically saying I am the child of the Chinese parents and why did you reject me? You should open your arms, work on me to back home, why did you set so many difficult obstacles such as I have to pass the language proficiency test in order to apply for citizenship. So these are the, I found the citizenship legislation is a good context for me to really detect where the Chinese identity worked. And then, apart from these ladies I said this diasporic identity, there are other younger generations who have, should we just say a hybrid identity, those younger ladies who were brought up and educated at their school. For them I say that they do not claim they are home going when they came back to Taiwan, they were home making because as a mother they gave birth in Taiwan brought up their children, their sense of citizenship derived from their motherhood.  So that's the how I've claimed that they are not home, they did not come back home in terms of migration but they make Taiwan their home. So these are my major findings of this chapter, I should stop here because more questions will come later. Okay thanks Isabel, I think one of the things that this rate is is that many of these migration trends that we highlight in this book are pushed by non-economic factors, for example in Isabel's case it's racial discrimination within Indonesia in another chapter for example that looks at Taiwanese in Canada. Many of these moved during the height of martial law. It was often political persecution or dissatisfaction with martial law Taiwanese politics was very important. Similarly in Limpings chapter for example among some mainlanders there was a sense of discrimination by the DDP government which seemed to have pushed some of those mainlanders to migrate to China. Just like in Isabel's chapter, a sense of moving to China, moving to any kind of imagined China but again in both Limpings chapter and Isabel is what we do see a sense of disappointment after moving to this imagined homeland. Okay let me move on now to talk a little bit about my chapter. The way I try to get at this migration topic was to look at how migration was dealt with in election advertising. Those of you that take my classes know how crazy I am about election ads so I wanted to find a way where I could link my kind of this kind of passion of mine. And to look at newspaper and television ads over a 20 year period and I wanted to see how Taiwanese political parties dealt with this issue. If we think about our own case we can see how salient or how influential the migration issue is in European elections. To what extent would we see similar patterns particularly if we think about the scale of migration in Taiwan is no less than that in most European countries. What were the findings over 20 years? Well I think the initial finding was that there was so little attention to migration at least until the last couple of elections. It seemed to be the missing issue in Taiwanese election politics. Often the issues, the way that migration was tackled by political parties was tackling very old issues or non issues. So for example in the 1990s there was quite a lot of attention to mainlanders. Those that migrated to Taiwan in 1949 to 1950 either pro mainlander ads or rather indirect anti mainlander ads. So for example making fun of Hoplater would be an example of an anti mainlander ad. While there would be ads that utilised the role of mainlanders in developing Taiwanese society. So a very mainlander focused positive ads coming out of KMT. Another big message that we get both in the 1990s and in 2008 was about a non-issue, a non-existent migration issue. And that's the issue of Chinese labour migration to Taiwan. First in the mid-1990s the DUP starts having this terror message that the verification equals mass migration from China. We get this again, this terror message very very heavily again in 2008 where it looks like the KMT is going to come back to power. We've got these images of Chinese train stations with crowds of people. But of course we don't have Chinese labour migration to Taiwan. Even after the KMT comes back to power that's why I talk about being a a non-issue. One issue that we gradually get an increase on over time is attention to the Taishang. So gradually the parties start to take the Taishang seriously. But again it doesn't really happen until about 2008 is the first election where there's a real attempt to appeal to Taishang and also an involvement in Taishang in the election campaign. We've got ads sponsored by Taishang that really start to emerge in 2008 and to an even greater extent in 2012. It's only really in 2012 that we start to get some significant and quite positive appeals to our Taiwanese migrant spouses. Particularly the South East Asian spouses. I think generally we have this idea that the KMT is much more friendly towards migrant spouses particularly from the mainland. But mainland spouses don't seem to appear in the ads. It's still Southeast Asia so it doesn't seem to be more common. I'm going to show you a couple of clips just to give you a bit of a sense. The first one I'm going to show you is a KMT ad from 2012. It's a recycle ad Some of my students were probably seeing this a couple of times. For those of you that haven't, I think it's definitely worth seeing because I didn't actually use this in the conference because it came after the actual conference. There's a lot of stuff in there and all about the various Taiwanese ethnic groups the hack and the mainlanders, the aboriginals. That ad was basically recycled from 1998. Mind you, I was using this again and again. The interesting thing about this occasion is the Vietnamese snack shop, the Vietnamese spouse. So it looks like finally these new migrants are actually part of the core ethnic groups. The KMT also adds to talk about for example a half Dominican, half French lady who's suddenly become a real hacker to cook hacker food. The message is very similar. I'm Taiwanese, I'm hacker but my citizenship is ROC. It's still tied into some of our traditional nationalism. Now the interesting thing about this campaign is that we also get the DVP actually has one which is trying to reach out to the spouses. That's the last ad I'm going to show you. Number 63 62 OK. This ad is quite a unique one I think. OK. I don't know how good your Vietnamese is but the fact that we've got a Taiwanese election ad in Vietnamese I think is really interesting and talking about promoting mother tongue within these kind of cross-cultural families. I think it's really interesting because when you actually look at these families in detail the general trend is that the fathers are discouraging the children to actually learn the South East Asian languages at least that's my impression. It tends to be very very patriarchal families that these spouses are moving into. But finding an attempt on the DVP to get rid of that negative stereotype which is something that features again in Eugene's paper. OK. Right. So that kind of gives you an impression. It's finally starting to get some attention but it's taking a bit of time and I think, yeah, so Eugene's choice is a good kind of follow up now because looking at the social movements and the politics of particularly mainlander spouses over to you. Am I allowed to remain seated here? Yeah, of course. Thank you. I first hold the articles. I still remember two years ago I was in the middle of my PhD studying and I was struggling a lot and then I came up with an article and I joined the conference in SOAS. And then I got a lot of variable inputs especially from Isabelle and the Deaf Aid and they helped me a lot to take shape of this. OK. So I'm going to briefly talk about the findings and the points that we have made in this article. So for those who are not familiar with the mainland spouse issues so mainland spouse is here. I mean I refer to mainland Chinese women marrying Taiwanese husband and this is a highly gendered phenomena like over 90% follow this pattern which is Chinese women marrying Taiwanese husband. So by the end of 2013 on the total population of 23 million there are almost half million married immigrants in Taiwan of whom and 0.328 million are mainland spouses coming down to 1.4% of the total population in Taiwan and if these numbers are not striking enough over the newborn babies there are 7.5 7.5% are given birth to by non-Taiwanese mothers of course these increase non-Taiwanese from every nationalities. So now I'm going to move on to the history of the mainland spouses phenomena. It started since 1987 which is the lifting of martial law and the lifting of martial law can open up the door for mainland women, mainland spouses to marry on Taiwanese husband and this phenomenon begin with the pattern that retired soldiers went back to their hometown and get married with local women that was the first pattern. It happened in 1987 that this phenomenon hasn't been regulated until 1992 the enactment of the statute governing relations between people of the Taiwan area and the mainland China area so hereafter we called it the statute. And this law also resulting in the differentiated situation between mainland spouses and all the other marriage immigrants from other countries because they are entitled to national nationality law. So this differentiated enactment of the law bring about different situations of like their right to work and their procedure to obtain the citizenship. So this is the basic background knowledge of the mainland spouse phenomenon and then I'm going to talk about the article. So the article the focus of this article is the collective movement of mainland spouses against the discrimination institutionalized by the regulations and how they through the collective movement how they negotiate with the government and negotiate over their right to citizenship. And the special attention is paid to the collective movement in 2002 and 2003 and this was because the government back then tried to prolong the minimum waiting period of obtaining citizenship from 8 to 11 years so it kind of triggered the discontent among mainland spouses and this was the first collective movement of mainland spouses and it was also led by a group a focusing group called CCSMHPA this group whose members are mainly the Taiwanese husband. So our approach to look at this mainland spouse movement is to look at it in the political context and to juxtapose it with the changing political climate in Taiwan. In other words how they interact with the Taiwanese party politics and competing the national building projects. So more importantly with the strategies they deployed in response to the changing political environment in order to generate more social support as much as possible from the society. So it's important to look at the political context of this movement and we started from before the democratisation so they were seen as the allies of communists by in the 80s and 90s and then the DPP party inherited this kind of mindset and keep seeing them as the allies of communist party. And this could be proved by the frequent use of the national security as excuse to violate their rights. But luckily and then I suppose it's got some support support by the splinters group of KMT parties such as during the DPP-led period such as the supports from Xintang with the new party and the people's first party. So during the DPP-led government period the KMT majority parliament majority kind of protect protect the reforms of the regulation which might have been brought more like human rights violations to those men and spouses. And of course the result of it was the men and spouses movement avoided avoidably they are directing to the partisans politics and being politicised. So that is the basic political context. And then we identify the difficulties of the movement of the men and spouses movement and then the first is the legal legal difficulties like they are not allowed to participate in demonstrations or organise themselves and register as the official parties because these activities do not conform with the purpose of they entering Taiwan. So they were presented by others like their husbands and other social organisations. So that's the first difficulties and the second difficulties and they fight against is this stirrup type about men and spouses linked with China nationalism communist and this kind of national characters. And the last one last difficulties men and spouses phenomena is a highly gendered phenomena. They did not evoke the empathy or sisterhood from a women's movement in Taiwan and that was because the commercial character of men and spouses which was considered as like strengthening the underlying patriarchy and men and spouses were associated with sex war and illegal employment. So these are difficulties of men and spouses movement and then we move on to look at the strategy they deployed. They are two strategies one is the use of human rights language. The use of human rights language we can see it in slogans, they chant in the protest during the two and three and also the banner on the banners like they claim we want citizenship, we need human rights. They use a lot of human rights language. And the advantage of using this language is first it's a very fresh political privilege term and it also tie themselves tie themselves with GDP's governing principle which is supposed to be based on human rights. And then the second advantage is using of human rights language kind of enlarge the alliance with other migrants advocacy groups by weakening the politicization and so it kind of enlarge the possibility to work together with other marriage migrants. And the other strategy they use is that they play out the beat with the nationalistic character, trying to refuse the Chinese national character of themselves. And to sum up we think that Melons Poses first of all, we think that Melons Poses first of all, we think that Melons Poses first of all, we think that Melons Poses phenomena hasn't been seen as just marriage immigrants since they carry these national characters that provoke the already confronting political agents and environment.  And the right of the right and the right of the well-being of Melons Poses shouldn't be and cannot be manipulated by single party or single government. So what I'm hoping is that that increased economic integration and the more and more frequent like cross straight communication could normalise this phenomena and start seeing it as an issue. Thank you very much. I think it's really interesting about Yuchin's work is that it's looking at us we tend to think we have a stereotype that social movements are kind of always alive with the DDP and I think one of the really interesting things about this one is that it's such an exceptional social movement so that's one thing I really like about this work. Okay now we move to our final chapter speaker and let's do it the other way. Okay thank you very much. Daphid used the phrase happy accident to describe my involvement in this program. It was a happy accident for me as well but let me tell you that when I joined the group, the workshop the conference, I was terribly conscious of the fact that everybody else was presenting very lonely papers on Taiwan and here was I the outsider as it were who knew almost nothing about Taiwan and I felt as if I was a little bit of an intruder in the party but then I think I see it as a great privilege that you've allowed me to become involved because I have enjoyed it enormously and I've learned a lot but what I've learned many of the things I've learned from the conference and since with the book concerns the uniqueness of migration to and from Taiwan, it's a very very interesting case it's special but at the same time as I was learning how unique it was I was conscious again and again of the parallels between what was happening in Taiwan and what was happening in other parts of the world including other parts of East Asia and so when I was asked to do the final summing up chapter I thought to myself well what do you think of ways in which I can kind of link what it is that's been talked about in the case of Taiwan with what has been happening in other countries and I'm just going to hint at some of the themes if you like of the final chapter which does that task of linking this case the Taiwan case to the wider East Asia case the first one has been touched on several times it's the degree of feminisation of the migration flow to Taiwan and roughly speaking in 40 years the proportion of women in the migrants to Taiwan doubled and that's not at all unusual around the world there has been a feminisation of migration flows in many many parts it's not everywhere of course migration is an extraordinarily complex set of processes and so it doesn't happen everywhere but generally speaking there has been a feminisation process and that's certainly true also for other countries in East Asia and how do women become part of Taiwan as we've heard for example as the wives of Taiwanese men as care workers and so on is that unique to Taiwan not at all the situation in Korea South Korea is very similar with respect for example to marriage migrants if you look at the recent big increase in the number of marriage migrants to South Korea they come from similar origins from Vietnam from the Philippines where do they go they go to the rural areas South Korea just as they do in the case of Taiwan in the case of Taiwan only about half of the Vietnamese as I understand it of the national average of Vietnamese that finish up in Taipei much higher proportions in the world there South Korea exactly the same Japan long story of Philippine migrants to world areas in northern Japan so there is definite similarity and parallels if you like second thing that I pick up is this issue of co-ethnicity very very interesting issue we've seen it of course in the case of Europe with the Ausidler in German return so-called return migration but in East Asia it's a big big issue because so many cases you have groups of people brought together by migration who have common ancestry but who when they come together face problems, face difficulties their relationship is ambivalent it's not easy it's often in fact very difficult that's true in other cases in East Asia particularly for example the Josephson job migrants from northeast China migrating to incidentally many of those are also marriage migrants migrating to South Korea finding a home in the ancestral homeland but not always very easily and often in circumstances which are not at all satisfactory again of course to Nike Jin from South America Brazilian nationals of Japanese descent coming back to Japan of course they're not coming back grandchildren in a sense were coming back to Japan and finding it difficult to settle in Japan in all sorts of ways they are industrial workers of course and they're playing an extraordinarily important role in Japanese industry but often the difficulties of the relationship come out in home life and in neighbourhoods where for example there's a tendency for I'm exaggerating a bit there's a tendency for the Nike Jin to hug one another it's something you do in South America you don't do that in Japan they start their parties at 10 o'clock at night that's when Japanese people are going to sleep in the relationships of course if you get my point this is not an easy relationship now co-ethnicity is not just to do with immigration it's also of course to do with immigration issues to do with Taishang we've been talking about Taishang earlier and this I think brings us into another very interesting field because not all migration of course is the migration of men or workers or care workers or marriage migration a lot of it is highly skilled and highly qualified migration and owners and so on and here I think again there are parallels between the Taiwan case and the case for for South Korea and Japan I was very much reminded of this when one of the papers about the Taishang in China talked about the early the early days when they came in as welcomed investors and the relationships were very much focused on how important this was for the economic development wasn't that exactly the same when the Japanese investment was taking it was going aboard and people were saying please come, we need your investment and it was almost like a new form, colonial relationship if you like between the investing incoming investors and the local communities and some of the relationships also, some of the awkwardness is a rise from living and working aboard similar in other parts of East Asia for example in South Korea there's something called Kirogig Gasok, these are the wild geese families this is where it's very important for Korean families to have their children going to an international school and learning English and I understand from some of the things I've heard that this tension also exists in some cases in the case of Taiwan and often sometimes re-insert back into the society as a result of having lived a period of time aboard which brings me on to another theme it's happened so often that the initial migration then triggers other migrations and it seems to me that in the case of the relationship between Taiwan and mainland China we've saw early on the business man going here but now what we see is something much more diverse one of the papers was talking about Shanghai Rush as if now there was this sort of much greater diversity of people moving into China for all sorts of complicated, all sorts of different kinds of reasons again very similar situation, I mean take the Japanese in London, you only have to go back what 20, 25, 30 years and the Japanese community in London was almost entirely salary men who were intra-organisational transfers, people who had been moved by their business and they were located in London for a few years to look after that business for a while and then go back to Japan then they were there with their trailing spouses, I know that's an ugly term but it's an honest one that they were there with their wives and children very often and that was almost the Japanese community in London what is it today, it's almost super diverse in terms of the very different kinds of people who are now embedded and integrated into the London community and then at the end of my chapter I tried to link the Taiwan situation with some very broad ideas about how migration works migration is very much about moving from one place to another in order to try and change your situation, to try and improve your situation and certain places in the world are so well endowed in terms of the opportunities that they offer that they act as a kind of escalator mechanisms, a social class, an occupational class escalator that you step on the escalator by migrating there when you're a young adult the rich environment that you are in now helps you to improve yourself, to raise yourself in terms of your status and pay and your position in the labour market and then at some stage you will perhaps go back to the place that you came from originally and it seems to me that many of the stories that we heard about Taiwanese migration couldn't fit that in the early on it was an internal migration of course to Taiwan but now it's international and that's another very interesting feature of migration it has shifted many of the relationships that one time were only internal to countries and now operating at a transnational scale and Shanghai does seem from the papers we heard seems to be playing out a very interesting role in relation to Taiwanese particularly the more educated and ambitious younger adult populations and finally I tried to link the Taiwan case to a model called the new immigration model which tries to explain why it is that countries that had been net immigration countries switched to become countries of net immigration but oddly enough not at the time when their economies were burying fastest but often at the point at which their economies were slowing down and that model tries to explain that and the situations that are interesting parallels in all of those three cases in particular of course key to it is the in the sense the end of the world of the world of the world of the world of the world of the world of the world of the world is the in the sense the end of the internal migration the rapid economic development means that you have enormous process of urbanisation sucking into the cities manufacturing zones of the surplus labour from rural areas when that ends when that is finished there is a sudden problem what happens now well two things happen first is that the wages of the indigenous population go up it's great if you are whatever those work but unfortunately for the employers this is a problem you are now paying much more for those workers and if you can't afford it if you are a small business then one of the answers of course is to start importing labour to fill that gap and so what you are getting in these countries if you like is a shift into a situation where the increase in the wages is making it more difficult for the economies to hold it for well but at the same time we are doing layoffs perhaps of indigenous population but at the same time certain parts of the economy are saying we are desperate for labour so we need to import workers from overseas and it does seem to me that in all three cases you can see that process working itself out great ok so we have got just over 20 minutes for comments and Q&A anyone want to start yeah go ahead I have a question for Dr Chen about the indigenous spouses because as you mentioned before they went to Taiwan actually they came from a very Chinese background and they went to China's language in Indonesia so I guess more or less they identified themselves as a Chinese factory so I wonder after they went to Taiwan their identity changed to be more of a Taiwanese because you know Chinese identity is more of a Bitcoin in a political sense or they still feel themselves very Chinese and feel connected with Chinese as the wonder of I should say I gave you these very extreme cases and you have the impression that all ladies are crazy about it no that's why the first lady gave me the left with such a strong name what we are talking about are two generations one group of the elder ladies aged between 14 5 and 16 belonged to that time so they see themselves as part of China because their parents but the other ladies who are introduced to me by their Indonesian names are those who were brought up or having their hybrid identities so for them they are actually more they feel they are more Indonesian than Chinese so the first group of lady came to Taiwan and I feel they are actually misplaced and they return to their home land but that is why the younger lady other than the younger lady she had a strong identity as I mentioned she criticised a lot about the citizen legislation saying why didn't you welcome your lost child of a real child of a adopted child of your child by choice why did you reject me she is actually very unique but most all others aged cool would actually feel they are more Indonesian than Chinese except one lady told me she said when I was 15 my dad told me we are Chinese and one day we should go back home I don't understand what he was talking about but when I came to Taiwan my player was just about to land I had a glimpse of the land I feel yes this is home so I described that as a kind of a dormant identity being awakened for that moment it is a strong surge of emotion but in their real life the older ladies they probably feel a bit misplaced I shouldn't say they feel misplaced they feel they went back home but this is they still see themselves as Chinese and Taiwan should be Taiwan is for Chinese or Chinese by Chinese and any other group of Indonesian ladies do not really see that way that's why I described that as one group is home going and the other group is actually home making and for those younger women because they have stronger Indonesian identity they actually do not really feel that homely in Taiwan because now the reason why I say that for people in Taiwan Indonesian now means backward poor uneducated rural strangely it seems that society has forgotten that they are actually overseas Chinese so for these ladies they've been looked down upon they've been discriminated they've been single out that they are foreigners indeed by law they're treated as foreigners as well because there's no way for them to claim the Republic of China nationality anymore so here we are seeing a really discrepancy between how people identify themselves and how they're treated by law but I should not give you an impression that all ladies have this kind of thinking in their mind hence we should really be careful about what kind of background they have before they came to Taiwan but the case of the 1998 the anti-Chinese riot in Indonesia in May 1998 is an extreme case so I did see that the number of women who came to Taiwan because of marriage rose a bit but then it became she'll say quiet down so that is my very winding answer to your question one thing I should follow up to is something that Tony you mentioned in terms of the comparative difference was that the Korean and Chinese cases seem to actually treat the coethnic spouses much more favourably while in the Taiwanese case and that really comes out as usually in this paper it's actually the opposite in other words the South East Asians get treated are treated at least wordually better than the mainland Chinese spouses and in many ways that's the root of a lot of the anger that comes out of your paper OK, Mo Mo, that wasn't the stuff but how social welfare regimes in these countries are shaking migration? How social welfare regimes shake, you might do not try to imagine it to me and I suppose also how social welfare regimes actually deal with these groups because of course I know it was a controversy about whether mainland students for example should be included within the national health service I wonder with that question about welfare, something that cropped up at all in any of your field work isn't that wise to any of us I guess? As far as I know things has changed a lot especially for mainland spouses so before before mainland spouses could not be included included in national health insurance until they spend like 2 or 4 years I could not remember but while the other marriage immigrants they are entitled to national health insurance immediately and now things has been changed so all of them of marriage immigrants are automatically entitled and it becomes compulsory for them to join the national health insurance I think really interesting considering how wonderful Taiwan's health insurance system is particularly from a UK perspective whether it does act as a magnet I mean it suddenly made me think about one of the first jobs I ever had after I graduated and I was working in Taiwan in a immigration company so we were kind of getting people ready to emigrate to Canada New Zealand, Australia and when we were talking to the customs about why they wanted to migrate one of the first apart from better education for their kids one of them was good social welfare but I bet if we did the same interview now the answer wouldn't be better social welfare because of course Taiwan is so proud about what amazing social welfare system they have previously been to the UK so I mean another point is that many social welfare, not the health care but a lot of benefits provided by the government to require us the identity card and the identity card was linked with the obtaining of citizenship so the point that's why men's policies were really not happy about enhancing the minimum waiting periods of getting citizenship because it means that no identity card which also means that you can't open a bank account you can't apply for the credit card and you couldn't have the driving license of things like that so we have nice national health insurance but out of benefits it's kind of discoordnative I wonder whether do you want to come at all I can't provide you Taiwan's experience because my field is in China so my information would be Taiwanese people in China's situation and certainly China does not provide any sort of social welfare system it's a big issue there not only for non-Chinese residents but also for themselves it's a big issue social welfare system is an important domestic problem for trans government at the moment however, what I've learned from my interview is as Tony mentioned before in the past holding a Taiwanese travel document the so-called in Chinese was a privileged thing and now it turned to be not as good because trans government actually provide a lot of localisation beneficial policy for investors so it's not exactly back to your point to a social welfare system but trans government actually provide better policy for domestic citizens in that case some Taiwanese investors you know, as I mentioned there's an economic interest driven to think about whether they hold a Taiwanese travel document or actually to hold a Chinese citizenship so again it's not totally about the social welfare system but about investment interest that it has changed for the Taiwanese business investors they're thinking about their identity in that sense Yeah Mike I was trying to get some memories of bad time when I used to came up with the immigration office for these extensions and so on and one thing I remember particularly a lot of Sri Lankans at that time now that's a more distant origin than others in Chinese and do you remember the time when it was a certain kind of I guess from a fishing industry they had to live on dormitory ships offshore they weren't even allowed to set foot online and when that finished it didn't go on But I think you raised an interesting question because one of the challenges we had with this book was how do you include every kind of type of migration topic the way areas we missed out I think for example the South Asian community is really a great one in Taiwan it just struck me when I was in Akolibysinica watching the cricket game on a very small green because you do have so many new high tech staff coming from South Asia for example similarly, probably the biggest omission in this book was not covering contract labour we also missed out for example the Taiwanese community in California which I think also is very significant politically but you're right that gradually we're seeing some improvement in the human rights of these groups but I think gradually is the big problem and I think even in Eugene's chapter you can see how things are getting better but it's not really a transformation really, it's still quite limited I told you what it's like I just wanted to add the South Asian migrants in Japan and South Korea is the big surprise story of the recent period when people didn't expect it and suddenly they found significant numbers of Sri Lankans and Nepalese and and so on in their countries when they really weren't expecting it and that population is not but it's complicated because one of the interesting groups of businessmen in Seoul for example that are Indian so it's not just workers working on construction sites which is typically where South Asians will be found, it's also the business community I did some mapping of South Korea from 2008 data and found to my amazement that was a peak of foreigners in a rural area of South East South Korea to start off I didn't know what it was and then I suddenly found out of course that this was the building of the formula 1 race track and what happened of course they bought in a lot of South Asian labour to build that facility can I just add another little point one of the small stories but nevertheless very interesting stories about East Asia which Taiwan fits into is the importance of South East Asia particularly in East Asia as crews in fishing industry and also as fish processing as well so in South Korea in Japan but also I believe to a small degree in Taiwan you have South East Asians in the fishing industry it was 2.3 so one would be about Burma whether or not that would be another interesting migration group to look at but it's actually a question really to any of you is whether or not that migration to Taiwan has had an impact on military service or the ending of military service whether or not that migration has actually had an impact on why the decision to to end it as it is coming up whether or not there was a correlation between the two I remember Nicky asked this question before I think it's in the past not really a rumor but from one of the professors at the National Gymru University I've been asking people about the question the question is whether the speculation of many children born to the men and Chinese mothers where does their loyalty reside what if they all of course if it's the conscription still going on then what happens when these young men join the military and where does their loyalty reside I've been asking people do you think there's a connection between this and the termination of prescription to three kinds of patients they just probably all say no this is nonsense it's completely irrelevant but I think that there's a there's a point of this question and interesting contrast is that we only pose this question we only impose this question on the children born to Chinese mothers not the children born to the Southeast Asia mothers or English mothers this kind of question only seem to be legitimate it's so legitimised to be asked on the children born to Chinese mothers I think this is actually a political issue more reflecting of how Taiwan's identity has become rather than really where their identity resides of course that's a real issue but I think it's interesting this idea about migration being a kind of a national security issue because I've a feeling that doesn't that crop up in your one in the way that or maybe it was in something that Isabelle wrote about it was a period when there was this kind of discourse on the quality of the offspring of these kind of cross-cultural marriages coming up as a national security issue I've a feeling that is it something that one of your pieces that touched upon that or I don't know whether your Chinese one is a response The national security has been frequently used as an excuse to legitimise any policies by the government and about the second generation that the most frequently questioned issue is lack I mean it is more on the marriage agreement not Chinese marriage agreement they'll ask how do you educate your children if you couldn't even speak Chinese it totally fills questions things like if you imagine if I have children here in UK will people question me of my ability to educate my children because I speak not perfect English or not so it's not again it's not only political but I would just say it's a discrimination one of these really kind of big questions that we definitely know the answer to I mean we've got a couple of challenges to try and look at the children of cross-cultural families so for example one of them looks at things like educational attainment tendency towards depression or abnormal behaviour and generally the trends work did seem to make any difference another chapter was doing interviews with the children I think of mainland spouses and I know at the time when we had the first conference it was probably the most controversial paper this kind of ethics of doing this kind of interviews with young children but if we think about the numbers of children we talk about here but 7.54% of births I think you mentioned then what's going to happen once these people get voting rights which way are they going to vote so I think it's a real really interesting question for the future of Taiwanese for example party politics, electoral studies always coming back to my favourite topic I think at the time we should finish here we've got sandwiches we've got wine juice and we've got some books for sale that Hano is going to be so I think we should thank our speakers one more time and then enjoy some wine thank you


Alright folks, Microsoft did an oopsie. They tried to increase the price of Xbox Live Gold over the last couple of days and received massive backlash and within 24 hours completely backtracked all of their plans. It felt strange at the time that they were doing this price increase because Microsoft up to this point over the past year I would say has been extremely pro consumer, making things cheaper, making Game Pass the best budget delivery of games in gaming and making Xbox, the series S in particular, the best budget console in gaming. In fact due to emulation it's really one of the best budget consoles in gaming. So it's been very interesting to see Microsoft say hey look we're going to bring our quote unquote greedy business practices back in place and start price hiking these services. To be fair a lot of people saw price hikes coming at some point because realistically how can they keep making things so cheap but they thought the price hike would be Game Pass not Xbox Live Gold which wasn't offering you anything extra for that price hike. They were just giving you what's already there which has been completely devalued by Game Pass in the first place and saying now you pay more for it. I think the idea behind it was to push people to be like hey look instead of paying these increased prices just go get Game Pass Ultimate which includes of course gold in it. Well I actually have a thought here and it's not necessarily criticizing them for the attempted price hike and we'll get into all that stuff. It's more so about should Xbox Live Gold even still exist and if other companies start to offer a Game Pass like service which it doesn't sound like Sony or Nintendo are planning to do that but if they did should they also do away with their online services. Does it make sense to run two concurrent subscriptions for online services even though they have some fundamental differences and I actually went and I asked you guys about this as well so we'll get into some of your guys' responsibility before I go any further. We are giving away a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X or a Nintendo Switch. Details on that are down in the description on how to enter or in the pinned comment. Winner will be announced not selected but announced during a live stream at the end of this month which is coming up pretty quickly. We're already on the 23rd here so we got about a week here to go. Alright let's first off get into what exactly Microsoft tried to do. So this is the official blog and it says no changes. They updated it and we'll get into the update in a bit but here's the original post. It says since we launched Xbox Live 18 years ago we were working to make it the most advanced multiplayer network available for the greatest community of gamers and there are a lot of you. Millions of people come together on Xbox to play with friends and discover great games. We invest in our community by strengthening the digital safety of our players enabling new ways to share, communicate and play with your friends and delivering industry leading reliability across our network. Periodically we assess the value and pricing of our services to reflect changes in regional marketplaces and to continue to invest in the Xbox community we'll be making price adjustments for Xbox Live Gold in select markets. In many markets the price of Xbox Live Gold has not changed for years and in some markets it hasn't changed in over 10 years. So what does this mean to you? If you're an existing online 12 month or 6 month Xbox Live Gold member there's no price change. If you choose to renew your membership it will renew it at your current price. So basically what they were saying is hey if you already have a recurring subscription and it's a you know a 6 month or a 12 month one you're going to get to keep the pricing that you've had this whole time as long as you keep automatically renewing. The price of one month Gold membership was going to increase by $1 USD and the price of the 3 month membership was going to increase by $5 USD or the equivalent amount in your local market. If you'd like to upgrade your Gold membership to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate your remaining Gold time will also convert directly to Ultimate up to 36 months. For example if you have 11 months of Xbox Live Gold now and you upgrade to Game Pass Ultimate those 11 months convert to 11 months of Ultimate at no additional cost. So what was interesting here is that people were actually taking advantage of the whole if you're new to Game Pass join for $1 and what they were doing was buying 3 years worth of you know up to 36 months 3 years of Xbox Live Gold you know cheaply. You can even get it as cheap as $30 bucks 20 bucks sometimes with some websites. So you can get 3 years of Gold and then pay $1 and convert that all in the Game Pass Ultimate and that matters because Game Pass Ultimate doesn't really have like a discount for a year subscription it's straight up if you want Game Pass Ultimate which includes Gold includes EA and also includes obviously Game Pass itself it was going to be $14.99 a month. So it's actually really insane savings that they allowed to do that and plenty of people were taking advantage of it and I thought at first this price hike was maybe like hey we need to curb people just getting Game Pass Ultimate you know so cheap for 3 years. So that's why I thought they initially were doing this but still let's get more into this. Members have already been notified in some regions if you're a region where prices are being adjusted and you will receive an email and message center notification over the next month letting you know the new pricing for your membership going forward. New pricing for one month will be $10.99 3 months will be $29.99 and 6 months will be $59.99 which was interesting because that's exactly a 0% discount over 3 months. Usually when you buy like you know the 3 month and the 6 month and the 12 month you would get a discount. Now they are eliminating the 12 month in this case. You could always visit your account to manage your membership and prices won't adjust until at least 45 days after you receive the messages. So they were trying to increase the price of Gold will not offer you any more features. Now to be clear the primary reason most people have Xbox Live Gold just like they have the Nintendo Switch Online Services or the PlayStation Network stuff from Sony is because they want access to play games online. All games on Xbox at the time of this post were they had online play whether it was free to play like Fortnite or whether it was Call of Duty Online all of it was behind Xbox Live Gold. Now the worst of things you get with Gold right you get games of Gold which were you get two to three free games per month that you can download and you can just use them as long as you're subscribed to Gold. They're only available to download for a limited time but once you have them downloaded you can redownload them all that stuff. So it's like you just keep growing your library every month but you don't control what those games are you don't know what those games are going to be ahead of time most of the time. So PlayStation has a similar thing going on with their system as well but yeah you saw this price tag and you're like man Sony's going to price tag now Nintendo's going to price tag now and they're not offering you anything new they're just charging you significantly more to give you an idea 59.99 for six months that was the price for 12 months. They effectively were doubling the price of a year subscription with that 59.99 for six months. Yeah that didn't go over well. Lots of backlash. So here's their update on it. We messed up. Okay this was less than 24 hours later. We messed up today and you were right to let us know. Connecting and playing with friends is a vital part of gaming and we failed to meet the expectations of players who count on it every day. As a result we've decided not to change Xbox Live Gold pricing. We're turning this moment into an opportunity to bring Xbox Live more in line with how we see player at the center of their experience. For free to play games you will no longer need an Xbox Live Gold membership to play those games on Xbox. This is kind of like a man we're sorry we messed up. We shouldn't have tried to price like free to play games they're not going to be behind gold anymore. So we actually ended up getting a positive out of this but moving on here. We are working hard to deliver this change as soon as possible in the coming months. If you are an Xbox Live Gold member already you stay at your current price for the renewal new and existing members going to continue to enjoy Xbox Live Gold for the same prices they paid today which is $10 or $9.99 for one month, $24.99 for three months, $39.90 for six months or $59.99 for retail 12 months. So there you go. As you see there was a significant price hike going on and they have now backtracked all of that. Now what's interesting here is when you look at what these services are. So first off here's Game Pass right. The reason I feel like they were price-hiking here is because they wanted people to get ultimate. For those who don't know, a lot of people have Game Pass ultimate but you don't have to have ultimate. You can get it for $9.99 on its own. You do not have to have gold to have Game Pass. This is a misnomer that happens because so many people opt for the ultimate because again it says best value and it really is but you can literally just not have Xbox Live Gold but have Game Pass because you'll still get access to all the games. You'll still get the new games added all the time. You'll still get the Xbox games due to your titles the same day as release and you still get member discounts and deals and this is whether you get it on console or PC. So you still get an incredible deal but again all these games you can't play online without Xbox Live Gold. So it's one of those things where it's, yeah there are gonna be some people that don't use Xbox Live Gold and we'll get into that but it's gonna be interesting to see that this is not an option most opt for. They opt for ultimate and why? Well you get the same access except you get it on PC and console. So instead of paying 10 bucks for each one, 15 you get access to both. New games added all the time. You get the Xbox games due to exclusive members. It's going to get free perks including in-game content and partner offers. That's not included in normal Game Pass. Play games on your Android mobile phone and tablet from the cloud. So if you have an Android phone or tablet you can basically use XCloud for free. That's pretty cool huh? So you get XCloud on your phones. You get Ultimate on your PC and console. You get all this stuff. Oh also it includes the gold membership and then it also includes EA Play. Notably the EA Play stuff does not, is not included in standard Game Pass. It's only in Game Pass Ultimate. So I felt like all the price hiking was basically to say get Game Pass Ultimate.  Now it would technically be more expensive to have Ultimate because they're 14 on a month. You extrapolate that over six months. You're actually paying more, right? You'd be paying like 90 bucks versus 60 for six months of gold. But if you're gonna pay 60 for gold why not pay the extra 30 bucks and have Ultimate the whole time? So it's a, it was weird to me. And I wasn't the only one that this was weird to. I don't think that gold needs to exist anymore. I think they should just have Game Pass call it Ultimate or whatever they want. Get rid of, I mean I guess you could still have the individual PC tier maybe. But like, I don't know. They should just not have gold anymore. They should just have Game Pass Ultimate.  They just want gold and be done with it. And I get it. I understand that point. And that's the point we're actually gonna get into here. You know, I was looking at gold here to see, you know, if there's anything else on this page. But there really wasn't. But then I asked this question and I said I got an interesting video going up at some point today about Xbox and it's not just about some price changes with gold, which again, we just covered that. One thing I wanted to include is some user poll stuff. So here we go. For those of you that own an Xbox via the one, the one S, the one X or the series S or X, do you use Game Pass? Even for those of you that don't, if you did own one, would you get Game Pass? Do you have gold? Both. All right. So I didn't make this poll as thorough as I should. I should have said, you know, I should have had Game Pass available on its own. I definitely have Game Pass Ultimate. I should have had Game Pass on its own as an option. I apologize about that. So 57% of people who answer this poll, who have an Xbox or intend to buy an Xbox, are going to get Game Pass Ultimate. 17% only have gold. I found this to be interesting because I don't know what the point of having gold is without having Game Pass, but we'll get into some of your comments. I have an Xbox that only, 26% of people say they have an Xbox but they don't use either of those services. And that's baffling to me since Xbox is ecosystem. Everything about the system is built around online and has been that way since the very first Xbox. So I always felt like if you're going to buy an Xbox, you are obviously going to use it online. I guess I was wrong. So let's go into this. So I have Game Pass Ultimate. It's the only reason I use it anymore. I bought a Series S for Game Pass in the occasional digital game on sale. So again, if you own an Xbox, why don't you have Game Pass? I'm being honest, Game Pass is still the greatest budget deal in gaming. We have all these exclusive games that they've announced for the Xbox Series X or at least the Xbox family. They're all coming to Game Pass. Like Game Pass is already incredible. Doom Eternal, game pass. Why spend 60 bucks in Game Pass? Cause you get that and you get so many other games. I have Game Pass. It's the best deal out there for third party games. Nintendo for first party and Xbox for third party games is my choice. All right. Just go on Amazon, get a year of gold for 60 bucks and go buy a month of ultimate for $14. It'll upgrade the whole year to ultimate. Yeah. Again, they had it for a $1 for a while. Maybe they got rid of them. They had the $1 deal still on PC. So maybe you should go get Game Pass Ultimate through PC. There's still a way to take advantage of that 36 month thing. Microsoft needs to make this April Fool's and make online gaming free. And that's kind of where I'm leaning towards is where gold, with Game Pass existing, does gold need to exist? I think that's my question to you guys. Does gold need to exist when Game Pass is a thing? Or should they drop gold? Let online gaming be free like it is on PC but then offer Game Pass and have Game Pass stand on its own. I think it's a worthy conversation starter. Are they going to? No, they have too many millions of people subscribed to gold that aren't Game Pass. But still, I do think that they're trying to get people to switch over to Game Pass Ultimate. One, they make more money. And two, it's actually better for the consumer in a way in terms of access to games. However, the reason there are some people that will refuse to get Game Pass on the stipulation they want to own their games. And I understand that. And I'm sure someone's gonna bring that argument up here. I get Game Pass Ultimate for free through Xbox Rewards. I've had it for free since 2019. And it's still going all the way to 2022. So that's what I'm rocking with. Hopefully I'll get a Series X as my first Xbox. I would get Game Pass, why wouldn't I? I recently bought a Series S solely for Game Pass and I've been absolutely loving it. Again, Game Pass is a great service. Let me see. I played a variety of big games in just one week. Was never a big Xbox guy. Had the original Xbox as a kid, but I went PlayStation after. And now after experiencing Game Pass, I fully intend to swap my Series S for a Series X when they're easier to find. I got an Xbox 360 and I just cleared the story mode of Rascals. I don't know what that was or anything. Game Pass is pretty cool to have. I never really thought I needed it since I've been building my Xbox Game Library since 2007 or 2008. And I understand that to a point, but I also say again, all new games are gonna be on Xbox that come from that are considered to be exclusive to the Xbox family. Those are all going to be on Game Pass. That's one of the major selling points to me anyways, not just the old games. I use Game Pass because it's amazing for playing a wide variety of Indies. Yep, there's a lot of Indie games on there. It's also just a really good deal, even if you're only interested in the future of the late games. I have it since launch on my Series X, but in the future, I will only get it when I want to. I don't want to pay monthly for it. And that's understandable.   What's nice about Game Pass? Ultimate. Is that it? There's no price discounts if you get it for three months or if you get it for six or a year. There's no price discount. It's all $14.99 a month. So you're not really punished for ending and restarting your subscription if you aren't someone who converted gold over. Let me see here. Damn, now. I know what you're talking about. My opinions. If it was $119, maybe I'd be okay with 120. That's what I was just trolling. I don't even have an Xbox. I had Game Pass for PC for a couple months, but I thought myself never really used it so I stopped playing. Game Pass on PC has also had a lot of issues. I'm not gonna dive into them here, but Game Pass on PC hasn't exactly been a smooth experience. I'm a Game Pass Ultimate member because it's a better value than PlayStation Plus or Nintendo's online service combined. I got a PC now. I don't use my Xbox or PlayStation 4. I was hoping to get more people commenting about how I have an Xbox but I don't have Game Pass and here's why. But instead of all the comments from people saying they love Game Pass. I have Ultimate when I first got X with it. It came out three months. I really liked it. Then when they announced Ultimate, I bought three years ago and then overturned it. Okay. Let's see here. I gave us Ultimate for my PC. Very except for Digital Futures, but a huge investor in the market. Before 25% of what you said, I don't use either subs. Why do you even have the console? That's what I was wondering. Let me see, right now I have X with 360. I don't want to get Series X. Let's see here. They updated. Yep. We talked about that. I'm subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate, but not through the Xbox consoles, but Android via XCloud. Yep. I bought Xbox Series X. I love physical games. I don't have or want any of the Game Pass. Wow. All right. Here's what he said. I bought, here's someone who owns an Xbox but doesn't use Game Pass. I bought the Xbox Series X. I love physical games. I don't have or want any of Game Pass. And I'm pissed that there is games I can't play because Xbox is trying to force me to buy it. That is wrong. One game is Sea of Thieves. I'm not done with this fight either. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? I'm pretty sure you could buy it. Hold on. Is someone trying to argue you can't that there's games on there you can't buy? I'm going to Amazon right now. Sea of Thieves. I'm like, I guarantee you could buy Sea of Thieves. But maybe I'm wrong. But I feel like you could buy Sea of Thieves. Let me, I didn't spell it right. That doesn't help. Sea of Thieves for Xbox One. Yeah. What is he talking about? And they let you free upgrade it. Look, they let you free upgrade it. You get the free upgrade when you buy this. What is he talking about? You can't buy Sea of Thieves physically. What is happening? Is that a thing? It's $34.15. Is that like, I'm sorry.  Cory, but you're like, you know, I'm pissed that there are games I can't play because Xbox is trying to force you to buy. They do force you to buy Xbox Gold. But you don't need Game Pass for Sea of Thieves. Yes, Sea of Thieves is on Game Pass right here. I could buy Sea of Thieves right now. Add to cart, physical version. Look, the physical version of Sea of Thieves right here. What are you talking about? I'm confused. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Well, since when can't you buy the physical version? Why don't brothers, as I'm with you on this, I don't have Gold currently, but I've had it in the past. I love collecting physical games. They have no interest in subscription services for games. I don't download the so-called free games and I've even paid for a physical copy for games that were available through Gold at the time. Raising the price for live Gold is even worse for gamers that stick to physical. Well, it's not, they ended up not raising it, but I get not wanting to pay for online, but that's a grander argument here because everyone, even Nintendo now, makes you pay to play games online. So if you're gonna get an online game like Sea of Thieves, you're gonna have to pay for Gold. But, like, what do you talk about Game Pass and like, you can't play Sea of Thieves as well? Yes, you can. You can't play with an Xbox Live Gold. But that's been, I mean, where have you been? That's been since the OG Xbox. That's not even new. And PlayStation and Nintendo are doing the same things. You wanna play Splatoon online? Splatoon 2 online? Better have a subscription. Ultimate's nice. So this is like, I was looking for someone to give a good argument, but then, like, this argument didn't even hold up when they mentioned their one example because you can totally buy that game. Let's see here. Don't own Xbox. Yeah, that was like the only.  That's like, I should, like, put this, I should, like, put that comment in the thumbnail.  I'm a man, baby, because I asked a question about Xbox, you know? Maybe it's just because they're still complaining that I covered the GameXplain situation. People can be funny sometimes. I think that it's just, we need to get Gold killed off and just stick with Game Pass. I think Game Pass is incredible. I understand for people that want to own everything physically, that Game Pass might as well not even exist. It's not going to do anything for them, but it's also not going to hurt you. They're still offering the games. Until they get to a point that they don't offer a physical or digital download way to buy these games, or both, ideally both, and they're only available in Game Pass. That's when you can maybe complain. I have yet to see or hear about a game that is exclusively on Game Pass. That hasn't happened yet. Until it does, I wouldn't really worry about it. Once it does, I think the complaints are valid and I think people are worried things are going to head in that direction and maybe they will, but we don't have any evidence or proof to suggest that. Ultimately, I enjoy my Xbox. I play my Xbox slightly more than my Switch right now, but that'll change once you know, Super Mario 3D World is here and some other games come out that are hot fire on Switch that I'm looking forward to. But right now, I'm enjoying Game Pass Ultimate. I think it's the greatest value in gaming. I think it's the primary reason to own an Xbox. If you're looking at, oh, third-party games are gonna perform better. Well, some third-party games perform better on PlayStation 5 than the Series X. Some perform better on the Series X than the PlayStation 5 and Hitman 3 or something. Some recent game that came out performs better on Series X now than PlayStation 5, whereas I know some of the launch games were better like Assassin's Creed Valhalla was better initially on PlayStation 5. So I honestly am just at this point where we have a lot of subscriptions, right? How many of you guys have like, like I have Nintendo Switch online. I'm just talking about, let me talk about all the things I'm subscribed to right now that I pay a monthly fee for, okay? If not like a three-month or six-month renewal, whatever, you know, things I'm subscribed to that cost money. All right, that are services, services. So I've got Xbox Live Gold and I've got Game Pass. I got them together as Game Pass Ultimate so we'll count that as one thing. So I have Game Pass Ultimate. I have Nintendo Switch online, okay? I have Netflix, I have Hulu, I have Amazon Prime, okay? I also have, that's five of them, I have more. Maybe that's it. Maybe I only have five active right now. I think, I used to have Disney Plus, don't have Disney Plus currently. I only activate Disney Plus when there's something I really want to watch but Disney Plus is cheap but I only activate it when there's something I really want to watch. So I guess I only have, I guess I only have five right now but still that's five. If you think about it, let's just say they only cost on average 10 bucks a month which they cost more than that. You know, that's 50 bucks a month. But we all know it's gonna, after you add everything together it's a lot closer to almost 100 bucks a month and that doesn't include the fact that I pay for internet every month. That doesn't include the fact that I also happen to have cable, right? You know, I don't pay for a streaming TV service because they always seem to be missing channels I want for sports so I just pay for cable which you know, that's another fee on top. Oh yeah, I also have Apple TV. I don't use it that often but I have it for a year. So when it's done I'll probably be done with it unless they start to add more shows I care about. So there we go, that's what I was forgetting about. Apple TV. So I have a lot of these subscription services and this doesn't include things like if you happen to have a Spotify paid account or something, right? I don't have any paid Spotify or Pandora accounts or anything but some people do. Think about all the subscriptions we have and how nickel and dime we get to the point where yeah, it's nice that you can just pay for what you want but what you want is on such a wide variety of services.  Why are you paying for Hulu and not doing the Hulu Disney Plus combo? It's like a similar price. I know, I know, okay? Don't remind me. Anyways, yeah, I would like to see Xbox Live Gold go. I would like to see Game Pass be the only thing that I would like to see online go free to play like it is on PC. Like it should have been on consoles this whole time. If it wasn't for Microsoft deciding they could charge money for it. So we'll see what happens. I'm glad the price hike didn't occur and I'm curious on your thoughts on this down on the console. This is an extra long video about Xbox Live. I did not plan for this to be a 20 plus minute video when I started out but you know what? Things happen. The gaming landscape is an ever evolving thing and I feel like it's important we keep following it. If you follow me for Nintendo content, hey, I also talk about other gaming content as well and I can't wait to get my hands on the PlayStation 5 here myself, not just for the giveaway but for myself. So I can finally talk about that, kind of do a review of that and compare experiences across all three platforms. All right folks, I'll catch you guys in the next video.