Marcin Jerzewskiby Marcin Jerzewski
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English
Photo Credit: European Values Center
The following article originally appeared in Indo-Pacific Current, the newsletter of the European Values Center for Security Policy.
IN ITS QUEST to diversify its political and economic engagements with the world, Taiwan keeps looking south. At the recent Yushan Forum, Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation Chairman Michael Hsiao (蕭新煌) proudly announced the launch of six new strategic corridors under the framework of the New Southbound Policy (NSP). This includes government-led initiatives to facilitate cooperation on technology, health, and resilience, as well as think tank, NGO, and youth corridors led by civil society.
This “New Southbound Policy+” upgrade remains true to the original spirit of the policy, which former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) launched in 2016 to boost Taiwan’s economic and people-to-people exchanges with 18 target countries: six in South Asia, ten ASEAN member states, as well as Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. By promoting investment and production relocation, the policy has strengthened Taiwan’s presence in the emerging markets of its neighborhood. In terms of reducing economic dependencies on China, the policy bore fruit, as in 2022, Taiwan’s investments in South and Southeast Asia reached 4.8 billion EUR, surpassing, for the first time, the 4.62 billion EUR invested in China. This trend intensified in 2023, with investments in the region totaling 3.97 billion EUR, compared to 1.16 billion EUR in China. Yet, whether we consider its original avatar or the new NSP+ under William Lai (賴清德), the “L-word” remains taboo. The policy fails to explicitly call for the institutionalization of labor cooperation with the target countries.
The omission of labor cooperation from the NSP is concerning as Taiwan heavily relies on migrant workers’ contributions to its advanced economy, which is highly dependent on manufacturing, and to its aging society. As of March 2025, there are over 829 thousand migrant workers in Taiwan, primarily from Indonesia (36.9%), Vietnam (34.5%), the Philippines (19.8%), and Thailand (8.9%). Overall, approximately 7 percent of the Taiwanese labor forceis from a migrant background, while in the industrial sector, this figure reaches 60 percent. Even though they are an indispensable driver of Taiwan’s prosperity, migrant workers suffer from limited protections under the Labor Standards Act, abysmal working conditions, and forced labor.
Taiwan has signed agreements related to labor cooperation with the countries from which it sources sorely-needed workers. However, these bilateral memoranda primarily regulate cooperation on migration and fail to include provisions for negotiating migrant workers’ rights. The exploitation of migrant workers in Taiwan undermines its efforts to project its image as Asia’s “city upon a hill” – the European Union and the United States have repeatedly called on Taiwan to clean up its act in terms of protecting migrant workers’ rights and ensuring proper working conditions. At the same time, Taipei continues to bury its head in the sand when it comes to addressing labor conditions in the context of the NSP, even though labor lies at the very nexus of the policy’s two buttresses – economic and people-to-people ties.
Notably, Taiwan recently concluded a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) on labor cooperation with India. Yet, the deal is controversial. Firstly, human rights groups lambasted the government for insufficient transparency in the process of negotiating the agreement with New Delhi, the failure to include migrant workers’ and civil society voices in the consultation process, and insufficient provisions for the protection of the human rights of migrant workers. Secondly, as explained in a previous issue of the Indo-Pacific Currents, the prospect of labor migration from India to Taiwan resulted in a wave of hateful responses, including racist comments from the then-labor minister Hsu Ming-chuan (許銘春) of the Democratic Progressive Party.
Moreover, the existing New Southbound International Programs of Industry-Academia Collaboration (新南向產學合作國際專班) have also led to abuse of international students who sought to combine classroom and professional education in Taiwan. Even though the government claims that the program values foreign talents and aims to nurture them, many students ended up performing grueling factory work—often unrelated to their field of study—unsupervised by labor laws, raising serious concerns about potential human trafficking. An investigation by The Reporter (報導者) unveiled the cases of Southeast Asian students assigned manual labor, disconnected from their chosen majors, leaving them with debt and little time for their actual studies.
While the NSP has proven to be a successful and productive tool of Taiwan’s economic statecraft, it is high time it is revised to address labor issues. A third-wave democracy, Taiwan began to transition from authoritarianism in the late 1980s, and, concurrently, it opened its labor market to Southeast Asian workers in 1989. While its democratic consolidation has been successful, the island nation’s human rights record remains stained when it comes to protecting the people who keep it prosperous amid the challenges of the aging population and geopolitical volatility. To support truly holistic economic and people-to-people engagements with its neighborhood, Taiwan’s NSP needs to include explicit provisions for safeguarding the human rights of migrant workers.