Jian Yongda

Introduction

A native of Nantou and a graduate from the Department of Journalism, National Taiwan University, Yongda is a former journalist at the "Reporter". He currently is an independent journalist. He has won a number of international and domestic journalism awards, including the 2017 Asian Journalism Excellence Awards (SOPA), the “the Hong Kong Human Rights News Award” for "Excellent Chinese Feature" twice, in 2018 and 2019, and the "Chinese Interpretive Feature Award", which is the highest honor for human rights news reporting in Asia.

Resident planning

All of Yongda’s stories start from "Yiguang". In 2016, he wrote the article "First Square - Underground Society Built by Migrant Workers". Prior to this, he was, like most of his readers, new to the issue of migration. Over the past four years, he has learned more and more from interviews and through writing about the life of migrant workers in Taiwan. How do they get exploited by the intermediary system? In a place where work-related deaths abound, how do they maintain hope for a safe return home? This book is divided into three chapters: "Underground Society", "Dangerous Island", and "Family in a Foreign Land". The first two, based on personal experience, take readers into the underground society of migrant workers, current laws and regulations, national management, and the intermediary system. These chapters also show how putting migrant workers at the bottom has made them face a perennially higher proportion of work-related disability and death than domestic workers. While in residence at the Taiwan Literature Base, the writer looks forward to completing the rewriting of his first two articles in the first "Underground Society" entitled "The First Square.