Overseas Chinese-heritage students learning to be Chinese language teachers in Taiwan: A journey of comparisons and affirmations

Overseas Chinese students have been actively recruited to come to Taiwan for study since 1962 (Lin et al., 2011, p. 793). Such recruitment is quite logical in light of the large number of overseas Chinese around the world. Some researchers estimate their number to be as high as 60 million (e.g., Rae and Witzel, 2008), while others put the number at around 40 million. In particular, Southeast Asia has witnessed their continued growth in recent decades. For example, Skinner (1959) put the number of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia at around ten million, but by the time of Kuhn’s (2008) work this number had increased to somewhere near 26 million.