Taipei

This paper focuses on a relatively overlooked aspect of social polarisation in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taipei: its gender implications. The transformation of these cities, from industrial to post-industrial cities, has been accompanied by a transition from Chinese patriarchal society to modern society. A dual gendered structure is emerging—a regime of labour intimacy (RLI) under state regulations and a technomuscular capitalism (TMC), presenting itself as a competitive labour market. Migrant workers are introduced to compensate for the loss of household labour, but the wage gap between them and their local counterparts may be con-trolled. The occupational segmentation and income disparity between men and women are improving because of the upgrade of women’s status. The model of bound RLIs and open TMCs emphasises a more contextually situated construction in which state migration policies and changing gender status play an intermediate role in the division of labour between work and home