This panel examines how migration and emerging nationality regimes reshaped legal status, economic life, and sovereignty in East Asia and the Pacific from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by rapid regime changes, imperial expansion, and emerging nationalism in the region. Bringing together four case studies spanning Japan, Taiwan, Okinawa, and the United States, the panel foregrounds Chinese and Taiwanese migrants as central actors whose mobility both created and contested notions of social and legal identity across shifting imperial formations.

The first two presentations focus on Chinese migrants in the Japanese empire. Mindy Su highlights diasporic Chinese merchant-manufacturers’s pivotal roles' in Kobe’s match industry, and Japanese officials’ and entrepreneurs’ contradictory attitudes towards the Chinese migrants’ alleged incursion into the Japanese economic sovereignty. Chuchu Zhao turns to the on-the-ground formation of legal identity, examining how Chinese migrants strategically navigated nationality regimes between the Qing and Japanese empires and the legal logics of naturalization as Japanese subjects.

The latter two papers shift the focus to Taiwanese migrants in overlapping imperial and post-imperial regimes. Yi-Ting Chung investigates the migration of Taiwanese to the United States between 1900 and 1941, demonstrating how U.S. immigration authorities, Japanese imperial claims, and the legacy of Qing sovereignty intersected to produce legal ambiguities under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Catherine Tsai examines Taiwanese migrants in American-occupied Okinawa (1945–1972), tracing their successive reclassification across Japanese, American, and Taiwanese nationality regimes amid geopolitical contestations over Okinawa’s sovereignty.

Together, these papers illuminate how Chinese and Taiwanese migrants moved through—and exposed the limits of—imperial sovereignty, while also showing that, in other contexts, migrants acted as active agents who co-produced business infrastructures across empires . By centering everyday economic practices, legal strategies, and lived experiences, the panel advances a transimperial perspective on modern East Asia and the Pacific, demonstrating that industrial modernity and citizenship were forged not solely by states, but through the entangled actions of mobile subjects across competing empires.