TAIPEI, Taiwan — Jason Lee spent most of the last decade building a business in a field for which Taiwan is famous. With three friends, he founded an animation studio here, churning out TV shows and special effects for games and films.

But costs rose and orders dried up, and they closed up shop in 2011. A few years later, Mr. Lee left Taiwan for mainland China, where he was hired to run an animation studio in the city of Qingdao. Five months ago, he started his own studio there. He has 20 employees, a number he hopes to double after the Chinese New Year next month — growth he could not have imagined in Taiwan.

“Personally, I see this as a good thing,” Mr. Lee, 38, said.

But what is good for Mr. Lee, and for many of his hundreds of thousands of compatriots working overseas, may not be as good for Taiwan. People here are increasingly worried that growing cross-strait trade and investment and the large number of people from Taiwan working on the mainland are making Taiwan dangerously dependent on China, which claims the island as part of its territory and has tried to use its economic clout to buy influence.

Such concerns helped set off large protests in 2014 against the ruling party, the Kuomintang, which faces the likelihood of heavy losses in presidential and legislative elections on Saturday.