The spring break holiday weekend, which is April 1 to April 4 this year, is known for parties in beaches around Kenting. But this year will be the time a major spring weekend music festival is planned for Taipei, with the Spring Wave Festival (春浪音樂節), a mainstream Mando-rock festival, saying it will double its scale and take place at Dajia Riverside Park (大佳河濱公園).
Spring Wave made the big announcement yesterday, and all sorts of political debates have erupted.
The festival, which has averaged 15,000 visitors per year for the last 10 years, claims it is moving because Kenting National Park denied it use of the lot near the Kenting Airport, where it has been held in recent years. Despite it’s normal lineup of A-list talent -— this year’s headliners will include A-Yue (張震嶽), MC Hotdog, and Luantan’s A-hsiang (亂彈阿翔) — the event has been lackluster in recent years. This is in no small part due to the event site, a windswept lot next to the highway far removed from the beaches and natural beauty of the region.
Photo: Chen Yan-ting, Taipei Times
Spring Wave started 10 years ago near the pristine beach at Baishawan (白沙灣), but moved to the Kenting Airport site eight years ago, when Kenting National Park tried to rein in the mushrooming party scene on Taiwan’s southern peninsula, almost all of which falls within park boundaries.
At the time, three sites were designated for holding parties, including the airport site (taken by Spring Wave), the Oluanbi lighthouse site (occupied by Spring Scream) and a coastal site near Jialeshui, which no one has ever used.
Kenting National Park’s alleged refusal to Spring Wave this years seems almost comic, as they are now more large-scale than you can count up and down Kenting’s main drag, Highway 26. There’s the foam party, the big beach party, the little beach party, the reggae party and so on. These have sprouted up through various loopholes, mostly because anyone with private property is trying to grab a piece of the action, while the rationale for enforcement is really anybody’s guess. The sad fact is that the larger events, which obey the law, incur the most financial risk and receive the most scrutiny, are often the ones in most danger.
Now in case you really don’t care about the politics and are just wondering what’s going to be the biggest party this year, it will be Spring Break on the Beach, run by the guys at Brickyard in Kaohsiung, with two world top-100 DJs, Danny Avila and Tujamo, as headliners. They saw attendance of several thousand people a day last year and are now plastering pictures of naked people all over Facebook — yes, they literally did a nude promotion on the streets of Kenting — so odds are you already know about this one.
The original Kenting party, Spring Scream, meanwhile continues to shift to a Burning Man-style vision, with an emphasis on a general participatory experience over any particular artists. If you’re a first timer, the info seems more and more cryptic, so it helps to attend with an initiate.
Against these mainstays, a competing spring weekend music festival in Taipei will be interesting. Lots of young people in northern Taiwan tend to stay put on the weekend anyway, as Kenting hotels have jacked up prices to the point that a vacation in the Philippines would be cheaper.
Other parties in Taipei’s riverside parks have recently seen success, notably Road to Ultra last fall, and a new EDM fest with headliner Hardwell slated for April 9, the weekend after Spring Scream. Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said he wanted to support such events as part of his campaign platform, and so far he’s been generally true to that pledge.
Which is not to say that Spring Wave’s move north comes without controversy. Democractic Progressive Party Taipei City Councilor Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) was quick to criticize the city because the festival’s application for a discounted rental fee had not been finalized. But that’s just nitpicking. Generally speaking, Taiwan needs good events, and I am glad to see viable concert sites near Taipei. Now had Liang framed it as an aesthetic debate and said, “But the music sucks!”, then there might have been room for discussion.
■ Spring Wave Festival (春浪音樂節) takes place on April 3 and 4 in Taipei’s Dajia Riverside Park (大佳河濱公園). Tickets are NT$900 through www.friendlydog.com.tw
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless