Started in 2002 with a budget of only NT$2 million (US$65,760), the Hakka Tung Blossom Festival has become the nation’s biggest festivity, with more than 6 million visitors and bringing more than NT$23 billion in revenue, Council for Hakka Affairs (CHA) Minister Huang Yu-chen (黃玉振) said yesterday.
“I was not very confident when I expressed my hope that the Hakka Tung Blossom Festival would attract more than 1 million people and create more than NT$6 billion in economic benefits,” Huang said. “But I was totally shocked when I saw the survey results.”
According to the results of a large-scale survey commissioned by the council and conducted by Gallup Market Research Corp Taiwan from the beginning of April to the end of May, more than 6.4 million people visited the festival, bringing more than NT$23 billion in revenue for businesses taking part in the festival, as well as around event venues.
Besides the number of visitors and the economic impact, the survey also found a 98 percent satisfaction rate from visitors to the festival — and more than half of the visitors were returning visitors.
Encouraged by the numbers, Huang announced an ambitious goal for next year’s Tung Blossom Festival.
“Next year will mark the 10th anniversary of the Tung Blossom Festival, the 10th anniversary of CHA and the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China,” Huang said at a press conference. “Well, since we have more than 6 million visitors this year, my objective is to attract 10 million people to the festival next year.”
Although Huang seemed very satisfied with the numbers, the Democratic Progressive Party’s Hakka Affairs Department director Yiong Cong-ziin (楊長鎮), who was the person who proposed organizing the Hakka Tung Blossom Festival when he was CHA chief secretary, expressed concerns about the future of the festival.
“In 2002, we only had a NT$2 million budget, so we couldn’t do much, but our goal was very clear,” Yiong told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview. “We wanted to create a local symbol of Hakka culture through which Taiwanese Hakkas could discover the beauty of their own homeland, while people of other ethnicities could get a chance to learn more about Hakka culture.”
Accordingly, at that time the CHA designated five Tung Blossom trails and recruited guides locally. Yiong said that they wanted locals to find out more about their own villages or cities by training to be local tour guides.
Yiong said that originally, they wanted all souvenirs and merchandise sold at Tung Blossom Festivals to be either local specialties or innovative products inspired by elements of local culture and made locally.
“But now, the Tung Blossom Festival is highly commercialized, with a lot of souvenirs made by large corporations with little connection to Hakka culture in China,” Yiong said.
Asked about Huang’s plan to attract at least 10 million visitors next year, Yiong called it “nonsense.”
“I don’t think the mountains and small villages are capable of handling so many visitors. If more than 10 million people pour into these small Hakka villages in the mountains, it would be an environmental disaster,” he said. “Besides, we’re a country of 23 million people, it’s nearly impossible to have half of the population taking part in an event.”
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods