The Yilan Green Expo, the county’s main tourist event in the spring season, attracted less than 400,000 visitors this year, the lowest in the past four years, county officials said.
The expo has been held since 1999 and the highest number of visitors it has ever attracted is estimated at 450,000, while the lowest number of visitors was 120,000 in its first year, when it ran for 19 days, compared with 51 days this year.
This year’s expo, which ended on Sunday, focused on “food ethics” and featured many prominent politicians, including premier-designate Lin Chuan (林全), Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) and Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).
The county government promoted the event on Workers’ Day on May 1 by waiving ticket fees for workers, but the promotion did not succeed in attracting enough visitors to pass the 400,000 mark as the organizers hoped.
The expo failed to attract crowds because it lacked innovation and variety, an official said on condition of anonymity, adding: “If you have seen one [vendor], you have seen them all.”
However, several tourists said that they found the expo’s activities and vendors interesting, and that the event could have used better marketing tools instead of relying on the celebrity status of political figures.
Yilan County Department of Agriculture Director-General Chen Te-shing (陳德星) said he attributes the low number of visitors to bad weather, insufficient publicity, poor content and heavy traffic in the Hsuehshan Tunnel (雪山隧道).
“We will listen to criticism, review the shortfalls we have encountered this year and improve on them for next year’s event to attract more tourists. After the expo closes, a number of large displays will remain in the Wulaokeng Scenic Area (武荖坑風景區) as art installations and will be incorporated into next year’s Green Expo,” he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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