To cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, landlords are reducing rents everywhere except in cultural and creative parks. In Taiwan, bookstores are a sunset industry and a hundred of them have closed, but this is not the case in South Korea.
The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has helped establish Paju Book City. About a 40-minute drive from Seoul, it is the world’s largest publication industrial park, and has attracted more than 300 companies employing 10,000 people.
In Taiwan, all that has been done to encourage publishing is to rent Huashan 1914 Creative Park to Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. Huashan is one of five creative parks making a profit, but most of it is unrelated to culture and creative industries; some lawmakers call it a “community of exotic restaurants.”
Paju is near the Demilitarized Zone, where rent is low. The government helped negotiate a favorable deal with the military, exempting it from taxes for the first five years and halving taxes for the next three years. It also enjoys water and electricity concessions.
In Huashan, the Ministry of Culture only serves as the landlord.
For Paju, apart from private-sector efforts, an important factor in its success has been the five-year incentive project former South Korean minister of culture, sports and tourism Choe Kwang-shik introduced in 2012.
Over five years, the project injected 79.2 billion won (US$64.2 million) into the publishing industry, aiming to place South Korea among the top 10 publishing countries. It reached that goal in 2016, making publishing a national strategic industry.
The cultural and creative parks in Taiwan tell a different story. Amid the spread of COVID-19, the Hualien Cultural and Creative Industries Park has closed and the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park has lost NT$60 million (US$2 million), but the Ministry of Culture insists on raising the rent, drawing criticism from lawmakers who say it is an odd way of supporting creative industries.
There is also evidence of bad apples and corrupt officials in the Ministry of Culture. For example, in April 2018, the Ministry of Justice’s Agency Against Corruption received a bribery report involving the former director of the Department of Humanities and Publications.
According to the report, a ministry official had allegedly accepted NT$600,000 in bribes and overseas travel from an association of Taipei publishers, which in turn received NT$1.5 million in subsidies.
The official was transferred from his post in July that year and made deputy director of the National Center for Traditional Arts, where he was allegedly also involved in corruption.
The Agency Against Corruption also found that an executive officer in the department’s digital publishing and newspaper and magazine divisions was to receive monthly bribes for three years beginning in 2018 in exchange for awarding government subsidies of NT$600,000 to the Indonesia International Book Fair, NT$1.25 million for the BookExpo exhibition in the US and NT$1 million for the Hong Kong Book Fair.
These cases have damaged the Ministry of Culture’s prestige and the quality of cultural affairs.
Former Council of Cultural Affairs chairman Chen Chi-lu (陳奇祿) praised the success of the Korean Folk Village, which was transferred to the private sector.
Former minister of culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) has said that the nation’s cultural and creative industry has failed.
Will the Ministry of Culture make the effort to change it?
Lu Ching-fu is a professor in Fu Jen Catholic University’s applied arts department.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
In the past month, two important developments are poised to equip Taiwan with expanded capabilities to play foreign policy offense in an age where Taiwan’s diplomatic space is seriously constricted by a hegemonic Beijing. Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) led a delegation of Taiwan and US companies to the Philippines to promote trilateral economic cooperation between the three countries. Additionally, in the past two weeks, Taiwan has placed chip export controls on South Africa in an escalating standoff over the placing of its diplomatic mission in Pretoria, causing the South Africans to pause and ask for consultations to resolve
An altercation involving a 73-year-old woman and a younger person broke out on a Taipei MRT train last week, with videos of the incident going viral online, sparking wide discussions about the controversial priority seats and social norms. In the video, the elderly woman, surnamed Tseng (曾), approached a passenger in a priority seat and demanded that she get up, and after she refused, she swung her bag, hitting her on the knees and calves several times. In return, the commuter asked a nearby passenger to hold her bag, stood up and kicked Tseng, causing her to fall backward and
In December 1937, Japanese troops captured Nanjing and unleashed one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Over six weeks, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered and women were raped on a scale that still defies comprehension. Across Asia, the Japanese occupation left deep scars. Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines and much of China endured terror, forced labor and massacres. My own grandfather was tortured by the Japanese in Singapore. His wife, traumatized beyond recovery, lived the rest of her life in silence and breakdown. These stories are real, not abstract history. Here is the irony: Mao Zedong (毛澤東) himself once told visiting
When I reminded my 83-year-old mother on Wednesday that it was the 76th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, she replied: “Yes, it was the day when my family was broken.” That answer captures the paradox of modern China. To most Chinese in mainland China, Oct. 1 is a day of pride — a celebration of national strength, prosperity and global stature. However, on a deeper level, it is also a reminder to many of the families shattered, the freedoms extinguished and the lives sacrificed on the road here. Seventy-six years ago, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東)
RSS