A free train ticket can be just a marketing gimmick — or it can be a exercise in cultural inclusion. From Aug. 1 to 7, the Taoyuan Airport MRT ran an unusual campaign: Anyone wearing traditional indigenous attire, or clothing, accessories or bags featuring identifiable indigenous designs, could ride the MRT for free, as many times as they wished, during that week.
What began as a warm-hearted blend of festival celebration and cultural promotion instead triggered what in Chinese is called a “father-and-son-on-a-donkey” response — whatever you do, someone will find fault. The campaign drew equal parts praise for its creativity and criticism for what some saw as cultural commodification and a performance.
A more troubling aspect was that this wave of negative chatter threatened to drown out the campaign’s cultural and social goals, eclipsing the rare but deserving sight of people making cultural acceptance visible in everyday public life.
Tradition and commerce have always been intertwined. The concern about commodification imagines that tradition gets flattened into a decorative symbol, but history tells a different story. Culture has always lived alongside economics and daily life — whether in the National Palace Museum’s souvenirs, festive holiday gifts or the seasonal boxes for Lunar New Year, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival.
Cultural promotion should not be held hostage by commodification anxiety. It does not automatically equate to shallowness. The real question is whether the product promotes meaningful understanding.
Pragmatism does not erase cultural value. Culture often slips into our lives not through the front door of ideology, but through the side door of curiosity. Some mocked participants as “just doing it to save money,” as if a practical motive cancels out cultural meaning. Yet many forms of cultural learning start with external incentives.
If someone unfamiliar with indigenous attire researches patterns and meanings just to save a few dollars — and perhaps borrows or buys the accessories — that is a gateway to knowledge.
The first step in cultural promotion is often not a lofty lecture, but a small human touch. This was about visibility as much as celebration. Culture does not live in glass cases. It rides the train with you. The policy was not just about showing indigenous culture to outsiders. It was about giving non-indigenous people a moment to declare acceptance, publicly and without prompting. This was not locking culture in a museum or staging one-off events in far-off villages. It was letting cultural symbols flow naturally into everyday urban mobility — onto trains, platforms and commutes.
Internationally, similar policies tend to look inward. In parts of Canada, transit discounts are provided only to indigenous residents. In some US states, free shuttles run within or near reservations. In Australia and New Zealand, special buses operate during indigenous festivals, but mainly for indigenous participants. Such measures preserve culture and aid communities — but they rarely place indigenous culture into mainstream public space. On this score, Taoyuan’s initiative stands out.
That is why Taoyuan’s example is worth trying again. It should not be scaled back under sarcastic fire, but amplified, replicated and adapted by other cities and even other countries. In a diverse society, the most powerful culture is not the kind hanging high on a wall — it is the kind sitting next to you in the train carriage.
In the mainstream transit system, cultural fusion does not have to be a “loss in ticket revenue.” It can be an investment in social capital, yielding greater mutual understanding, visibility and civic pride.
This was no mere fare promotion. It was a rare, even unique, model of high-level cultural exchange, bringing culture out of the museum and the village, and into the minutes of a morning commute. A free ticket here did not just buy a ride — it put culture on board, on track and into daily life.
Cultural education was already happening in three ways.
First, in the cultural literacy of staff, as ticketing and train crew had to recognize basic patterns and features of various indigenous groups’ attire. This was on-the-job cultural training, spreading knowledge naturally and directly.
Second, in self-identity for indigenous participants, wearing traditional attire or symbolic accessories in public is an act of cultural confidence, moving identity from the private sphere into the shared public space.
Third, through mainstream acceptance. When non-indigenous riders willingly wear indigenous motifs and do so confidently in public, it becomes a visible declaration of recognition and support, a cross-cultural gesture of goodwill.
Culture is strongest not when it is guarded, but when it is shared — and the best way to share it is to let it ride along in the ordinary rhythm of everyday life.
Chu Jou-juo is a professor in the Department of Labor Relations at National Chung-cheng University.
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