Taiwan Today

In late May, Kaohsiung native Lee Hsin-ren found that he did not have to go abroad to experience culture shock. He went to a nightclub in Taipei but was denied admission at its entrance. "I wore sandals that day, but the bouncer said if I wanted to get into the club I needed to replace them with less casual footwear," says Lee, a social observer now studying for a master's degree at National Taiwan University. "I was just wearing what I like to wear. You know, in southern Taiwan, it's no problem to wear flip-flops in a nightclub as long as it's not in a five-star hotel."

Nightclub dress codes aren't the only difference between Taipei and southern Taiwan, Lee has found. For example, Taipei girls are often seen going to pubs by taxi. This is thought to imply good taste and sophistication. "Those in the south tend to ride scooters to pubs, carrying an LV bag and wearing a crash helmet with designs of cartoon figures on it," Lee says. "To northerners this seems awfully tacky, but in the south it is quite acceptable."

And it's not just with respect to youth culture that northerners and southerners differ. Chen Kung-hung, chairman of National University of Tainan's Graduate Institute of Taiwan Culture, had a wedding banquet in his hometown of Chiayi in southern Taiwan and another in Taipei. He spent less money on the one in Chiayi, which was held on a roadside as is quite common in southern Taiwan. The Taipei feast took place in a luxury hotel. "In Taipei the food was served in smaller portions on larger plates. We southerners think differently. We prefer inexpensive food that can make you feel really full," he says.

In Taiwan, "southerners" generally refers to people living in the southwestern part of the island, from Chiayi County--some argue Yunlin County--southward. Conversely, "northerners" is usually used to mean those who live in and to the north of Miaoli County and sometimes the term is used to refer exclusively to citizens of Greater Taipei, a highly urbanized area with about a quarter of the island's population. "I think when people talk about the north in relation to the south, they actually think of Taipei," says Gillian Shen, who teaches English at a grade school in Singying, the second largest town in Tainan County.

Southerners tend to see themselves as straightforward and unpretentious. "And in general most southerners are rustic; they hit it off with each other soon after getting together, even though they are at first mutual strangers," says Wu Chin-hsi, an associate professor of geography at National Taiwan Normal University.

Agricultural Roots

This quick acceptance of each other has its roots in the vicissitudes of agricultural development in the south. The region has specific problems; unlike in the north its rivers easily dry up and often fail to supply enough water to rice growers. In such a situation, individual survival often depended on community spirit; people had to stick together and offer each other help. "This partly explains why southerners are direct and easy to work with. In contrast, northerners are less so," Wu says.

Linguistic homogeneity also plays a role in forging solidarity among southerners. Over 85 percent of southerners are the descendents of immigrants from China's Fujian province and they speak the southern Min, or Minnan language, as their mother tongue. Nearly half of the northerners in Miaoli, Hsinchu and Taoyuan counties claim to be of Hakka descent, according to a survey released by the Cabinet-level Council for Hakka Affairs in 2004. The demographic and linguistic tapestry in Taipei City is even richer, with a significant percentage of people coming from many different Chinese provinces and arriving in 1949 with the Kuomintang (KMT), as they fled China after the Civil War. With their diffuse origins, these "mainlanders" are far from being the homogenous, Mandarin-speaking group they are usually portrayed as. With the same survey showing that mainlanders account for some 21.7 percent of the capital's population, northern Taiwan is far more of a linguistic and ethnic mosaic than the south of the island.

If the north is affected by the sheer diversity of residents, not to mention its diversity of commerce and industry, it is agriculture that has shaped the character of the south and its people. According to Wu, farming in the south remained challenging and dependent on the weather until the project for building the Wushantou Reservoir and Chianan Irrigation Canal, directed by Hatta Yoichi, a Japanese engineer posted to Taiwan during the colonial era (1895-1945), was realized in 1930. The first reservoir in Taiwan, Wushantou greatly improved the water supply system for farmland on the great Chianan Plain, which extends from Changhua in central Taiwan to Kaohsiung. "In comparison, the irrigation systems for rice paddies in the north had already been completed during the rule of the Chia Ching Emperor (1796-1820) of the Qing Dynasty," says Wu.

The economically unstable and unpredictable life in the south gave rise to other phenomena, like consulting the gods or spirits. "It is common to seek divine advice in the south," says Wu. "Southerners are more superstitious. Don't you notice that not only do temples abound in the region but they are larger and more elaborate than in the north?" Many of these temples, Wu says, are dedicated to Wang Ye. Originally imported from China, the Wang Ye cult actually refers to hundreds of lesser gods with various surnames and each Wang Ye temple is dedicated to different gods. The Burning of Wang Ye's Boat ritual, intended to drive away pestilence, carried out annually in Donggang, Pingtung County, is the best-known Wang Ye-related festival.

Pugilistic Pride

On the other hand, the scramble for scarce water resources among villages in the south, especially in the lower reaches of a river, has bred a pugnacity which can degenerate into gangsterism while sometimes achieving quite selfless feats of heroism. "Although the so-called strongman may be villainous and violent in normal times, he could be relied on, with his great fighting skills and physical strength, to fight for the interests of the whole village at crucial times," Wu says. "Hence the saying 'villages on an estuary are homes to hoodlums.' But their fighting feats were worthy of admiration among southerners as displaying a kind of toughness, especially in a time of hardship," he says.

Over time southerners have developed a rather mixed image. On the one hand is a reputation for simplicity, rusticity and hospitality. But equally they are associated with provincialism, a lack of sophistication and a high degree of superstition. Their respect for martial skills seems, in the eyes of their detractors, to be a deplorable toleration of the use of force to settle disputes. And their direct speech can sound less like refreshing honesty and more like bad manners.

Whatever the dangers of broad generalizations, Gillian Shen's personal experiences of living and working both in Taipei and her hometown, suggest that, to a certain degree, the stereotypes do reflect reality. "People in the south feel close and are neighborly to each other. If you don't see your neighbor's car for a couple of days, you would guess the family has gone on vacation and you would keep an eye on their home to prevent burglary," she says. This kind of behavior is rare in Taipei, where people living next door may remain strangers for years. "But southerners, older people in particular, can be limited in perspective. Taipei people, in contrast, don't make a fuss about what looks weird and unconventional. Although they may come across as distant, they avoid invading privacy."

It is strange that the south should be a repository of conservatism, if only because its history would suggest that it would be more open-minded and sophisticated. "Southern Taiwan has the island's oldest cultural legacies. And it made contact with the West earlier than any other region of Taiwan," says Lee Hsin-ren, referring to the area of Tainan City--long the island's capital, where the Dutch and then the Han Chinese built the first non-indigenous settlements on the island in the 17th century. "But now it's Taipei that is viewed as Taiwan's center of culture, economics and politics," he says.

Bookstore Weathervane

For a cultural marker, take the Eslite Bookstore chain, seen by many as the embodiment of cultural sophistication over the past 15 years. The company has a strong presence in the Taipei area with about 20 shops, and can be found taking up a whole freestanding building in the capital. In the south there are only five shops and, Lee points out, they are often just parts of a department store.

The rise of northern Taiwan as a Johnny-come-lately over the south, settled for so much longer, Lee says, is a matter of resource allocation. While poor farming conditions had been a headache for southerners for hundreds of years, the situation became worse when the then ruling power on the island, the Qing government, relocated the island's administration from Tainan to Taipei shortly before relinquishing control. "Then the Japanese came [in 1895] and focused their attention on the north of Taiwan. The south fell out of favor," says Chen Kung-hung. The exception was Kaohsiung, an emerging port city the Japanese hoped to develop as a base for their southward expansion into the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries.

The KMT picked up where the Japanese left off when they relinquished control of Taiwan in 1945. In line with government policy, export-processing and industrial zones were quickly developed in Kaohsiung, turning it into a blue-collared city from the mid-1960s. Meanwhile in the rest of the south, agriculture continued to be the economic staple. The status of Taipei as the hub on various fronts was further solidified. "During this time southerners gradually lost their self-confidence," Chen says.

Although the Tainan area was developed earlier than Taiwan's other regions, the advantages of being the site of the capital in terms of access to funding and the ability to attract commerce and investment have bolstered the domination of the north.

In Taiwan, as Chen says, fashionable merchandise usually first makes its debut in Taipei before being found elsewhere on the island. "I am going to Taipei to earn a living because people say you can find everything wonderful there," run the lyrics of Marching Forward, a Minnan song popular in 1990. Taipei has been a magnet for young people seeking their fortune, although the experience of moving there is not always satisfying to some. "We southerners are often called people from Taiwan's 'nether regions' when studying or working in Taipei. That sounds degrading," Chen says.

Wu is afraid the current world trend is only widening the gap between the north and the south. "Globalization builds strong networks between individual cities, but not so much between countries. This means that Taipei will develop at a faster pace in the future, with all other Taiwanese cities trailing further behind," he says. "Taipei is more and more like an international metropolis."

Nativist Impetus

The good news for the south is that Taiwanese nativism started to gain a strong boost in the 1990s, from both society at large and the central government. "I think 1995 was a turning point, when former president Lee Teng-hui made it a policy to promote the local flavor of communities around Taiwan," Chen says. People in the south have since become active in discovering and restoring the unique identities of their hometowns, which has done something to restore their lost self-confidence.

The results of the 2000 presidential election further consolidated the concept of Taiwan consciousness. Having long gained support from southerners, the Democratic Progressive Party came out as the winner and began to address the developmental imbalance between the north and the south by, for example, encouraging more big festivals and events in the region. The policy of moving government agencies from Taipei to the south--the first being the Fisheries Agency under the Council of Agriculture scheduled to move by the end of October this year--is only one of a series of actions recently taken to re-allocate resources and develop the south.

As recently as the late 1990s, Huang Yu-shan, a professor at Tainan National University of the Arts, and her students still had to travel for hours to Taipei to quench their thirst for non-commercial films released nowhere else on the island. But in 2001 she founded the South Taiwan Film and Video Festival that has since filled a need among her students and many other lovers of art-house movies living in the south. "This event is meant to redress the imbalance between the north and the south in terms of the development of cinematic culture. It tries to challenge the idea that the north is the cultural center," says Huang, who is also a movie director.

According to Huang, film exhibitions in the region used to be few in number and small in scale. By comparison, this event, which receives significant corporate sponsorship, is bigger, exhibiting over 60 films in 2006, many of them independently produced Taiwanese works. The budget for the event, held mainly in Tainan and Kaohsiung, has reached more than NT$2.5million (US$76,000), up from NT$600,000 (US$18,000) in 2001. "There are even people coming from Taipei to see these movies," Huang says.

Major development projects like the Southern Taiwan Science Park are transforming the region too, as they attract executives and engineers from around Taiwan. Formally established in 2003 in Tainan and Kaohsiung, the park is changing the attitudes of locals. "Most southerners tend to economize, for example. But consumer behavior in Tainan is changing, partly thanks to the influx of these well-paid newcomers," Chen Kung-hung says.

Today, however, despite the growing attention paid to the south, Lee thinks northerners still have a superiority complex. Taipei people are not interested in the south, he says, except as a place to go on holiday. Southerners, on the other hand, usually go north and live there for a long time to earn a living. Southerners are, however, starting to be confident enough to ignore how their northern counterparts see them. "To a self-righteous northerner, southerners might well say: 'We belong to two different worlds. Just mind your business and leave me alone. I have my southern way'," he says.

Indeed, Lee did not give in to the Taipei pub's dress code, nor did the pub compromise and let him in. The line separating the north and the south is still there even today, but southerners are now looking at it with confidence, not with awe.

Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw