Taiwan Today

Two music groups aim to inspire greater love for the land by singing about the concerns of farm villages around Taiwan.

I heard my mother say that rice grows here on the Changhua Plain because of the water of the Zhuoshui River.
Children on the Changhua Plain all grow up drinking water from the Zhuoshui River.
The Zhuoshui River is the river of my mother and the river of Taiwan.
The Zhuoshui River is suffering from man’s destruction.
Our mother is in tears.

Accompanied by a drummer and a cellist, a male singer slowly sang the words of the song as twilight fell on July 17 this year. A crowd of more than 3,000 people listened as the group performed during an overnight protest on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei City. Many members of the audience wore yellow protest ribbons bearing the words “immediately stop draconian land seizure laws” in red ink, while others wore traditional-style farmer’s hats with the words “land justice” written in black. Bundles of rice straw were stacked up behind the performers, forming a backdrop.

The lyrics of the song were written by Jiang Yu-da, the leader of the band. Known as Farm Village Armed Youth, the group was invited to perform at the event because most of the subject matter of its songs reflects the protestors’ concerns about the decline of farming villages in Taiwan. Jiang’s band, moreover, is not the only group to have actively voiced the concerns of rural Taiwan, as a troupe known as Runran Takau has followed a similar agenda—although by different means—in the south of the island for the past six years.

Participants in the July 17 protest made their way to Taipei from all over the country to show their opposition to the expropriation of farmland in Dapu Borough, Miaoli County, northern Taiwan. The county government took control of farmland that had belonged to 24 Dapu families for generations in order to expand Zhunan Science Park, says Ye Xiu-tao, a Dapu resident who is petitioning against the seizure.

Zhunan Science Park, a satellite of the well-known Hsinchu Science Park, opened in 1999 with an area of 123 hectares. As of May this year, 41 companies were operating at Zhunan. A project to enlarge Zhunan by 23 hectares was launched in 2004, but was expanded to 28 hectares in 2008 at the request of Chimei Innolux Corp., formerly named Innolux Display Corp., Ye says.

The expropriation of the extra 5 hectares resulted in a series of protests. Many of the farmers say that their land is being taken forcibly and without sufficient compensation, as they feel the county government’s assessed valuation falls far below market value. As of the end of July this year, Dapu farmers had traveled to Taipei City seven times to stage protests against the county government’s move. The Taipei protest that Farm Village Armed Youth appeared at was organized by the Taiwan Rural Front, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization, to support the farmers whose land had been seized.

After a series of mediation meetings and other efforts to solve the crisis, the Miaoli County Government proposed allowing farmers who do not want cash compensation to keep their residential property while exchanging their farmland for plots of similar size inside the science park. The county has also offered to help build irrigation systems for the new plots. The farmers were still mulling that proposal as of early September this year.

Jiang’s roots in Tianzhong Township, Changhua County, central Taiwan—an area where agriculture is the primary industry—are a big reason for his own strong ties to the land. “During my childhood, I played in the fields every day when I came home from school,” he recalls. “I remember the feeling of walking on soil, its temperature and its softness.”

Like many other young people from rural areas in Taiwan, however, Jiang also nursed big-city dreams. In 1999, he began studying at Tunghai University, which is located in Taichung City, Taiwan’s third largest metropolis. While studying at Tunghai, Jiang usually returned home just once each semester. “Back then, it was like there was a ghost or something in my hometown that made me unwilling to go back,” Jiang says. He adapted to the city environment, going as far as opening a coffee shop near Tunghai after he graduated. Jiang still operates the coffee shop, but takes care to serve only fair trade coffee.

Jiang’s estrangement from his rural roots lasted until 2007, when he met Yang Ru-men, a young man from a rural community who is now a farming activist, but who previously earned the moniker of “the rice bomber.” In 2003 and 2004, Yang placed 17 bombs containing rice and gunpowder around Taipei City as a protest against imported rice after Taiwan’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2002. Yang attached notes to the bombs that said “oppose rice imports” and “the government should look after farmers.” Two of the bombs exploded, but did not cause injuries. Yang was sentenced to seven years and six months in prison in 2005. After an appeal, the Taiwan High Court reduced his sentence to five years and 10 months in January 2006. Yang’s cause continued to generate a large amount of sympathy from activists, university professors and other farmers, however, and he was released from prison in July 2007.

“I was inspired by Yang’s acts, which showed a strong love for our local farmers,” Jiang says. He began returning home to Changhua County, where most of his neighbors in his hometown are elderly farmers. Through their conversations, Jiang says he reached a better understanding of agrarian issues and problems in Taiwan. He has also rediscovered the joys of the rural area where he grew up. “Now I like to visit the land where I spent my childhood,” he says.

Growing Responsibility

A growing sense of responsibility accompanied Jiang’s renewed love for rural Taiwan and increased understanding of its issues, however. “I decided I needed to do something for our farmers and the land,” Jiang says. Following Yang’s example, albeit in a more positive manner, the singer formed Farm Village Armed Youth in 2007 with djembe drummer Siao Chang-jhan and violinist Wei Hong-yang. Cellist Chen Li-chu replaced Wei at the beginning of this year.

Jiang remains committed to performing music to support the cause of local farmers. Farm Village Armed Youth has played at events supporting human rights and environmental campaigns at farm villages in Changhua County, Chiayi and Tainan counties in southern Taiwan, and Hualien County in eastern Taiwan, as well as in Sanying and Xizhou villages, which are located in Taipei County and are populated mostly by indigenous people.

Jiang does not have to go very far to find inspiration for the group’s music. In 2007, a farmer who lives in Jiang’s old neighborhood announced he was going to quit farming, as the price of rice had fallen so low that he could no longer earn a living by growing it. He was one of the many area farmers who struggled to compete with low-price rice imports after Taiwan’s entry into the WTO. In 2006, for example, locally grown rice sold for NT$26 (US$0.80) per kilogram, much higher than the NT$16 (US$0.50) per kilogram for rice imported from the United States and double the NT$13 (US$0.40) per kilogram for rice from Thailand, according to a study released by the Council of Agriculture (COA) in 2007.

Faced with the big change in the market following WTO membership, the COA began offering subsidies ranging from NT$60,000 (US$1,875) per hectare in 2003 to NT$80,000 (US$2,500) per hectare in 2009 to encourage farmers to stop cultivating their land. As Jiang sees it, however, the subsidies have disrupted life in rural villages by idling farmers and driving younger generations to seek work in cities. “These are common problems among farming communities around Taiwan,” Jiang observes.

Drawing on his neighbor’s experience, as well as the many visits he paid to farming villages around Taiwan between 2007 and 2008, Jiang wrote a song entitled Unwilling to Farm Again. The song appeared on Farm Village Armed Youth’s debut album in January 2009, along with nine other songs touching on a range of social and environmental issues. “This album records the significant social movements of the past three years,” observes Chang Tieh-chi, a cultural and music critic as well as a social activist.

In August 2009, Jiang began a tour of farm villages—including Meinong Township, Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan; Erlin Township, Changhua County; and Houlong Township, Miaoli County—that eventually extended to two months. Thus inspired, Jiang and the band returned to the studio and recorded Return Our Land to Us, which was released in December 2009 as the group’s second album.

When asked about music’s ability to bring about social change, Farm Village Armed Youth drummer Siao Chang-jhan says that audiences can gain a greater understanding of issues by listening to groups such as his. Furthermore, because the message is presented through the entertaining medium of music, more people are likely to pay attention. Eventually, a portion of listeners feels the need to stand up and work on the social issues the band sings about, he says.

One of Farm Village Armed Youth’s fans, for example, told Siao that he had learned about the environmental issues surrounding the fourth-stage expansion project at the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP) in Erlin Township during the group’s performance at the Taiwan Band Festival in 2009. At that show, the band sang about the CTSP project and unfurled banners calling for its suspension.

After the show, a number of audience members posted messages on the band’s Facebook page, saying that they had been moved by the songs and requesting more information about the expropriation of land at Xiangsiliao, a community in Erlin Township where some 20 households would be forced to leave if the CTSP expansion project were to go through. Siao explains that music has an undeniable power to evoke emotion. “It drives you to imagine that you’re facing these issues and then maybe to act,” he says. “The key is what the music makes you feel.”

Jiang agrees, saying that as a medium, music conveys emotion more easily than the written word. “That’s why I chose music to pursue justice,” he says. “The audience doesn’t have to make a big effort to receive the information, but music is a powerful trigger for further action.”

Critic Chang Tieh-chi says that while the music performed by groups like Farm Village Armed Youth does not immediately change people’s thinking, it can influence their attitudes toward issues over time. Jiang concurs, saying “It does have an impact on listeners, eventually.”

Voice for Farmers

Like Jiang Yu-da and Farm Village Armed Youth, Yan Yung-neng and performance group Runran Takau also act as a voice for farmers around Taiwan—they just go about it in a different way. While Jiang’s group concentrates on music, Yan and his troupe offer something more akin to a variety show, featuring everything from hip hop and dancing to drama and folk arts. In a performance at the Hutoupi Reservoir Scenic Area in Tainan County in August 2010, for example, members of the troupe wore bamboo hats and carried farm tools while performing a scene about farm life in days gone by. In the scene, the performers rolled up their sleeves and acted as if they were reaping rice as Yan sang “Grandpa, grandma, uncle, aunt, brother and sister—come help with the harvest.”

The next piece was a song entitled In the Moonlight. Yan rendered the lyrics in a soft tone as he sang about a child who went to an outdoor theater with his grandmother. As Yan sang about the child’s happiness at receiving a piece of candy at the show, two members of the troupe wearing white masks handed out candy to children at the actual concert.

Over the past six years, Yan Yung-neng and Runran Takau have been based in Kaohsiung, but most of their time is spent touring farm villages in other parts of southern Taiwan. It is no surprise, then, that the troupe’s songs mainly focus on agrarian society. “Yan’s songs are stories about local things he has seen in the south. They depict the lives of people at the bottom of society,” says Hsu Chia-fang, a friend and fan who has known Yan for more than a decade.

Yan was inspired by folk singers such as Chen Ming-chang, Yang Kui and Lim Giong, who earned recognition in the 1990s by telling the stories of ordinary Taiwanese people in their songs. Following their example, Yan began performing in the countryside in 1997. “Those locations were in front of temples, near fishing ports, parks or open spaces in villages—you name it,” Yan recalls. 

Pianist Wang Jun-jie is not a member of Runran Takau, but participates in some of the same shows. “Sometimes, before the concert, it was really hard to believe that an audience would show up,  but when the performance began, a flock of locals would appear from nowhere,” Wang says. “The response of the people in those audiences would make you feel like a superstar.”

Wang observes that most members of those audiences—usually consisting of a few hundred people—were farmers or laborers who had just finished work. “People in the countryside don’t have much access to concerts where they live,” he says. “But in fact, they constitute the majority of people in Taiwan.”

Yan explains he likes to focus on happy memories and events associated with farm life. In the past, for example, rural villagers would help their neighbors bring in the harvest. To express their appreciation, the farmers receiving the assistance would prepare a meal for their helpers. Yan uses events such as that meal—a enjoyable part of life in farm villages—to evoke nostalgia. “I want to connect with these people by singing songs about their happiness,” he says.

In turn, Yan Yung-neng says he has learned the meaning of contentment from Taiwan’s farmers. “They know what happiness is,” he says. “For them, happiness is spending time with their families after work every day. That and talking about this year’s harvest.”

While Yan and his troupe are mostly focused on the joys of life in rural Taiwan, as with Farm Village Armed Youth, there is also an element of social commentary in Runran Takau’s performances. Troupe member Wang Huang-peng, for example, dyes his hair green, the color of growing rice, to show his support for the farmers of Dapu Borough who are fighting the seizure of their land.

One of Runran Takau’s most popular songs, As Long as Everyone Eats Taiwanese Rice, depicts a 71-year-old farmer who loves to work in his paddy fields every day, accompanied by egrets and his old water buffalo. During performances, when Yan sings the refrain, “As long as everyone eats Taiwanese rice,” members of the audience usually give him a thumbs-up in response.

Headline News

Yan composed the song after being inspired by a news report about 78-year-old Huang Kun-bin, who was named National Champion Rice Farmer by the COA on September 18, 2006. Huang won the award at a chaotic time, as the so-called “red-shirt protests”—a wildly popular, month-long anti-corruption movement that attracted hundreds of thousands of participants and heavy media attention—were then occurring. “But Huang’s story also made the headlines of every newspaper then,” Yan says. “In fact, I thought Huang’s story was more important than the protests. It’s the kind of news the media should report more of—the story of a hard-working farmer and his award-winning rice.”

Yan says he talked to Huang Kun-bin after the land expropriation occurred in Dapu Borough, Miaoli County. “We have to defend the rice,” Yan recalls saying to the farmer. “He replied ‘People can die, but rice can’t,’” Yan says, meaning that people in Taiwan would not survive without rice.

“What I really want is for intellectuals living in cities to reflect on our stories about life in farm villages,” Yan says. “I want them to understand that important parts of life in those villages are disappearing, things like those meals that farmers share with neighbors. I’d like people to think about why we haven’t cherished those things more.”

Write to Vicky Huang at powery18@mail.gio.gov.tw