[Editor's Note]A Good Show Needs a Big Stage

"A good show needs a big stage." So wrote Hua Jian, a researcher at the Cultural Industry Research Center of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, in his book Culture + Creativity = Wealth. His is a fitting slogan for the increasingly intertwined cultural and creative industries of Taiwan and mainland China.

Formosa's cultural purveyors have long been building a niche for their products on the mainland-an achievement well documented in Taiwan Panorama's reports spanning the last decade.

When the Taiwanese diva Chang Hui-mei traveled to the mainland for a hot-ticket concert tour in 2000, we attended the show in Beijing, writing a report under the headline "From Little Teng to A-Mei: Marking Time in Music." The story probed how Taiwan pop music was unobtrusively creating an opening for cross-strait cultural detente.

In 2002, works by Taiwanese writers Liu Yung and Lin Qingxuan were bestsellers on the mainland. The Performance Workshop's Millennium Teahouse and the Contemporary Legend Theater's The Kingdom of Desire were also big hits in Beijing. Also, the Taiwan architect Deng Kunyan, who had spent 10 years converting some old factories along the banks of the Suzhou River into modern architectural design studios, brought his post-modernist aesthetics and methodology from Taipei to Shanghai, rousing that mainland city from its architectural slumber and becoming a living legend in the process.

Our 2003 report "Rewriting the Book-Publishing in Cultural Greater China" discussed competition and cooperation between the publishing industries in Taiwan and mainland China. A few years later, another article would look at how Taiwan's television and film industry had entered into joint cross-strait productions aimed at creating an entertainment industry that could serve the worldwide Chinese-speaking community.

The first few pioneers from Taiwan have turned into colonies of cultural and creative soldier ants. The newer arrivals view the mainland as a place to look for expanded business opportunities. So how big is the market for cultural products on mainland China?

At the cutting edge is Shanghai, the mainland's window on the world. In step with the advance of the market economy and technological development, Shanghai's industrial structure has undergone a major transformation. Agriculture's share of the city's economy is approaching zero. Meanwhile, the manufacturing sector has stabilized, demonstrating neither marked growth nor decline. But in 2010, the cultural and creative sector accounted for 10% of the metropolis' GDP.

With its collision of cultures and dynamic cross-fertilization, Shanghai, once known as Asia's fashion capital and the Paris of the Orient, has all the prerequisites for a thriving creative economy. By the end of 2010, Shanghai had already established 89 industrial parks devoted to cultural and creative industries, which had attracted over 8000 firms. About 60% of these cultural and creative industry parks make use of old factories, warehouses and other industrial relics-providing still more evidence of the city's industrial transformation.

Although the mainland market is huge, Taiwanese companies have to negotiate numerous pitfalls there. How can creativity be protected? Liuligongfang and Franz, both early arrivals, note that mainland knockoffs of their products have posed little threat, largely because their own firms' design sensibilities and techniques are so far superior to those of their mainland imitators. The Taiwanese do indeed hold some big advantages.

Author Jan Hung-Tze, a keen trend watcher, pointed out several years ago that Taiwan's publishing, pop-music and gaming industries were highly competitive and should be given pride of place in the emerging creative economy. Bearing out those predictions, YAOX Edutainment won fame for its hugely popular multimedia work River of Wisdom at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. The firm's success has greatly encouraged those following behind it in the digital content industry.

"In Taiwan, developing creative industries is feasible, worthwhile, and prudent," wrote Jan, because Taiwan, like Hollywood, has the ability "to sell a beautiful lifestyle."

A good life comes from the freedom to be different. This issue also contains stories about reading disabilities and Taiwan's declining marriage rate among women. We hope that students with difficulties reading, as well as people who are single by choice or by circumstance, will all find their own ways to live their lives and find happiness.