In the last few years, a new wave of white-collar workers has arrived, workers who understand the advantages of getting to a place early. These workers have come from as far away as Taipei, the island's political and economic center. What is it about Kaohsiung that attracts them? And what kinds of resources can they bring to the city?
Wrapped up in a heavy coat, Ni Pei-pei boards a plane bound for Kaohsiung at Taipei's Sung Shan airport after lunch one afternoon. Forty minutes later she has said good-bye to cold and dismal Taipei and arrived in sunny Kaohsiung.
"It's strange, but when I began coming to Kaohsiung to work, the airlines suddenly started adding a lot more north-south flights," says Ni as she sheds her big coat. Now wearing just a light blouse, she jokes that these flights were added just for her benefit. In fact, now there is a great deal of air traffic between Taipei and Kaohsiung. With an average of one flight every 10 minutes, getting a flight is easier than catching a bus in Taipei.
Ni, who used to host a radio show, founded her own radio station, Broadcast Entertainment South Taiwan (BEST), targeted at white collar workers and the youth audience in Kaohsiung, three years ago. But her family and a portion of her work remain in Taipei, forcing her to make one or two trips a week between the two cities, flying back and forth like some sort of migratory bird.
A new market
Prompting her to begin her journeys to Kaohsiung was the opening up of the domestic airwaves to new private radio stations in 1993. As there were already several strong, well-established stations, including Broadcast Corporation of China (BCC) and ICRT, as well as a horde of new stations, which included Voice of Taipei (VOT) and UFO, crowded together in the northern part of the island, competition was fierce. In contrast, for a long time Kaohsiung had only had a small number of AM stations, and thus was the new market for expansion.
Although Tatsung Broadcasting and Happy Broadcasting have also entered the market, there nonetheless has been good news at the not-yet-two-year-old BEST: For this year's Lunar New Year's holiday, Ni gave employees red "hong bao" stuffed thick with cash for their year-end bonuses.
"I was born and bred in Taipei; I'm Taipei through and through. When I first came to Kaohsiung, I had no resources like a network of people or familiarity with the market to draw on," says Ni. In the earliest stages of starting up her station, she didn't even have an office and interviewed people for jobs in her hotel room. When she thinks back to that time and compares it to the present (the station now has more than 70 employees), she feels she has accomplished something.
New opportunities and new markets are the lures bringing white-collar workers south to Kaohsiung.
The Kaohsiung area's economy has traditionally been based principally upon manufacturing, with most workers tending to be blue-collar. According to statistics from the Kaohsiung Department of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, these blue-collar workers make up 70%~80% of the workforce. Professionals, elected representatives, entrepreneurs and management personnel together make up less than 15% of the workforce.
In the last few years, the financial, service, media and academic fields have all begun to grow and there has been sharp growth in both the demand for goods and the demand for talented people. It really is beginning to look like a "New World," ripe for development.
"On the other hand, Taipei is saturated with white-collar workers," says Wang Ming-shen, dean of the Institute of Public Affairs Management (IPAM) at Sun Yat-sen University. By examining employment data, he has found that an ad for a marketing position in Taipei brings in ten applicants. From this data, the level of competition is apparent.
A public opinion poll taken by this magazine in the greater Taipei area also revealed that work, including the availability of jobs and potential for advancement, was the most important factor for people considering whether or not to move.
Talent from the north
Wang himself is an example. When he was returning to Taiwan after completing his studies in the US in 1987, he had two offers of teaching positions. One of these was at Taipei's Chengchi University, while the other was at Kaohsiung's Sun Yat-sen University. After considering the opportunities for advancement, he chose the job in the south.
"Though Taipei is Taiwan's academic and information center, the competition is tough there and it's not easy to get resources for research," he says. Given that Sun Yat-sen University is Kaohsiung's only national university, with the school and the government both having the ambition of creating a stronger academic environment in the south, resources would certainly pour in.
The situation developed as he had predicted, and now, though not yet 40 years old, he is already a full professor and runs the IPAM. In 1994, he also established the Kaohsiung Metropolitan Development Fund, which has won the full support of the city government. The fund gives him the opportunity to test the theories of city management he studied. He has now put down roots in Kaohsiung, having bought a house and begun to raise a family there. He says, "Kaohsiung's housing prices are about 30% lower than those in Taipei. Had I remained in Taipei, I probably still wouldn't be able to buy an apartment!"
In addition to the media and academia, service industries have also recognized the city's potential. Chou Chao-kuo, secretary of Kaohsiung's Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (ASME), feels that although the city doesn't lack for financial institutions to serve local industry, most are branches of firms from the north. Some marketing companies also view their Kaohsiung offices as just another branch. He says that there are few people who put real effort into the city's financial services market.
"This has meant that the city's weighting of financial, administrative, marketing and securities businesses has been very low," says Chou. Among the nearly 600 members of the Kaohsiung ASME, these industries make up fewer than 5%. He says that the city's manufacturers have always been more focused on production. Now, however, many people have realized that to upgrade industries and strengthen organizations, financing, management and marketing must be improved. Therefore, demand for these kinds of people and services has shot up.
Yangtze and Co., an accounting firm which is based in Taichung, saw opportunity in Kaohsiung's lack of trained accountants. Two-and-a-half years ago, the company set up an office in the city. Wang Chin-hsiang, an accountant with the firm, explains that at the end of 1995 the government revised regulations for listing on the Over-the-counter (OTC) stock market. The government lowered the requirements on a company's return-on-investment, growth rate and profitability, making it easier for companies to list and giving SMEs an opportunity to list. A listed company can use the stock market to raise capital, allowing it to expand the scale of its operations and improve its structure, benefiting its overall competitiveness. "This provided a direct stimulus to reform-minded local firms, and to demand for accounting, management and data processing people," says Wang.
"In the past, Kaohsiung did nothing to foster the development of these kinds of professionals," he says. For example, in the past, the city's universities didn't have any kind of finance departments. It was just in the last couple of years, after Kaohsiung Polytechnic Institute became I-shou University, that such a department was finally established. But so far, it hasn't graduated any students. "You just can't find people locally, so you must source people from the north and the center of the island."
Big visions wanting out
Broadcasting and public relations are also hot in the city now. Tsui Ko-mei, manager of Experts Communication, graduated from Taipei's Chengchi University 11 years ago. When a group of her friends decided to remain in Taipei to work after graduation, she bucked the trend, instead returning to Kaohsiung. After working for a few years as a local reporter, she went abroad to study, getting a master's degree in political science. And when she returned to Taiwan, she also returned to Kaohsiung. "I like to drive fast and since Kaohsiung's roads are big and wide, you can drive faster," says Tsui, who drives an imported Ford TX5.
She admits, however, that having studied political science there were fewer job opportunities in Kaohsiung than there would have been in Taipei. That being the case, she chose to work for herself. Three years ago, she and a friend put together NT$500,000 and started a broadcasting company which does public relations, puts on events, shoots TV footage and creates ads. They had no idea that they were opening up virgin territory.
"My company doesn't have a sales staff. We don't need to go out and get clients. All of our business comes through friends or clients who seek us out on their own." Tsui says that her clients range from the Kaohsiung City Government, the tax bureau and the Science and Handicrafts Museum to private entities such as clubs, firms and even political candidates. "This pie is huge. We're not afraid of not having enough, but of not being able to finish what's on our plate."
Other people have come to Kaohsiung because of the potential of its consumer market. With the opening of the domestic telecommunications market, TransAsia Telecommunications won the right to operate a cellular telephone business in southern Taiwan. The company established its headquarters in Kaohsiung but couldn't find a marketing manager. Eventually, the company had to go through a head hunter which found them Sean Hsieh in Taipei. Hsieh had worked as a sales strategist at an advertising firm and as a marketing strategist at a producer of physical education products before he was hired to be TransAsia's marketing manager.
The 34-year-old Hsieh had lived in Taipei for his entire life and had almost no experience of southern Taiwan. He says that both the future prospects of the telecom industry and the management position that TransAsia offered him made his heart skip a beat, "but pulling up my roots in Taipei to move to Kaohsiung meant big changes in my life."
It was his wife Kuo Sheng-nan's expression of her complete support for his changing his workplace to Kaohsiung that ended his hesitation. She felt that it would help him break through a career bottleneck and thus encouraged him to make the move.
"Three months after I came down here, I was certain I had made the right choice." Hsieh says that although he is entering a new field which is taking time and effort to learn, he's already begun to appreciate that the city's future business prospects and outlook are much greater than those of Taipei. "Today's trailblazers will reap the greatest rewards in the future."
Kuo, who is still working at Citibank in Taipei, is also considering taking the opportunity to apply for a transfer to the bank's Kaohsiung branch. "I often come down to Kaoshiung on my days off and I've realized that it's a nice place to live. The climate is good, there's a lot of space and it moves at a leisurely pace." She says that right now they are staying with friends, but they've bought a car. On holidays they make outings around Kaohsiung, driving the scenic Southern Cross-island Highway and to the resort town of Kenting. All of southern Taiwan has opened up before them in a way they never expected.
Salmon returning to their birthplace
In the midst of this wave of immigration to Kaohsiung, there is a group for whom it is in fact a homecoming. These people were originally from Kaohsiung, but had moved to other cities to work. Now that job or business opportunities have begun to appear in Kaohsiung, they are going back, like salmon returning to their birthplace.
"It isn't that Kaohsiung lacks local talent. It's just that job opportunities were limited and so these people moved elsewhere," says Joe Lin, who runs Hong Chung Culture and Entertainment, a bookstore and movie theater chain. Lin feels that in the past, Kaohsiung's cultural side was underdeveloped. This situation forced many Kaohsiungites who studied humanities at college to move away from the city to find work. They usually wound up in Taipei.
The 37-year-old Lin was himself born in Kaohsiung, but after graduating from Taipei's World College of Journalism and Communications, he, like most of his classmates, stayed in Taipei to work. He remained in Taipei until the company he worked for, Kuang Tung Publishing, opened a store in Kaohsiung in 1987. He says that in the last ten years, 60%~70% of his Kaohsiung classmates and friends of his generation have found work or opened businesses allowing them to return.
Lin uses the consumer market to illustrate the changes that have come about within the city's middle class and intelligentsia. "Years ago, most of a bookstore's best-sellers were either feel-good/motivational books or books useful in daily life, like cookbooks. In the last few years, the best selling books have involved finance, management, data processing and culture. What's hot here is almost keeping pace with Taipei," he says.
Movies are also an indicator. Over the last few years, his theater has often promoted art films. Ticket sales have been good, indicating that the city's "consumption" of art is becoming more diverse. This has made Lin more willing to invest in this area. He recently selected a few movies by the famed Iranian director Kiarostami Abbas for an Abbas film exhibition that he is organizing.
For Kaohsiung, long known as the "Industrial City" and even "Taiwan's Factory," this wave of white-collar workers are really taking it in a new direction. And they are now viewed as being "productive, creative, high-quality personnel resources."
They have brought with them professional skills and a portion of Taipei's resources. When Ni made the move to Kaohsiung and set up a radio station on her own, she relied on her more than 20 years of radio experience. Her broad network of entertainment industry contacts was also useful to her in running the station.
On average, her station puts on some kind of event such as a charity event, a fan club activity or a listeners' club activity every three days, helping the station to quickly build up a young audience. At the end of 1996, she invited a number of big pop stars to a New Year's Eve concert which she sponsored. The concert attracted an audience of 60,000. Last year, she did it again, and this time the audience swelled to 90,000.
"I don't consider Kaohsiung a part of the rural south. And I don't think of it as being second to Taipei," says Ni. Instead, she views it as an international city and plans programs with a national audience in mind. She doesn't deny that the north and south are different, but "it's just a difference of rhythm and style."
Not always smooth sailing
But these northerners don't win every battle.
"The southerners still retain a lot of the old rural-style hospitality. When they talk business with you, they don't jump right to the point. First, they sit down, make some tea and chat with you, checking out what kind of person you are," says Chou Chao-kuo, who moved from the north to the south to work in 1989. He goes on to say that this kind of emphasis on relationships, this style of becoming friends before doing business, is hard to accept for northerners, who emphasize efficiency and tend to immediately talk of profits and losses.
Another problem for entrepreneurs and managers who have set up shop in Kaohsiung is that in their efforts to be successful in the city, they are often like brilliant generals without any men to command.
Take Sean Hsieh, for example. His marketing planning group was supposed to have a staff of 13, but after nearly six months of running ads in local newspapers, they still didn't have all the people they wanted.
Even Tsui, who is from the city and has a more solid network of contacts, hasn't been able to avoid this problem. Two months ago, she was looking for planning staff. After spending more than NT$20,000 to run ads in the papers for a week, only four people responded, none of whom had the qualifications she was looking for. She then went to a personnel resources page on the Internet where she found more than 20 people of the sort she was looking for based in Taipei, but none based in Kaohsiung.
It's no wonder that this is the case when most of Taipei's college and university graduates hope to remain in Taipei and work for a couple of years to pick up some experience. People feel there are fewer opportunities to hone their skills in Kaohsiung. If you are going to fill up these entry-level white-collar positions, you are going to have to rely on graduates from related departments of southern colleges and universities. And, obviously, this is not a quick solution.
Working is easy, but immigrating. . .
Even though opportunity abounds in Kaohsiung, not all of this wave of white-collar workers considers it a place to settle down and so are not included in census figures as new residents.
"Kaohsiung's living environment is obviously not up to the standards of the middle and northern parts of the island in such respects as air and water quality and cultural atmosphere," says Wang Chin-hsiang, who spends five days a week in the city but makes his home in Taichung. This is the fundamental obstacle slowing immigration to the city.
In the case of double income families, there is the question as to whether the spouse's job opportunities are equally exciting. This is a difficult problem, and the lack of such opportunities has led to many couples living apart.
Kuo Sheng-nan's reason for spending half a year living apart from her husband rather than going with him down to Kaohsiung is that she has seen some people come back from Kaohsiung defeated. "A friend quit her job and went down to Kaohsiung with her husband. She couldn't find a job there equivalent to what she'd had in Taipei, so she remained at home and unemployed, becoming more and more listless." Kuo says that some of her co-workers who were transferred down south to work at the Kaohsiung branch of Citibank have also recently asked to be transferred back to Taipei because they couldn't get used to Kaohsiung.
Some people, on the other hand, just can't let go of the resources available to them in northern and central Taiwan. Ni uses her Taipei office as an information gathering and planning center which adds to the resources available to BEST. She doesn't have an apartment in Kaohsiung, instead choosing to stay in a hotel for the two or three days she spends in Kaohsiung every week. She says, "At a hotel you're free to come and go and you have people to serve you. It's convenient and means I have less to deal with."
"The island's transportation network is really convenient and pervasive now and modern people are more independent, too. They can handle this kind of traveling lifestyle," says Lin, who for two years made the north-south commute for his book business. He thinks that many people now think of the whole of Taiwan as their stomping grounds. They move back and forth between north and south freely. He himself is an example. Even though he has now settled in Kaohsiung, he still often comes up to Taipei to negotiate for movies and such.
It can't be denied that those white-collar workers who first recognized Kaohsiung's potential have more of the "can-do" attitude and the trailblazer's spirit. They make good use of their resources and can overcome the problems of distance. But what the city itself wants is more than just flocks of migratory birds which avail themselves of its opportunities before flying on.
Underneath the glitter
Feeling that he'd seen all there was to see of extravagance, writer Yu Kwang-chung left Hong Kong's Chinese University 13 years ago. He came to Sun Yat-sen University and fell in love with Kaohsiung's open spaces. Sun Yat-sen University backs up against Wanshou Mountain and looks down on Hsitzuwan Beach. Yu feels, "The sea is broad and straight, extending like a never-ending road, while the sky is like a window that is forever open." The South's pastoral scenery also provided him with abundant topics for his writing; his moment's perch has become a permanent nest.
Residents of the city view him as a treasured asset. In addition to his teaching work, he sponsors literary events, gives lectures, writes poems for the national parks and when the city government promotes Kaohsiung, he feels obligated to help by filming ads and writing materials for them.
"Because there are few literary people in Kaohsiung, I stand out and people tend to ask more of me." Yu says that he has always cared for the earth, society and culture. And he knows that with his little bit of fame, when there are local cultural promotion events, the need for him is a little greater. People hope that he will do a little more than most people for the city by attending such events and fostering the growth of the local "literary atmosphere." So, to avoid disappointing the city's people, he accepts almost any kind of request asking him to do something for the city.
But he's not the only one involved. His wife also spends her time acting as a docent at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. "She works harder than I do. One minute, it's western painting, the next, it's oil painting, then it's sculpture. . . . She's studied them all just to guide and explain things. She's enthusiastic, and studies every day," says Yu.
Yu has not only praised Kaohsiung in his poetry and expressed his concern for the city, but has also criticized some of its bad points. He has written one unsentimental poem satirizing the special privileges and land destruction that accompany the building of golf courses:
Suddenly
Spreading over one hectare then another of private land
Spreading over the rezoned and stolen public land
Spreading over the festering holes the unbridled development the unbridled construction of the wasteland
Spreading over the pollution and the fishless rivers
Spreading over the suffocating and birdless atmosphere
Spreading over the acrid stink of corpses corpses corpses
64 astonished bodies, over spread
Law-breaking rule-breaking burning island, over spread
This greedy island village of special privilege, one little white ball
From today yesterday tomorrow every day the same ridiculous headlines
Yu says, "Since coming to Kaohsiung, I've written more poems of social criticism. I love Kaohsiung's good points, and I criticize its bad ones."
Returnees? People passing through?
"The middle-class, white-collar population has more ability to act and to band together, so they are always used as an indicator of a city's development." Wang Ming-shen says that looking at most cities' experience of development, it reflects the quality of the social, political, literary and artistic environments. These factors most likely affect a city's ability to continuously develop.
According to Wang's research, if white-collar workers or workers in the prime of their lives can't flourish, then a "brain drain" is likely to occur. "It makes it difficult for productivity and consumption to increase, leads to sudden enthusiams for issues that fizzle out before anything is done, keeps demands on the government to implement policies low and means that there is little supervision of the government. It also results in insufficient cultural diversity, self-awareness and independence in the society." Wang says that this is just the problem Kaohsiung is facing in its development.
What Kaohsiung needs is people who will put down deep roots and spread thick branches, not just great numbers of commuters flying in and out.
p.24
The busy air traffic between Taipei and Kaohsiung suggests that the distance between them is lessening. (photo by Diago Chiu)
p.26
Setting their sights on Kaohsiung's consumer power, many corporations are now investing there, sparking a demand for people in the service industry. (photo by Diago Chiu)
p.27
The well-known broadcaster Ni Pei-pei left Taipei to found BEST in Kaohsiung. This surprised a lot of people, but they are now envious of her success. (photo by Diago Chiu)
p.28
TransAsia marketing director Sean Hsieh (first at left) came to Kaohsiung half a year ago feeling like a pioneer. Aiming to develop the telecom market in southern Taiwan, he has gathered a group of equally dedicated colleagues around him.
p.29
Tsui Ko-mei (center), who started her company, Experts Communications, from scratch, has been in the vanguard of firms exploiting the virgin territory of advertising and PR in Kaohsiung. (photo by Diago Chiu)
p.30
The Kaohsiung Municipal Government is hoping to attract more high-quality white-collar workers to live in the city. If they put down roots there, it will help raise the city's cultural standards.
p.31
Yu Kwang-chung, a well-known poet and a professor of foreign languages at Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, and his wife have lived in Kaohsiung since 1985. He is seen as one of the city's most precious "cultural assets."
p.33
"The extends like a never-ending highway, while the sky is like a window that is forever open." With such a sea and sky, can Kaohsiung convince those who originally were "just passing through" to stick around and make it home?
TransAsia marketing director Sean Hsieh （first at left） came to Kaohsiung half a year ago feeling like a pioneer. Aiming to develop the telecom market in southern Taiwan, he has gathered a group of equally dedicated colleagues around him.
Tsui Ko-mei （center）, who started her company, Experts Communications, f rom scratch, has been in the vanguard of firms exploiting the virgin territory of advertising and PR in Kaohsiung. （photo by Diago Chiu）
The Kaohsiung Municipal Government is hoping to attract more high-quality white-collar workers to live in the city. If they put down roots there, it will help raise the city's cultural standards.
"The extends like a never-ending highway, while the sky is like a window that is forever open." With such a sea and sky, can Kaohsiung convince those who originally were "just passing through" to stick around and make it home?
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