Ever since Taiwan began permitting mainland Chinese students and tourists to study and travel on our island, a steady stream of articles praising Taiwanese honesty, warmth, and enthusiasm for offering directions has been appearing in the mainland and Taiwanese press.

In fact, in July Guangzhou’s New Weekly devoted 150,000 words and more than 200 pages to describing the wonderful qualities of Taiwan’s people. The magazine that in August 1998 called Taipei “the strangest of cities,” now rhapsodizes: “We [mainland Chinese] find Taipei’s streets familiar and amiable. The distant other we imagined is in reality a next-door neighbor.”

For the issue, New Weekly sent its entire staff of 70 people to Taiwan to travel and conduct interviews. Riffing on the name of Taipei’s most prominent landmark, they produced pieces on “101 Things You Need to Know about Taiwanese,” “101 Things You Have to Experience in Taiwan,” and “101 Reasons to Love and Hate Taiwan.” The staff also invited a number of mainlanders who visit the island regularly to fill out the portrait with their impressions of Taiwan.

As one article puts it, “It’s not that Taiwanese don’t have troubles and concerns. It’s just that on this little island of 30,000-odd square kilometers, you can always find someone living in the moment, someone helping others.”

In the mainland’s efforts to understand Taiwan, and our own attempts to get to know the mainland, the media is the medium.

Taiwan Panorama writers have visited the mainland in every year since cross-strait exchanges were liberalized in the early 1990s, seeking a better grasp of our neighbor. But the mainland is truly vast. Able to explore only a few cities or a single topic per visit, we have been consistently struck by how hard it is to take in the whole picture.

For our current issue, our writer chose to examine Taiwanese agribusinesses on Hainan because agriculture is an often overlooked and very fragile aspect of cross-strait trade and cultural exchanges. Our interviews there revealed that many Taiwanese agribusinesses have been operating on Hainan for more than a decade. In fact, at the time these companies first established their Hainan operations, leasing land was so inexpensive that many were able to put tens of thousands of hectares in cultivation and earn a fortune. But the Hainan government’s more recent plans call for turning the island into an international tourism destination. This is raising the prospect of rapid changes to land policy that could potentially compel Taiwanese to shut down their farms and come home. Should they give up? Many are giving the question careful thought.

New Weekly devotes each issue to the discussion of a single topic, an approach that allows interested readers to really delve into the subject.

Taiwan’s new mini-magazines take just the opposite approach. Small, with limited funds, and with staffs that average just three people, these mini-mags address completely inconsequential topics, such as breakfast or shopping, with some of their articles seeming to be nothing more than daily activity logs. Trivial and personal, they have become very popular. Chan Wei-hsiung, an important figure in the mini-mag movement, explains that Taiwanese society is in the process of changing from a collective entity into something more atomized, with the result that inherent differences between individuals are beginning to gain respect and readers are becoming more able to be themselves. As Huang Wei­rong, editor-in-chief of C’est si bon, puts it, each mini-mag issue represents a foray into a new subject and the establishment of new friendships.

Taiwan Panorama is a much more comprehensive publication, one that covers virtually everything under the sun in order to better display the diversity of contemporary Taiwan. This month’s issue is a case in point, with articles on mini-mags, radio-controlled model vehicles, and the growing worldwide popularity of Taiwanese boba tea.