Promoting Taiwan through its Food

BY MARK CALTONHILL

Learning from the example of Korea and Thailand, the government is turning to “gastrodiplomacy” to raise
Taiwan’s international prominence.

PHOTO: TOURISM BUREAU

In October 2009, the People’s Republic of China celebrated the 60th birthday of the Communist Party’s takeover of the world’s most populous state with its largest ever military parade down Chang’an Avenue in Beijing. Said to cost in excess of US$40 million, it featured the PRC’s latest innovations in fighter aircraft, battle tanks, nuclear missiles, and PLA soldiers bearing their newest rifles and machine guns.

In October this year, Taiwan will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China with tea and cakes.

ROC President Ma Ying-jeou, the latest convert to the allure of “soft power,” announced that this country will commemorate its centenary with a display of culture and not a parade of arms. In particular, the president made “taking Taiwan’s food to the world a policy priority,” the head of the Government Information Office’s Audio-Visual Materials Department, Pedro Yuan, said at the October 2010 premiere of “All in Good Taste: Savor the Flavors of Taiwan.”

This 25-minute film, to be shown by Taiwan’s representative offices abroad at food fairs, airport tasting booths, and tea ceremonies, is the GIO’s contribution to promoting the country through gastrodiplomacy. Still in its infancy compared to Thailand’s “Global Thai” program, South Korea’s “Kimchidiplomacy,” and even a plan by the North Korean Workers’ Party to open restaurants in the West, Taiwan’s campaign has had mixed responses so far. “Some Polish people assume that shrimps are worms!” a staffer at Taiwan’s Warsaw office said, on condition of anonymity, adding: “It is a problem that many dishes in Taiwan are made of seafood. Some people said that seaweed has the strange taste of the sea.”

“And it seems Western people don’t like black food. They refused to try our sesame dessert, saying it looked like tar. Fortunately, Polish people still enjoy drinking tea. But it is hard to get tea and ingredients for Taiwanese dishes, so promoting our cuisine in Europe is difficult. Colleagues assigned to the U.S. are far more fortunate, because there are a larger number of Taiwanese immigrants there, so ingredients are more accessible.”

Most embassy staffers contacted were not even aware that their government had launched a gastrodiplomacy program. But Taiwan’s cuisine has long been seen as one of the country’s best selling points, and so presenting it has always been used as an accompaniment to other ROC diplomatic efforts.

Next month the Hong Kong office of the GIO is hosting a visit by food writer Han Liang-lu (韓良露) in a “Springrolls for Springtime” event. But this is just the latest in an annual series; in 2010, for example, it organized a “Tea and Music” occasion. Similarly, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) held a “Taiwanese Food and Flower Culture Event” in London in November 2010 to jointly promote gastrodiplomacy and the Taipei International Flora Expo.

The general impression of the foot soldiers of diplomacy, however, is that business as usual predominates. One said, also requesting anonymity, “The government's food-promotion policy is targeting mainland China and Southeast Asian countries, aiming to help local brands such as 85 Degrees C to expand,” referring to Taiwan’s largest and fast-growing coffee-shop chain.

Officially, the NT$1.1 billion (US$38 million), four-year program will include hosting international food festivals, sponsoring Taiwanese chefs to participate in overseas cooking competitions, setting up promotional shops and booths, establishing a foundation to research ways to promote Taiwan’s culinary soft power, and supporting Taiwanese restaurants trying to set up abroad.

At present, few foreigners are even aware that there are Taiwanese restaurants in cities abroad or know anything about the unique features of Taiwan’s cuisine. Visitors to TAITRA’s London event, for example, were treated to a live cooking instruction by Chef Peng of the Hunan Restaurant (which despite being named after a Chinese province is a Taiwanese restaurant) in the U.K. capital, and also sampled traditional side dishes provided by Leong’s Legend, another Taiwanese restaurant. The GIO staffer said diners commented favorably that the food was lighter and less greasy than they were used to at Chinese restaurants in the Soho district.

The government hopes that its investment will result in the opening of 3,500 new restaurants (both in Taiwan and overseas), with private investors matching its dollars almost two for one. No doubt it has closely studied the experience of Thailand, which according to The Economist was the pioneer of gastrodiplomacy. Noting that eating in restaurants is often the only contact many people have with foreign cultures, the authorities in Bangkok concluded that the spread of Thai restaurants would help deepen relations with other countries and even persuade more people to visit Thailand.

But there are two key differences between the two countries. First, there were already around 5,500 Thai restaurants around the world before the Global Thai program was launched in 2002, when the Bangkok authorities set a target of increasing that number by 3,500 to 8,000. Second, Thailand long ago became a tourist Mecca for visitors from around the world, whereas the majority of Taiwan’s visitors come primarily for reasons other than tourism and hail mainly from neighboring East Asian nations, such as Japan, Hong Kong, China, and South Korea.

On the plus side, observes Paul Rockower in a paper entitled Branding Taiwan Through Gastrodiplomacy, “Taiwan has a reputation as a premier foodie paradise. Ask anyone who has been to the island, and the first words that come out are related to its gastronomic treats.” An American gastronomist and specialist in public diplomacy, Rockower was recently a visiting fellow in Taipei at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy.  

The bad news for local entrepreneurs thinking of investing in a Taiwan-themed restaurant in Washington, London, or Tokyo is that Rockower’s main examples of these treats are less suitable for being sampled in high-profit luxury surroundings than at the “colorful night markets for which the island is famous.” The examples he cites include stinky tofu, kong-xin cai (空心菜; water spinach), and beef noodle soup, followed by chua-bing (挫冰; shaved ice with toppings) and washed down with pearl milk “bubble” tea.

The latter, he laments, is becoming popular around the world without drinkers knowing that it was originally a Taiwanese innovation. Rockower has suggested that the Taiwan government create an International Pearl Milk Tea Day to attract thousands of gourmet tourists to Taiwan, and a “traveling night market” to take Taiwan’s specialties to Washington, Los Angeles, and fairs and rodeos in the American heartland.

GIO officials seem to agree with him. Peanut brittle from Kinmen, brown-sugar cake from Penghu, and pineapple cake from Taichung were served at the launch of the four-year program, under the title of “All in Good Taste: Savor the Flavors of Taiwan.” Furthermore, in a national survey to identify the island’s most popular foods, also held by the GIO last year, 8,117 people voting online picked stinky tofu, oyster omelets, braised meat rice, and bubble tea. But before rushing to assume that Taiwanese people are gastrinomically low-brow, one should know the back story: Voters were given four very limited choices, a) the tofu or blood pudding, b) omelet or meat balls, c) ground meat-topped rice or steamed buns, and d) bubble tea or mango on shaved rice.

This is a shame. As residents of Taiwan know very well, the country has a great variety and high standard of restaurants. Night markets are merely the above-water part of the island’s culinary iceberg; seeing the other nine-tenths requires a bit more effort.

Rockower is probably wrong when he repeats the story that Chiang Kai-shek and his generals and ministers selected many of China’s master chefs and brought them over when they fled across the Taiwan Strait in 1949. And he is certainly wrong in suggesting that a second wave of mainland chefs arrived in the 1960s and '70s fleeing a Communist clampdown on “bourgeois” restaurants. This argument represents a top-down approach to the handing down of cooking skills and does not fit the facts. Moreover it looks at history through the eyes of contemporary Taiwan, where many young people cannot cook an egg and star chefs have their own television shows. Mainland immigrants were not like this, and cooking has always been a popular craft engaged in by the many rather than an art preciously practiced by a few.

But it is true that the Republican government’s defeat in the Chinese Civil War and the relocation of a million or so people from all areas of China brought a wide variety of cuisines to Taiwan. These were added to the island’s long history of Fujian, Hakka and aboriginal cooking, as well as the more recent introduction of Japanese food. Six decades on, this wide range of foods still exists; the annual appearance of this publication attests to that complexity.

It would be good to see Taiwan’s government find some way to promote these non-snack dishes too.