Despite the best efforts of local leaders, and the redirection of central-government spending to Taiwan’s south, it sometimes feels as if Pingtung County is sinking into irrelevance.
Between 1985 and this year, the number of people living there fell by nearly an eighth to 801,000. Pingtung residents now account for less than 3.5 percent of Taiwan’s population, compared to 4.7 percent in the early 1980s. Owing to its shrinking electorate, the county was stripped of one of its three legislative seats before the 2020 election.
Pingtung natives express their pessimism via an idiom: “At the end of the line, all is