Labor Exchange Band (交工樂隊)

30-second overview: Labor Exchange Band (交工樂隊, 1999–2003) was the first Taiwanese rock band to use Hakka eight-instrument music as a counter to globalization. Born from the anti-Meinong dam movement, two albums — We Shall Sing the Mountain Songs (《我等就來唱山歌》) and Night March of the Chrysanthemums (《菊花夜行軍》) — used suona horns, moon lutes, and rock guitars to document the sounds of a dying rural world. The band existed for only four years, yet it changed the way Taiwan listens to the suona.

In the autumn of 1998, Lin Sheng-xiang closed his bank account in Tamsui — the balance: NT$57¹². He boarded a bus home, heading from Taipei back to Meinong — the water reservoir controversy in his hometown would no longer let him pretend nothing was wrong.

That decision bent Taiwan's music history at a corner.

A Village's Battlefield

The Meinong anti-dam movement began in late 1992³. The government planned to build a reservoir in Meinong Township, Kaohsiung County; Tseng Kuei-hai, Chung Yung-feng, and others organized the "Meinong Love the Homeland Association" and began a struggle that would last eight years.

When Lin Sheng-xiang returned to Meinong, this movement had already been fighting for six years. Poet Chung Yung-feng was an old friend of his, and one of the movement's core figures. The two quickly found their division of labor: Chung wrote lyrics, Lin composed music, and together they left records of every node in the movement.

In April 1998, Premier Hsiao Wan-chang announced that the Meinong reservoir would begin construction within a year. Meinong's community members rushed overnight onto buses heading north, preparing to petition outside the Legislative Yuan. Chung Yung-feng sat on that bus, witnessed the farmers' faces, and that night sent Lin Sheng-xiang the first set of lyrics: "Night Bus" (〈夜行巴士〉)².

Setting Out Under the Name "Labor Exchange"

"Jiao-gong" (交工, labor exchange) is an ancient Hakka rural institution: in the busy farming season, neighbors would exchange labor with each other — no money, only labor in kind¹.

In 1999, Lin Sheng-xiang took this concept as the name and reorganized the original "Guanzi Music Pit" (觀子音樂坑) into Labor Exchange Band¹⁶. The band's naming was a declaration: grounded in the rural mutual-aid concept, not designed for the record industry.

The five core members were: Lin Sheng-xiang (vocals, guitar, moon lute), Chen Guan-yu (bass, recording), Chung Cheng-da (percussion), Kuo Jin-tsai (suona), and Chung Yung-feng (lyrics)¹. The five either came from Meinong or had deep familiarity with it; the basis for their collaboration was a social movement, not a market.

Lin Sheng-xiang later recalled: "If it weren't for Yung-feng taking me around Meinong's countryside, seeing the world and participating in all kinds of activities, I wouldn't have had the creative capacity I developed later."⁷

The Suona Replaces the Guitar Hero

Labor Exchange's sound is difficult to define with a single label. They used electric guitar — but also the suona (嗩吶). They had the noise of rock — but at the core, the cadence of Hakka eight-instrument music: gong, drum, suona, moon lute, and three-stringed lute.

Kuo Jin-tsai's suona was not decoration — it was the protagonist. In Taiwan's rock scene, this was almost singular: no other band of that era placed a traditional rural instrument at the center of the stage, and did so not within a "cultural preservation" framework, but in the mode of "speaking about what is happening now."

📝 Curator's Note: Labor Exchange chose to record in an abandoned tobacco barn in Meinong¹. Hakka farming communities once grew large quantities of tobacco leaf; tobacco barns (菸樓) were structures for drying it, and most fell into disuse after the 1990s. Using an abandoned agricultural space to record music about rural decline was not romanticism — it was precision.

The First Microphone: _We Shall Sing the Mountain Songs_

In April 1999, We Shall Sing the Mountain Songs (《我等就來唱山歌》) was released¹. This was the first Taiwanese album sung entirely in Hakka fused with rock.

The album's name draws on a conventional phrase in traditional Hakka folk song, meaning simply: "Let's sing the mountain songs together." This band did not want anyone to be confused about what they were doing.

At the 11th Golden Melody Awards in 2000, this album won two of its four nominations — Best Composer and Best Producer¹. In an era when Taiwan's indie music had almost no space in award ceremonies, this was an unusually clear signal.

Ah-cheng's Road Home: _Night March of the Chrysanthemums_

In September 2001, Night March of the Chrysanthemums (《菊花夜行軍》) was released¹. This is an album about a rural community left behind by its era.

Taiwan joined the WTO in 2001. Imported grain struck domestic agriculture; the rural exodus of people accelerated; and Meinong's chrysanthemum farmers faced a system that hands could not fight⁴. The album's protagonist, "Ah-cheng," is a fictional farmer's child walking back and forth between city and countryside — in the end, only that nighttime road remains.

Night March of the Chrysanthemums was later included in the list of "100 Greatest Taiwanese Pop Albums (1993–2005)"⁵.

Music critic Ma Shih-fang wrote after the album's 15th-anniversary concert: "This album can move the urban intellectual, the Meinong elderly farmer, and the Southeast Asian sister who has married far away all to tears; it can ignite the blood at a social movement event and, like an audiophile disc, be used at a hi-fi shop to test equipment."⁴

📝 Curator's Note: An album of rural protest being inducted into the mainstream cultural institution's list of the hundred greatest was not a foregone conclusion in the Taiwan of 2001. Labor Exchange sang in Hakka about farmers' struggles — the commercial market could barely reach it; the Golden Melody Awards ceremony was one of the few occasions when it could publicly be seen. This contradiction was itself a microcosm of the Taiwan indie music environment of that era.

Thanking the Earth God

In 2002, Night March of the Chrysanthemums won Best Band at the 13th Golden Melody Awards¹.

On stage, Lin Sheng-xiang said that if Labor Exchange Band was a microphone, they hoped to pass it to the farmers and workers in front of them, to tell this society what they had seen and what stories they had heard². Then he thanked the Earth God (土地伯公) — the deity of the Hakka rural faith who guards the land.

It was the first time anyone at the Golden Melody Awards ceremony had thanked the Earth God.

✦ "I never say 'I' wrote these lyrics — I would say 'we' wrote these lyrics together." — Chung Yung-feng⁷

September 1, 2003

Labor Exchange Band disbanded on September 1, 2003¹.

The reason for the disbanding, Lin Sheng-xiang has said, is a secret he will keep forever — because saying it would certainly hurt the other members². No farewell concert, no public statement. The members went their separate ways: Lin Sheng-xiang continued collaborating with Chung Yung-feng, later forming "Sheng-xiang Band" (生祥樂隊), which has since accumulated seven Golden Melody Awards⁶⁸; Chen Guan-yu, Chung Cheng-da, and Kuo Jin-tsai formed "Hakka Band" (好客樂隊)⁶, continuing on the Hakka rock path.

In 2016 — fifteen years after Night March of the Chrysanthemums was released — Lin Sheng-xiang and Chung Yung-feng put out a double-disc remixed edition and held a concert back at the abandoned tobacco barn⁴. Three thousand people attended. Many of the community members who had once boarded that northbound night bus now had white hair. The chrysanthemum fields are still there — but fewer people to tend them.

Chen Shui-bian announced in 2000 that the Meinong dam would not be built during his term³. The movement had won. But the rural world that Labor Exchange Band spent four years documenting continued its decline.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Hakka Music
• Taiwan Campus Folk Song Movement
• Taiwan Indie Music
• History of Rock Music in Taiwan

References