2022 Cross-Strait Chinese Character Festival Held in Taipei

The 2022 Cross-Strait Chinese Character Festival (海峽兩岸漢字節) culminating event was held in Taipei on December 14, 2022. The festival was organized on the mainland side by the Haicang District Propaganda Office of the Chinese Communist Party (中共海滄區委宣傳部), the Haicang District Federation of Literary and Art Circles (海滄區文學藝術界聯合會), and the state-run Xiamen Daily (廈門日報社), published by the CCP Committee in Xiamen, with Taiwan’s Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時傳媒集團) serving as the Taiwan co-organizer. The annual character — “thought/longing” (思) — was announced at the Taipei ceremony, selected from more than 14.7 million votes. Excellence Magazine (卓越雜誌) president Xu Banghao (徐邦浩) participated and the magazine partnered with organizers to publish a companion volume in Taiwan. The festival, established in 2008 and anchored in Haicang since 2014, has been described by organizers as a platform for advancing cross-strait “emotional convergence” (心靈契合). The phrase originates with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who introduced it in 2014 as a central concept in his unification framework, describing the goal of unification as not merely formal but requiring that compatriots on both sides achieve a deeper spiritual and emotional alignment — a formulation that People’s Daily has since elaborated as the ideological basis for using cultural exchange to build Taiwan public acceptance of unification.