Every year, Taiwan’s government puts €35 into the pocket of every young resident and tells them to go experience their culture. What looks like a simple subsidy is, on closer inspection, something considerably more deliberate.
Key takeaways:
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Taiwan’s Culture Points program provides annual digital vouchers to residents aged 13 to 22, designed to sustain domestic cultural industries and anchor younger generations in Taiwan’s cultural ecosystem.
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The program’s core innovation lies in its behavioral design. Targeted incentives and the exclusion of digital platforms actively steer consumption toward specific forms of cultural participation rather than simply subsidizing existing habits.
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While uptake and spending have been consistently high, the key question is whether these effects persist beyond the subsidy period, determining whether Culture Points function as a temporary stimulus or a durable behavioral policy tool.
A voucher with an agenda
In January 2024, Taiwan’s then-Premier Chen Chien-jen stood at a press conference and described culture as the “soul” of the nation that “helps shape national identity.” The occasion was yet another expansion of Culture Points, Taiwan’s national youth cultural voucher program. The remark was unusually candid. Most governments introduce cultural subsidies in the language of access and participation. Taiwan frames its scheme as a battle for the cultural identity of young Taiwanese in a world increasingly shaped by global streaming services and Chinese social media platforms.
If young Taiwanese spend their discretionary cultural attention and money on internationally or Chinese-produced content rather than on domestically rooted cultural production, Taiwan’s independent bookshops, live music venues, and film industry will gradually lose the audience that sustains them commercially, and the narratives most available to young Taiwanese will shift accordingly.
Culture Points is administered by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. Each eligible resident receives NT$1,200 (roughly €35) annually into a dedicated smartphone application. It can be spent at designated venues across Taiwan, including independent bookshops, record stores, live music venues, performing arts halls, cultural parks, artisan markets, museums, and cinemas screening domestically produced Taiwanese films. The money expires at the end of each calendar year, cannot be transferred, and cannot be exchanged for cash.
The program launched in June 2023 for residents aged 18–21. It has since been expanded in three stages. In 2024, eligibility was extended to individuals aged 16 to 22. In 2025, children aged 13 to 15 were included, with an annual allocation of NT$600 (around €16) each. Since January 1, all residents aged 13 to 22 have received the full NT$1,200 (€35), creating a ten-year eligibility window spanning early adolescence to early adulthood.
How the points actually work
The mechanics matter because they reveal what the program is designed to achieve. Redeeming Culture Points at an eligible venue is straightforward. Users open the Ministry of Culture application, scan the venue’s QR code, and confirm the transaction. For the small number of eligible participants without smartphones, paper-based QR codes are issued upon request.
Less immediately apparent is that the program does not treat all eligible venues equally. Purchases at independent bookshops generate a 50% bonus, meaning that a NT$200 book (€5,4) costs NT$133 (€3,6) when paid with Culture Points. This strategic subsidy makes buying physical books locally significantly cheaper than purchasing them through dominant online retailers and international e-commerce platforms (such as Amazon or the Chinese giant Taobao), which typically attract youth through aggressive discount wars.
The Ministry of Culture deliberately designed this 50% incentive to make independent bookshops the highest-value use of the voucher. This stems from the government’s recognition of independent bookstores not merely as retail spaces, but as critical cultural infrastructure. In Taiwan, independent bookshops serve as vital hubs for civil society, frequently hosting community discussions, promoting local authors, and fostering democratic discourse. By heavily subsidizing them, the state actively protects these vulnerable cultural spaces from being hollowed out by digital globalization, ensuring they remain viable platforms for Taiwanese civic engagement.
Cinema carries its own incentive structure. When multiple participants purchase tickets to a Taiwanese film simultaneously using Culture Points, each receives 100 bonus points. When four friends attend a film together, each receives an additional NT$100 (€2,7), effectively rewarding the social dimension of collective cinema attendance. The program does not provide an equivalent incentive for foreign films. This distinction is deliberate.
International streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ are not eligible. Neither is Xiaohongshu, the Chinese lifestyle platform known as RedNote, which has become a daily fixture for many Taiwanese teenagers, even as Taiwanese authorities imposed a one-year access ban on the app in December 2025. The exclusion of these platforms means that a young Taiwanese person cannot use Culture Points to do what they might otherwise do with €35 in discretionary spending; the voucher only works when they walk through the door of a physical cultural space.
This offline requirement serves a critical strategic function. By explicitly excluding algorithmic digital platforms, which have become primary vectors for China’s cognitive operations and cultural homogenization, the Taiwanese government is subsidizing physical, localized engagement. Driving youth into local theaters, independent bookstores, and domestic cultural spaces builds an offline resilience and a sense of shared community that cannot be easily replicated or manipulated by foreign digital influence.
What three years of data show
After three years, the results have exceeded the Ministry of Culture’s own expectations.
In 2023, 770,000 participants registered, generating NT$620 million (approximately €16.8 million) in cultural spending. With an 80% utilization rate, the share of eligible participants who claimed and spent their vouchers was reached within six months of the program’s launch. The then-Minister of Culture, Shih Che, described the figure as unexpected. The high uptake directly motivated the first eligibility expansion. The 2024 utilization rate reached 83.6%. By late December 2025, over 80% of the eligible population had spent nearly NT$1.5 billion (€40.6 million) across more than 18,000 participating venues.
Books and publishing consistently account for roughly half of all transactions, a direct consequence of the bookshop bonus. Domestic cinema is the program’s second-largest category. In 2025, more than 80% of Taiwanese film tickets purchased by eligible youth were paid for with Culture Points. In 2023, Taiwanese films generated over NT$1.1 billion (€29.7 million) in box office revenue, surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
The cultural production these vouchers support is not state-commissioned content. Authors such as Wu Ming-yi produce commercially independent work rooted in Taiwan’s cultural context. His novels The Man with the Compound Eyes and The Stolen Bicycle, the latter longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, have been translated into multiple languages. A teenager redeeming Culture Points at an independent bookshop in Tainan and picking up Wu’s novel is making a market choice rather than following a state curriculum. The program creates the economic conditions for that choice; it does not determine it.
The question the data cannot yet answer
Culture Points is, by any direct measure, a success. Yet Taiwanese authorities themselves do not define success in purely fiscal terms. President Lai Ching-te frames the program as a tool to bring younger generations closer to books and culture and to strengthen the foundations of national cultural development, explicitly linking cultural participation, especially reading, to long-term nation building.
Minister of Culture Li Yuan presents Culture Points in more political-economic terms, arguing that spending these funds within domestic cultural and creative industries is not only a right but also a duty, thereby positioning the program as a mechanism to sustain the sector.
But does any of this endure once the subsidy disappears? Does a young woman who spends her Culture Points at an independent bookshop in 2026 return in 2029 when there is no voucher? Do groups of friends who discover Taiwanese cinema through the group bonus in 2025 keep going once the incentive is gone?
Italy’s 18app scheme, which provided €500 in cultural vouchers to 18-year-olds between 2016 and 2023, has been evaluated by researchers, with findings presented at the 2025 Association for Cultural Economics International conference. The study found that the program produced lasting changes in cinema attendance even after the subsidy expired, extending to household members who were not themselves recipients. This type of behavioral persistence beyond the subsidy period provides a more meaningful benchmark than the indicators currently used in Taiwan, where policy success is primarily assessed through uptake rates and aggregate spending. Taiwan has transaction data collected through the Ministry of Culture application across every program year, enabling comparable analysis. However, a systematic evaluation methodology capable of identifying such long-term effects has not yet been developed.
Not a solution, but a structure
Culture Points does not replace the global platforms that shape the media habits of young Taiwanese. Its purpose is narrower: to lower the cost of engaging with domestic culture and help sustain Taiwan’s cultural ecosystem. This has broader implications. Taiwan’s cultural identity has long been contested, and a system that cannot remain commercially viable will struggle to compete for the attention of younger generations.
Rather than expanding access in general terms, the program is designed to influence how cultural consumption takes place. By prioritizing specific venues, embedding targeted incentives, and excluding digital platforms, it intervenes directly in the conditions under which cultural choices are made. The result is not a substitution of existing habits, but a recalibration of them.
The durability of these effects remains uncertain. If sustained, the program could serve as a relatively low-cost instrument for shaping long-term cultural behavior. If not, its impact will be limited to the subsidy period. For policymakers beyond Taiwan, the issue is less about replacing global platforms and more about whether behavioral policy tools can keep domestic cultural ecosystems viable alongside them.
