Hakka Affairs Council Minister Lee Yung-de attended regional forums on Hakka affairs in Kaohsiung and Pingtung on March 16. During the forum, Lee awarded Chung Zhen-bin (鍾振斌) with the Hakka Affairs Professional Medal, Third Class (三等客家事務專業獎章) for his vigorous promotion of the Hakka language and culture. Regarded as the promoter and cultural cultivator of the Liudui region, Chung is also known as “Brother A-bin” and founder of the “Past and Present of Liudui (六堆風雲)” magazine.

He has dedicated himself to Hakka-language education and teaching materials, including the creation of nursery rhymes, kids’ poems, textbooks, and scripts that are suitable for children in Pingtung’s Liudui to learn Hakka. Providing public participation opportunities through literary activities, Chung has organized literature camps in Liudui on several occasions. At the beginning of this year at Zhongyi Temple, he also held a 40-year retrospective exhibition of Liudui’s Youth Club, which brought back memories for many former members.

Chung established Liudui’s Youth Club, a local organization aimed at the revival of Hakka culture, and hosted Hakka folk arts workshops while he was in college. In 1989, he founded the “Past and Present of Liudui” magazine particularly for the Hakkas in Liudui to express themselves. As the founder of the magazine, Chung has been overcoming many difficulties and accumulating documents and records about Liudui’s Hakka affairs for 30 years.

Deep concern for the inheritance of Hakka culture motivated Chung to be a mother-tongue teacher, a radio presenter, and a Hakka news anchor. Once he was invited to give a lecture at an elementary school, and he found out more than half of the students were incapable of speaking Hakka. To prevent the language from becoming extinct, he has vowed to make the voices of Hakka broadly heard.