Geographically, the Hakka live on the wedge-like Meinung plain formed by the two-mile-wide Kaoping River running along its southern border, and two mountain ranges which, by running from the Yellow Butterfly Valley, the plainRiver, close in the plain's north-easternmost edge, to the Kaoping east and west borders. The river and the mountains have allowed the distinct Hakka culture to flourish within a naturally divided ecosystem which limited outside interference from the Hokkien, who have historically occupied the areas on the side of these natural barriers. In the past twenty years, Meinung has become the most famous Hakka town in Taiwan, hailed as the community most illustrative of Taiwan's rich Hakka culture that originated in southeastern Mainland China. In the wake of rapid and broad-based industrialization and urbanization, many artists and novelists began to perceive and culturally Meinung as a major source for their nostalgia of an autochthonous culture.

Historically, Meinung has enjoyed relative independence from broader Taiwanese society. Its distinct culture, economic base, and unique geography have contributed to this independence. First, ethnically, Hakka Meinung is surrounded and isolated by Hokkien, the major ethnic group in Taiwan. Hakka and Hokkien are mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects, which have formed the basis of two very distinct cultures. These cultural and linguistic distinctions have led to many conflicts, the major ones being struggles over land, water for irrigation, and access to marketing facilities.

Second, economically, ever since its introduction into the Meinung area during the final stages of Japanese occupation, tobacco cultivation has dominated Meinung's economy. Meinung soon became the most important tobacco plantation in Taiwan, in terms of cultivation areas, production amount, and tobacco farming households. Geography is also responsible for tobacco's dominance in Meinung. The two mountain ranges block chill winter's winds coming from northern Mainland China and render Meinung's winter weather more stable and warmer than elsewhere in Taiwan. The plentiful Kaoping River guarantees Meinung against winter drought, making Meinung suitable place tobacco cultivation in winter.

The social nature of the tobacco economy is different from other agricultural production in two respects. First, its production process is much more organized. In adapting to the labor-intensive process of tobacco cultivation, Meinung's tobacco farmers have developed a labor exchange system based on locality and extended-family networks, that guarantees a labor source on the one hand and reduces production costs, on the other hand. Second, tobacco farmers do not need to look at the market to make their decisions regarding production. The Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau (TTWMB) assigns farmers yearly planting quotas, the number of plants, the total weight of final product, and its unit price. This freedom from market competition and fluctuation of prices has fostered a relative stability among Meinung's Hakka family. The absence of a need to deal with the broader market has helped developed Hakka social relationships through the production and reproduction of their socio-economic lives. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s when the majority of Taiwan's rural economy was seriously struck by the agriculture decline, Meinung, due to tobacco cultivation, and the guarantee from the TTWMB, was able to maintain its relative prosperity.

Meinung has been applauded for, and traditionally proud of, its educational achievements: out of its some 50,000 population, over 100 Ph.D. and thousands of Master and bachelor's degrees have been produced over the past forty-five years. Education proved to be a wise strategy for household investment because the money sent back by the well-educated younger generations holding nice jobs in urban cities helped maintain local living standards. More importantly, when the security of Meinung was threatened by state policies, the student’ s intellectual feedback also proved to be crucial for the protection of the Hakka homeland.

The relatively isolated geographical condition, the conflictual ethnic relations, and the social networks of tobacco economics have been interwoven in the creation of social relationship that distinguishes Meinung from other Taiwanese communities. The distinction is reflected in, and can be better described, by marriage. In Mylon L. Cohen's observation of one the major villages in Meinung in the 1960s and the early 1970s, marriages patterns in Meinung had already become almost endogamous.

People in Yen-liao voice their opposition to marriages between Hakka and non-Hakka; and they take the infrequent occurrence of such marriages as evidence that their sentiments determine marriage patterns. That marriages with Hakka not from the Meinung community are about as uncommon as those with non-Hakka indicates, however, that marriage patterns are not based exclusively on ethnic factors. (Cohen, 1976:41-42)

After the early phase of settlement, while the other Hakka areas in Taiwan continued to be connected to each other by forming broader marital regions and began to be gradually acculturated by the dominating Hokkien culture either by proximity or economics, Meinung's marital connection to the other Hakka areas in southern Taiwan was weakened first by the transpiercing Kaoping River and then by its relatively independent tobacco economics.

In comparison with other major crops grown in Taiwan, tobacco production requires by far the heaviest labor input. According to agricultural statistics (Lu, 1962:487-91), the labor demand before agricultural mechanization was greatly introduced in 1970s into rural areas was 789.0 workdays per crop per hectare for tobacco production, while the average workdays for two consecutive rice crops combined were 198.9. Even after rice production was overly mechanized, most of the labor process in tobacco production still remains unsubstituted. The greatest labor demand in an agricultural year would include two crops of rice, characteristic of much of rural Taiwan, and one of tobacco. Such a combination continues to dominate Meinung's agricultural patterns these days.

Tobacco also far exceeds all other crops with respect to the value of the main product and the percentage of field costs that comprises human labor. Although from tobacco cultivation farmers can receive the greatest profit, it also demands the greatest labor input. The most effective strategy for farmers to lower production costs while meeting labor demand is to fully exploit their family labor. This behavior is found in Meinung where labor intensity is the greatest in rural Taiwan and can easily exhaust members of the average family. Networks of labor exchange are then developed to supplement labor deficiency.

The most common form of cooperation is known as“labor exchange (kao-koung)”—simply an arrangement between families to swap a certain number of“koung,”a term I translate as“workday,”but which means more precisely“an able-bodied adult performing a full day's work at a given task.”Tasks which require that several people work together for one or more full days are usually calculated in workdays; labor exchange is reckoned within the context of the same agricultural operation; workdays are not supplied in exchange for tobacco-sorting workdays. (Cohen, 1976:52)

Prior to the conspicuous mechanization of agriculture in late 1970s, labor exchange, especially that within the local genealogical group accounted for the major portion of non-family labor. More importantly, labor exchange overlaps and mutually intensifies with the traditional obligation between the genealogy-related families to provide assistance.

Thus, the intense social ties in Meinung were formed and accumulated around the interaction among the particular geographic characteristics, relatively independent economics, and isolated social relationship networks. Tracking and making reference to genealogical lines, two people unknown to each other can familiarize and establish their social relation easily. Mi-nung-ngin (person from Meinung) expresses, to them, not just where they are, but how they are. They share a strong sense of all Meinung people as a family, interwoven through reproduction and marriage.

The extraordinariness of Meinung's social ties can be witnessed in the numerous establishments of Meinung tung-hsiang-hui (club of fellow Meinung emigrants) by those Meinung emigrants who still have strong nostalgia from their early life experiences in Meinung. Although similar organizations are widespread among Chinese emigrants all around the world, their reference locality is mostly based on common province, city or county, not usually on a mere town. Meinung emigrants join with other non-Meinung Hakka emigrants in forming Hakka clubs. But interestingly, they always try to have their own tung-hsiang-hui formed, which is now ubiquitous in every major stop of Meinung emigrants. It has become a praiseworthy joke to the Meinung chauvinists that there is even a Meinung tung-hsiang-hui established right in Chi-shan, the adjacent Hokkien town to Meinung's west. As we will see in later analysis, the sense of locality and social ties tightly maintained in Meinung, contributed to the sustainable mobilization of the anti-dam movement and community movements of specific issues.