The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan

By Columbia University Press

This sourcebook contains more than 160 documents and writings that reflect the development of Taiwanese literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Selections include seminal essays in literary debates, polemics, and other landmark events; interviews, diaries, and letters by major authors; critical and retrospective essays by influential writers, editors, and scholars; transcripts of historical speeches and conferences; literary-society manifestos and inaugural journal prefaces; and governmental policy pronouncements that have significantly influenced Taiwanese literature.

These texts illuminate Asia's experience with modernization, colonialism, and postcolonialism; the character of Taiwan's Cold War and post--Cold War cultural production; gender and environmental issues; indigenous movements; and the changes and challenges of the digital revolution. Taiwan's complex history with Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese colonization; strategic geopolitical position vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the United States; and status as a hub for the East-bound circulation of technological and popular-culture trends make the nation an excellent case study for a richer understanding of East Asian and modern global relations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Aug 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231537544

Book preview

The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan

The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan

Edited by

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

Michelle Yeh

Ming-ju Fan

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Taiwan Ministry of Education in the preparation of this volume.

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53754-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Columbia sourcebook of literary Taiwan / edited by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Michelle Yeh, Ming-ju Fan.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16576-1 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53754-4 (ebook)

1. Chinese literature—Taiwan—History and criticism—Sources. 2. Literature and society—Taiwan. 3. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Chinese literature—21st century—History and criticism. I. Chang, Sung-sheng, 1951– II. Yeh, Michelle Mi-Hsi. III. Fan, Ming-ju, 1964–

PL3031.T3L5726 2014

895.109'951249—dc23

2013040914

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover design: Archie Ferguson

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction:

Literary Taiwan—An East Asian Contextual Perspective

PART I

The Beginnings and Entry Into Modernity Through Colonial Mediation (1728–1948)

1.  Preface to Volume 1 of Jade Ruler Between Sky and Sea (1728)

Xia Zhifang

2.  Preface to Collection of Coral Branches (Eighteenth Century)

Zhang Mei

3.  Preface Number 5 (by the Author) (1816)

Zhang Fu

4.  Ars Poetica (Mid-nineteenth Century)

Lin Zhanmei

5.  Elucidating the Meaning of Literature

Xie Xueyu

6.  Congratulations on the Founding of the Taiwan Literary Society

Wei Qingde

7.  On the New Mission to Promote Vernacular Writing

Huang Chengcong

8.  On Reforming Classical Chinese

Huang Chaoqin

9.  A Letter to the Youth of Taiwan

Zhang Wojun

10.  The Awful Literary Scene of Taiwan

Zhang Wojun

11.   On Reading A Comparison of Old and New Literature in the Taiwan Daily News

Lan Yun

12.  Diary

Liu Na’ou

13.  Advance

Lan Yun

14.  The Solitary Spirits League and the Anarchist Theater Movement

Zhang Qishi

15.  Why Not Promote Nativist Literature?

Huang Shihui

16.  Annotation on Three-Six-Nine Little Gazette

Xin An

17.  A Proposal on the Construction of Taiwanese Vernacular Writing

Guo Qiusheng

18.  On Reforming the Taiwanese Vernacular

Huang Chunqing

19.  The Prospect of Popular Literature

Qi

20.  A Giant Bomb on the Old Poetry Scene

Chen Fengyuan

21.  Elegant Words

Lian Yatang

22.  Absolute Objection to Nativist Literature Written in the Taiwanese Vernacular

Lai Minghong

23.  On Taiwan’s Nativist Literature

Wu Kunhuang

24.  Burning Hair—the Rites of Poetry

Shui Yinping

25.  Writing on the Wall

Guo Shuitan

26.  Manifesto

Jie Zhou

27.  Foreword: Understanding Folk Literature

Huang Deshi

28.  Art Belongs to the People

Yang Kui

29.  The Historical Mission of Taiwan Literary Arts

Zhang Shenqie

30.  Miscellaneous Thoughts on Literature—Two Types of Atmosphere

Lü Heruo

31.  Poetry Snippets: On Highbrow

Weng Nao

32.  Preface to Mountain Spirit

Hu Feng

33.  Youth and Taiwan (II): Ideal and Reality of the New Drama Movement

Shima Rikuhei

34.   A Chat with the Governor-General About Discontinuing Chinese Columns in Daily Newspapers

Anonymous

35.  Why Can’t Taiwan’s Art Scene Advance?

Old Xu

36.  Criticism and Guidance Welcomed

Mansha

37.  On the Future of Taiwanese Literature

Zhang Wenhuan

38.  The Prospect of Taiwanese Literature

Long Yingzong

39.  The Past, Present, and Future of Taiwanese Literature

Shimada Kinji

40.  On Building a Literary Scene in Taiwan

Huang Deshi

41.  Diary (1942–1944)

Lü Heruo

42.  Responsibility of the Literati on the Island

Yu Wen

43.  Taiwanese Theater in the Current Stage of Development

Takita Teiji

44.  A Conversation on Taiwanese Culture

Nakamura Akira and Long Yingzong

45.  A Commentary on Current Literature

Nishikawa Mitsuru

46.  Kuso Realism and Pseudo-Romanticism

Shiwai Min

47.  An Open Letter to Mr. Shiwai Min

Ye Shitao

48.  Good Writing, Bad Writing

Wu Xinrong

49.  In Defense of Kuso Realism

Yidong Liang

50.  The Thorny Road Continues

Zhang Wenhuan

51.  Our Propositions

Nagasaki Hiroshi, et al .

52.  The Path of Bridge—Report on the Second Writers’ Gathering

Ge Lei

53.  Questions and Answers Concerning Taiwanese Literature

Yang Kui

PART II

Wading Through the Cold War Under Martial Law (1949–1987)

1.  Inaugural Preface to Literary Creation

Zhang Daofan

2.  Declaration

Ji Xian

3.  Inaugural Preface to Military Literature: Establishing a Modernized, Populist, Revolutionary, and Combative National Literature

Editors

4.  Poetry Is Poetry; Song Is Song; We Do Not Say Poem-Song

Ji Xian

5.  Explicating the Tenets of the Modernist School

Ji Xian

6.  To the Reader

Xia Ji’an

7.  A Critique of Peng Ge’s Setting Moon and a Discussion of the Modern Novel

Xia Ji’an

8.  Newsletter of Literary Friends: Correspondence Between Zhong Zhaozheng and Zhong Lihe

9.  Notes from the Editors of Epoch Poetry Quarterly

Zhang Mo

10.  On Symbolist Poetry and Chinese New Poetry: A Rejoinder to Professor Su Xuelin

Qin Zihao

11.  Five Years Later

Editors

12.  To the Poet Ya Xian

Shang Qin

13.  Random Talk on New Poetry No. 4: Whither It Goes?

Yan Xi

14.  Taiwanese Writers Whose Works Burst with Local Color

Wang Dingjun

15.  Notes of a Poet

Ya Xian

16.  Introduction to Modern Literature

Editors

17.  One Year of Modern Literature

Editors

18.  Preface to Selected Poems of the 1960s

Zhang Mo, Luo Fu, and Ya Xian

19.  On Yu Guangzhong’s Sirius the Dog Star

Luo Fu

20.  Goodbye, Nihilism!

Yu Guangzhong

21.  Preface to the Japanese Edition of The Orphan of Asia

Wu Zhuoliu

22.  An Open Letter to Guo Lianghui

Xie Bingying

23.  An Announcement from the Chinese Writers Association

24.  I Do Not Value The Locked Heart and Membership in the Writers Association

Guo Lianghui

25.  Cutting Off the Prose Braids

Yu Guangzhong

26.  Lower the Flag to Half-Mast for May Fourth!

Yu Guangzhong

27.  Message from the Editors

Lin Hengtai

28.  Postscript to Carefree Wandering

Yu Guangzhong

29.  Toward a New Departure in Modernism: Thoughts on the Recent Production of Waiting for Godot

Chen Yingzhen

30.  The Girl with Long Black Hair: The Author’s Preface

Ouyang Zi

31.  The Evolution of Modern Poetry in Taiwan

Huan Fu

32.  Epigraph to the Inaugural Issue

Chen Fangming

33.  On the Predicament of Modern Chinese Poets

Guan Jieming

34.  On the Special Issue of Retrospect

Ye Shan

35.  Not Our Paradise

Tang Wenbiao

36.  Benchmarks in Fiction Criticism: Reading Tang Jisong’s "Autumn Leaves by Ouyang Zi"

Bai Xianyong

37.  Qideng Sheng’s Polio Style

Liu Shaoming

38.  Take Pains to Read, Take Care to Evaluate Family Catastrophe

Yan Yuanshu

39.  Looking Forward to a New Kind of Literature

Yan Yuanshu

40.  Two Kinds of Spirit in Taiwanese Literature: A Comparison of Yang Kui and Zhong Lihe

Lin Zaijue

41.  Author’s Preface

Huang Chunming

42.  She Is a True Student of China: On Reading Zhang Ailing on Reading

Zhu Xining

43.  Should the Ban on May Fourth and 1930s Writings Be Lifted?

Zhu Xining

44.  Grassroots Manifesto

Luo Qing and Li Nan

45.  The Past Decade of Taiwanese Literature (1965–1975)—with Remarks on Wang Wenxing’s Family Catastrophe

Liu Shaoming

46.  The Pursuit and Disappearance of Utopia

Bai Xianyong

47.  Random Thoughts: Author’s Preface

Chen Ruoxi

48.  Starting from the Flaws of Taipei People: On the Method and Practice of Literary Criticism

Ouyang Zi

49.  Looking Back

Bai Xianyong

50.  Preface to Three-Three Journal

Zhu Tianwen

51.  It is Realist Literature, Not Nativist Literature—A Historical Analysis of Nativist Literature

Wang Tuo

52.  Introduction to the History of Nativist Literature in Taiwan

Ye Shitao

53.  The Blind Spot of Nativist Literature

Xu Nancun

54.  Where Is Literature Without Human Nature?

Peng Ge

55.  Xiangtu Wenxue: Its Merits and Demerits

Wang Wenxing

56.  Impressions Gleaned from the Conference on Literary Arts Organized by the Armed Forces: The Bugle of Unity

Zeng Xiangduo

57.  Notes on the Publication of Essays on Nativist Literature

Yu Tiancong

58.  Two Types of Literary Mind: On Two Short Stories That Won the United Daily Fiction Contest

Zhan Hongzhi

59.  Ten Years of Flowing River

Lin Haiyin

60.  Foreword to Anthology of the Modern Chinese Essay

Yang Mu

61.  Preface to Thirty Eventful Years: The Predicament Facing the Newspaper Literary Supplement in Taiwan at Present and a Way Out

Ya Xian

62.  Looking Back at the Chinese Literary Arts Association

Yin Xueman

63.  Taiwan Consciousness of the Taiwanese People

Zhan Hongzhi

64.  Influence and Response! From Concern, Engagement, and Action to We Have Only One Earth

Han Han and Ma Yigong

65.  Footprints, Sort Of: Superfluous Words on the Launch of the Newsletter of Literary Friends

Zhong Zhaozheng

66.  Eternal Quest (in Lieu of a Preface)

Wang Zhenhe

67.  The Question of Nativization in Taiwanese Literature at the Present Stage

Song Dongyang

68.  House of Salt—by Way of Introduction

Shi Shu

69.  Flaws and Mercy—Preface to The Mulberry Sea

Yuan Qiongqiong

70.  The Translingual Generation of Poets: Beginning with the Silver Bell Society

Lin Hengtai

71.  Heralding a Taiwanese Dawn: Introducing Lin Shuangbu, Novelist of the New Generation, and Appraising Taiwan’s Enfeebled Fiction

Song Zelai

72.  Sacrificing a Life to Literature Is Nothing to Boast About

Zhong Zhaozheng

73.  A Painful Confession

Ye Shitao

74.  Something Out of Nothing: On Improvisation and Theater

Lai Shengchuan

PART III

The Era of Democracy and Globalization (1987–2005)

1.  Preface to Series in Contemporary Mainland Chinese Writers: Replies to Inquiries

Guo Feng

2.  Coming Together for a Long Journey Ahead: Celebrating the Birth of the Taipei Theater Fellowship

Zhong Mingde

3.  Preface to Heteroglossia

Wang Dewei

4.  Writing a Literature with a Nationality

Peng Ruijin

5.  Recovering Our Names

Monaneng

6.  Preface to Complete Works of Taiwanese Writers

Zhong Zhaozheng

7.  If the Poets Don’t Die, the Thieves Won’t Quit: The Predicament of Taiwan’s Poetry Scene and How to Resolve It

Lin Yaode

8.  She Waves the Flag: Preface to Ping Lu’s New Collection Who Killed XXX?

Zhang Xiguo

9.  Diary

Qiu Miaojin

10.  Literature of the Military Family Village: The Inheritance and Abandonment of Homesickness

Qi Bangyuan

11.  Discovering a New Taiwan: On Wang Qimei’s Collage

Jiao Tong

12.  Inaugural Editorial of the Taiwanese Poetics Quarterly 402

13.  The World of Mountains and Seas: Preface to the Inaugural Issue of the Culture of Mountains and Seas Bimonthly

Sun Dachuan

14.  Who Is Going to Wear My Beautiful Knit Dress?

Ligelale Awu

15.  Summer Mist

Zhu Tianxin

16.  Postscript to On the Island’s Edge

Chen Li

17.  On Ku’er: Reflections on Ku’er and Ku’er Literature in Contemporary Taiwan

Ji Dawei

18.  Preface: Just Who Is the Devil with a Chastity Belt?

Li Ang

19.  Wandering in Gods’ Garden (in Lieu of a Preface)

Wang Dingjun

20.  Saving a Boatload of Starlight: The Story of How Mr. Wang Tiwu Gave Financial Assistance to Young Writers

Jiang Zhongming

21.  The Activist Character of the Literary Supplement to the United Daily

Li Ruiteng

22.  Newspaper Literary Supplements and the Nobel Prize in Literature: A Personal Reflection

Zheng Shusen

23.  On Bai

Zhang Dachun

24.  Retrospect on Thirty Years of Taiwan Literary Arts

Zhong Zhaozheng

25.  Foreword II: On Taiwan’s Literary Canon

Chen Yizhi

26.  To the Reader: Preface to the Unitas Edition of Complete Works of Luo Zhicheng

Luo Zhicheng

27.  Broken Chinese and Good Work

Huang Jinshu

28.  Like a Road Sign That Looks Ahead and Behind: Introduction to Compendium of Taiwanese-Language Literature

Lin Yangmin

29.  The Brave New World of the Mother Tongue: Taiwanese-language Literature Under Construction

Xiang Yang

30.  A Flower Recalls Its Previous Incarnation: Remembering Zhang Ailing and Hu Lancheng

Zhu Tianwen

31.  The Mysterious Revelations of Nature Writing

Wu Mingyi

32.  Building a Bridge for Taiwanese Literature: Foreword to the Newsletter of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature

Lin Ruiming

33.  A Perspective on Prose

Liu Kexiang

34.  My Story of the Chinese Language—Roaming

Li Yongping

35.  A First Step out of Migration Literature

Nanfang Shuo

36.  Hakka Literature, Literary Hakka

Li Qiao

37.  The End of the Military Family Village

Su Weizhen

38.  Interview with Wu He

Zhu Tianxin

39.  Zhang Xiaofeng on Prose

Zhang Xiaofeng

40.  Preface to the New Edition of Born Under the Twelfth Star Sign

Luo Yijun

41.  Ocean Tide Loves Me Best: A Dialogue Between Sun Dachuan and Xiaman Lanpoan

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Notes on the Translators

Notes on the Authors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For scholars and general readers alike, this sourcebook offers, in part or in entirety, more than one hundred sixty historical documents—manifestos, editorials, polemical essays, memoirs, diaries, and interviews—that delineate the trajectory of Taiwan’s literary development from the Qing dynasty to the contemporary period. The wide array of themes, movements, and issues represented herein not only provides a better understanding of Taiwan but also facilitates comparative perspectives with regard to the Sinosphere and other Asian countries, as well as the world as a whole.

This multiple-year project was completed with the support and assistance of many institutions and people. Above all, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan provided generous funding, for which we are extremely grateful. In particular, we wish to thank Professors Huang Kuanzhong, Chen Fangming, and Chen Dongsheng, as well as the staff of the MOE Advisory Office—Liu Wenhui, Li Peilin, and Chen Jingyao—for their unflagging support and expert advice.

We also express our heartfelt appreciation to National Chengchi University (NCCU) for administering the MOE grant, especially to Wu Huiling for her patient guidance throughout. The following young scholars have served as research assistants at various stages of the project: Lü Kunlin, Zhuang Shiyu, and Wang Wanting at the NCCU Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature; and Professor Peilin Liang at the National University of Singapore and Lorin Lee at the University of Texas, Austin. Their dedication is greatly appreciated.

For a project of this scope, we have consulted a large number of scholars both in and outside Taiwan. While it is impossible to list them all, we would be remiss if we did not mention the following: Professors Huang Mei’e and Mei Jialing of National Taiwan University, Xu Junya of National Taiwan Normal University, Ying Fenghuang of Taipei Education University, Chen Fangming of NCCU, Liu Naici of National Cheng Kung University, and David Der-wei Wang of Harvard University. Their suggestions and advice were invaluable; any limitations of the sourcebook are the sole responsibility of the editors.

Last but not least, our gratitude goes to all the writers (and their families or publishers) for granting us permissions, and to all the translators for their contributions and cooperation.

Introduction

Literary Taiwan—An East Asian Contextual Perspective

SUNG-SHENG YVONNE CHANG

Over the last fifteen years or so, editors of this volume have been approached by colleagues in various disciplines—literature, history, anthropology, and film, cultural, and media studies—seeking background information as they try to incorporate Taiwanese literature into their college-level courses. There are, moreover, unmistakable signs of growing recognition in the field of East Asian studies of the interconnectedness of cultural developments across the region and of important issues that have not been adequately addressed by existing scholarship, which tends to focus on national cultures and, in most cases, specifically on the cultural traditions of the more powerful political entities, such as China and Japan. This sourcebook has been compiled largely in order to meet these emerging pedagogical needs and new research imperatives in English-speaking academia.

This introduction aims to present some preliminary observations on the prominent features of Taiwan’s literary history that, in my view, can benefit as well as profit from studies from a comparative perspective of cultural processes in modern East Asia. Different parts of East Asia first encountered modernity under pressure from Western imperial powers via similar trajectories, and the ways in which Western cultural categories simultaneously served as models for emulation as well as targets of denouncement in these societies also resonate strongly with one another. Moreover, specific cultural influences from the West were often routed from one place to another. For instance, as a result of its successful westernization efforts in the Meiji period (1868–1912), Japan has long served as an intermediary for the transmission and ramifications of Western ideas and trends throughout the region. Although intraregional cultural exchanges were weakened considerably during the Cold War, they have regained vitality with a vengeance since, as evidenced by the exponential growth of cultural crosscurrents in different parts of East Asia in recent years. It is therefore high time to explore the multiple variants of literary trajectories within the East Asian region that share certain common elements and are bound to be mutually illuminative.

Because an individual society’s selection or rejection, assimilation or denouncement, and transplantation or transcendence of particular strands of the Western-originated institution of modern literature are always complexly circumscribed by locally present historical factors, the construction of elaborate taxonomies of these trajectories is an important first step toward a more thorough understanding of modern East Asian cultural processes and the exact nature of the repetitions and differences found therein. Taiwan’s research value lies precisely in its tremendous potential for enriching the scope and enhancing the sophistication of this critical paradigm. Whereas Taiwan shares with other East Asian societies most macrolevel historical contexts, as a site of geopolitical strategic interests in the region it has undergone multiple changes in political sovereignty and has been extensively exposed to multiple intersecting cultural orbs since the dawn of modern East Asia. Its convoluted literary history is therefore a product of the clashes and convergences of diverse cultural matrixes and contains elements that either mirror and magnify or confound and contradict common patterns found elsewhere in the region.

The tripartite division of this sourcebook corresponds roughly to Taiwan’s three historical eras of conflicting political and cultural identities: the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945) and the immediate postwar years (1945–1949);¹ the martial law period under the Chinese Nationalist regime (1949–1987); and the contemporary period, during which a two-party democracy has been consolidated since the lifting of martial law in 1987. The first section of this introduction on historical trajectories provides a cursory sketch of Taiwan’s truncated modern history for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with this background. The remaining sections identify four scenarios in which courses of cultural development in Taiwan simultaneously exemplify a general regional pattern and deviate from it, hence revealing some hidden dimensions of the issues at stake. These scenarios are as follows: (1) the coping strategies adopted by those who participate in literature under authoritarian regimes of different generic characters; (2) the special types of public spheres that developed around literary debates, which are closely tied to the literary media’s shifting role from public forum to a component of the culture industry; (3) the vernacular movement that marked a common struggle within the East Asian Sinosphere upon its entrance into modernity; and (4) the Cold War divide along the ideological lines of leftist–socialist versus liberal–bourgeois.

In terms of theoretical framework, discussions here are primarily concerned with the agents, vehicles, routes, and mechanisms by which literary norms and assumptions are transmitted rather than with the unraveling of the nuanced details of asymmetric power relations and political maneuvers that attended the East–West modern cultural encounter, which tends to be a central focus of earlier postcolonial studies. One must also keep in mind that the materials collected in the sourcebook are primary documentations of public and private literary discourses. As such, they are not blessed with the benefit of hindsight and often bear the imprint of either externally imposed or unwittingly internalized ideological constraints. Aside from serving as testimonials to the shaping power of contextual elements, they should also be read as evidence of the innocent desires and arduous endeavors that Taiwanese authors and publishers embraced and assimilated with the aesthetic resources they were able to access at any given point in time, which constituted a supreme value valorized by circumstantial forces. Admittedly, productive circumstances in modern Taiwan’s literary history were often by-products of violent and unjust political arrangements: old and neocolonialisms; Japanese, American, and Chinese imperialist projects; emergency or expedient programs in support of hot or cold wars; government policies in capitulation to neoliberalist globalization and geopolitical power alignments; and so forth. Readers of the sourcebook can easily infer the erased historical downside of the hailed cultural hybridity, which is ofttimes the outcome of complicit measures dictated by the ruling class’s interest in domination. At the same time, the genuine feelings and admirable commitment threading through the majority of personal writings in this volume ought to be taken seriously as a reminder of the inadequacy of either the singularly stigmatizing or uncritically celebratory views that many scholars adopt in accordance with their own cognitive mappings.

HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY

This section contains a broad-strokes sketch of the historical journey the society of Taiwan has taken from colonial rule, to authoritarian governance, to today’s electoral democracy. It may not be an exaggeration to say that struggles over the definition of Chinese are the crux of all cultural reorientations taking place during era transitions in modern Taiwan. Ethnically speaking, the majority of Taiwan’s population is Han Chinese and has been so ever since settlers from the southeastern coastal provinces of the Chinese mainland began to arrive on the island in large waves in the seventeenth century. In the last 120 or so years, the Chinese identity has been alternately suppressed (by Japanese colonizers), resurrected (by the Nationalist government), and problematized and contested from time to time. In the post–martial law period, however, the residents’ self-identification as Taiwanese—either exclusively or as part of a multiple identity—has grown steadily; now that the government no longer monopolizes historical narratives, new circumstances, to be discussed shortly, compel a continual process of reinventing the Taiwanese identity in fresh and creative ways.

"BECOMING JAPANESE"

Historic circumstances and hegemonic cultural practices in the Japanese colonial period have left indelible marks on the identity issue. Before Taiwan was ceded to Japan by the Qing court in 1895, the cultural life of the majority of the island’s elite and folk sectors did not differ significantly from that of the Chinese living in southern Fujian across the strait. This was altered by the incremental assimilation endeavors by the Japanese colonial government in the ensuing fifty years. Popular education was established around 1918–1919 as an important step toward modernizing Taiwan. Although Japanese and Taiwanese students were segregated, Japanese was the primary language of instruction in both elementary school systems. At the same time, the traditional-style tutorial classes (sishu or shufang), the prime vehicle for the early learning experiences of gentry-class Han Chinese offspring, gradually disappeared. Print media was mostly bilingual in the early colonial period, but that came to an end in 1937 when Chinese language columns in newspapers were officially banned (see reading 34 in part I; subsequent references to reading numbers will be by part and number, in this case, I34). Nevertheless, throughout the colonial period, older members of the literati continued to compose poems in classical Chinese, and traditional-style poetry societies mushroomed. The fact that colonial Taiwan boasted the highest number per capita of shishe (poetry societies) compared with regions in mainland China is often cited to demonstrate how various civilian organizations functioned as an outlet for indigenous cultural sentiment as well as passive resistance to the colonial rule.²

Coming to realize the futility of armed resistance that sporadically marked the first phase of Japanese colonialism, the intelligentsia formed the Taiwan Culture Association in 1921 as a channel for enlightening the masses and negotiating with the colonial regime for greater autonomy. The modern literature movement that began in the mid-1920s, following the debate on New and Old Literature, was among the most far-reaching enterprises launched by this organization. Participants in the literary movement comprised a generation of Taiwanese intellectuals who had acquired a classical Chinese education during their childhood and whose motivations in promoting vernacular literature closely echoed those of the May Fourth advocates on mainland China: to modernize and rejuvenate the society of Taiwan through facilitating mass literacy and revolutionizing the obsolete and corrupt feudalist cultural orders. Toward the end of the decade, however, the association was beleaguered by friction and strife between its liberal and left-wing members. This eventually resulted in a split shortly before the colonial government cracked down on Communists in 1931, although the leftist intellectual ferment persisted as a potent impetus behind literary activities throughout the prewar period—like everywhere else in East Asia.³ In the 1930s Taiwan saw a marked improvement in social stability, modernized material conditions, and a transformed urban landscape. In the meantime, as Japan-educated Taiwanese elites assumed leadership positions, society as a whole became more deeply entrenched in the Japanese cultural sphere. The relative rise and decline of the value of Japanese and Chinese cultural capitals became saliently visible in this decade.

Latent tension between the colonizer and the colonized, however, eventually surfaced with a vengeance in the early 1940s under strained wartime conditions. Coercive mobilization of Taiwanese writers was exacerbated by Japan’s intensifying war efforts. The kominka campaign, purporting to transform Taiwanese into the imperial subjects, lured converts with material and symbolic incentives. Propaganda rhetoric justified the enlistment of volunteer soldiers to fight in the South Pacific front lines as granting the Taiwanese a privilege to pay blood-tax. Sourcebook entries from these few years conjure up a complex picture that epitomizes the colonial literary field at its most dissonant moment. It is noteworthy that, by this time, the most active Taiwanese writers were from the age cohort born around 1905–1915 and had received formal education entirely within the colonial system. Many had studied in Japan, and even those who did not go abroad were likewise nourished by aesthetic resources made available locally by the colonizers. Several Japanese literary men, such as Shimada Kinji (I39), Nishikawa Mitsuru (I45), Takita Teiji (I43), and Kudo Yoshimi (I30), assumed prominent roles in the literary scene, whereas the first generation of Taiwan-born Japanese (wansheng) also came of age. Despite the fact that all groups publicly celebrated the Japanese war effort and endorsed the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere vision with highly eulogistic rhetoric, subtle differences between the colonizers and the colonized were discernible. The debate on "kuso realism" (I45–I47, I49), in which two literary magazines Literary Taiwan and Taiwan Literature—the former dominated by Japanese and the latter by Taiwanese—bitterly confronted each other, represented an eruption of hidden rancor. Ostensibly prompted by differences in aesthetic judgments, this internecine dispute nonetheless pointed to a host of complex issues within the colonial order, in particular the ingrained discrimination compounded by divergent self-positioning along racial, generational, and ideological lines.

"CHINESE REBORN"

A dramatic reversal in government-ordained national identification came after the end of World War II, when Taiwan was retroceded to the Republic of China (ROC) by Japan. In its effort to re-sinicize Taiwan’s residents, the ROC’s Nationalist regime condemned the Japanese colonizer for turning Taiwanese into slaves and sweepingly stigmatized all cultural remnants from the colonial period. Initially, Taiwanese intellectuals, cognizant of their own Chinese ancestry, were willing to comply, as evidenced by the transcripts of a roundtable organized in 1948 by Bridge, a cultural supplement of the New Life Daily (I52), and the essay by the leading writer-critic Yang Kui (I53). Yet in the end, the prospect of a genuinely coauthored cultural reorientation, which for a brief moment seemed almost within reach, failed to materialize. A well-known reason was the deep acrimony left behind by the February 28 Incident that took place a year before the roundtable. Yet perhaps more significantly, in 1949, just a couple of years later, the sudden, unforeseen mass retreat of two million people—one-third of Taiwan’s local population at the time—from mainland China to the island following the Nationalists’ defeat in the civil war with the Communists abruptly ushered Taiwan into a set of new sociopolitical cultural orders.

Taiwan’s post-1949 era featured a peculiar form of minority rule, with the top echelon of the Nationalist governing body principally composed of waishengren, the mainland émigrés who followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan around 1949. The ratio of waishengren to the native Taiwanese (benshengren), comprising earlier Han settlers and a small percentage of aborigines, was on average about one to four over the next few decades. The uneven distribution of political power and cultural resources between the two population groups was backed by the Nationalists’ authoritarian regime during the prolonged martial law period (1948–1987). Moreover, friction rose as a result of differences in lifestyle, dialect, regional custom, and, above all else, personal historical memories. This last factor is best illustrated by the conspicuous disparity in the two groups’ attitudes toward the Japanese: for the mainland émigrés, the Japanese were erstwhile invaders who had committed horrendous war crimes against their country and people; the sentiments of the Taiwanese toward their former colonizers, however, were far more ambivalent—some even favored the era of Japanese rule over the present situation, in which they felt they were treated like second-class citizens by those of the same race.

Several other factors during this era transition were instrumental in effecting drastic changes in Taiwan’s cultural arena. One that has caught the widest attention from scholars is the replacement in 1948 of Japanese with Mandarin Chinese as the official language, which resulted in a collective exodus of middle-aged Taiwanese writers from the literary field. Even more far-reaching was the Nationalist government’s conscious transplantation to Taiwan of cultural institutions and symbolic systems from its reign on the Chinese mainland during the Republican era (1911–1949), an act that clearly served the regime’s interest of domination and nearly wiped out all traces of Taiwan’s colonial past in mainstream cultural representations.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, in a relatively liberal intellectual climate and as a result of avid assimilation of Western (chiefly American) influences, a new cultural identity began to emerge that was closely associated with the modernist vogue in the creative practices. Granted, this generation of Taiwanese writers by and large situated their own literary enterprise within the Chinese New Literature tradition, yet they were clearly embarking on a path with distinctive traits of its own. A more self-conscious advocacy for a Taiwan-based identity arose in the 1970s, following the ROC’s withdrawal from the United Nations in 1971 and amid the vibrant counterhegemonic nativist literary movement, which was intermingled with a heavy dose of a socialistic agenda that criticized the social ills arising from Taiwan’s rapid course of modernization.⁴ Attention also must be paid to a demographic change—participants in the modernist and nativist movements alike included both waisheng and bensheng writers who had received a complete formal education under the Nationalists, which suggested a possible coauthorship of cultural production and reproduction in Taiwan in the years to come.

Because Chinese nationalism remained officially sanctioned and firmly embedded in the cultural infrastructures, nativist assertions in the 1970s and early 1980s coexisted alongside the government-endorsed Sinocentric agenda, with glaring ambiguities and downright contradictions in public discourse. It was not until the late 1980s, when an ascending Taiwanese nationalism evoked the cultural memory of pre-1949 Taiwan, that Sinocentrism was seriously and extensively challenged in conjunction with efforts to reverse the cultural hierarchy that the Nationalists had imposed.⁵ In retrospect, Sinocentrism served not only to guard the Nationalist regime’s domestic domination, it was also a by-product of the early part of the Cold War, when most of the world recognized the ROC’s now defunct position as the sole legitimate government of the entire ‘China.’ Although the international community gradually discarded this preposterous position, the lingering effects of Sinocentrism contributed to an oddly bifurcated Taiwanese cultural arena in the next decade and a half leading to the lifting of martial law. On the one hand, overall sociopolitical liberalization and the rising middle class nourished a thriving mainstream culture and maintained its basic commitment to Sinocentric cultural assumptions, as evidenced by the institution of fukan (literary supplements to newspapers). On the other hand, the surge of localist narratives went hand-in-hand with the growth of Taiwanese nationalism and oppositional political forces, which culminated in the founding of the home-grown Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 1986. Shortly after the watershed event of the lifting of martial law in 1987, latent discordance in the cultural field under the authoritarian Nationalist rule quickly surfaced as acrimonious confrontation in the public sphere. The enabling condition, to be sure, was Taiwan’s maturing democracy and, in particular, the liberalized media and increasing freedom of speech.

IDENTITY AS A SITE OF REINVENTION

The lifting of the four-decades-long martial law certainly had momentous implications, as Taiwan was transformed almost overnight into an open society. In particular, the removal of stringent information control, the freedom to travel abroad, and the resumption of communication with mainland China resulted in a sharpened awareness of the fact that the world at large recognized only citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as authentic Chinese.⁶ This discovery gave rise to faith-shaking reexaminations of the sacrosanct self-identification that the Nationalist government had instilled in its people. A large part of the 1990s was consumed by the relentless struggle between the Sinocentric narrative tied to the founding ideology of the Nationalist Party, with its roots traceable back to the 1911 Republican Revolution on the Chinese mainland, and its localist challenger, the DPP, which espoused a Taiwanese cultural nationalism resurrected from the Japanese colonial period. This historically grounded split in identity continues to plague Taiwan’s sociopolitical order to this day.⁷

However, what we have seen in the documentation in this sourcebook is a picture that is a great deal more nuanced and complex than a simple confrontation between Sinocentrism and localism (or Taiwanese nationalism). The majority of the entries represent serious attempts at rewriting the monolithic Sinocentric narrative, clearly motivated by desires to ease the tension of social schism and ultimately to reinvigorate the crumbling affective economy that had bred and sustained many of the dominant values during Taiwan’s lengthy martial law period.⁸ Memoirs of veteran Taiwanese writers on how localist literature was repressed during the White Terror period carry a conciliatory overtone, with the intent of transcending history-inflicted personal wounds (II65, II72, II73, III6, III10). Essays on various subcultures—juancun or military housing compounds (III10, III37), aboriginal (III5, III13, III14, III41), Hakka (III36), and queer (III9, III17)—that assert the pluralistic nature of Taiwan’s social fabric are clearly conceived with a constructive spirit. Particularly noteworthy in Taiwan’s newly democratized, economically affluent, nonauthoritarian society is that writers were quick to assimilate various globally circulating intellectual discourses in reprogramming Taiwan’s existing dominant culture. Radical postmodern culturalism, feminism and sexual liberation, minority rights and gay and lesbian discourses, indigenous revivalism, and environmentalist conservationism (III31, III33) have served as new anchors of meaning and brought literary projects into closer connection with other types of grassroots activism in the society at large.⁹ While perennially subjected to co-optation by and assimilation into new forms of dominant culture, such progressive ethos—well adapted to Taiwan’s indigenous locale—provides a basis for healthy resistance to the various forms of repressive relationships of domination ubiquitous in an advanced capitalist society. In particular, such ethos serves as a positive counterforce to mainstream intellectuals’ dystopian mood and feelings of impotence in a society in which a sensation-driven and poorly disciplined media often unabashedly puts itself at the service of brash commercialism and vociferous partisanship.

Overall, pluralism is a notion that has served positive purposes at a time when Taiwanese society is moving away from the conservative dominant culture of the previous era and has opened up multiple possibilities for more creative and flexible identity construction. Sociopolitical realities of the new millennium, including the flagrant exploitation of personal identifications in election campaigns, have further reinforced the perception that the so-called rentong (identity or identification) is fundamentally fluid and multifarious and morphs as circumstances change. Practically speaking, whether or not one embraces a Chinese identity has no relation to one’s citizenship, and even those who reject it cannot deny their ethnic and cultural heritages. Precisely because the divisive ethnic conflicts in Taiwan are the result of historical rather than racial or religious differences, marks of ethnic distinctions are steadily fading as time passes. Today, for Taiwan’s largely local-born population, identification with Taiwan—especially in a nonexclusive sense—has virtually become a matter of fact rather than a choice.

Undoubtedly, DPP governance in 2000–2008 further undermined the powerful Sinocentric core of Taiwan’s dominant culture, but the closer ties—economic and otherwise—with Chinese on the mainland have provided an even stronger impetus for Taiwanese intellectuals’ continual investment of energies in identity construction. As hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese are now long-term sojourners on the mainland and as mainland Chinese tourists crowd the island’s scenic sites on a daily basis, the psychological distance between Taiwan and China has paradoxically increased. Contemporary residents of Taiwan find the structure of feelings harbored by the PRC citizens—with the ideological remnants of the socialist era, holdovers from (or revival of) Mao worship, and memories of the founding of the Communist regime—incommensurable with their own formative experience. Moreover, despite—or perhaps because of—their close interconnectedness, the basic political and economic interests of the mainland and Taiwan are divergent and even contradictory, and it is naturally difficult for residents of the two places to empathize with the other side’s compelling social problems. It may not be far-fetched to say that the PRC’s profoundly alien history, more than its military threats and territorial claims, have contributed to the shaping of the direction of Taiwan’s dynamic identity quest. One official version of the quest is the adoption of the terms huaren (person of Chinese descent) and huayu (language of the Chinese)—the latter a term that has been nicely merging with the Sinophone discourse in American academia—by the Taiwan government, which has the advantage of confirming the Chinese identity yet simultaneously differentiating it from that of the PRC. However, the fluid nature of Taiwanese identity could certainly stimulate one’s imagination in more unorthodox ways. A proposed conference theme for the 2012 convention of the North American Association of Taiwan Studies, a U.S.-based graduate student organization, features Taiwan as a node, gateway, and liminal space. Capitalizing on Taiwan’s pivotal role in the global circuits of commodities, technologies, and ideas, this theme captures one’s attention, because it situates Taiwan within a geocultural space that both is separate from and encompasses China. Resonating with newly emerging modes of positive self-particularization within Taiwan, such a theme assures us that identity as a site of dynamic reinvention continues to be a source of attraction as well as productive of cultural energies for younger generations of Taiwanese intellectuals.

CONSEQUENCES OF COMPRESSED MODERNITY: CULTURAL DYNAMICS OF THE EAST ASIAN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME

In recent years, a number of scholars have observed the generally positive impact of Taiwan’s cultural hybridization, brilliantly showcased in the diverse topoi and rich textures of the products of its dynamic creative industry, making the island nation a visible node in the global and intraregional circulations of images and symbolic goods in the new millennium. Viewed from a different angle, however, cultural hybridization more often than not takes place involuntarily, under government coercion and within the framework of asymmetric relations among real and symbolic powers. In particular, consecutive era transitions taking place within a brief span of time tend to intensify and further complicate this process—a phenomenon patently evidenced in public and private literary discourses documented in this sourcebook. With each new era, a different set of historical narratives, symbolic systems, and institutional structures are introduced. Whether forcibly imposed or not, the new cultural order often exhibits a hegemonic character, is supported by the all-encompassing and deeply penetrating state apparatus, and implies an explicit or implicit rejection of key elements from the dominant culture of the previous era. Most crucial to our concerns is that such abrupt transitions inevitably cut short and redirect cultural processes on an extensive scale.

In some particular sense, the tortuous political history of modern Taiwan, characterized by drastic cultural reorientations following each era transition, throws into sharp relief a dismal truth about the compressed modernity of East Asia as a whole: the ubiquitous phenomenon of frequent ruptures in the evolutionary cycle of literary institutions necessarily carries negative implications. Consider the radical disruptions encountered by East Asian literary systems across the region in the mid-twentieth century. With the founding of Communist regimes, entire cultural fields on the Chinese mainland and in North Korea were forcibly restructured into a state-monitored socialist system featuring emphatically different aesthetic assumptions, evaluative criteria, and productive and distributive apparatuses from the preceding era. The East Asian societies that maintained the capitalist bourgeois mode of cultural production—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—also experienced profound changes, as all had barely emerged from wartime upheavals before finding themselves inexorably engulfed in Cold War political and ideological maneuvers. Granted, the years following World War II were a time when sea changes took place in cultural arenas everywhere across the globe, but the situation in East Asia was compounded by the effects of the region’s ongoing and compressed modernization process after the Western model.

Rather than dwell on relations between the fundamentally incommensurable indigenous and alien literary traditions, this introduction foregrounds the fact that structural-level ruptures and atrophied evolutionary cycles have constituted a shared basic condition for the evolution of literature as an institution in East Asia since the region’s initial encounter with the modern West a century earlier. Such disruptions are caused by historical factors that vary from one society to another, and they also do not occur with the same frequency or degree of severity. Therefore, the extent to which people who participate in literature in a particular society manage within the limits of their circumstances to contain and overcome the negative consequences of historical caprices and to retain and maximize the benefits ironically bestowed on them becomes crucially relevant in any evaluation of their accomplishments. Gauged by this yardstick, writers and artists from modern Taiwan have done exceptionally well. However, beyond simply acknowledging their laudable achievements, the editors of this sourcebook are also interested in better understanding the generalizable elements of Taiwan’s specific circumstances—the conditions under which cultural activities withered or flourished and writers and artists kept silent or charged forth.

INTELLECTUAL PARADIGMS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE PAST

The ending of martial law marked a momentous turning point in Taiwan’s recent history, as it officially removed many constraints that stood in the way of Taiwan’s march toward an open society. A collective identity reinvention ensued, which above all involves the coming to terms with the community’s historical past. Literary scholars, as brokers of symbolic capital, have played critical roles in this process, as they were instrumental in articulating and re-interpreting the relevance of Taiwanese literary history to contemporary sociopolitical struggles. Given the many divisive historical factors that had separated the two main population groups, the cultural field in the immediate post–martial law era was simultaneously energized and relentlessly factionalized. As a matter of course, the Taiwan-centered imperative prevailed for the majority of Taiwan residents, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, the study of Taiwanese literature, a category formerly held suspect by the government for its alleged separatist implications, was finally admitted into academia. Since then, ideological affiliations have been increasingly subjected to professional discipline and containment, and the last decade has seen robust growth in the newly institutionalized scholarly field.

Viewed from the standpoint of the scholarly disciplines, Taiwanese literary studies, as a late starter, enjoys certain unique benefits, which include a relatively professionalized academic environment and a vibrant intellectual climate that values theoretical sophistication. Comparative literature and cultural studies, in particular, have supplied this burgeoning field with critical conceptions and interpretive frames, as well as up-to-date academic lingo. Overall, these are positive influences, as they drive scholars in this young field—the majority of whom were trained in Taiwan’s highly conventional Chinese literature departments—to venture beyond the time-honored empiricist tradition.

However, to effectively adapt the critical insights imported from the First World to studies of Taiwan literature is no easy task. Less seasoned scholars often find their subjects of inquiry being prescribed for them and the very courses of argument unwittingly shaped by preconceived value judgments. A good case in point is the immense popularity among Taiwanese literary scholars of the postcolonial–postmodernist theoretical formulations, which often bear traces of the specific historical experiences of countries formerly colonized by the West that are incongruous to Taiwan’s historical reality. For instance, in his new book, Taipei: City of Displacements, Joseph Allen insightfully points out that ‘raciality’ during Japanese colonialism in Taiwan was used in ways quite different from its use by European colonialists—the latter is famously depicted in Homi Bhabha’s essay Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, for which skin color functions as a key index¹⁰—whereas Japan claimed affinity with, as well as difference from, the colonized people.¹¹

One may argue that an even more crucial distinguishing factor is the particular temporal frame in which East Asia came to experience the modern, including the modern form of colonialism. With the term contra-modernity, Bhabha argues that the regions colonized by Western imperial powers in fact constituted the underside of European modernity because of the role they played during the historical period of these Western powers’ advancement to modernity through the Enlightenment ideology.¹² By the mid-nineteenth century, when East Asia belatedly entered modernity, however, the world map had already been drawn and its territories parceled out to competing Western imperial powers. The East Asian countries’ attempts to join the game through emulation of existing models—Japan modeling itself after Germany’s militarist state and Western imperialism in general, China’s adoption of Communism as inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and the various fascist/Leninist authoritarian regimes that followed the wars and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century—were in a sense reactionary and ultimately short-lived failures. Before seriously taking on any version of alternative modernity with self-assertive undertones, it seems advisable to first come to terms with modern East Asia’s contested membership in the community of the modernized by noting the manifest symptoms in the region’s cultural processes that directly reflect thwarted endeavors at establishing modern institutions—political, economic, legal, and cultural—within a compressed timetable.

This sourcebook facilitates the use of modern Taiwan as a case study to discuss a phenomenon commonly found in the abridged modern experiences of the East Asian region. That is, under various brands of authoritarian government in twentieth-century East Asia, literary agents’ (broadly defined) tension-ridden and ambivalent relationships with hegemonic cultural formations coercively enforced by state apparatuses are sometimes paradoxically productive. Such special types of cultural dynamics generated in the politically subjugated fields in the region deserve closer, more nuanced, and differentiated analysis.

UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYES OF THE STATE: TO SURVIVE IS TO THRIVE

Drastic cultural reorientations with the advent of each new era in Taiwan in the last century were often accompanied by pervasive symbolic violence, as they inevitably impinged on people’s internalized values, belief systems, and social imaginaries, all of which were rooted in the dominant culture of the previous era. As a rule of thumb, dissenting voices may not be adequately preserved in written records, as they are subject to different forms of suppression—not least those based on prudence and self-censorship. Recent scholarship in our field on topics of history, memory, and trauma finds excellent materials for case studies from Taiwan’s modern literature, especially those related to the February 28 Incident in 1947 and the White Terror of the 1950s (Braester 2003; Berry 2008; Lin 2007). However, published literary discourses from the periods of tumultuous transition—such as those collected in this sourcebook—provide a very different kind of record, as they tend to be discourses in compliance with the official narrative, at least in an ostensible sense.

These documentations are valuable in that they bear witness to the complex workings of hegemony in the East Asian context, typically marked by a mixture of consensus and coercion. Two examples from the early martial law period serve as excellent illustrations. The first is an informal literary newsletter, Newsletters of Literary Friends (II8, II65), founded in 1957 by Zhong Zhaozheng with six other aspiring Taiwanese writers. Born in the Japanese colonial period and faced with definitive disadvantages in the mainlander-dominated literary field of the early martial law period, these writers conceived a pragmatic objective: to practice writing in Mandarin Chinese in order to enhance their chance of being accepted in mainstream literary media. The second case is Wu Zhuoliu, a veteran fiction writer and journalist from the colonial period, who launched the literary journal Taiwan Literary Arts in 1964 with donations and his own pension (II72, III24). The journal functioned as a publishing organ for marginalized localist literary writings long before localism became the dominant trend. Both were landmarks in the early evolution of the sociopolitically constituted localist artistic position in contemporary Taiwan’s literary field. At the time, Zhong and Wu decidedly opted to play the game by its rules, and their self-identification as Han Chinese contributed to their positive responses to interpellations, a la Althusser, from the Sinocentric dominant culture. For most of his career, Zhong functioned as a mediator between the Nationalist literary bureaucrats and the localist-minded Taiwanese writers. Wu’s hidden discontent and real motives were only made known a decade after his death, through the posthumous publication of his memoir Taiwan Forsythia (II72, III24).¹³

Resilience and compliance are undoubtedly the most common survival strategies under authoritarian governments’ arbitrary—and often unfair—distribution of resources in the cultural realm. In the main, the value of cultural capital is contingent upon the government-endorsed symbolic system that patently serves its interest of domination. Mainlanders in the early martial law period naturally fared better than Zhong and Wu. Nonetheless, everyone was subjected to overt and covert forms of coercion via surveillance by bureaucratic institutions and hegemonic cultural controls and needed to be constantly vigilant and observant of the parameters set by the authorities. Ultimately, to remain active participants in the cultural field, one important psychological mechanism was to selectively identify with elements in the dominant culture, albeit with varying degrees of self-persuasion and disguise.¹⁴

In the last two decades, a number of scholarly attempts have gone beyond the repression–resistance model to probe the particular cultural mechanisms at work in modern East Asian societies during periods of control by authoritarian regimes and times of upheaval. Examples include studies on the following: the permissible scope that writers internalized in socialist China (Perry Link); the conservative, conformist, and neotraditionalist dominant culture in postwar Taiwan and Japan (Sung-sheng Y. Chang; Margaret Hillenbrand); the centrality of mass mobilization in the literary culture of the early Mao period and the Cultural Revolution (Charles Laughlin; Cai Xiang; Ban Wang); the collectivist paradigm and paramilitary mobilization of writers developed during the War of Resistance, whose legacy was shown in the literature of assent in the PRC (Charles Laughlin); and the aesthetics of fascism in Japan (Alan Tansman). Different segments of modern Taiwan’s literary history provide a wealth of materials for comparative studies in this type of research. One may, however, continue to question why literary accomplishments in modern Taiwan have excelled in artistic quality under prolonged coercive hegemony. A significant contributing factor may be the ready accessibility of aesthetic resources from different origins within an intellectual climate conducive to quests in high-culture art. Ironically, this often went hand in hand with undesirable historical circumstances. Despite the oppressive colonial rule and its hypocritical concealments of unjust power relations, Tokyo served as a conduit for Taiwanese writers to access modernistic aesthetics, especially naturalism, French symbolism, and surrealism popular among Japanese writers in the early twentieth century. And despite the Nationalists’ forcibly imposed Sinocentric ideology and the White Terror during the early Cold War period, the traditionalist educational focus on classical Chinese heritage and American propaganda vehicles such as the U.S. Informational Service played a crucial role in nourishing literary talents from Taiwan’s postwar generation. Discussion of the deeper implications of this paradoxical phenomenon will be resumed in the last section of this introduction.

LITERARY MEDIA: FROM PUBLIC FORUM TO VEHICLE FOR GLOBAL COMMERCIALIZATION

As new types of public spheres are emerging via various social networking platforms on the Internet, it is high time to look back at the shifting relationships among literature, literary discourse, and the public sphere prior to the arrival of the digital age. Even a cursory look assures us of the extraordinary prominence that lunzhan (debate) occupies in our sourcebook selections. The majority of these debates are much more than polemics over aesthetic matters that only concern writers and critics; they are also indicators of momentous sociopolitical trends and serve as vital engines steering the course of cultural developments in new directions. Indeed, the great prevalence and high visibility of literary debates serving as public forums are quite notable in the history of modern East Asia. This phenomenon can be partially explained by certain shared epochal imperatives that accentuated literature’s civilizational mission. Accelerated economic development and globalization, however, have created drastic changes in the perceptions and practices of legitimate cultures in the region since the late twentieth century. Further shifting of the literary media from public forum to a vehicle for global commercialization and corporatization is no doubt merely part of the big picture.

LITERARY DEBATES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

This sourcebook documents a wide range of debates, and all would be familiar items on an East Asian lunzhan template—if such a template were ever to be constructed. During the Japanese period, three interrelated debates in the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s—the New and Old Literature debate (I9, I10, I11, I20), the (first) nativist literature debate (I15, I22, I23), and the Taiwanese vernacular-script debate (I17, I18, I22)—were variants of the vernacular movement that marked the entrance into modernity for all East Asian societies in the Sinosphere, or—as some scholars are calling it—the Chinese-character (hanzi, kangji) cultural sphere. What motivated this language reform, of course, was the urgency in modernizing a society that was still steeped in the feudalist order. The 1943 debate on kuso realism (I45–I47, I49) between a Japanese-dominated and a Taiwanese-dominated literary magazine, then, was driven by classic issues found in all societies in which discriminatory practices and two-tier citizenship are formally institutionalized.

The first significant debate in Taiwan’s post-1949 era, the Chinese versus Western Cultural Debate that broke out in the Literary Star in 1961–1962, was one more instance of the chronically recurring East versus West public polemics and ought to be considered alongside the Chinese May Fourth movement, the Japanese wartime and postwar debates on how to Overcome the Modern, and the PRC’s phenomenon of culture fever/cultural reflection in the 1980s.¹⁵ The 1963 diatribe against the female writer Guo Lianghui for the allegedly immoral-pornographic depictions in her novel Locked Heart and Guo’s subsequent expulsion from the Chinese Writers’ Association exemplified the close partnership between conservative ideologies and the challenges that the dominant culture faced from rising popular culture (II22–II24).¹⁶ Ample space in this sourcebook is devoted to the (second) nativist literary movement of the 1970s, whose counterhegemonic character made it a landmark in the history of Taiwan’s democratization. At the same time, the movement’s criticism of social inequality incurred during Taiwan’s rapid economic development and the nativist camp’s harsh condemnation of Western-inspired modernist literature are fraught with echoes of prewar left versus right contentions, posing such timeworn questions as how to treat the West in one’s own course of modernization—as a model for emulation or as a source of imperialist invasion and thereby an object of resistance—and which paradigm of modernity—socialist or capitalist—one should follow.

The more recent literary debates that occurred in the post–martial law period may be appropriately seen as offshoots of the overriding social ferment of contemporary Taiwan: the battles between competing Chinese and Taiwanese nationalisms.¹⁷ However, as important as these literary debates were, it is nonetheless clear that they were subordinate and contributing to, rather than spearheading, cultural changes, given the conspicuous surge and proliferation of other types of public forums in the rapidly democratizing society.

The sheer quantity and variety of debates that have punctuated modern Taiwan’s literary history and borne cross-references to events elsewhere in the region make them excellent material for the study of East Asian literary public sphere prototypes, a project that is obviously immensely complex and challenging. It is, of course, not necessarily the opinions expressed in the debates that matter most; rather, it is the problems that generate the debates—of which they are symptoms—that deserve to be the focus of our attention.¹⁸ In his book Institution of Criticism, Peter Uwe Hohendahl traces the origin of the Western liberal public sphere to the practice of literary criticism in eighteenth-century Europe. As freedom, equality, and rationalist discourses were basic features of the liberal public sphere, its rise represented efforts by the bourgeois class to curb the absolutist state’s arbitrary powers. What, then, may be said to be the historical driving forces of the eminently symptomatic literary debates in twentieth-century East Asian societies? How did aesthetics, ideology, and politics intertwine in a characteristically East Asian way? What are the institutional frameworks within which these debates occurred?

Many entries in this sourcebook, other than those documenting the debates themselves, may also be examined for essential clues providing answers to the above questions and thereby more clearly delineating the contours of modern East Asia’s literary processes. In particular, these entries are ideal sites for fathoming what the institution of art (including literature)—or in Peter Bürger’s words, the ideas about art that prevail at a time and that determine the reception of works—entails in modern East Asia because, when a cultural fault line like Taiwan is involved, core elements constituting the regional differences and repetitions tend to be foregrounded.¹⁹ For instance, in the early years of the East Asian modern age, the prevailing conceptions about literature appeared to be a mélange of the Arnoldian conception that regarded it as an index of civilizational attainments and the Confucian dictum "wen yi zai dao, or literature as a vehicle of the Dao" (here Dao can be understood as the cosmic laws in the Daoist sense or moral teaching in the Confucian sense). This high-culture presumption about literature virtually permeated all discourses collected in the sourcebook from the Japanese colonial period, which constantly invoke literature’s power of spiritual rejuvenation in order to achieve the twin objective of societal modernization and national strengthening. At the same time, the ostensibly ambivalent reference to national community, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s when first-generation colonial Taiwanese intellectuals were reluctantly transitioning from the Chinese to the Japanese cultural identity, reaffirms the truism that discourses of literature never seamlessly correspond to either creative practices or political realities. Nonetheless, as long as the same set of epochal concerns and regional imperatives persists as the core thematic thrust in literary discourses, we can surmise that the prevailing assumptions about the basic nature and function of literature have retained their potency. These assumptions, in turn, can be considered an index for the overall structural stability of the cultural environment in which literature debates are intimately wedded to public expressions of sociopolitical opinions.

Given the firm beliefs in literature’s ability to fulfill civilizational missions, it was no surprise that it was always the young cultural elites who established the first platform for a literary public sphere in different modern periods. We may include on the list such epochal events as the founding of the New Youth in 1917 in Peking, the Taiwanese People’s Newspaper in 1923–1924 in Tokyo,²⁰ and Modern Literature in 1960 in Taipei (II16). However, as leftist thinkers like Bertolt Brecht trenchantly observe, producers of culture do not possess the means of production in a capitalist society, which was apparently true even where the capitalist social organization was at a nascent stage or had been incompletely instituted. Although prototypes of literary public spheres in modern China and Taiwan were launched through coterie journals and voluntary literary societies, the continual growth of these prototypes was dependent on the use of platforms provided by larger, commercially oriented cultural institutions, in particular newspapers (especially the fukan) and the publishing industry, which in turn were subjected to invasive measures of control by the state. Therefore, the most prevalent mode of existence for the Chinese literary public sphere in the last century has been, in a sense, one that was visibly constrained by the dual forces of market demand and state intervention, as exemplified by the quasi-autonomous literary culture found in the Republican period, martial-law Taiwan, and China’s reform era. At times, the pendulum swung to the extreme. For instance, in periods of war and revolution—during, for example, the Sino-Japanese War and the civil war on mainland China, the last years of the Pacific War and the initial phase of the martial law era in Taiwan, and the Cultural Revolution in the PRC—cultural production was subjected to much greater state control in a top-down fashion.

These types of literary public sphere inevitably departed from Western liberal models in significant ways. It is extremely challenging trying to accurately gauge the liberating potential literary media possessed within these cultural fields and to effectively generalize the dynamics of change. On the