History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 26

Previous◀ Chapter 25

History of Chinese Literature

NextChapter 27 ▶

Chapter 26: Taiwan Literature — From Nativist Debate to a Polyphonic Tradition

1. Introduction: A Literature Between Worlds

The literature of Taiwan occupies a unique and complex position within the broader history of Chinese literature — a position that is shaped by the island's distinctive historical experience, its linguistic diversity, its political evolution from authoritarian rule to vibrant democracy, and its ambiguous relationship with the mainland Chinese literary tradition from which it both descends and diverges. Taiwan's literary history is, in many respects, a history of contested identities — Chinese and Taiwanese, colonial and postcolonial, traditional and modern, local and cosmopolitan — and the literature that has emerged from this history of contestation is correspondingly rich, diverse, and multilayered.

The island of Taiwan had been a colony of Japan from 1895 to 1945, and the literary culture that existed on the island at the end of the Second World War was shaped by the experience of Japanese colonial rule. Taiwanese writers of the colonial period had written in both Japanese and Chinese (in the vernacular Chinese that had been promoted by the May Fourth Movement on the mainland), and they had developed a literary tradition that was influenced by Japanese literature, by mainland Chinese literature, and by the distinctive cultural traditions of the island itself — the folk traditions of the Hoklo-speaking majority, the Hakka-speaking minority, and the indigenous Austronesian peoples who had inhabited the island for thousands of years before the arrival of Chinese settlers.

The end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the arrival of the Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT) government on Taiwan in 1949 — following its defeat by the Communist forces on the mainland — inaugurated a new chapter in the history of Taiwan's literary culture. The Nationalist government, which claimed to be the legitimate government of all China and which was determined to maintain the Chinese cultural identity of the island, imposed Mandarin Chinese as the official language, suppressed the use of Japanese and the local Taiwanese languages (Hoklo, Hakka, and the indigenous languages), and established a cultural policy that emphasized the continuity of Taiwan's literature with the mainland Chinese literary tradition. The government also imposed martial law, which lasted from 1949 to 1987, and which severely restricted political dissent, press freedom, and literary expression — creating a climate of censorship and self-censorship that shaped the production and reception of literature for nearly four decades.

The literary history of Taiwan since 1945 can be understood as a series of overlapping movements and debates — from the modernist movement of the 1950s and 1960s, through the nativist literature debate of the 1970s, to the post-martial law pluralism of the 1990s and beyond — each of which represented a different response to the fundamental questions that have defined Taiwan's cultural identity: What does it mean to be Taiwanese? What is the relationship between Taiwan's literature and the literature of mainland China? How should literature engage with the island's complex linguistic and cultural heritage? And how can literature give voice to the diverse experiences and perspectives of a society that is, perhaps uniquely in the Chinese-speaking world, genuinely pluralistic and democratic?

2. The February 28 Incident and Its Literary Repercussions

The event that most profoundly shaped the literary and cultural development of postwar Taiwan — and that cast the longest shadow over the island's literature — was the February 28 Incident (二二八事件, Er'erba shijian) of 1947, a mass uprising against the Nationalist government that was brutally suppressed and that resulted in the death or disappearance of an estimated ten to thirty thousand Taiwanese — including many of the island's most prominent intellectuals, writers, artists, and civic leaders.

The February 28 Incident was triggered by the shooting of a bystander by government agents on February 27, 1947, during a crackdown on illegal cigarette vendors in Taipei, but its roots lay in the deep resentment that had been building among the Taiwanese population since the arrival of the Nationalist government in 1945. The Taiwanese, who had expected liberation from Japanese colonial rule to bring freedom and prosperity, were bitterly disappointed by the corruption, incompetence, and arrogance of the new administration — which treated the island as a conquered territory, monopolized economic resources, excluded Taiwanese from positions of authority, and treated the local population with contempt. The shooting on February 27 sparked a spontaneous uprising that quickly spread across the island; the Nationalist government responded by sending military reinforcements from the mainland, which arrived on March 8 and carried out a systematic campaign of suppression that targeted intellectuals, civic leaders, and anyone suspected of involvement in the uprising.

The February 28 Incident had devastating consequences for Taiwanese literary culture. Many of the writers and intellectuals who had been active during the Japanese colonial period and who might have played leading roles in the development of postwar Taiwanese literature were killed, imprisoned, or silenced. The incident also created a climate of fear and distrust that poisoned relations between the "mainlander" (外省人, waishengren) population — those who had come to Taiwan with the Nationalist government from the mainland — and the "native Taiwanese" (本省人, benshengren) population — those whose families had been on the island for generations. This division between mainlanders and native Taiwanese would become one of the defining fault lines of Taiwanese society and one of the central themes of Taiwanese literature.

The February 28 Incident was, for decades, a forbidden subject in Taiwan — a taboo that was enforced by martial law and by the pervasive censorship apparatus of the Nationalist government. Writers who attempted to address the incident risked imprisonment or worse, and the event was effectively erased from the public record. It was not until the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the subsequent democratization of Taiwanese society that the February 28 Incident became a subject that could be openly discussed and that its full significance for Taiwanese history and culture could be acknowledged.

The literary engagement with the February 28 Incident, when it finally came, was intense and multifaceted. Li Qiao (李乔, born 1934), a Hakka writer, addressed the incident in his epic trilogy Wintry Night (寒夜三部曲, Hanye sanbuqu, 1980–1981), which traced the history of a Hakka family in Taiwan from the late Qing dynasty through the Japanese colonial period and the February 28 Incident. The novelist Lin Yaode (林耀德, 1962–1996) and the poet Li Min-yung (李敏勇, born 1947) also addressed the incident in their work, and after the lifting of martial law, a flood of novels, poems, memoirs, and oral histories appeared that sought to recover the memory of the event and to come to terms with its traumatic legacy. The February 28 Incident became, in Taiwanese literary culture, not merely a historical event but a symbol of the suppression of Taiwanese identity and a touchstone for the ongoing debate about Taiwan's relationship to the Chinese mainland.

3. The Modernist Movement

The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of a literary modernist movement in Taiwan that was, in many respects, the most sustained and the most sophisticated modernist movement in the history of Chinese-language literature. The Taiwan modernists — who included poets, fiction writers, and literary critics — drew on the techniques and the aesthetic principles of Western literary modernism (symbolism, surrealism, stream of consciousness, existentialism) to create works that were formally innovative, psychologically complex, and philosophically ambitious. The modernist movement was also, in its own way, a political statement: by embracing Western modernism and by rejecting the socialist realism that had become the official literary doctrine of the mainland, the Taiwan modernists were asserting the cultural autonomy of Taiwan's literature and aligning it with the literary traditions of the non-Communist world.

The modernist movement in Taiwan poetry was led by Ji Xian (纪弦, 1913–2013), a poet who had been active in the Shanghai literary scene before 1949 and who founded the Modernist School (现代派, Xiandai pai) in Taiwan in 1956. Ji Xian's "Six Tenets of the Modernist School" — which included the principles that modernist poetry should be a "horizontal transplant" (横的移植, heng de yizhi) of Western modernism rather than a continuation of the Chinese poetic tradition, and that poetry should be an exploration of "pure poetry" (纯诗, chun shi) rather than a vehicle for political or social messages — provoked fierce debate but also galvanized a generation of young poets to explore new formal and thematic territory.

Yu Guangzhong (余光中, 1928–2017) was perhaps the most accomplished and the most versatile poet of his generation. A native of Nanjing who had come to Taiwan as a young man, Yu Guangzhong wrote poetry that ranged from the formally experimental to the deeply lyrical, from the intellectually challenging to the emotionally accessible. His poem "Nostalgia" (乡愁, Xiangchou, 1972) — which depicted the experience of separation from the mainland through a series of simple, concrete images (a small stamp, a narrow boat ticket, a short grave, a shallow strait) — became one of the most widely known and most frequently recited Chinese poems of the twentieth century, resonating with the experience of millions of Chinese who had been separated from their homeland by the political division of the nation. Yu Guangzhong's work demonstrated that modernist poetic techniques could be combined with emotional directness and cultural resonance to produce poetry of both literary distinction and wide popular appeal.

Luo Fu (洛夫, 1928–2018), another major poet of the modernist generation, co-founded the Epoch Poetry Society (创世纪诗社, Chuangshiji shishe) in 1954 and produced poetry that was characterized by a surreal intensity and a linguistic density that pushed the boundaries of Chinese poetic language. His long poem Death of a Stone Cell (石室之死亡, Shishi zhi siwang, 1965) — a visionary meditation on death, war, and the limits of language — was one of the most ambitious and most formally innovative poems in modern Chinese literature.

The modernist movement in fiction was led by Bai Xianyong (白先勇, born 1937), whose short story collection Taipei People (台北人, Taibei ren, 1971) was one of the finest achievements of Chinese modernist fiction. The stories, which depicted the lives of mainlander exiles in Taipei — former generals, former beauties, former nightclub singers, former aristocrats — who had been stranded on the island by the Communist victory and who lived in a twilight world of memory, nostalgia, and gradual decline, were characterized by a psychological subtlety, a narrative sophistication, and a prose style of luminous beauty that earned comparisons with the work of Chekhov, Fitzgerald, and Proust. Bai Xianyong's fiction was profoundly shaped by his consciousness of exile and loss — by the awareness that the world he depicted was a world that was vanishing, that its inhabitants were living on borrowed time, and that the elegance and the grace of their former lives had been reduced to a kind of gorgeous desolation.

Wang Wenxing (王文兴, 1939–2023) produced two experimental novels — Family Catastrophe (家变, Jiabian, 1973) and Backed Against the Sea (背海的人, Bei hai de ren, 1981–1999) — that were among the most formally radical works of Chinese-language fiction. Wang Wenxing's prose — characterized by an extreme compression, a systematic violation of conventional syntax, and a density of allusion and wordplay that made it virtually impenetrable to the casual reader — represented a deliberate attempt to push the Chinese language to its expressive limits and to create a fiction that demanded the same kind of close, intensive reading that modernist poetry demanded.

4. The Nativist Literature Debate (Xiangtu Wenxue)

The modernist movement in Taiwan literature — with its emphasis on Western literary techniques, its cosmopolitan orientation, and its relative indifference to local social and political realities — provoked a reaction in the 1970s that took the form of the "nativist literature debate" (乡土文学论战, xiangtu wenxue lunzhan) — one of the most important and most consequential literary debates in the history of Taiwan's literature. The nativist literature debate, which reached its peak in 1977–1978, pitted advocates of "nativist" or "local" literature (乡土文学, xiangtu wenxue) — literature that was rooted in Taiwanese soil, that depicted the lives of ordinary Taiwanese people, and that engaged with the social and political realities of the island — against defenders of modernist aesthetics and those who insisted on the universal validity of literary art regardless of its local roots.

The nativist literature movement drew on several sources. It was influenced by the broader cultural and political ferment of the 1970s — a decade in which Taiwan's international position was undermined by the normalization of relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, the loss of Taiwan's seat in the United Nations, and the growing sense among many Taiwanese that the Nationalist government's claim to represent all of China was increasingly untenable. It was also influenced by a revival of interest in Taiwanese history, culture, and identity — an interest that was fueled, in part, by the experience of modernization and rapid economic development, which was transforming the island's landscape, its economy, and its social structure at a dizzying pace and which created a desire to preserve and to celebrate the traditional ways of life that were being swept away.

The leading figures of the nativist literature movement included Chen Yingzhen (陈映真, 1937–2016), a writer and political activist whose fiction depicted the lives of workers, peasants, and the urban poor with a combination of social realism and humanistic compassion. Chen Yingzhen — who had been imprisoned from 1968 to 1975 for his leftist political views — was a passionate advocate of the principle that literature should serve the people and should engage with the social injustices and political contradictions of contemporary society. His stories — including "My First Case" (我的第一个案件) and "Mountain Road" (山路, Shanlu, 1983) — depicted the human cost of Taiwan's rapid industrialization and the political repression of the martial law era with a moral seriousness and a narrative skill that placed him among the most important writers in the history of Taiwanese literature.

Huang Chunming (黄春明, born 1935) was perhaps the most beloved and the most widely read of the nativist writers. His stories — which depicted the lives of the people of rural Yilan County in northeastern Taiwan with a combination of humor, pathos, and affectionate realism — gave literary voice to a world that was rapidly disappearing: the world of small-town and rural Taiwan, with its fishing villages, its rice paddies, its temples, its festivals, and its deeply rooted human communities. Stories like "The Drowning of an Old Cat" (溺死一只老猫, Nisi yi zhi lao mao, 1967), "His Son's Big Doll" (儿子的大玩偶, Erzi de da wan'ou, 1968), and "The Taste of Apples" (苹果的滋味, Pingguo de ziwei, 1972) depicted the dislocations and the absurdities of modernization with a tragicomic sensibility that was deeply rooted in the oral storytelling traditions of the Taiwanese countryside.

Wang Zhenhe (王祯和, 1940–1990) brought to the nativist movement a satirical edge and a linguistic inventiveness that were uniquely his own. His stories and novels — which depicted the lives of the people of Hualien, on Taiwan's east coast, with a sharp eye for the absurd and a keen ear for the rhythms and textures of local speech — were characterized by a comic energy and a linguistic exuberance that drew on the multilingual reality of Taiwanese life (mixing Mandarin, Hoklo, Japanese, and English in ways that reflected the actual speech patterns of the island's inhabitants). His novel An Old Man Hung Upside Down in the Rose Petals (玫瑰玫瑰我爱你, Meigui meigui wo ai ni, 1984) — a darkly comic satire of a small town's preparations to entertain American soldiers on leave from the Vietnam War — was one of the most original and most entertaining Taiwanese novels of the 1980s.

5. "Great River" Novels: Epic Narratives of Taiwanese History

The nativist literature movement and the broader cultural awakening of the 1970s and 1980s gave rise to a tradition of epic historical fiction — sometimes called "great river novels" (大河小说, dahe xiaoshuo) — that sought to encompass the sweep of Taiwanese history in ambitious, multi-volume narratives. These novels, which drew on the model of the European historical novel (particularly the tradition of Zola, Tolstoy, and Thomas Mann) as well as on the Chinese tradition of the historical novel (历史小说, lishi xiaoshuo), represented an attempt to construct a Taiwanese national narrative through literature — to give the people of Taiwan a sense of their own distinctive history and identity.

The most important "great river" novelist was Zhong Zhaozheng (钟肇政, 1925–2020), a Hakka writer whose trilogy The Turbid Current (浊流三部曲, Zhuoliu sanbuqu, 1961–1965) — comprising Dammed Currents (浊流), The Tides of the Jiangshan River (江山万里), and Into the Whirlpool (插天山之歌) — traced the history of a Hakka family in Taiwan from the Japanese colonial period through the early postwar years, depicting the complex and often painful process of cultural adaptation and identity formation that characterized the Taiwanese experience under successive colonial and authoritarian regimes. Zhong Zhaozheng's fiction was grounded in a deep knowledge of Hakka culture and the Hakka language, and his novels gave literary voice to a community whose experience had been largely invisible in the mainstream literary culture.

Li Qiao (李乔, born 1934), another Hakka writer, produced the trilogy Wintry Night (寒夜三部曲, Hanye sanbuqu, 1980–1981), which is widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements of Taiwanese historical fiction. The trilogy traced the history of a Hakka family from the late Qing dynasty through the Japanese colonial period and the February 28 Incident, depicting the successive waves of colonization, exploitation, and cultural transformation that the Taiwanese people endured with a narrative sweep and a human depth that earned comparisons with the great European family sagas. Li Qiao's prose — dense, lyrical, and deeply rooted in the landscape and the culture of the Hakka communities of Miaoli County — was a powerful instrument for the recovery and the celebration of a Taiwanese cultural heritage that had been suppressed and marginalized by the dominant political and cultural forces.

The tradition of the great river novel also found expression in the work of Dongfang Bai (东方白, born 1938), whose massive novel Langdan sha (浪淘沙, Waves Washing the Sand, 1990) — one of the longest novels in Taiwanese literary history — traced the history of three Taiwanese families across the entire twentieth century, from the Japanese colonial period to the present, providing a panoramic depiction of the transformations of Taiwanese society that was unprecedented in its scope and its ambition.

6. Indigenous Taiwanese Literature

One of the most significant literary developments of the post-martial law era was the emergence of indigenous Taiwanese literature — literature written by members of Taiwan's Austronesian indigenous peoples (原住民, yuanzhumin), who constitute approximately two percent of the island's population and whose cultures, languages, and literary traditions had been marginalized and suppressed by successive colonial and authoritarian regimes.

Taiwan's indigenous peoples — who are divided into sixteen officially recognized tribes, including the Amis, the Atayal, the Paiwan, the Bunun, the Tsou, the Rukai, the Saisiyat, the Yami (Tao), and others — possess rich oral literary traditions that include myths, legends, songs, chants, and ritual narratives that have been transmitted from generation to generation for millennia. These oral traditions, which are among the oldest in the Pacific region, constitute a literary heritage of extraordinary richness and diversity — a heritage that is, however, threatened by the decline of indigenous languages and the erosion of traditional cultural practices.

The emergence of a written indigenous literature in Taiwan dates from the 1980s and accelerated after the lifting of martial law in 1987, which created a political environment in which indigenous cultural expression was encouraged and supported. Among the pioneering figures of indigenous Taiwanese literature were Monaneng (莫那能, born 1956), a Paiwan poet who was one of the first indigenous writers to publish in Chinese, and Topas Tamapima (田雅各, born 1960), a Bunun writer whose fiction depicted the lives of indigenous communities in the mountains of central Taiwan with a combination of realism and mythological resonance.

Syaman Rapongan (夏曼·蓝波安, born 1957), a Tao (Yami) writer from Orchid Island (兰屿, Lanyu), was perhaps the most internationally recognized of the indigenous Taiwanese writers. His works — including The Eyes of the Sky (天空的眼睛, Tiankong de yanjing, 2012) and Cold Sea, Deep Feeling (冷海情深, Lenghai qingshen, 1997) — depicted the maritime culture of the Tao people — their fishing traditions, their boat-building practices, their relationship with the sea — with a lyrical power and a cultural specificity that made his work a unique contribution to the Chinese-language literary tradition. Syaman Rapongan's fiction and essays — which were written in Chinese but were deeply informed by the Tao oral tradition and the Tao worldview — raised fundamental questions about the relationship between language, culture, and identity, and about the possibility of expressing an indigenous consciousness within the framework of a colonial language.

Badai (巴代, born 1962), a Puyuma writer, and Ahronglong Sakinu (亚荣隆·撒可努, born 1972), a Paiwan writer whose memoir The Sage Hunter (山猪·飞鼠·撒可努, Shanzhu, feishu, Sakenu, 1998) became one of the best-selling works of indigenous Taiwanese literature, also made significant contributions to the development of indigenous literary voices. The emergence of indigenous Taiwanese literature represented a fundamental expansion of the boundaries of the Chinese-language literary tradition — an expansion that challenged the assumption that Chinese literature was exclusively the literature of the Han Chinese and that opened new perspectives on the relationship between literature, language, and cultural identity.

7. Post-Martial Law Pluralism

The lifting of martial law in 1987 and the subsequent democratization of Taiwanese society — which culminated in the first direct presidential election in 1996 and the first transfer of power from the KMT to the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2000 — created conditions for a literary pluralism that was unprecedented in the history of Chinese-language literature. For the first time in the Chinese-speaking world, writers were able to work in an environment of genuine political freedom — an environment in which there was no official literary doctrine, no state censorship of literary works (with minor exceptions), and no political consequences for literary dissent. The result was an explosion of literary diversity that reflected the full range of Taiwan's cultural, linguistic, and social complexity.

Post-martial law Taiwan literature was characterized by a proliferation of voices, perspectives, and literary styles that resisted easy categorization. Feminist literature — which had been developing since the 1980s, with writers like Li Ang (李昂, born 1952), whose novel The Butcher's Wife (杀夫, Shafu, 1983) had been a landmark of feminist fiction — continued to flourish in the 1990s and beyond, with writers like Zhu Tianwen (朱天文, born 1956) and Zhu Tianxin (朱天心, born 1958) exploring the intersections of gender, memory, and urban life with a formal sophistication and an intellectual ambition that placed them among the foremost Chinese-language writers of their generation. Zhu Tianwen's novel Notes of a Desolate Man (荒人手记, Huangren shouji, 1994) — a lyrical and philosophically dense meditation on desire, decay, and the end of an era, narrated by a gay man in Taipei — was one of the most critically acclaimed Taiwanese novels of the 1990s and marked a significant moment in the development of LGBTQ literature in the Chinese-speaking world.

The literature of sexual and gender diversity — which had been largely suppressed under martial law — emerged as a significant strand of Taiwanese literature in the post-martial law era. In addition to Zhu Tianwen's work, writers like Qiu Miaojin (邱妙津, 1969–1995), whose novel Notes of a Crocodile (鳄鱼手记, Eyu shouji, 1994) depicted the experience of lesbian identity in Taipei with an emotional intensity that was heightened by the author's subsequent suicide at the age of twenty-six, and Chi Ta-wei (纪大伟, born 1972), whose fiction and critical writing explored the intersection of queer identity and science fiction, contributed to a body of literature that was remarkable for its honesty, its courage, and its literary ambition.

The post-martial law era also saw the emergence of a vigorous literary engagement with the complexities of Taiwanese identity — an engagement that was fueled by the island's ongoing political evolution and by the unresolved question of its relationship with the Chinese mainland. Writers explored the multiple layers of Taiwanese identity — indigenous, Hoklo, Hakka, mainlander, and the various hybridities and intersections among these categories — with a nuance and a sophistication that reflected the genuine complexity of the island's cultural landscape.

8. Wu Ming-yi, Wu He, and the Contemporary Scene

The contemporary Taiwanese literary scene — from the late 1990s to the present — has been characterized by a remarkable diversity of voices and visions, among which two writers in particular have achieved international recognition and have come to be regarded as among the most important Chinese-language writers of their generation.

Wu He (舞鹤, born Chen Guocheng, 1951) is a writer whose fiction is characterized by an extreme formal difficulty and a moral seriousness that place him in the tradition of the most demanding modernist writers. His novel Remains of Life (余生, Yusheng, 1999) — a sprawling, nearly punctuation-free narrative that explored the aftermath of the Musha Incident (雾社事件, Wushe shijian) of 1930, in which members of the Seediq indigenous people rose up against Japanese colonial rule and were brutally suppressed — was one of the most challenging and most critically acclaimed Taiwanese novels of the late twentieth century. Wu He's prose — which flowed in long, winding sentences that could stretch across entire pages without a period — was a deliberate formal strategy designed to break down the conventional boundaries of narrative and to create a reading experience that was itself a kind of immersion in the traumatic historical experience that the novel depicted. Remains of Life was a profound meditation on colonial violence, indigenous memory, and the ethical responsibilities of the writer in the face of historical trauma — a work that placed Wu He in the company of writers like W.G. Sebald, J.M. Coetzee, and Claude Simon in his commitment to using experimental form as a means of ethical inquiry.

Wu Ming-yi (吴明益, born 1971) has emerged as perhaps the most internationally recognized Taiwanese writer of the twenty-first century. His work — which spans fiction, nonfiction, and environmental writing — is characterized by a deep engagement with the natural world, a concern for environmental destruction and ecological loss, and a narrative imagination that draws on sources as diverse as natural history, philosophy, indigenous mythology, and the aesthetics of everyday life. His novel The Man with the Compound Eyes (复眼人, Fuyanren, 2011) — a speculative narrative that depicted a vast island of trash floating across the Pacific Ocean and crashing into the coast of Taiwan — combined environmental allegory with mythological imagination and psychological realism to create a work that was both a meditation on environmental catastrophe and a deeply moving exploration of loss, memory, and the search for meaning. His subsequent novels — The Stolen Bicycle (单车失窃记, Danche shiqie ji, 2015), which wove together the histories of bicycles and their owners across decades of Taiwanese history, and The Magician on the Skywalk (天桥上的魔术师, Tianqiao shang de moshushi, 2011), which evoked the vanished world of a Taipei pedestrian overpass and its community of street vendors and magicians — demonstrated a narrative inventiveness and an emotional depth that earned him comparison with the most accomplished novelists of world literature.

Other significant contemporary Taiwanese writers include Kan Yao-ming (甘耀明, born 1972), whose fiction combined the traditions of Hakka culture with elements of magical realism; Huang Chun-ming's student Wu Zhuoliu (吴浊流, 1900–1976), whose legacy continued to influence younger writers; and a new generation of writers who were engaging with the challenges of globalization, digital culture, and the island's increasingly complex relationship with the Chinese mainland and the wider world.

9. Literature in Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka

One of the most distinctive features of Taiwan's literary culture — and one that distinguishes it most clearly from the literary culture of the Chinese mainland — is the existence of a significant body of literature written in the island's indigenous Chinese languages, particularly Taiwanese Hokkien (台语, Taiyu, also known as Southern Min or Hoklo) and Hakka (客家话, Kejiahua).

The development of a written literature in Taiwanese Hokkien has been hindered by several factors: the absence of a standardized written form of the language, the dominance of Mandarin Chinese in education and official life, and the suppression of Hokkien-language expression during the martial law era. Nevertheless, a tradition of Taiwanese Hokkien-language literature has developed — a tradition that draws on the rich oral literary heritage of the Hokkien-speaking community (including folk songs, opera libretti, proverbs, and storytelling traditions) and that uses a variety of writing systems (including Chinese characters, romanization, and hybrid scripts) to represent the sounds and the rhythms of the spoken language.

Among the most important Hokkien-language writers are Xiang Yang (向阳, born 1955), a poet who has written in both Mandarin and Hokkien and whose Hokkien-language poetry — including the collections The Homeland of the Earth and Songs of the Soil — draws on the folk traditions and the natural landscapes of rural Taiwan to create a poetry that is both linguistically distinctive and emotionally resonant. Lin Zongxian (林宗源, 1935–2021) was a pioneering figure in the development of modern Hokkien-language poetry, producing work that demonstrated the capacity of the language to serve as a vehicle for sophisticated literary expression.

Hakka-language literature has followed a similar, if somewhat less developed, trajectory. The Hakka community in Taiwan — which constitutes approximately fifteen percent of the island's population — has a rich oral literary tradition, including mountain songs (山歌, shange), tea-picking opera (采茶戏, caichaxi), and various forms of narrative and ritual performance. The development of a written Hakka literature has been encouraged by the establishment of Hakka-language media (including the Hakka Television Channel, founded in 2003) and by the growing cultural awareness and pride of the Hakka community.

The existence of literature in Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka — alongside the Mandarin-language literature that continues to dominate the island's literary culture and the indigenous literatures discussed earlier — makes Taiwan's literary landscape one of the most linguistically diverse in the world. This linguistic diversity is not merely a curiosity; it reflects the fundamental pluralism of Taiwanese society and raises important questions about the relationship between language, identity, and literary expression. The question of whether a genuinely Taiwanese literature can be written in Mandarin Chinese — a language that was imposed on the island by the Nationalist government and that is shared with the Chinese mainland — or whether authentic Taiwanese literary expression requires the use of the island's indigenous languages, remains one of the most debated questions in contemporary Taiwanese literary criticism.

10. Conclusion: A Polyphonic Tradition

The literature of Taiwan, as it has developed over the course of the past eight decades, constitutes one of the most remarkable and one of the most complex literary traditions in the Chinese-speaking world — and, indeed, in world literature. Born from the intersections of multiple colonial experiences (Chinese, Japanese, and American), shaped by the traumas of political violence and authoritarian rule, enriched by the diversity of the island's linguistic and cultural communities, and transformed by the experience of democratization and globalization, Taiwanese literature has achieved a richness and a depth that belie the small size of the island and its population.

The defining characteristic of Taiwanese literature — the characteristic that distinguishes it most clearly from the literatures of the Chinese mainland, of Hong Kong, and of the Chinese diaspora — is its polyphony. Taiwan is a society in which multiple languages, multiple cultures, multiple histories, and multiple identities coexist and interact in a dynamic and ever-changing relationship — and the literature that has emerged from this society reflects this polyphony in its extraordinary diversity of voices, perspectives, and literary forms. From the modernist experiments of Bai Xianyong and Wang Wenxing to the nativist realism of Huang Chunming and Chen Yingzhen; from the epic historical narratives of Li Qiao and Zhong Zhaozheng to the environmental imagination of Wu Ming-yi; from the indigenous voices of Syaman Rapongan and Badai to the Hokkien-language poetry of Xiang Yang; from the feminist explorations of Li Ang and Zhu Tianwen to the queer narratives of Qiu Miaojin — Taiwanese literature encompasses a range of voices and a diversity of perspectives that is unmatched in the Chinese-language literary world.

The future of Taiwanese literature — like the future of Taiwan itself — is uncertain. The island's complex geopolitical situation, the ongoing question of its relationship with the Chinese mainland, the challenges of globalization and technological change, and the generational shifts that are transforming its society and its culture all create conditions of uncertainty and flux. But the literature that has been produced on this small island over the past eight decades — literature that has given voice to the experiences and the aspirations of one of the most culturally diverse and most democratically vibrant societies in Asia — is a permanent and invaluable contribution to the larger story of Chinese literature and to the literature of the world.

References

Previous◀ Chapter 25

History of Chinese Literature

NextChapter 27 ▶