On April 17, 1895, China and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, ending the Sino-Japanese War. China ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores to Tokyo, and the islands would be returned only after World War II. The fifty-year colonial occupation had a profound impact on Taiwan's culture. Japanese language and education were instituted, artists were censored, and Chinese-language publications were eventually banned.
When the Japanese first took possession of the island, they met with sporadic armed resistance. But by 1919, Japan's military governors had consolidated control over the island. It be came clear that Japan's undisputed political and military might precluded the possibility of any large-scale uprising against the colonial authorities. Instead, the island's intellectual elite engaged in a cultural resistance of sorts. The occupation acted as a catalyst for the creation of a strong regional identity, one that found its clearest expression in literature. Taiwan's modern poetry was born during this period, and it evolved rapidly. Its development can be divided into three periods: the early days (1923-1931), the flourishing period (1932-1937), and the war years (1938-1945).
The early days of Taiwan's modern poetry were shaped by China's New Culture Movement of 1917 and the example of modern Japanese literature, which had developed since the Meiji reform period (1868-1911). These precipitated a literary reform movement that completely changed the way poetry was written. Free verse in modern vernacular Chinese and Japanese replaced highly formalistic traditional poetry written in classical Chinese. New themes also emerged. As Japanese economic and cultural influences on the island grew more pervasive, a need to define and preserve a sense of place and tradition began to emerge among local poets. Nascent expressions of ethnicity and Chinese nationalism filled the new poetry and were, like the social and political movements of the day, made possible by a political climate that was still fairly liberal. In general, literary realism prevailed during this period.
When Taiwan was annexed by Japan, it was still governed by China's imperial bureaucratic system. Although the island was considered a backwater of the empire, and many of its residents had an aversion to mandarin rule imposed from the continent, the local educational system was fairly well developed. One indication of this was the impressive success of local students in the imperial examination system. During the Ching dynasty, Taiwan produced three Hanlin scholars, representing the top of the intricate exam pyramid, and forty-one chin-shih, or "presented scholar" degree holders, also a substantial intellectual accomplishment.
When the Japanese arrived, there were two thousand private schools with thirty thousand students. The schools were devoted to traditional Confucian education—the rote memorization of Chinese characters and the classics. Students studied ancient commentaries on classical texts, practiced calligraphy, and learned to write elegant, refined essays in stylized form. In the course of their education, most scholars also learned the intricacies of classical verse forms, which are characterized by complex rules for tone, rhyme, and meter. The ability to turn out a classical poem was considered a mark of culture. Poets and poetasters often organized poetry clubs or societies.
At the turn of the century, the island had approximately one hundred poetry societies. These bastions of traditional Chinese culture actually increased in number during the early years of the occupation, peaking in the mid 1920s. Membership in such societies was a form of cultural protest against the occupation and the institution of Japanese education. Since most Japanese administrators had been educated in the Chinese classics and also had a great deal of respect for traditional learning, they did little to hinder the growth of these societies. Many of the classical poems written during these years were mannered imitations of poems written in earlier dynasties, especially those by scholars who were dissatisfied with the imperial court and who chose to live as recluses. Other poems, though stilted in diction, were genuine in feeling, as Taiwan poets bemoaned the island's fate and their own sense of disgrace and loss.
Similar sentiments were growing throughout China as the Ching dynasty suffered a string of humiliating defeats at the hands of foreign powers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The position of the imperial court worsened, and it was finally overthrown in 1911. Overnight, the imperial system was eliminated. Intellectuals and reformers began to assess China's predicament. Many blamed the country's anachronistic civil service exam system and inaccessible classical language for China's backwardness. Demands for educational reform and the official adoption of the modern vernacular became increasingly vocal and widespread. The sentiments came to a head in 1917, when Hu Shih (胡適), then a philosophy student at Columbia University, launched a new literature movement with an essay published in New Youth (新青年) magazine entitled "A Modest Proposal for the Reform of Literature." His target: classical poetry.
By attacking the most sacrosanct element of the classical literary tradition, and the one least susceptible to change, Hu Shih hoped to overturn the authority of the classical language once and for all. His essay contained eight tenets for literary re form. These attacked the classical language as well as outmoded poetic diction and forms in favor of free verse in the vernacular.
Chen Tu-hsiu (陳獨秀), editor of New Youth, was another strong advocate for literary reform. He attributed the West's strength to the reforms of the Renaissance, which coincided with the rise of Europe's modem vernacular languages. Chen demanded that the "aristocratic literature of the few" be replaced with a "plain, simple, and expressive literature of the people."
The success of the movement was assured by the May 4th Movement of 1919. This erupted in response to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I. The treaty left the former German concessions in Shantung province in Japanese hands. In the name of progress, science, and democracy, students took to the streets in protest. Broadsides, pamphlets, and newspaper articles in the vernacular by students and reformers flooded the country. The movement succeeded. In 1920, the Ministry of Education formally adopted vernacular Chinese for classroom instruction in elementary schools, and by 1922, all textbooks were in the vernacular.
Although Taiwan was ruled by Japan, the island's intellectuals nonetheless felt the cultural shock waves from the mainland, even though the impact was somewhat delayed. The beginning of Taiwan's own new literature movement can be dated to a group of four modern Japanese poems by Chui Feng (追風) entitled "Imitations," which were written in 1923 and appeared in Taiwan Magazine the following year.
It is not surprising that the island's first modem poems were written in Japanese. Shortly after their arrival in Taiwan, the colonial authorities instituted education in Japanese. By the time of the May 4th Movement, approximately 39 percent of Taiwan's school-aged boys were attending the six-year Japanese educational program. Through Japanese translations, the island's youth were exposed to a world of new ideas well in advance of their compatriots in the mainland. Japan itself had gone through a similar cultural reform during the Meiji period, and by the 1920s there was already a substantial body of modern Japanese literature to inspire young Taiwan writers.
But Taiwan's new literature movement in Chinese found its leader in Chang Wo-chun (張我軍), 1902-1955, a bank employee from Panchiao, near Taipei. In 1923, when the bank folded, Chang decided to use his severance pay to study in Peking. On his way, he stopped off to see friends in Shanghai, where he also met with members of the radical Taiwan Youth Association, a cultural organization with links to the Communist Party. Once in the old capital, Chang enrolled in night school to study Mandarin. With great excitement, he read the essays by Hu Shih, Chen Tu-hsiu, and others calling for a revolution in literature. He also witnessed firsthand the strides made in mainland China since the new literature movement had begun. Several months after arriving in Peking, he wrote his first literary work in the vernacular, a poem entitled "Quiet" (沈寂 ):
In the dusty capital.
In the spring light.
A young man from Taiwan
Is in love with his home!
And he thinks of his love!
His home, thousands of miles away;
Deep in the night he often
Sighs to the moon,
Where is his love ....
When he is alone he often
Curses the god of love!
Later that same year, Chang ran out of money and was forced to return to Taiwan, where he began work as an editor at the Taiwan People's News, a Taipei newspaper. He brought with him the seeds of the island's new literature movement. As a newspaper editor, he was well placed to publicize the new ideas he had picked up in mainland China. Chang wrote a series of letters and editorials for the paper denouncing China's traditional literature—which still held sway on the island—while advocating a new literature written in the modem vernacular. In "A Letter to the Young People of Taiwan," "Taiwan's Lamentable Literary Scene," and "Let's Smash This Crumbling Palace," Chang presented his ideas on literary reform, many of which were drawn directly from Hu Shih.
Chang's writings caused a great stir around the island. His primary target of attack, like Hu Shih's, was classical poetry. In 1924, he also published a number of modem poems in the Taiwan People's News, and the following year he published a book of modem verse about his experiences in Peking, entitled Love and Chaos in the Capital. Because these are his early attempts at using the modern vernacular, Chang's poems are not exceptional. But they do mark the beginnings of Taiwan's new poetry. Chang was also instrumental in publishing in Taiwan the model works of many famous mainland writers, such as Lu Hsun (魯迅), Ping Hsin (冰心), and Kuo Mo-juo (郭沫若).
Although writers such as Chang Wo-chun helped introduce readers to what was happening in mainland China, the transition to the modem Chinese vernacular as a literary medium remained problematic in Taiwan. The island's writers had to struggle against the staunch supporters of the classical tradition. Confucian scholars of the old school found the idea of literary reform impossible. Old values continued to have resonance and classical portly societies continued to grow on the island, in spite of the reforms occurring in the mainland. The colonial government was also doing its best to implement compulsory Japanese education and promote the study of Japanese and traditional poetic forms, such as haiku. At the same time, colonial customs authorities were alerted to stopping imports of progressive and radical publications from the mainland.
Most people in Taiwan had only a vague notion of the May 4th Movement. Poet Yang Yun-ping (楊雲萍), who was born in Taipei in 1906 and later gained fame as a historian, was in high school when Chang's essays began appearing. Yang also had the chance to see vernacular publications from the mainland in the home of a friend, Chiang Meng-pi (江夢筆), whose father owned a Chinese medicine shop and often went to mainland China to purchase stock. When Chiang's father returned to Taiwan, he in variably brought some of the latest mainland magazines.
Yang himself also had an opportunity to visit mainland China. As an honor student in a Japanese school, he was allowed to go there on a graduation trip. He bought all the literary magazines he could find, but after returning to Taiwan and reading them carefully, he was disappointed. He felt the publications were not up to the standards of Japanese literary magazines. He found that writers and translators from Japan were in better touch with the most recent trends in world literature. By comparison, the Chinese were rather isolated and ignorant of international avant-garde movements such as surrealism. Yang remarked in an interview with the author, "We were in contact with the world through Japanese."
At the age of nineteen, Yang decided to launch a vernacular literary magazine with his friend Chiang Meng-pi. In March 1925, they published the first issue of JenJen (人人). Though it was only ten pages long and written entirely by the two young men, it holds the enviable position in the history of Taiwan literature as the island's first literary magazine in the Chinese vernacular. In the first issue they focused their attack on classical poetry. "We were not against classical poetry because we couldn't write it or understand it, but because it had lost its value," Yang says. The second and final issue appeared in December and included works by many writers, including Chang Wo-chun.
Yang Yun-ping, a skilled poet, wrote classical Chinese verse—he published one collection—as well as modem poetry in Chinese and Japanese. He first wrote in Chinese, but later switched to Japanese because the language of modem Japanese poetry was more developed and so phisticated. As Yang points out today, "China has a long history of vernacular fiction; there was tradition to build on. But there was no such tradition for poetry. The language of modem poetry was still in need of refining." Yang published his only collection of modem poetry, Mountains and Rivers, in 1943. The poems were all written in Japanese, and Yang's reputation as a poet rests on this single volume. As Yang says, "It must be the first and only time in the history of China that Japanese—or any other foreign language for that matter—was used to write Chinese literature."
Yang's lyric poetry is a sophisticated blend of reason and emotion. His realist poetry centers on daily life, giving his verse a homey, down-to-earth tone. It has been suggested that the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, who made a lecture tour of China in 1933, was his greatest influence. Yang's poem "Wife" is a typical example of his poetry:
Dear wife, another year,
The world has changed,
time flies.
You wash diapers
dig turnips
with pianist's hands;
I consign my blood to
piles of old books,
Half a life spent on
dry research.
You smile at me,
But I see your loneliness
The streets are alive,
Let's go out, let's go out
Together.
But not all poets chose to write in Japanese. Perhaps the most important poet to write exclusively in Chinese after Chang Wo-chun, was Yang Hua (楊華). He was born in Pingtung, southern Taiwan, in 1906, and committed suicide in 1936. Yang Hua was educated in both Japanese and Chinese, but he was al ways partial to Chinese culture and letters, and later taught the Chinese classics. His own poetry, which for the most part consists of several poetic sequences, was influenced by Tagore and Japanese haiku. Most of his poems are sad, dealing with colonial oppression and social problems.
In 1927, Yang Hua was arrested by the Japanese authorities and jailed in Tainan, southern Taiwan. While in jail, he wrote a collection of fifty-three short poems entitled The Black Tide, some of which were censored during the occupation. In poem 50 of the collection, he compares the fate of the people of Taiwan under Japanese rule to grains of sand tossed about by the wind:
Fate!
It's a dervish on the desert of life
Which flings us
Without mercy
-we are helpless grains of sand
Floating
Close together
In the empty sky
The 1920s saw some of the greatest economic and political changes of the occupation. The administration of the colonial government was placed in the hands of a number of enlightened civilian administrators who worked to improve the quality of life. Taiwan's economy flourished and productivity increased via Japanese technological input. Limited industrialization, especially in agricultural processing, had begun and it was changing the character of rural Taiwan. The assimilation process was also being speeded up through liberal policies. People from Taiwan were admitted to the highest circles of the colonial government in an advisory capacity. Business laws were eased, allowing the entry of local entrepreneurs into the modern sector, and educational opportunities were also increased.
Throughout the 1920s, Taiwan students and intellectuals came increasingly under the sway of liberal ideas from the West. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points on the rights of self-determination for small and weak nations and, later, Lenin's work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, were particularly influential. Lenin's ideas gained supporters in colonial areas throughout the world, especially after the second congress of the Third Comintern adopted "The National and Colonial Question in 1920." This document, drafted by Lenin, emphasized the need for an anti-imperialist alliance of national and anti-colonial movements. These ideas gained popularity in places like the Philippines, India, and Vietnam. They were also introduced in Taiwan through radical overseas student organizations such as the Taiwan Youth Association in Shanghai and the Taiwan Youth Association in Tokyo. Returning students disseminated these new ideas through local organizations, such as the Taiwan Cultural Association, which was established in 1921 and had links with the Taiwan Communist Party.
Leftist and humanist ideals had an impact on the island's writers, including Yang Hua. One of his better-known poems, "A Woman Worker," is a good example:
The starts are few, the breeze is soft,
The lonely light of the moon shines on her,
She rubs her face and opens her eyes
She thinks it is daybreak.
She must be at work by break of day
She throws on her clothes without pausing
And sets off for work on foot.
When she arrives at the textile factory
The steel gate is locked tight,
she can't get in,
Only then does she realize she has been
tricked by the moonlight.
She considers going home, but is afraid
she'll be late,
the moon is already setting in the west;
If she doesn't go home, she'll have no breakfast;
There's no one on the street at that hour,
Silent, the weeds a jumble
The cold wind cuts to the bone
The moon shines through the trees.
She waits and waits, but the gate doesn't open
The wind is colder than ice water
Her hands and feet are numb
She grows exhausted just waiting
Till the moon sets and the cocks crow.
The poem is a comment on the dehumanization that came with early industrialization during the occupation. The bright full moon and the young woman, two images associated with traditional love poems, take on very different qualities here. They stand in stark contrast to the cold inhuman factory and its environs. The warm human relationships of traditional society have been replaced by heartless economic exploitation. Yang draws a realistic and moving picture of life in the early years under Japanese colonial economic development.
There were a great number of poets writing in Chinese during this time who were concerned with the Japanese occupation and the threat it posed to their cultural and ethnic identity. One such poet is Lai Ho (賴和), who is best known for his short stories and is often called the father of modern Taiwan literature. His realist poems deal primarily with the occupation.
Lai Ho was born in 1894 in Changhua, central Taiwan. At sixteen, he entered the Taiwan Medical School. After he graduated and began practicing medicine, he also became involved in clandestine anti-Japanese activities. He was arrested twice by the Japanese authorities, the first time in 1923. After the huge September earthquake in Tokyo, colonial authorities feared that activists would take advantage of the crisis in Japan to overthrow their colonial governments. As a result of these fears, police measures were increased throughout the Japanese empire, and massive arrests were carried out. Lai Ho was arrested in December and held for about one month. He was arrested again in 1941. During his stay in jail, his health began to decline, and he died in 1943 of a heart condition.
In 1930, he wrote a long poem entitled "Lament for a Southern Nation," which was published in the bilingual Taiwan New People's News the following year. The poem was about the October 1930 Wushe uprising in central Taiwan. After a series of misunderstandings, Atayal tribespeople in the area attacked the Japanese in Wushe village. The rebellion was suppressed after fifty days of fighting in which the Japanese troops employed bombers and poison gas. More than nine hundred indigenous tribespeople and two hundred Japanese died in the uprising.
Lai's poem begins with the woeful pronouncement, "All the warriors are dead," and ends with a call for all people to unite and "struggle for their descendants." The poem is important because it is one of the first pieces of writing in which a larger Taiwan identity, including both the Han Chinese and the non-Han peoples of the island, begins to take shape. Lai sees all the peoples of Taiwan united against a common foreign aggressor—the Japanese.
Hsu Ku (虛谷 ), 1891-1965, was bom in Changhua and, like Lai Ho, wrote fiction and poetry that dealt with life under the occupation. Hsu was educated in Japan and later became an important member in the liberal Taiwan Cultural Association. He was also one of the founding editors of the bilingual Taiwan New People's Daily in 1932. His stories and poems were written to remind readers that they were culturally different from their rulers.
In one decade, modem Chinese poetry was not only becoming more sophisticated, but also increasingly confrontational in tone. Hsu Ku's poem ''The Enemy," which originally appeared in the weekly Taiwan New People's News in 1931, is typical:
Stop, stop, stop!
Let's stop our crying
The enemy is here,
Don't let them hear;
If they hear,
They'll think we're looking
for sympathy
They 'll laugh with more cold pride.
We must rely on ourselves,
We don't need their help
Even if we're finished.
We mustn't show them that
we suffer; If we do,
Death couldn't be more hateful.
Stop, stop!
Stop crying.
Brush away,
Let's brush away our tears,
Our enemy is here!
Don't let them see;
If they do,
They'll secretly be gladdened
by our predicament
And curse, telling us to repent;
We must solve our own problems,
We don't need their false kindness,
Even if we are lost,
We cannot show our despair
In front of our enemy;
By showing despair,
Our shame would be worse than death
Brush away,
Let's brush away our tears!
Although the early stage of Taiwan's vernacular literature movement and modem poetry began largely as a result of the Literary Movement of 1917 and the May 4th Movement in China, it had its own unique characteristics. Taiwan poets, like their mainland counterparts, moved away from rigid classical forms and began to experiment with free verse written in the language of colloquial speech. But many Taiwan writers felt lost by the lack of models in Chinese, so they began writing in Japanese. Others, more concerned with maintaining their cultural roots, stuck with Chinese.
Whatever language the poets used, many of them were galvanized by the Japanese presence. As the process of economic and cultural assimilation continued and deepened, writers felt compelled to explore and define their own cultural identity. They sought to identify those qualities that set them apart from their colonial rulers, and were encouraged in this endeavor by Japan's own increasing self-confidence in world affairs. As Japan's position improved internationally, political liberalization was undertaken at home. This new liberalism was also reflected in Japan's colonial policies. Influenced by progressive ideas from the West and a more tolerant civil administration, people in Taiwan also began advocating more local autonomy. This fairly liberal interlude lasted through the mid 1930s, and it provided an environment for even greater artistic expression in what can be called the flourishing second period of Taiwan's modem poetry development. John Balcom, formerly an editor of the Free China Review, is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on contemporary Chinese literature. This article is the first of a three-part series.