A book by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang tracks
decades of changes in Taiwan's literature.
The title of this book accurately describes its content: changes in the political parameters guiding society have wrought profound changes in the literature of Taiwan. As apt as the title is, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's treatment of the evolution of literary culture on Taiwan over the past half-century is a good deal more nuanced and detailed than any short description can encapsulate.
Initially, the Kuomintang (KMT) government of Chiang Kai-shek imposed a top-down policy of political control over literature and the arts. Author Chang, an accomplished scholar and a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, observes that this essentially recycled policies and practices the KMT had established on the mainland during the Sino-Japanese war. There were distinct similarities to the cultural practices of Mao Zedong: both Chiang's KMT and Mao's Chinese Communist Party employed coercive methods to further political ends. And, though bitter enemies, the two sides agreed literature must no longer be the practice of language games and frivolous content to amuse the leisure class. Since, however, the KMT's goal was to counter communist influences emanating from the mainland, its desired literary forms were very different from those favored by Mao's government. For example, to combat the communist emphasis on class struggle, KMT ideologues extolled the Confucian concept of renxing, the innate goodness of human nature. Unfortunately, this quickly degenerated into sinocentric rhetoric and neotraditional moralism.
It is believed, despite the lack of hard evidence, that an intense power struggle between the KMT and its military determined the direction of the government's cultural policy for the first 30 years of its administration of Taiwan, with the military often dominant. Contrary to the widespread view that the military ruled with an iron fist, Chang argues that the military's leadership was pragmatic and essentially non-ideological. As long as the bottom line of national security was not jeopardized, they were flexible. This included tolerating Western influences, resulting in an interesting mix of loyalty and patriotism on the one hand and stylistic avant-gardism and creative free play on the other. These would form the bases for the evolution from hard to soft authoritarianism that characterized the transition between Chiang Kai-shek's presidency and that of his son, Chiang Ching-kuo. The mainstream and essentially collectivist model of literary production begun in the early years of the KMT's administration of Taiwan was fostered by fukan, which were literary supplements to daily newspapers. Intended for leisure reading, they provided a space for amateur writers to share intimate personal feelings and unorthodox forms of knowledge in a fairly casual manner to a sympathetic readership.
This mainstream position would later be challenged by elitist journals advocating modernism, nativism and localism. Modernism regarded native literary development as inferior to its western counterparts and in need of a major overhaul in order to "modernize," by which its adherents appear to have meant elevating Taiwan's literary development to Western levels. Modernists espoused liberal-humanist outlooks, and attempted a "horizontal transplantation" of contemporary Western forms into Chinese literature. Though self-consciously elitist, the modernist critique of the officially sanctioned mainstream literature was also potentially subversive. Members were not, however, pro-communist. Aware of the atrocities that the communist government of the mainland had perpetrated against artists and writers, Taiwan's modernists declared themselves grateful that they enjoyed the option of remaining silent. Nativists, by contrast, espoused leftist-humanitarian theories. They considered western cultural imperialism to be the primary threat to national identity, and rejected capitalist influences in favor of a socialist agenda. Though agreeing with the KMT government that there was but one China, their socialist views differed markedly from the KMT's pro-capitalist policies. Localists, whose movement developed partly in response to nativism, stridently rejected nativists' sinocentrism. They stressed that Taiwan rather than China was the real ancestral land of the Taiwanese people and criticized the government's lack of public acknowledgement of "ethnic conflicts" on the island, as well as its marginalization of the history and culture of the aboriginal population. Their rejection of the one-China concept differed sharply from the KMT's position and, until Taiwan-born Lee Teng-hui assumed the presidency in 1988, they were regarded as a greater challenge to government control than even the left-leaning nativists. Localists, who were mostly natives of Taiwan, were more disadvantaged vis-a-vis mainlanders than any of the other movements, since the latter were both better versed in sinocentric culture and more likely to have studied abroad, and therefore able to incorporate the latest foreign trends into their work.
By the mid-1970s, these movements had evolved into real threats to the mainstream cultural hegemony instituted by the KMT. In a highly literate society of newspaper readers, and therefore fukan readers, their respective literary outputs were widely read. Like most challenges to established patterns, the new movements did not emerge full-blown. Tu (soil), a short story published by Wang Ding-jun in 1967, shows the sinocentric form in transition. Its central figure becomes seriously ill after misplacing a small bottle his mother has filled with soil from his mainland home. After the protagonist explains his parents' belief that those who live away from home will get seriously ill and eventually die unless they have a drink mixed with soil from their native place, a sympathetic radio announcer broadcasts the man's concern. Among the many responses from the audience is one from a young woman who chastises the man for a belief that blinds him to the beauty of the Taiwan landscape. In what may be considered a compromise ending, the protagonist recovers the bottle, minus its cap and much of the contents. He decides to keep it, but also to entrust his illness to modern medicine. In later writings, Wang describes China, which he had left four decades ago, as just a map on the wall, or a painting he has fallen out of. Refuting a friend's claim that "China is our mother," he replies that mother, that is, home, is Taiwan, while China is a dream.
Innocuous to the untrained eye, Wang's assertions, and those of others like him, posed a profound challenge to the legitimacy of the KMT. The party was at that time dominated by mainlander leaders whose dream was to return both themselves and their government to the mainland. The idea of Taiwan as a permanent home was anathema; moreover, for mainlander KMT leaders to admit that their rule extended only to Taiwan would reinforce already existing criticisms that the party was an alien regime with no right to rule the island. Hence, localists had to struggle for both political and literary legitimacy. Happily for the group, shifts in the political landscape that occurred in the late 1980s worked to their advantage. In 1987, emergency decrees enacted nearly three decades before to guide the struggle against communism were lifted, allowing greater freedom of expression both politically and artistically. And, in 1988, Taiwan had its first Taiwan-born president. These changes finally conferred legitimacy on the localists. However, they occurred just as the entire cultural field was escaping political subjugation and gaining relative autonomy. A new principle of legitimacy based on culture began to supercede the former, politically based, principle. Sensing this, members of the mainstream movement quickly incorporated the aesthetic innovations introduced by the modernists in the 1960s and 1970s, thus establishing their cultural legitimacy in this new competition. Chang captures the localist dilemma in a clever metaphor, observing that, having spent all of their energy winning the old race, the localists collapsed across the finish line, only to find that it had just been moved.
After lifting the emergency decrees, the government steadily withdrew from direct involvement in cultural activities. State agencies such as the Government Information Office, the Council for Cultural Affairs and the cultural bureaus of city and county governments abandoned their watchdog role in favor of allocating public funds for culture in the most effective fashion. The content of literary production became increasingly subject to market forces. At the same time, there was a marked increase in both the volume and diversity of popular cultural products from the international market. High-quality mass culture products like Canto-pop from Hong Kong, comics and literature from Japan, Hollywood films, and Japanese and Korean soap operas became easily available. Largely in response to this, fukan literature, and literary readership in general, has declined in the past 25 years.
Influenced by a new trend from abroad, post-modernism, literary criticism in the 1990s bemoaned the commodification of literature, using terms borrowed from neo-Marxist and so-called lit-crit theories. Still, creative writers had to cope with the immediate problem of survival, and most reacted to the new cultural environment by accommodating it. There was a gradual turnabout in attitudes toward "high" and "popular" literatures. Laments about the decline of serious, "pure" literature have largely been replaced with skepticism of self-appointed cultural guardians. The current tendency is to denigrate self-indulgent aesthetic practices in favor of commercial viability. Chang believes that the quest for high culture may have ended. However, like many other judgments by experts in other fields, such as the end of ideology or the end of history, this is apt to change quickly.
As western products flooded into Taiwan's cultural market in the 1980s, the juxtaposition of sinic culture versus western culture diminished, being replaced by Taiwan versus Chinese culture. In such works as Li Ang's Mi Yuan (Lost Garden), Taiwanese were urged to rid themselves of "the Chineseness within" in order to assert their Taiwanese identity. After being placed under house arrest by KMT agents, the father of Li's heroine replaces all the trees in the elaborate Chinese-style garden he has built with native species. The symbolism of this gesture is impossible to overlook. Other writers suggested that, as an island, Taiwan has always been a mercantile society heavily dependent on import-export trade. Hence, it long ago developed an oceanic civilization that is fundamentally different from the agrarian society of mainland China. Rather than emphasizing the traumas of colonialism--from China as well as Japan--Taiwanese began to be characterized as energetic, shrewd entrepreneurs who have a competitive advantage in navigating the international business world.
Taiwan also began to be imagined in different ways, as, for example, a racially mixed community comprising Austronesian, Han Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese elements. The concept of this new, multi-cultural Taiwanese no longer excluded the mainland-born and their descendants, and indeed a number of writers with mainland backgrounds actively participated in forming this new identity. However, not all writers were comfortable with this downgrading and even rejection of Chinese culture. Hence the 1990s saw a good deal of struggle over what may be called identity politics. Among the sinophiles, there is some nostalgia for pre-revolutionary China, albeit confined to the largely imagined world of a small privileged elite.
The debate between the two sides was starkly revealed in a 1999 event to select the literary classics of Taiwan. Commissioned by the Council for Cultural Affairs and organized by a leading newspaper, a seven-member selection committee made an initial recommendation of 150 works in five categories: fiction, poetry, drama, prose and criticism. Ballots were then mailed to 100 instructors of literature in colleges and high schools throughout the nation. The committee made its final selection based on their votes, with the process culminating in a conference on the works that had been chosen. To the great surprise of both sponsor and organizer, the event turned into chaotic public theater and a political shouting match. Localist protestors complained that native Taiwan authors were grossly underrepresented, citing the absence of several well-regarded names from the list. They also argued that, since some of the writers selected were avowedly anti-Taiwancentric, and since they had declared themselves Chinese rather than Taiwanese, their works should be disqualified. A particularly contentious issue concerned a mainland writer, Zhang Ailing, who had never been to Taiwan. Supporters argued that the exceptional influence Zhang's work exerted on Taiwanese writers should qualify her for inclusion. Localists countered by pointing out that other writers such as Shakespeare and Hemingway have also had an important influence on Taiwan's writers, yet no one had argued that they should be included. Debate on the core issue of legitimacy--which writers and which works should qualify as Taiwanese--goes on, albeit in a less strident fashion.
Also in the mid-1990s, a new "middlebrow" literature began to emerge, many of its works topical and aimed at niche markets. While owing little or nothing to sinic culture, it owed a great deal to international movements. Intellectuals who had exiled themselves from Taiwan during the period of repression began to return, bringing cultural influences from many countries with them. Literature began to depict yuppie lifestyles, feminism and gay rights, among other topics. The day-to-day concerns of average citizens, such as educational reform, environmentalism and social safety net issues also came to writers' attention. With these trends still developing, Chang concludes, it is difficult to assess their outcome. On the basis of reading her book, this writer predicts that the literary culture of the future will resemble that of democratic societies all over the globe, with some features specific to the island's unique social and political milieu--middle-class literature with Taiwanese characteristics, as it were.
It is not easy to write about a moving target, particularly one in Taiwan's fast-changing political and social environment. Chang has reviewed a prodigious number of sources--her selected bibliography runs to 23 pages in small print--and has done an impressive job of teasing out movements and trends for classification. The general reader should, however, be forewarned that this is not an easy book to read. As is appropriate for publication by a prestigious university press, the author is writing for her scholarly colleagues in language not ordinarily used by the average person. Readers confronted with a succession of tropes, hegemonic discourses and heteronomous principles of hierarchization may feel that they are being called upon to decode a message without the necessary decryption equipment. The analysis often skips back and forth among time periods in order to consider cross-cutting trends, which can be a bit confusing for non-specialists. Finally, a Chinese character index for the many names, titles and terms used would have been helpful. Those who persevere will learn much.
June Teufel Dreyer is professor of political science at the University of Miami. The 5th edition of her China's Political System: Modernization and Tradition is in press.
Copyright (c) 2005 by June Teufel Dreyer.