Taiwanese New Literature

The TNL movement began as part of a larger cultural reform movement during the 1920s. A brief introduction of this cultural movement, sometimes called the Taiwanese New Culture movement may be in order. The first events of this movement took place in 1920, when some Taiwanese expatriates in Tokyo organized the New People Association followed by a student-based Taiwanese Youth Association. The two organizations published a journal called Taiwanese Youth to propagate progressive ideas and voice opinions about the current state of affairs in Taiwan.
There were already articles on language reform and the need for rejuvenating contemporary Taiwanese literature, it was not until the heated New Versus Old Literary Debate, which began with Chang Wo-chun's attack on traditional poets in 1924 and lasted until 1926, that the TNL movement was formally launched. In this debate, new literary concepts mainly those centering around the advantage of adopting the vernacular as a new literary medium and the social functions of literature in a modern age--were introduced, criticized, and defended. Traditional poets were castigated for using literature to incur social gains and political favor, their literary style criticized as hackneyed and insincere. Advocates of new literature, on the other hand, were branded as shallow and ignorant charlatans, their literary views ungrounded in solid learning. As in the case of many literary debates in modern times, the heated antagonism between opposite camps prevented a meaningful exchange of ideas. Rather, the debate performed an important ritualistic function: after the debate, traditional literary activities were increasingly confined to poetry clubs that continued to thrive but with limited social reach, while New Literature was legitimized as a powerful social institution. Through this institution, the new intellectuals denounced their Chinese cultural heritage--partly by taking traditional men of letters and their world views as scapegoats and endorsed a vision of "modern civilization." These denouncements and this new vision constituted the major content of TNL for at least a decade.
The Nativist Literature Debate testified to the prominent leftist presence in Taiwan's literary circles. The literary program proposed by its chief advocate Huang Shih-hui, who suggested that writers target their creative works at the masses in the working class, was clearly modeled upon the leftist concept of proletarian literature. The split of the Taiwanese Cultural Association in 1927 was primarily a result of disagreement in resistance strategies between the nationalist right wing and the socialist left wing. After the split, the association was controlled by the left-wing members Lien Wen-ching and Wang Min-chuan. The more moderate members formed the Taiwanese People's Party and continued to fight for greater constitutional rights for the Taiwanese people. However, the political climate in the colony was so disillusioning by that time that even the Taiwanese People's Party began to display a leftward leaning tendency. Consequently, it was forced to dissolve by the colonial government in 1931.
To facilitate popular education in a country with an extremely high illiteracy rate, advocates of the May Fourth movement proposed to replace the difficult, obsolete classical Chinese language with modern Chinese vernacular as the official written language. The basic theoretical assumption was that since there would be a close correspondence between the spoken and written versions of modern Chinese, as reflected in the famous slogan, the efforts required to become literate in Chinese would be greatly lessened. In reality, however, a standard Chinese vernacular had yet to be popularized within the country; people from different regions were still predominantly using dialects, some of which were even mutually unintelligible, for daily communication. There was, to be sure, a considerable disparity between the standard Chinese vernacular and the southern Fujianese dialect used by the majority of Taiwanese. Moreover, as Taiwan had already been politically separated from China for over two decades, its people had far fewer channels for learning the standard Chinese vernacular through public institutions, such as an education system, publications, or a state bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, early advocates of the TNL movement still favored the adoption of Chinese vernacular as the medium for TNL. The fact that this position was uncontested at the time shows that by then the ethnic-cultural identity of Taiwanese intellectuals was still predominantly Chinese. One popular argument they espoused was that since most of the Taiwanese gentry class members were still tutored in the written language of classical Chinese in their childhood, minimal additional efforts would be needed to enable them to use the Chinese vernacular as a literary medium. The advantage of this was that it would facilitate the circulation of Taiwanese literary works in the larger Chinese community, since obviously Chinese recognition was still highly regarded by Taiwanese intellectuals. In practice, however, despite the goodwill on the part of most TNL writers, the disadvantages are by no means negligible. It is said that Lai Ho had to write his works in classical Chinese first, then translate it into the Chinese vernacular, and finally revise it with more lifelike Taiwanese colloquialisms. Yang Shou-yu, a writer well-versed in the Chinese vernacular because of his background, had to regularly rewrite works submitted for publication when he served as the editor for the literary section of the Taiwanese People's Newspaper . Such a cumbersome and laborious process work against the fundamental principle of realistic literary writing, which explain why the kind of reevaluation offered by the Taiwanese Language movement was well-received even by Lai Ho, a writer with ostensible Chinese consciousness.
Without political enforcement, goals of Taiwanese Language movement were very difficult to materialize. The fact that many words in the Taiwanese spoken language are not believed to have corresponding Chinese characters made the development of a new writing system an enormous project beyond the reach of private groups. The colonial government, not surprisingly, only tried to hinder such a nationalistically motivated project and viewed it as an obstacle to the implementation of Japanese as the official language in Taiwan. The Taiwanese Language Debate thus reveals a typical dilemma facing colonized people: as the effort to develop a new national language based on the native tongue was seen by the Japanese colonial rulers as mainly a linguistic strategy of resistance and a means to assert one's own subjectivity, it was not likely to gain the political support required for its success. Despite failure, however, the Taiwanese Language movement must be regarded as a significant turning point in the TNL movement. There was a marked decline in the number of works by Chinese New Literature writers reprinted in Taiwanese journals after 1931. From this point on, the development of TNL began to consciously depart from the Chinese model, embarking on a path of its own.