Cultural Control

During the martial law era, cultural production in Taiwan was subject to tight state control exercised through an interlocking grid of institutions: the Taiwan Garrison Command's publication review boards, the Government Information Office's licensing of newspapers, the Ministry of Education's textbook committees, and the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement's directives on "healthy" literature and film. Publication censorship, book banning that eventually indexed over three thousand titles — including Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Ba Jin, and any author suspected of "remaining on the mainland" — and press restrictions that capped the number of licensed newspapers at thirty-one from 1951 to 1988, curtailed the free circulation of speech and ideas to a degree comparable to contemporary Soviet bloc societies.

The Mandarin-only policy, enforced through fines on students who spoke Taiwanese in school corridors, through compulsory "Mandarin speaking" badges of shame hung around their necks, and through the gradual reduction of Taiwanese-language broadcasting to a single daily half-hour timeslot by the mid-1970s, suppressed the public use of Taiwanese, Hakka, and indigenous languages, creating deep cultural ruptures that would take generations to repair and whose consequences for inter-generational language transmission remain visible today in the declining fluency of younger Hakka and indigenous speakers.

Yet beneath this heavy-handed control, undercurrents surged in literature and the arts. The Nativist Literature Movement of the mid-1970s — driven by Chen Ying-chen, Wang Tuo, Yang Ching-chu, and Huang Chun-ming — challenged the official anti-communist literary line with local language and rural themes, depicting the daily lives of small-town merchants, fishermen, and factory workers in ways that implicitly indicted developmental inequalities. Modernist writers including Pai Hsien-yung, Wang Wen-hsing, and Chen Jo-hsi used metaphor, stream of consciousness, and symbolism to obliquely critique the authoritarian system, while cinema directors experimented within the censorship boundaries that would eventually loosen into the New Taiwan Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. The founding of the Free China Journal by Lei Chen and its forced closure in 1960 — when Lei was jailed for attempting to organize a new party with Taiwanese opposition figures — became an iconic episode in intellectuals' confrontation with authoritarianism, its last issue passing from hand to hand in mimeographed form long after the print run was confiscated.

This volume traces the mechanisms of cultural control during the martial law era alongside the undercurrent of literary and artistic resistance, presenting the voices that were never truly silenced during the age of silence — and reconstructing, through banned-book registers, newspaper suspension orders, private correspondence, and the coded language writers deployed to outfox the censors, the ways a generation of Taiwanese cultural producers kept imagination alive under conditions explicitly designed to extinguish it.