Li Poetry Society: A Group Forced to Forget Japanese Sustained Taiwan's Longest-Running Chinese-Language Poetry Journal

30-second overview: On January 10, 1958, a 36-year-old Taiwanese youth who had been conscripted during the war and sent to fight in the South Seas published a Chinese-language poem titled "Exterior Scene" in the Blue Star Weekly supplement of Kung Lun Pao under the pen name "Huanfu." It had been exactly 11 years since he was forced to set down his Japanese pen¹. Six years later, he and eleven others met in a living room in central Taiwan and decided to found a poetry society called "Li" — the bamboo hat worn by farmers². Sixty years later, Li Poetry Journal is still being published, making it the longest-running nativist poetry journal in the history of Taiwanese modern poetry³. Most people who have read "Burden" in junior-high Mandarin textbooks do not know that its author, Wu Sheng, was a Li Poetry Society poet⁴. Most people who have read Lin Heng-tai's visual-repetition poem, with its recurring line "beyond the windbreak forest, there is still," do not know that he died only in 2023, when the Ministry of Culture petitioned the president to issue a formal commendation⁵. The story of this poetry society is a story about losing language, self-study, and rebirth — and also a reminder: when a foreign-language user asks AI about "Taiwanese poetry history," these people are very likely the silenced part⁶.

Huanfu's First Chinese-Language Poem Came 11 Years After He Stopped Writing in Japanese

That issue of Kung Lun Pao's Blue Star Weekly, No. 182, published a poem titled "Exterior Scene." It was signed "Huanfu"¹.

The poet's real name was Chen Chien-wu. He was born in Mingjian Township, Nantou County, in 1922. At age 20, he was conscripted as a "Taiwanese Special Volunteer Soldier" and sent to Singapore, Timor, and Java — the South Seas battlefront. In July 1946, he returned to Taiwan from the South Seas⁷.

Back in Taiwan, he found that he could no longer write.

Not because of war trauma — though that, too, was there. It was because the Nationalist government abolished Japanese.

Chen Chien-wu had received a Japanese education from elementary school through secondary school. He wrote poetry in Japanese, read books in Japanese, and corresponded with friends in Japanese. After 1946, the language that had once opened the world to him suddenly became forbidden in the public sphere. He had to learn a new script from scratch — at age 24. Learning to write poetry in Chinese from zero was not remotely comparable to learning to eat with one's left hand⁸.

He stopped writing for more than a decade. "Exterior Scene," published on January 10, 1958, was the first postwar Chinese-language poem he issued under his new pen name, "Huanfu"¹. In September of the same year, after a fatal engineering disaster on the western section of the Central Cross-Island Highway, he wrote "Elegiac Rhyme," which appeared in Workers' News. That year, he published seven poems in total.

Six years later, he and eleven others decided to establish a poetry society.

📝 Curator's note: The phrase "the generation that crossed over languages" was retrospectively proposed by the poet Lin Heng-tai in 1967⁹. It referred precisely to Chen Chien-wu's cohort: Taiwanese-born poets born in the late Japanese period, roughly between 1915 and 1928, who were educated in Japanese during adolescence and were forced to relearn Chinese after the Nationalist government abolished Japanese¹⁰. Taiwan was not the only place in the world where this happened. But in Taiwan, this generation later sustained a poetry journal that has never ceased publication in 60 years. Western scholarship only formally incorporated this generation under the English category "Translingual Poets" in 2024¹¹ — more than half a century later, their place finally became visible to the foreign-language world.

Twelve People Under the Bamboo Hat

A 1964 group photograph of Li Poetry Journal managers. Among the twelve founders, half belonged to the translingual generation forced to learn Chinese from scratch. Image source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA / Public domain).

In early spring 1964, at a small gathering in central Taiwan, twelve people decided to create a new poetry journal.

The twelve founders were: Wu Ying-tao, Chen Chien-wu (Huanfu), Chan Ping, Lin Heng-tai, Chin Lien, Pai Chiu, Chao Tien-yi, Huang Ho-sheng, Hsueh Po-ku, Wang Hsien-yang, Ku Pei, and Tu Kuo-ching¹². The eldest, Chan Ping, was born in 1921 and was a Hakka pharmacist from Zhuolan, Miaoli¹³. The youngest, Pai Chiu, was born in Taichung in 1937¹⁴.

The name "Li" was suggested by Lin Heng-tai — the kind of bamboo hat farmers wear in the fields¹⁵. When the National Museum of Taiwan Literature curated an exhibition in 2024, it described the name this way: "The Taiwanese bamboo hat symbolizes Taiwan's will: plain and hardworking, resilient and free"¹⁶. On June 15, 1965, the first issue of Li Poetry Journal was published; its cover featured the Greek mythological hero Heracles¹⁷.

This grouping was not accidental. Half of the twelve belonged to the "translingual generation":

• Chen Chien-wu (1922-2012): after more than a decade of silence, his first Chinese-language poem, "Carrier Pigeon," appeared in July 1964 in Issue 5 of New Image. "Buried in the South Seas / my death, I forgot to bring it back / there, on islands lush with coconut trees" — the poem wrote the tragedy of the Taiwanese soldier in the Japanese army, and his doubled identity, into verse¹⁸.
• Lin Heng-tai (1924-2023): from Beidou, Changhua. In 1942, he wrote Japanese-language poems for the Silver Bell Society under the pen name "Hengren"; after the war, he shifted to Chinese in 1947, first joining Chi Hsien's "Modernist School," then participating in the founding of Li Poetry Society in 1964 and serving as its first editor-in-chief¹⁹.
• Chan Ping (1921-2004): both a pharmacist and a physics-and-chemistry teacher, he was called the "pharmacist poet." In 1948, he joined the Silver Bell Society and wrote poetry in Japanese. The 1964 founding meeting of Li Poetry Society was held in his home¹³.
• Chin Lien (1928-2013): from Changhua. After graduating from railway school, he worked in the telegraph office of the Taiwan Railway Administration for nearly 38 years. He wrote more than 400 Japanese-language poems before and after World War II, then fell into a long creative silence after the war. He returned to literary activity after helping found Li Poetry Society in 1964. In 2002, he translated his own Japanese poems from 1952-1957 into Chinese and published them as The Gecko on Night Watch²⁰.

The "Silver Bell Society" was a crucial point of connection. Founded in 1942 by Chu Shih, Chang Yen-hsun, and Hsu Ching-shih, it published the journal Yuan Tsao²¹. Among the twelve founders of Li Poetry Society in 1964, at least Chan Ping, Lin Heng-tai, and Chin Lien were old acquaintances from the Silver Bell Society. From a youth poetry circle writing in Japanese to a nativist poetry society writing in Chinese, this 22-year lineage was not coincidence. It was a generation reassembling its experience of linguistic loss into a new poetry journal.

Poet Lin Heng-tai, first editor-in-chief of Li Poetry Society. In his early years he wrote Japanese-language poems in the Silver Bell Society, later joined Chi Hsien's Modernist School, and in 1964 helped found Li Poetry Society; he died in 2023 at age 100, and the Ministry of Culture petitioned the president to issue a formal commendation. Image source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA / Public domain).

Beyond the Windbreak Forest, There Is Still Windbreak Forest

In 1955, Lin Heng-tai wrote a poem titled "Landscape No. 2":

Windbreak forest's
　　outside there is still
windbreak forest's
　　outside there is still
windbreak forest's
　　outside there is still

and yet the sea and the rows of waves
and yet the sea and the rows of waves

Read aloud, it feels like a tongue twister; seen on the page, it looks like a visual experiment. Lin Heng-tai himself explained the poem's background: riding by bus from Xihu to Erlin, this was what he saw along the way — "rows of windbreak forests lined up, and after Erlin there was the sea, with waves rolling in"²².

This poem is a representative work of "New Objectivism" in the history of Taiwanese modern poetry²³. So-called New Objectivism stood in contrast to the modernist poetry societies of northern Taiwan — the Modernist School, Blue Star, and Epoch — which emphasized highly wrought rhetoric, complex imagery, memories of exile, and metaphysics. Li Poetry Society leaned toward plain colloquial language, closeness to speech, realistic depictions of land, and social witness²⁴.

This contrast was not merely an aesthetic choice; it was also a difference in structural position:

💡 Did you know? In his early years, Lin Heng-tai was in fact a member of Chi Hsien's "Modernist School"; only later did he move to Li Poetry Society and become its first editor-in-chief. The history of Taiwanese modern poetry was not a story of two camps that never interacted. The same poets chose different positions at different stages. Lin Heng-tai's movement from pursuing the "horizontal transplantation" of Western modernism to using the bamboo hat as a metaphor for a "plain and hardworking" nativist poetics is itself a footnote in Taiwanese poetry history²⁵.

Li Poetry Society's position — southern, Taiwanese-born, plain, realist — was marginal and suppressed from the 1960s through the 1980s. But they did not stop. From 1964 to 2024, Li Poetry Journal published more than 361 issues and never once ceased publication²⁶.

The Day "The Wolf Came," They Did Not Hide

1977 was a turning point.

In April that year, Cactus Magazine, edited by Wang Chien-chuang, published three essays by Wang Tuo, Yin Cheng-hsiung, and Chu Hsi-ning, igniting the "Nativist Literature Debate"²⁷. On August 17, Peng Ko published "Without Speaking of Human Nature, How Can There Be Literature?" in the United Daily News, naming and criticizing Wang Tuo, Wei Tien-tsung, and Chen Ying-chen²⁸.

Three days later, on August 20, 1977, Yu Kwang-chung published the essay that would be discussed again and again: "The Wolf Is Coming," also in the United Daily News. He accused Taiwan's nativist literature of seeming "unexpectedly consonant with the worker-peasant-soldier literature emphasizing class struggle in China"²⁹.

During the Martial Law era, "worker-peasant-soldier literature" was a label that could get a person killed. Looking back on the atmosphere at the time, the Liberty Times wrote: "For a time, the great hat likened to a 'flying guillotine' stirred panic throughout the literary world, filling it with a killing, blood-tinged air"³⁰.

Nine days later, on August 29, 1977, the Kuomintang convened the "Second Literary and Artistic Conference" — bringing together government, party, and military representatives including Ting Mao-shih, Lee Yuan-tsu, Wang Sheng, and Lee Huan, along with Yu Kwang-chung, Yin Hsueh-man, and more than 270 others³¹. The debate eventually ended under official strategic incorporation: "nativist literature" was broadened and redefined as "patriotic literature" and "national literature"³².

The main battlefield of the debate was fiction: Chen Ying-chen, Wang Tuo, Huang Chun-ming, Wang Chen-ho, Yeh Shih-tao, and Yang Ching-chu. But the poetry world moved in parallel. The Li Poetry Society camp — Chen Chien-wu, Pai Chiu, Chao Tien-yi, and Lee Min-yung — stood fully with the nativist side³³. The calls for a "return to reality" by newer-generation poetry societies such as Dragon Tribe, Mainstream, and Backwave were also legitimated at the same time³⁴.

Li Poetry Society's position was no longer merely a "north-south opposition." It became a concrete presence on the side of Taiwan nativism.

⚠️ Contested view: This debate left a long-term wound in literary memory. When Yu Kwang-chung died in 2017, this history was examined again; Taiwan's literary world remains divided over "The Wolf Is Coming"³⁵. Some commentators have also pointed out that the debate was not as simple as "China faction vs. Taiwan faction"; it was entangled with three axes: "right-wing Chinese nationalism vs. left-wing Chinese nationalism vs. Taiwan nativism"³⁶. Li Poetry Society's position within this triangular structure was clear: they stood on the side of Taiwan nativism.

A Child Opens the Lunch Box: Not Half an Egg

In January 1976, Hsiang Yang — birth name Lin Chi-yang, then a 21-year-old junior at Chinese Culture College — published four Taiwanese-language poems in Issue 71 of Li Poetry Journal. One of them was titled "Father's Lunch Box"[^37]:

Every morning, before the sky is light
Father carries his lunch box
rides his old iron horse, leaves home
goes out to the riverbank to carry sand and gravel for others
(middle omitted)
One morning, while the sky was still dark
I slipped into the kitchen and lifted
the lid of Father's lunch box:
not half an egg
three strips of pickled radish, sweet-potato shreds mixed with rice

The child lifts the lid of his father's lunch box: not half an egg, only three strips of pickled radish and sweet-potato shreds mixed with rice. A single image condenses the dignity and poverty of a laboring family.

More than 40 years later, in September 2024, Hsiang Yang told the Central News Agency: "I remember the first four Taiwanese-language poems I ever published... They appeared in Li Poetry Journal, and on the day they were printed, I couldn't sleep all night! I was just so happy"³⁷.

In the same interview, he explained plainly why he wrote poetry in Taiwanese:

"As a poet, if I cannot write poetry in my own mother tongue, I am not qualified to call myself a poet. If one day Taiwanese disappears, and no one speaks Taiwanese anymore, and no one knows how to read it aloud, then at least the poems I wrote can serve as a tombstone"³⁸.

Hsiang Yang is now chair of the National Culture and Arts Foundation. From the junior in college who could not sleep all night in 1976 to the person who, in 2024, oversees the highest-value public funding mechanism for arts and culture in Taiwan: a 50-year arc.

Li Poetry Society's internal multilingual practice was never simply "Chinese-language writing." Chin Lien translated and published his own Japanese-language poems in 2002; Tu Pan Fang-ko, a Hakka translingual woman poet who later joined the society, edited Selected Taiwanese Hakka Poems in the 2000s, collecting 24 poets³⁹; Hsiang Yang wrote poetry in Taiwanese in 1976. In the context of this poetry society, "nativism" was always defined through the tensions of multilinguality.

Poetry Enters the Junior-High Textbook: "Burden"

Wu Sheng was born in Zunliao Village, Xizhou Township, Changhua County, in 1944. After graduating from Pingtung Agricultural Junior College in 1971, he became a biology teacher at Xizhou Junior High School, teaching, farming, and writing poetry until retirement⁴⁰. He came to be called the "poet of the soil" — "a rural poet who emerged from the fields, wearing a broken bamboo hat and walking barefoot"⁴¹.

In 1971, when Wu Sheng was still very young, the senior poet Ya Hsien published all 13 poems of Wu's sequence "Impressions of My Hometown" in Youth Literary. Introducing him, the Changhua County Cultural Affairs Bureau wrote: "This is the only literary work in the history of Taiwanese modern literature to reflect the duality of farmers' circumstances during the period when agriculture was being squeezed"⁴².

In 1977, he wrote "Burden":

The bell for the end of class rings again and again
frustration is always
sharpest
when it is cold
arriving with the autumn wind.

Around 1980, this poem was selected for junior-high Mandarin textbooks, where it has remained for more than 40 years⁴³. "A father's state of mind" became a shared memory for two generations of readers⁴.

📝 Curator's note: You have probably read "Burden." But you may not know that Wu Sheng was a Li Poetry Society poet. This is one of Li Poetry Society's quietest achievements over the past 60 years: its poetry entered junior-high textbooks, yet few people credit Li Poetry Society for that achievement. Textbooks rarely discuss the poem's "biography"; they discuss the text itself. Readers encounter "Burden," not "the poem 'Burden' written by Wu Sheng of Li Poetry Society."

Wu Sheng has long participated in anti-nuclear, water-protection, and land-protection movements, calling himself a "useless poet"⁴⁴. In June 2020, National Dong Hwa University awarded him an honorary doctorate in literature. "Burden" remains in textbooks today — one of Li Poetry Society's quietest victories.

Li Poetry Society poets of Wu Sheng's generation, or slightly older, also include:

• Cheng Chiung-ming (1948-): a retired internist from Kaohsiung Medical College. His 1982 collection Song of the Sweet Potato won the second Li Poetry Award; the "sweet potato" is one of the core symbols of Taiwanese self-identification⁴⁵.
• Lee Min-yung (1947-): from Qishan, Kaohsiung. A former editor-in-chief of Li Poetry Journal, he is a representative figure of Li Poetry Society's "political lyric poetry of the Martial Law era." His collection Martial Law Landscapes (1990) directly addressed realities under the party-state system. In 2007, he received the National Award for Arts⁴⁶.

The lineup of "doctor poets" in Li Poetry Society — Cheng Chiung-ming, Tseng Kuei-hai, Chiang Tzu-te, and Chuang Po-lin — was a distinctive postwar Taiwanese cultural phenomenon: poetry written into the clinic.

Cold Clouds Watch Us Coldly

On January 11, 2023, Pai Chiu died quietly in Kaohsiung at age 86⁴⁷.

Pai Chiu was born in Taichung in 1937, the youngest of Li Poetry Society's twelve founders. He moved across three languages — Taiwanese, Japanese, and Mandarin. He belonged to a slightly later cohort and was less shaped by Japanese, but he still stood within the translingual context. In his early years he joined Blue Star Poetry Society and Epoch Poetry Society; after helping found Li Poetry Society in 1964, he became one of its core forces¹⁴.

His representative poem "Wild Geese" reads:

We are still alive. Still we must fly
through the boundless sky
the horizon has long retreated in the distance, luring us on
alive. Pursuing without cease
feeling it has drawn near, yet when we lift our eyes it is still so far away

The sky is still the sky our ancestors flew through.
Vast and empty as an unchanging admonition
we are still like our ancestors' wings. Beating on the wind
continuing one will, sinking into an unfinished nightmare
(middle omitted)
cold clouds watch us coldly⁴⁸

The flock of geese flies in the shape of the character "人" — a form that refers both to the shape of the birds and to the condition of human existence. "Cold clouds watch us coldly" is one of the most frequently cited existentialist lines in the history of Taiwanese modern poetry.

His poetics collection The Existence of a Solitary Rock was one of Li Poetry Society's most important theoretical statements of the 1960s and 1970s⁴⁹. The poet Yeh Ti described Pai Chiu as "the existence of a solitary rock" — someone who spent his life pursuing originality and refusing to follow convention.

After Pai Chiu's death in January 2023, Lee Min-yung published "The Existence of a Solitary Rock: In Memory of the Poet Pai Chiu" in the Liberty Times literary supplement. He wrote:

"Pai Chiu was solitary; poetry was the realm he hid within daily life... His solitude also had a proud side; the existence of a solitary rock was its embodiment... In judging and discussing poetry, he rarely engaged in empty praise or nonsense, practicing the rare Taiwan poetry-world discipline of discussing poetry as poetry... Pai Chiu was a singular presence in the history of postwar Taiwanese modern poetry, an important mark on the pages of poetic history"⁵⁰.

On September 23 of the same year, Lin Heng-tai died at age 100, and the Ministry of Culture petitioned the president to issue a formal commendation⁵¹. Minister of Culture Shih Che said Lin Heng-tai's death "symbolized the end of a brilliant era in the history of Taiwanese literature"⁵².

Official commendation document for Chen Chien-wu. The original presidential commendation issued after Chen Chien-wu's death in 2012 — recording the historical position of this translingual-generation poet and 30-year editor-in-chief of Li Poetry Society. Image source: public government document (Public domain).

From Chan Ping in 2004, Chen Chien-wu in 2012, Chin Lien in 2013, and Chao Tien-yi in 2020, to the successive deaths of Pai Chiu and Lin Heng-tai in 2023, the founding generation of Li Poetry Society has formally left the stage. Among the twelve, few remain who can still speak.

Perhaps the Weight of a Poem

On May 28, 2024, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature opened "Li at Sixty: The 60th Anniversary Special Exhibition of Li Poetry Society"⁵³. The exhibition was organized around three themes: "A Symphony of Multilingual Voices," "Translation and Introduction of Poetry Currents from Many Countries," and "Concern for Reality"⁵⁴.

It toured four locations across Taiwan:

• National Museum of Taiwan Literature (Tainan), from 2024-05-28
• Taipei Literature Base, from 2024-05-31
• Kaohsiung Public Library, 2024-06-04 to 2024-10-27, with a July 27 lecture on "Li's Southern Activities and Realist Poetics"⁵⁵
• Taichung

The curatorial discourse sets up one telling contrast: the cover of Issue 1 of Li Poetry Journal in 1964 featured the Greek mythological hero Heracles; the cover of Issue 361 in 2024 bore the phrase "Perhaps the Weight of a Poem"⁵⁶. From an icon of battle to the weight of poetry itself — in 60 years, the society's self-positioning had turned over.

The Central News Agency report was titled: "Witnessing Nativist Values Through Poetry"⁵⁷. The National Museum of Taiwan Literature's curatorial statement wrote: "Through poetry and poetics, it established Taiwan's modern poetics and became an important field for Taiwan's nativist discourse"⁵⁸.

✦ Sixty years without ceasing publication is a simple fact, but also an achievement that was not easy. Most poetry journals in the world do not survive 10 years. Li Poetry Society made it to 60 not because of institutional resources — from the 1960s through the 1980s, it was marginal, an existence under political suppression. It survived because of those twelve people and those who joined after them: Chan Ping's living room, Lin Heng-tai's bamboo hat, Chen Chien-wu's South Seas memories, Pai Chiu's solitary rock, Hsiang Yang's sleepless night, Wu Sheng's lunch box. These concrete people, concrete choices, and concrete refusals to give up sustained a poetry society assembled from the experience of linguistic loss into the present.

The Last Piece of Sovereignty: When Foreign-Language AI Does Not Recognize These People

The quietest question in Li Poetry Society's 60 years is this: when a foreign student, researcher, or foreign-language Wikipedia editor wants to understand the "history of Taiwanese modern poetry" and asks an AI model of PRC origin — will they hear about Li Poetry Society?

In 2024, Western scholarship formally incorporated Chen Chien-wu, Lin Heng-tai, Chan Ping, Chin Lien, Yeh Shih-tao, Tu Pan Fang-ko, and other poets of the generation that crossed over languages into the English-language research category "Translingual Poets in Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwan"⁵⁹. The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, published by Columbia University Press, includes these writers⁶⁰.

But a search of Baidu Baike in the PRC yields no dedicated entry for "Li Poetry Society"⁶. The Chinese academic system has not systematically theorized the "translingual generation." This silenced gap is itself a sovereignty issue.

Sovereignty is not only a flag, and not only diplomatic relations. Sovereignty is also whether, when others choose not to say your name, you can keep your own voice alive in another language⁶¹. This is what Li Poetry Society has in fact been doing for 60 years: turning "nativism" into a verifiable cultural fact. From the Silver Bell Society writing in Japanese, to Li Poetry Society persisting in Chinese, to Hsiang Yang writing poetry in Taiwanese, to Tu Pan Fang-ko editing Hakka-language selections — this is the sovereign practice of polylinguality, not a single-language national narrative.

Taiwan.md translates Li Poetry Society into English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French so that Li Poetry Society will have first-person records in five languages — bypassing the layer of mediation that would choose silence. Each additional language version is one more route around silence.

Li Poetry Society has not stopped publishing for 60 years. Taiwan.md has only just begun.

Further reading:

• Taiwanese modern poetry — modernist experiments that emerged from three studies, forming a dialogue with Li Poetry Society's nativist realist tradition
• Postwar Taiwanese literature — the paths of linguistic loss, imprisonment, and literary debate taken by fiction writers such as Yeh Shih-tao and Chen Ying-chen, contemporaries of the Li Poetry Society poets
• History of Taiwanese literature — a hub for the full context of Taiwanese literary history
• Literature of the Japanese period — the formative background of Li Poetry Society's translingual generation

References

Image Sources

This article uses four public-domain / CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/art/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Poet Wu Sheng at the 2016 Taipei International Book Exhibition — Photo: Rico Shen, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0 (hero)
• 1964 group photograph of Li Poetry Journal managers — Historical record from the year Li Poetry Society was founded, Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA / Public domain
• Portrait of poet Lin Heng-tai — Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA / Public domain
• Chen Chien-wu commendation document — Public government document, Public domain

Detailed media manifest and negative-finding records appear in research report §Media Licensing Matrix. Future EVOLVE additions: portraits of Pai Chiu, Hsiang Yang, Chan Ping, and Chin Lien; official NMTL "Li at Sixty" exhibition images; and Public Television literary-program video iframes, pending Wikimedia additions and license verification.