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

30-Second Overview: On January 10, 1958, a 36-year-old Taiwanese youth who had been conscripted to fight in the South Pacific during the war published a Chinese poem titled "Outdoor Scene" (外景) under the pen name "Huan Fu" in the Blue Star Weekly of the Public Opinion Daily. This was exactly 11 years after he was forced to stop writing in Japanese¹. Six years later, he and eleven others met in a living room in central Taiwan and decided to found a poetry society called "Li" (笠)—a farmer’s bamboo hat². Sixty years later, the Li poetry journal is still being published, making it the longest-running local poetry journal in the history of Taiwan modern poetry³. Most people who read the poem "Burden" (負荷) in their junior high school Chinese textbook do not know that the author, Wu Sheng, is a poet of the Li Poetry Society⁴. Most people who have read Lin Heng-tai’s visual repetition poem featuring the recurring line "beyond the windbreak forest there is" do not know that he passed away in 2023, with the Ministry of Culture presenting a Presidential Citation of Commendation⁵. The story of this poetry society is one of aphasia, self-study, and rebirth—it is also a reminder: when foreign-language users ask AI about "Taiwanese poetry history," this group is likely the one rendered silent⁶.

Huan Fu’s First Chinese Poem, 11 Years After He Stopped Writing in Japanese

The Blue Star Weekly issue 182 of the Public Opinion Daily that day published a poem titled "Outdoor Scene." The byline read "Huan Fu"¹.

The poet’s real name was Chen Chien-wu, born in 1922 in Mingjian Township, Nantou County. At age 20, he was conscripted as a "Taiwan Special Volunteer Soldier" and sent to Singapore, Timor, and Java: the South Pacific battlefield. In July 1946, he returned to Taiwan from the South Pacific⁷.

Upon returning to Taiwan, he found he could no longer write.

Not because of war trauma—though that was also true. It was because the Nationalist Government abolished the Japanese language.

Chen Chien-wu received education from elementary school through high school under the Japanese system; he wrote poetry in Japanese, read books in Japanese, and corresponded with friends in Japanese. After 1946, this language, which had once opened the world to him, suddenly became a forbidden zone in the public sphere. He had to relearn a new script: he was 24 years old. Learning to write poetry in Chinese from scratch was a different order of magnitude from learning to eat with your left hand⁸.

He stopped writing for over ten years. The poem "Outdoor Scene" published on January 10, 1958, was his first post-war Chinese poem published under the new pen name "Huan Fu"¹. In September of the same year, following a tragic engineering accident on the western section of the Cross-Island Highway, he wrote a poem titled "Elegiac Rhyme" (哀韻) published in the Worker Daily. That year, he published a total of seven poems.

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

📝 Curator’s Note: The term "The Translingual Generation" was retrospectively proposed by the poet Lin Heng-tai in 1967⁹—referring precisely to this group of Chen Chien-wu: poets born in the late Japanese colonial period (roughly 1915–1928), educated in Japanese during their youth, and forced to relearn Chinese after the Nationalist Government abolished Japanese. Taiwan is not the only place in the world where this occurred, but this generation later sustained a poetry journal that never ceased publication for 60 years. Western academia only formally categorized this generation under the English name "Translingual Poets" in 2024¹⁰—more than half a century later, their position was finally seen by the foreign-language world.

The Twelve People Under the Bamboo Hat

1964 Li Poetry Society Editorial Board Group Photo. Half of the twelve founding members were part of the translingual generation who had 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 founding members were: Wu Ying-tao, Chen Chien-wu (Huan Fu), Zhan Bing, Lin Heng-tai, Chin Lien, Bai Qiu, Chao T’ien-i, Huang Ho-sheng, Hsueh Po-ku, Wang Hsien-yang, Ku Pei, and Tu Kuo-ching¹¹. The eldest, Zhan Bing, was born in 1921 and was a Hakka pharmacist from Zhuolan, Miaoli County¹². The youngest, Bai Qiu, was born in 1937 in Taichung¹³.

The society’s name "Li" was suggested by Lin Heng-tai: the bamboo hat worn by farmers in the fields¹⁴. The National Taiwan Literature Museum described it in its 2024 exhibition: "The Taiwanese bamboo hat symbolizes the simple, diligent, resilient, and free-spirited will of Taiwan"¹⁵. On June 15, 1965, the first issue of the Li poetry journal was published, featuring the Greek mythological hero Hercules on the cover¹⁶.

This combination was not accidental. Half of the twelve members were part of "The Translingual Generation":

• Chen Chien-wu (1922–2012): His first Chinese poem after a decade-long hiatus, "The Carrier Pigeon," was published in July 1964 in issue 5 of New Image. "Buried in the South Pacific, my death, I forgot to bring back / There lies an island with lush coconut trees"—embedding the tragic dual identity of Taiwanese Japanese soldiers into poetry¹⁷.
• Lin Heng-tai (1924–2023): From Beidou, Changhua. In 1942, he wrote Japanese poetry under the pen name "Heng Ren" in the "Silver Bell Society"; after the war, he switched to Chinese in 1947, first joining Chi Ch’uan’s "Modernist School," and in 1964 participated in founding the Li Poetry Society, serving as its first editor-in-chief¹⁸.
• Zhan Bing (1921–2004): A pharmacist and chemistry teacher, known as the "Pharmaceutical Poet." He joined the Silver Bell Society in 1948 to write poetry in Japanese; the founding meeting of the Li Poetry Society in 1964 was held in his home¹².
• Jin Lien (1928–2013): From Changhua. After graduating from a railway school, he worked in the telegraph room of the Taiwan Railways Administration for nearly 38 years. He wrote over 400 Japanese poems before and during WWII; his creative output remained dormant for a long time after the war, but he re-emerged after participating in the founding of the Li Poetry Society in 1964. In 2002, he translated his Japanese poems from 1952–1957 into Chinese, publishing The Night-Watching Gecko¹⁹.

The "Silver Bell Society" was a key connecting node. Founded in 1942 by Chu Shih, Chang Yen-hsun, and Hsu Ching-shih, it published the journal Yuan-tsao²⁰. Of the twelve founding members of the Li Poetry Society in 1964, at least Zhan Bing, Lin Heng-tai, and Jin Lien were old acquaintances from the Silver Bell Society: the 22-year lineage from a youth poetry circle writing in Japanese to a local poetry society writing in Chinese was not a 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 the Li Poetry Society. He wrote poetry in Japanese early on in the Silver Bell Society, later joined Chi Ch’uan’s Modernist School, and participated in founding the Li Poetry Society in 1964; he passed away at age 100 in 2023, receiving a Presidential Citation of Commendation from the Ministry of Culture. Image source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA / Public domain).

Beyond the Windbreak Forest, There Is Still a Windbreak Forest

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

Windbreak forest
beyond
Windbreak forest
beyond
Windbreak forest
beyond

Yet the sea, and the procession of waves
Yet the sea, and the procession of waves

Read aloud, it sounds like a tongue twister; visually, it appears as an experimental poem. Lin Heng-tai explained the background of the writing himself: he took a bus from Xihu to Erlin, and the scenery along the way was exactly this: "Rows of windbreak forests lined up, and beyond Erlin was the sea, waves rolling"²¹.

This poem is a representative work of "New Objectivity" in the history of Taiwan modern poetry²². The so-called New Objectivity stood in opposition to the modernist poetry societies in the north (Modernist School, Blue Star, Creation): the latter emphasized high rhetoric, complex imagery, memories of exile, and metaphysics; the Li Poetry Society tended toward simplicity and colloquialism, closeness to spoken language, realistic depiction of the land, and social witness²³.

This opposition was not merely an aesthetic choice, but a difference in structural position:

💡 Did You Know: Lin Heng-tai was actually a member of Chi Ch’uan’s "Modernist School" early on, before later moving to the Li Poetry Society and becoming its first editor-in-chief. The history of Taiwan modern poetry is not about two camps that never communicated; rather, the same poets chose to stand in different positions at different stages—Lin Heng-tai’s shift from pursuing the "horizontal transplantation" of Western modernism to using the bamboo hat as a metaphor for a "simple and diligent" local poetics is itself a footnote in Taiwan’s poetry history²⁴.

The Li Poetry Society’s position—southern, local, simple, realistic—was marginalized and suppressed from the 1960s to the 1980s. But they did not stop. From 1964 to 2024, the Li poetry journal published over 361 issues, never ceasing publication even once²⁵.

The Day the Wolf Came, They Did Not Hide

1977 was a turning point.

In April of that year, the Cactus Magazine, edited by Wang Chien-chuang, published three articles by Wang T’uo, Yin Cheng-hsiung, and Chu Hsi-ning, igniting the "Native Soil Literature Debate"²⁶. On August 17, Peng Ko published "If We Do Not Discuss Human Nature, What Is Literature?" in the United Daily News, explicitly criticizing Wang T’uo, Wei T’ien-tsung, and Chen Ying-zhen²⁷.

Three days later, on August 20, 1977, Yu Guang-chung published the much-discussed "The Wolf Is Coming" in the United Daily News, accusing Taiwan’s native soil literature of "having a hidden alignment with the worker-peasant-soldier literature of mainland China that emphasizes class struggle"²⁸.

During the Martial Law period, "worker-peasant-soldier literature" was a label that could kill. The Liberty Times recalled the atmosphere at the time: "For a time, the large hat喻 as 'blood drops' caused panic in the literary world, permeating a肃杀 bloody atmosphere"²⁹.

Nine days later, on August 29, 1977, the Kuomintang held the "Second Literary Symposium," with government/party/military representatives including Ting Mao-shih, Li Yuan-chu, Wang Sheng, and Li Huan, along with Yu Guang-chung and Yin Hsueh-man, convening over 270 people³⁰. The debate ultimately ended under official strategic co-optation: "native soil literature" was expanded and redefined as "patriotic literature" and "national literature"³¹.

The main battlefield of the debate was fiction (Chen Ying-zhen, Wang T’uo, Huang Chun-ming, Wang Chen-ho, Yeh Shih-t’ao, Yang Ch’ing-chu). But the poetry world was moving in sync: the Li Poetry Society camp (Chen Chien-wu, Bai Qiu, Chao T’ien-i, Li Min-yung) stood fully on the side of the native soil faction³². The "return to reality" demands of contemporary new-generation poetry societies like Dragon Clan, Mainstream, and Post-Wave were also legitimized³³.

The Li Poetry Society’s position was no longer just "north-south opposition," but a concrete existence "standing on the side of the local."

⚠️ Controversial View: This debate left a long-term memory wound. When Yu Guang-chung passed away in 2017, this history was re-examined; the Taiwan literary world’s views on "The Wolf Is Coming" remain divided to this day³⁴. Some commentators point out that the opposition in the debate was not simply "China faction vs. Taiwan faction," but intertwined three axes: "right-wing Chinese nationalism vs. left-wing Chinese nationalism vs. Taiwan local theory"³⁵. The Li Poetry Society’s position in this triangular structure was clear: they stood on the side of Taiwan local theory.

The Child Opens the Bento Box, No Egg Inside

In January 1976, Xiang Yang: real name Lin Chi-yen, then a 21-year-old junior college student at the Chinese Culture College, published four Taiwanese Hokkien poems in issue 71 of the Li poetry journal, one of which was titled "Father’s Bento" (阿爹的飯包)[^37]:

Every day when waking early, the sky was still not light
Father took the bento
Rode the old bicycle, left the house
Went to the stream bed to move sand and stones for others
(excerpt omitted)
One day when waking early, the sky was still dark
We secretly walked into the kitchen, lifted
Father’s bento:
Not a single grain of egg
Three strips of dried radish, sweet potato strips mixed with rice

The child lifts the father’s bento box: not a single egg, just three strips of dried radish mixed with sweet potato and rice. A single image condenses the dignity and poverty of a laborer’s family.

Over 40 years later, in September 2024, Xiang Yang said in an CNA interview: "I remember the first 4 Taiwanese Hokkien poems I published... published in the Li poetry journal, on the day it was published, I couldn’t sleep all night! I was so happy."³⁶

He explained his reason for writing in Taiwanese Hokkien clearly in the same interview:

"As a poet, if I cannot write poetry in my mother tongue, I am not qualified to be called a poet. If one day Taiwanese Hokkien disappears, no one speaks it anymore, no one knows how to read it, then at least the poems I write can serve as a tombstone."³⁷

Xiang Yang is currently the Chairman of the National Culture and Arts Foundation. From the junior college student who couldn’t sleep all night in 1976 to the person managing Taiwan’s highest-level public arts funding mechanism in 2024: a 50-year arc.

The multilingual practice within the Li Poetry Society was never just "writing in Chinese." Jin Lien translated his Japanese poems into Chinese for publication in 2002; Tu Pan-fang-ko (a Hakka translingual female poet who joined later) compiled Taiwanese Hokkien Poetry Selection in the 2000s,收录ing 24 poets³⁸; Xiang Yang wrote Taiwanese Hokkien poems in 1976: in the context of this poetry society, "local" was always defined within the tension of multilingualism.

Poetry Entered the Junior High School Textbook: Burden

Wu Sheng was born in 1944 in Zhenniao Village, Xizhou Township, Changhua County. After graduating from Pingtung Agricultural Junior College in 1971, he worked as a biology teacher at Xizhou Junior High School, teaching, farming, and writing poetry until his retirement³⁹. He was called the "Soil Poet"—"a rural poet with a broken bamboo hat and bare feet, walking out from the fields"⁴⁰.

In 1971, when Wu Sheng was still young, the senior poet Ya Hsien edited the Young Lion Literature journal, which published his series of 13 poems "Impressions of My Hometown" in full. The Changhua County Cultural Bureau introduced him as follows: "This is the only literary work in the history of Taiwan modern literature that reflects the dual nature of farmers’ plight during the period of agricultural squeeze"⁴¹.

In 1977, he wrote "Burden" (負荷):

The dismissal bell rang again and again
Depression always
At the coldest time, is the sharpest
Coming with the autumn wind.

This poem was selected for the junior high school Chinese textbook around 1980, remaining there for over 40 years without being replaced⁴². "Father’s mood" 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 is a poet of the Li Poetry Society—this is one of the Li Poetry Society’s quietest achievements over 60 years: their poetry entered the junior high school textbooks, yet few people credit this achievement to the Li Poetry Society. Textbooks rarely discuss the "lineage" of this poem, only the text itself. Readers encounter "Burden," not "Burden written by Wu Sheng of the Li Poetry Society."

Wu Sheng long participated in anti-nuclear, water protection, and land protection movements, calling himself a "useless poet"⁴³. In June 2020, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Literature by National Dong Hwa University. "Burden" remains in the textbooks: this is one of the Li Poetry Society’s most silent victories.

Other Li Poetry Society poets of Wu Sheng’s generation or slightly earlier include:

• Cheng Ching-ming (1948–): Retired internal medicine physician from Kaohsiung Medical College. His 1982 poetry collection Song of the Sweet Potato won the 2nd Li Poetry Award; "sweet potato" is one of the core symbols of Taiwanese self-identity⁴⁴.
• Li Min-yung (1947–): From Qishan, Kaohsiung. Former editor-in-chief of the Li poetry journal, he is a representative of the Li Poetry Society’s "political lyric poetry during the Martial Law era." His poetry collection Martial Law Landscape (1990) directly addresses reality under the party-state system. He received the National Arts Award in 2007⁴⁵.

The "doctor-poets" in the Li Poetry Society—Cheng Ching-ming, Tseng Kuei-hai, Chiang Tzu-te, and Chuang Po-lin—represent a special cultural phenomenon in post-war Taiwan: writing poetry into the clinic.

Cold Clouds Coldly Gaze Upon Us

On January 11, 2023, Bai Qiu passed away quietly in Kaohsiung at the age of 86⁴⁶.

Bai Qiu was born in 1937 in Taichung, the youngest of the twelve founding members of the Li Poetry Society. He spanned three languages: Taiwanese, Japanese, and Chinese. The era was slightly later, with less Japanese influence, but still within the translingual context. Early on, he joined the Blue Star Poetry Society and the Creation Poetry Society; after participating in the founding of the Li Poetry Society in 1964, he became its core force¹³.

His representative work, "Wild Geese" (雁):

We are still alive. Still must fly
In the boundless sky
The horizon long retreated from afar, teasing us
Alive. Continuously chasing
Feeling it is close, but looking up, it is still so far

The sky is still the sky our ancestors flew through.
Vast and empty like an unchanging admonition
We are still like our ancestors’ wings. Drums on the wind
Continuing a will into an endless nightmare
(excerpt omitted)
Cold clouds coldly gaze upon us⁴⁷

The flock of geese flies in the shape of "人" (person/human): "人" refers both to the shape of the bird flock and to the human condition of existence. "Cold clouds coldly gaze upon us" is one of the most frequently cited existentialist quotes in the history of Taiwan modern poetry.

The poetry theory collection The Existence of the Lone Rock was one of the most important poetic theories of the Li Poetry Society in the 1960s and 1970s⁴⁸. Poet Ye Di described Bai Qiu as "the existence of the lone rock"—pursuing originality throughout his life, not following the vulgar crowd.

In January 2023, after Bai Qiu’s passing, Li Min-yung published "The Existence of the Lone Rock — In Memory of Poet Bai Qiu" in the Liberty Times Literary Supplement, writing about him:

"Bai Qiu was lonely, poetry was the kingdom he hid in daily life... His loneliness also had an aloof side, the existence of the lone rock is the写照... Critiquing poetry rarely involved flattery and nonsense, practicing the rare poetry-only discussion in the Taiwan poetry world... Bai Qiu was a special existence in the post-war Taiwan modern poetry history, an important mark on the pages of poetry history."⁴⁹

On September 23, 2023, Lin Heng-tai passed away at the age of 100, with the Ministry of Culture presenting a Presidential Citation of Commendation⁵⁰. Culture Minister Shih Che said: Lin Heng-tai’s passing "symbolizes the end of a shining era in Taiwan literature history"⁵¹.

Official Document of Chen Chien-wu’s Commendation. Original Presidential Citation after Chen Chien-wu’s passing in 2012: recording the historical positioning of this translingual poet and Li Poetry Society editor for 30 years. Image source: Public Government Document (Public domain).

From Zhan Bing in 2004, Chen Chien-wu in 2012, Jin Lien in 2013, Chao T’ien-i in 2020: to Bai Qiu and Lin Heng-tai’s consecutive passing in 2023, the founding generation of the Li Poetry Society has officially taken its bow. Of the twelve people, few remain who can speak.

Perhaps It Is the Weight of a Poem

On May 28, 2024, the National Taiwan Literature Museum’s "Sixty Years Like a Bamboo Hat: Li Poetry Society 60th Anniversary Special Exhibition" opened⁵². The exhibition was divided into three display themes: "Multilingual Polyphony," "Translation and Introduction of Multi-National Poetry Trends," and "Concern for Reality"⁵³.

The tour covered four locations across Taiwan:

• National Literature Museum (Tainan) from May 28, 2024
• Taipei Literature Base from May 31, 2024
• Kaohsiung City Library from June 4, 2024 to October 27, 2024 (held a themed lecture "Southern Activities of Li and Realist Poetics" on July 27)⁵⁴
• Taichung

In the curatorial narrative, there is a counterpoint: the cover of the first issue of the Li poetry journal in 1964 was the Greek mythological hero Hercules; the cover of the 361st issue in 2024 was "Perhaps It Is the Weight of a Poem"⁵⁵. From a war-torn totem to the weight of poetry itself: the self-positioning of 60 years flipped upside down.

The CNA report’s title was: "Witnessing Local Values Through Poetry"⁵⁶. The National Taiwan Literature Museum’s curatorial narrative wrote: "By establishing Taiwan’s modern poetics through poetry and poetic theory, it became an important field for Taiwan local discourse"⁵⁷.

✦ 60 years of never ceasing publication is a simple fact, but also an unlikely achievement. Most poetry journals in the world do not survive 10 years. The Li Poetry Society survived for 60 years, not relying on any institutional resources—they were marginalized in the 1960s to 1980s, existing under political suppression. They relied on twelve people and those who joined them later—Zhan Bing’s living room, Lin Heng-tai’s bamboo hat, Chen Chien-wu’s South Pacific memories, Bai Qiu’s lone rock, Xiang Yang’s insomnia, Wu Sheng’s bento box—these concrete people, concrete choices, concrete persistence, sustained a poetry society assembled from experiences of linguistic loss until today.

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

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

In 2024, Western academia formally categorized Chen Chien-wu, Lin Heng-tai, Zhan Bing, Jin Lien, Yeh Shih-t’ao, and Tu Pan-fang-ko, among others, into the English research category "Translingual Poets in Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwan"⁵⁸. The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, published by Columbia University,收录ed these poets⁵⁹.

But search Baidu Baike: there is no independent entry for "Li Poetry Society"⁶. The Chinese academic system has not systematically discussed this generation of "translingual poets": this gap of silence is itself a sovereignty issue.

Sovereignty is not just flags, not just diplomatic relations. Sovereignty is also "when others choose not to say your name, can you make your voice continue to exist in another language"⁶⁰. The Li Poetry Society’s 60 years have actually been doing this: turning "local" into a verifiable cultural fact. From the Silver Bell Society writing in Japanese, to the Li Poetry Society persisting in Chinese, to Xiang Yang writing in Taiwanese Hokkien, to Tu Pan-fang-ko compiling in Hakka: this is a sovereignty practice of polylinguality, not a single-language national narrative.

Taiwan.md is translating the Li Poetry Society into English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French, to ensure the Li Poetry Society has first-person records in five languages—bypassing the layer that chooses silence. For every additional language version, there is one more path around silence.

The Li Poetry Society has not ceased publication for 60 years. Taiwan.md has just begun.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan Modern Poetry — Modernist experiments emerging from three study rooms, forming a dialogue with the Li Poetry Society’s local realist tradition
• Post-War Taiwan Literature — The aphasia, imprisonment, and debate paths of novelists like Yeh Shih-t’ao and Chen Ying-zhen; contemporaries of the Li Poetry Society poets
• History of Taiwan Literature — Hub of the complete Taiwan literature history context
• Literature During the Japanese Colonial Period — The growth background of the Li Poetry Society’s translingual generation
• Tu Pan-fang-ko — Hakka translingual female poet who joined in 1965; "Peaceful Play" and the Hakka poetry line

Image Sources

This article uses 4 public domain / CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/art/ to avoid hotlinking to the source server:

• Poet Wu Sheng at the 2016 Taipei International Book Fair — Photo: Rico Shen, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0 (hero)
• 1964 Li Poetry Society Editorial Board Group Photo — Historical record from the founding year of the Li Poetry Society, Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA / Public domain
• Portrait of Poet Lin Heng-tai — Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA / Public domain
• Chen Chien-wu’s Commendation Order — Public government document, Public domain

Detailed media manifest and negative finding records are in research report §Media Authorization Matrix. Future EVOLVE supplement: portraits of Bai Qiu, Xiang Yang, Zhan Bing, Jin Lien + NMTL "Sixty Years Like a Bamboo Hat" official exhibition images + Public Television Literature Program related video iframes (pending Wikimedia supplement and authorization verify).

References