Taiwanese Magazines: From Free China to Benesse Kids, a Reading History of Pages Turned and Swiped Past

30-second overview: On September 4, 1960, Lei Chen was sentenced to ten years in prison for “knowing of Communist bandits and failing to report them” because of an editorial in Volume 23 of Free China. That semimonthly magazine was the first dissident voice openly passed from reader to reader after the Kuomintang came to Taiwan¹. Sixty-five years later, in July 2025, the Chinese edition of Reader’s Digest, which had accompanied Chinese-language readers for 60 years, announced its closure²; in early 2024, the 35-year-old Benesse Kids ended the print subscription familiar to 1.83 million families³⁴. The first half of Taiwan’s magazine history was about “turning pages”: readers leafing through banned books, page by page, in the cracks of authoritarian rule. The second half is about “swiping past”: readers flicking covers away, finger by finger, before the algorithm.

On the day Lei Chen was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1960, Free China had already reached Issue 5 of Volume 23¹. On December 10, 1979, members of the Formosa Magazine office faced off with police on Zhongshan 1st Road in Kaohsiung; Issue 4 had been founded less than three months earlier⁵. In January 2024, Benesse Kids Monthly announced that it would stop accepting print subscriptions, 35 years after its 1989 launch³⁴. Three years, three magazines, three ways of being “ended”: the first two by power, the third by readers themselves. The path Taiwanese magazines have traveled is not a linear “golden age to digital shock,” but a long struggle over “how many pages readers are willing to turn.”

The Age of Turning Pages: Magazines as Forbidden Voices

Japanese Colonial Period: Women’s Magazines Were Not Decoration, but Instruments Measuring Colonial Modernity

From the 1900s to the 1930s, Taiwan had two women’s magazines associated with the Taiwan branch of the Japanese Women’s Patriotic Association: Taiwan Patriotic Women and Taiwan Women’s World⁶. In 2019, Professor Wu Pei-chen of National Chengchi University discovered a complete collection of the first 65 volumes of Taiwan Patriotic Women, filling a gap in early women’s studies. Before then, researchers could not even say clearly how many issues of the magazine had existed⁶. On the surface, these publications discussed family, literature and art, and the “new woman”; at their core, they were test paper through which the colonial government measured whether “Taiwanese women could be assimilated into women of the Greater Japanese Empire.” They were not a preface to later magazine history, but the starting point of Taiwanese readers first being treated as “subjects in need of enlightenment.”

From the Postwar Period to the Lifting of Martial Law: Two Magazines, Two Imprisonments, and One Formosa Incident

After 1945, speech briefly loosened, but it tightened immediately after the February 28 Incident⁷. In November 1949, Free China was founded in Taipei, with Hu Shih named as publisher and Lei Chen as editor-in-chief¹. Eleven years later, the essay “The River Flows Eastward, Unstoppable” in Volume 23, Issue 9 became the trigger. Lei Chen was arrested on September 4, 1960, and sentenced by military court to ten years on September 26¹. This was the first time the Kuomintang in Taiwan handled a magazine editor-in-chief under the charge of “rebellion.”

📝 Curator’s note: What an authoritarian system fears most is not what a magazine prints, but readers beginning to cut out the same editorial and pass it around.

From the 1960s to the 1970s, Wenxing, Crown, Biographical Literature, and Modern Literature each carved out space in the fissures of culture, popular reading, historical materials, and literature. In August 1979, Formosa Magazine was founded, and its circulation quickly rose to 80,000 copies. On December 10 of the same year, International Human Rights Day, a march in Kaohsiung developed into clashes, later known as the Formosa Incident⁵. The eight people indicted, including Shih Ming-teh, Yao Chia-wen, Lin Yi-hsiung, Annette Lu, and Chen Chu, later almost all became core figures in the founding of the Democratic Progressive Party. A magazine shut down after four months in exchange for the formation of a political party: even in world media history, this is rare.

The Fastest Page-Turning Years: CommonWealth, Next Magazine, and Reader’s Digest

CommonWealth Magazine: The Question Yin Yun-peng Brought Back from Her Wall Street Journal Seat

When the first issue of CommonWealth Magazine went on sale in June 1981, Taiwan’s GDP had just surpassed US$48 billion, and the economy was moving from processing exports toward industrial upgrading. Its founder, Yin Yun-peng, was then the Taiwan correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. What she wanted to make was not a Chinese edition of Fortune, but a magazine in which “Taiwan asks its own questions”⁸. Its 1996 special report “Environmental Taiwan” was the first time a mainstream Taiwanese business medium treated “economic development is harming this island” as a cover story. That was the same year Taiwan had just announced plans to build the Binnan Industrial Complex⁹.

📝 Curator’s note: The greatest courage of a business magazine is not criticizing the government. It is publishing a cover story questioning economic growth itself when the subscriber list is filled with corporate owners.

Next Magazine: Jimmy Lai Brought Gossip In, Then Exited with Print

On May 31, 2001, the first issue of the Taiwan edition of Next Magazine went on sale, with Chu Mei-feng on the cover¹⁰. Paparazzi, telephoto lenses, follow cars, tip-off hotlines: all the terms later criticized for twenty years were brought into Taiwan at once by this magazine¹¹. What it created was not only controversy over journalistic ethics, but also a new reading rhythm: readers began to expect, every Thursday, “who did they photograph this time?” On April 4, 2018, Next Magazine stopped print publication; on February 29, 2020, it closed completely¹⁰. From introduction to closure, it lasted exactly 19 years: longer than Jimmy Lai had expected, and later to close than all other print magazines of the same period.

The Chinese Edition of Reader’s Digest: The Window Lin Tai-yi Held Open for 23 Years

In March 1965, the Chinese edition of Reader’s Digest was founded in Hong Kong and distributed in Taiwan at the same time. Its first editor-in-chief was Lin Tai-yi, the second daughter of Lin Yutang¹². She held the position for 23 years, from 1965 to 1988, and positioned the magazine as “a window that opens the world for readers”¹². The term “chicken soup essay,” now used pejoratively, was originally the magazine’s staple fare: columns such as “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met,” “Life’s Like That,” and “Points to Ponder” accompanied three generations of Chinese-language readers. In July 2025, the Chinese edition of Reader’s Digest announced its closure, and a 60-year window shut².

Children’s Magazines: Squeezed Between Talking Pens and YouTube

Little Newton and Copernicus 21: The Print Ceiling of Popular Science Enlightenment

Little Newton was founded in 1984 and ceased publication in 2006 after Kao Yuan-ching, founder of its parent company Newton Publishing, suffered investment losses. Although it later split into Young Newton and New Little Newton to continue the line, the original team was gone¹³. The international Chinese edition of Copernicus 21: Science Magazine for Children and Youth was founded in February 1985 and ceased publication in August 2001, with 199 issues in total¹⁴. The two magazines shared one thing: both died before online popular science content, such as PanSci and YouTube science channels, had truly matured, but their readers had already left print one step earlier to look for free content.

Benesse Kids: 35 Years, 1.83 Million Families, One Shutdown

Benesse Kids Monthly was introduced to Taiwan in 1989 by Fukutake Publishing, later Benesse. Its protagonist, Qiaohu, is the greatest common denominator of childhood memory for Taiwanese children born after 1990³. Over 35 years, it accompanied 1.83 million families³. In January 2024, Benesse announced that it would stop accepting print subscriptions and shift fully to digital delivery⁴. This was not a publisher that could no longer survive. It was parents who had changed: when a three-year-old child can swipe an iPad and tap YouTube Kids independently, a monthly print magazine becomes a household problem of “having to find a place to put it.”

Still Moving: The Talking-Pen Strategy

Global Citizen 365 Children’s Edition combines a talking pen, character education stories, English picture books, and composition training, positioning itself as Taiwan’s first “audio knowledge magazine”¹⁵. Little Da Vinci, founded in 2005, will publish its 240th issue in December 2025; it has survived by constantly updating thematic units and maintaining a dual track of print plus audio files¹⁶. These publications are still alive not because their content is better, but because they have redefined “print” as “the carrier for a talking pen.” Paper is no longer the reading medium itself; it is an extension of a hardware service.

📝 Curator’s note: The way forward for print children’s magazines is to admit that they are no longer the protagonist, and to take on the supporting role of hardware.

Niche Magazines: Two Print Farewells, Baseball and Cars

In February 1990, on the eve of the Chinese Professional Baseball League’s inaugural season, Professional Baseball magazine published its first issue¹⁷. It was born in the same year as the league, published semimonthly, and from Issue 1 to Issue 189 served as the main channel through which fans followed game statistics and player profiles¹⁸. After online statistics sites such as CPBL Stats and Baseball Reference matured, fans no longer needed to wait half a month to see the standings. Even the U.S.-based Baseball Digest has ceased publication¹⁹, and the readership for this kind of specialized magazine in Taiwan has drained away even faster.

Among car magazines, Carnews Magazine has been in publication for more than 25 years. It was once Taiwan’s most-read car magazine for four consecutive years and received a Golden Tripod Award recommendation for excellence in magazines²⁰²¹. What it and Option Carnews sustained was not “vehicle specification tables,” which manufacturer websites already provide, but a car-enthusiast culture willing to read an 8,000-word long-form road test. The carrier for that culture is now called the YouTube test-drive video: an average length of 12 minutes, with track testing included, and views starting in the millions.

The Age of Swiping Past: NT$63.683 Billion in Digital Advertising and a Reading Population Below Ten Percent

The Cold Face of Data: Eighty Percent of Advertising Revenue Gone

In 2024, Taiwan’s digital advertising market reached NT$63.683 billion, with mobile devices accounting for 77.9%²². Read in reverse, that number means traditional media, including television, newspapers, magazines, and radio, lost nearly 80% of their advertising share within ten years, while the print-reading population fell below 10%. The University of Oxford Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report showed that Taiwan ranked 24th globally in press freedom, with a score of 77.04, but social-level trust in media did not rise accordingly²³. In other words, readers left print for the internet, but they did not trust online content more. It was simply cheaper and faster.

Still Turning: Subscriptions, Memberships, Podcasts, and AI Paywalls

The transformation model of CommonWealth Magazine includes a paywall, subchannels such as Web Only, Future City, Crossing, and CSR@CommonWealth, podcasts, offline forums, and corporate education and training modules²⁴. The business model has shifted from “advertising-centered” to four legs: subscriptions, memberships, events, and data services. Cases from nDX, the Taiwan News Digital Innovation Project, show that some media outlets have begun using AI to assess the distribution potential and paid-conversion rate of individual articles, dynamically adjusting the position of the paywall²⁴. This is not a fixed break after the third paragraph. It is AI deciding in real time based on how far you have scrolled and how sharp the article itself is.

📝 Curator’s note: The opponent of print magazines was never Facebook. It was the very question of whether “readers are willing to stay for eight minutes.”

Conclusion: What Can One Page of Paper Still Do?

On the day Volume 23 of Free China was confiscated by the Taiwan Garrison Command, Lei Chen began writing his famous prison diary in jail. On the day Issue 4 of Formosa Magazine was banned, the editorial office hid the remaining magazines in rice jars in readers’ homes. On the day Benesse Kids announced that it would stop print subscriptions, the first response on PTT’s Parenting board was: “What should we do with that box of old issues at home?”

From turning pages to swiping past, what Taiwanese readers learned over these 65 years was not “how to read magazines,” but “when they are willing to stop and read for eight minutes.” Whether the magazine as a medium will continue to exist is not decided in the boardrooms of Benesse or CommonWealth, but in the next moment each reader unlocks a phone: will the finger swipe left, or scroll all the way down?

The retreat of print does not mean the retreat of “one complete page of content.” It has merely changed carriers and continues looking for readers. The question has never been whether magazines will die, but whether this island is still willing to turn to the second page for the sake of an argument.

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