Renjian Magazine

30-Second Overview

In November 1985, a magazine called Renjian was born in Taipei. Its founder, Chen Yingzhen (pen name Hsu Nantsun), used 47 issues over four years to do something no one at the time dared to do: turn the camera toward farmers, workers, and Indigenous peoples, toward the realities of Taiwan that the government regarded as its "dark side."

It was a quiet revolution launched through photography and writing, neither a political magazine nor a literary journal. It cultivated an entire generation of reportage writers and photographers, changed the way Taiwanese people looked at their own land, and then quietly ceased publication in 1989 under financial pressure.

Forty-seven issues over four years: this was the starting point of Taiwanese reportage literature, and one of the sources of today's documentary photography tradition.

Why It Matters

The "documentary photography" we now take for granted, the concern for the disadvantaged that now seems ordinary, and the use of the camera to tell stories were all revolutionary in the 1980s.

Renjian was the starting point of Taiwanese reportage literature. It proved one thing: real power does not lie in shouting slogans, but in quietly recording, witnessing, and discovering. When everyone else was making political declarations, Chen Yingzhen chose another path: turning the camera toward people living real lives on this land.

The magazine existed for only four years, but the seeds it planted are still germinating today.

Chen Yingzhen: One Person and One Magazine

Chen Yingzhen's birth name was Chen Yongshan. He was born in 1937 in Zhunan Township, Miaoli County (then Zhunan District, Shinchiku Prefecture), and later studied at Tamkang Junior College of English.¹ His life was complex, contradictory, and full of controversy, but it also reflected multiple dimensions of Taiwan's postwar history. Throughout it all, he held fast to certain convictions.

In 1968, the 31-year-old Chen Yingzhen was sentenced to ten years in prison for rebellion because he had organized a reading group. He was later released early under the amnesty issued after Chiang Kai-shek's death in 1975, after serving about seven years in prison.² This experience deeply shaped his later writing and thought. He read Lu Xun, Chekhov, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, and considered how literature could intervene in reality and speak for those kept silent.

After leaving prison, Chen returned to the literary world as a contributor to Xiachao magazine, continuing the leftist intellectual tradition. But Taiwan's political climate in the 1980s left him unsettled. According to biographical materials related to Chen Yingzhen, he once expressed that the Kuomintang suppressed both the left and the dangwai opposition; he could identify neither with the Kuomintang line nor fully with the dangwai position. He therefore resolved to "open another battlefield."

That "other battlefield" was Renjian magazine.

Historical Background: Taiwan Before the Lifting of Martial Law in the 1980s

Taiwan in the 1980s stood on the eve of dramatic change. Chiang Ching-kuo was still in power, martial law had not yet been lifted, but the lower strata of society had already begun to stir. Economic takeoff brought prosperity, but it also brought inequality, environmental pollution, and problems of labor rights.

Rural villages were withering. Young people poured into factories. Traditional culture struggled amid the tide of modernization. Indigenous peoples faced the crisis of cultural extinction. Old soldiers missed home but could not return. New migrants survived on the margins of the city.

Mainstream media did not report these stories. The government considered them "negative issues" that would damage Taiwan's international image. Dangwai media were occupied with political resistance and had little capacity to attend to the social underclass.

It was precisely in this gap that Renjian found its position.

What Was Inside the 47 Issues

The founding purpose of Renjian was simple: "a magazine that engages in reporting, discovery, documentation, witnessing, and commentary through images and words."

It is difficult for readers today to imagine how radical those sixteen Chinese characters were at the time.

Each issue of Renjian was like a cross-section of Taiwanese society. You would see:

Rural Features — Real records of rural struggles for survival, not romanticized pastoral poems. Pesticide pollution, land expropriation, the outflow of young and middle-aged people: issues discussed today had already appeared in the pages of Renjian 35 years ago.

Workers' Stories — Child laborers in factories, workers in mines, fatal accidents on construction sites. These people's voices were amplified for the first time; for the first time, someone was willing to crouch down and listen to them speak.

Indigenous Cultures — Records of crises in cultural transmission, disputes over land rights, and confusion over identity under the impact of modernization, rather than tourist-brochure-style song-and-dance performances.

Folk Crafts — Skills on the verge of disappearance, the handcraft wisdom of master artisans, and cultural heritage under the wave of industrialization.

Every report was accompanied by extensive photography. Images stood beside text as an equal narrative language, not as decorative illustrations. Photographers went deep into the field, using the camera to capture overlooked moments.

The Revolution in Documentary Photography

Before Renjian, Taiwan did not have "documentary photography" in any true sense.

Wang Hsin, the first photo editor, defined the concept: documentary photography had to possess "informational and guiding qualities"; it was "a critical attitude and a force for critique and reform."

This was a new media language, neither art photography nor news photography. Here, the photographer was a witness, critic, and reformer.

Kuan Hsiao-jung's camera followed farmers into the fields. Juan I-jong went deep into Indigenous communities. Tsai Ming-te photographed the lives of people on the urban margins. Their photographs combined the precision of objective documentation with humanistic concern for their subjects.

These photographers later established themselves in Taiwan's documentary photography field. Their point of initiation was Renjian.

Tsai Ming-te and the Documentation of Urban Marginality

Tsai Ming-te was the photographer in Renjian's circle most focused on the urban underclass. For many years he moved through Taipei's Wanhua and Zhonghua Road areas, documenting the lives of unhoused people, temple-front vendors, old soldiers, child prostitutes, and marginal workers. His photographic work spanned more than a decade, from 1985 to 1995.³

One of his representative works is the "Wanhua Series": the camera follows elderly men as they wander around Bopiliao and pass time at temple-front thresholds and at the edges of existence. These photographs are not a compassionate gaze from above, but a form of equal companionship. Tsai Ming-te's distinctive strength lies in his ability to make his subjects forget the camera's presence.

Another series, "Taipei People," records those left behind by the metropolitan transformation of the 1990s: demolished old houses, construction workers temporarily living in work sheds, and old mainlander soldiers surviving in night markets. These works later became visual documents of Taiwan's urban transformation and have been repeatedly cited in studies of photographic history.

Tsai Ming-te's photographic aesthetics emphasized "non-intervention": to be present, record, and leave; not to alter the situation of the photographed subject, but to let the image speak. Among the photographers associated with Renjian, this attitude was the closest to the documentary tradition.

Issue 15: The Taoyuan Airport Incident Exclusive

On November 30, 1986, the blacklisted dangwai figure Hsu Hsin-liang and others attempted to fly back to Taiwan from Japan, but were blocked. The Democratic Progressive Party mobilized more than a thousand supporters to Taoyuan Airport in solidarity. Military police deployed water cannons to disperse them; red dye was added to the water to mark the identities of protesters. The standoff lasted ten hours.

That evening, Taiwan's three official television stations broadcast only footage of people throwing stones and called the protesters "mobs." The only outlet willing to publish images of military-police violence was the Independence Evening Post, whose editor-in-chief was Yen Wen-shan.

In January 1987, Renjian's fifteenth issue published an exclusive interview with Yen Wen-shan, revealing in depth another side of the Taoyuan Airport Incident. In an era when television stations were controlled by the party-state and most media outlets kept silent, this interview directly challenged the question of "who has the right to define the truth."

"Opening Another Battlefield": Neither Kuomintang nor Dangwai

Chen Yingzhen's political position has always been highly controversial. He was a leftist unificationist who supported unification across the Taiwan Strait and opposed Taiwan independence. This position is a definite minority in Taiwan today, and it was not accepted by the mainstream at the time either.

But the significance of Renjian does not lie in Chen Yingzhen's political views. It lies in the "third path" it opened.

When the Kuomintang was busy maintaining stability and the dangwai opposition was busy resisting, Chen Yingzhen chose a completely different battlefield: social concern. He did not discuss unification or independence, nor democracy. He focused on one question: how were the people living on this land actually doing?

This angle allowed Renjian to avoid the political vortex, but it also gave the magazine a power that transcended politics. Farmers were not divided by blue or green. Workers were not divided by unification or independence. Indigenous peoples were not divided by party affiliation. Suffering was shared, and concern should also be shared.

The People It Cultivated and the Seeds It Left Behind

Renjian cultivated an entire generation of Taiwanese reportage writers and photographers. In writing, Chen Lie later became known for his prose; his representative work Years on Earth records the lives of political prisoners on Green Island. Lan Bozhou inherited Chen Yingzhen's leftist tradition and wrote important works of reportage literature such as Song of the Covered Wagon.

In photography, Kuan Hsiao-jung became a representative figure of rural photography, using the camera to record changes in Taiwan's agricultural society. Juan I-jong's works Taipei Rumors and Notes from Bachi Gate are records in the history of Taiwanese photography. Tsai Ming-te focused on photographing people on the urban margins, documenting the many faces of human life during social transformation.

All of these people later achieved distinction in Taiwan's cultural sphere, and their starting point was Renjian magazine. They continued Renjian's core method: looking at the disadvantaged with a warm gaze, and recording reality with professional craft.

Renjian's influence on Taiwanese reportage literature is also visible in later media practice. The concept of "citizen journalism" that emerged in the 1990s, and the thematic orientation of the documentary wave after the 2000s, including Indigenous cultures, rural issues, and labor rights, all show the continuation of the Renjian line. When The Reporter was founded, it cited Renjian in multiple articles as a precursor to investigative reporting in Taiwan. This thread has never been broken.⁴

Contemporary continuations of the Renjian spirit:

• The Reporter: founded in 2015 by former mainstream media workers, continuing the tradition of in-depth reporting
• PTS's Our Island: reporting on environmental issues and carrying forward Renjian's concern for the land
• Independent documentary film: the social concern visible in the works of directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chi Po-lin can be traced back to the Renjian period
• Community documentation movements: "image documentation workshops" at community colleges across Taiwan are also grassroots practices of the Renjian spirit

Chen Yingzhen's Social-Movement Context and *Renjian*

Before founding Renjian, Chen Yingzhen already had a leftist social-movement background of two decades. The reading groups of the 1960s gathered him with a group of National Taiwan University teachers and students to discuss Lu Xun, Zola, and Marx. The 1968 verdict made him understand the cost of engaging in intellectual movements in martial-law Taiwan.²

After Chen Yingzhen left prison in the 1980s, he faced a more complicated situation. The dangwai movement was rising, but its line was centered on Taiwanese nationalism; the Kuomintang was still repressing dissent, but its emphasis had shifted toward economic construction. Chen chose a third path that was neither opposition party politics nor simply being out of power: using social issues as an entry point for resistance.

Renjian was not a social-movement publication, but behind every story it documented was a social-movement logic: rural decline was a problem of land policy, worker injuries and deaths were problems of labor law, and Indigenous deracination was a problem of cultural policy. Chen Yingzhen chose to let readers arrive at their own conclusions, rather than provide political answers. This method of "not saying it directly, yet leaving one heartsore" is precisely why Renjian could cross political positions and leave an imprint on both conservative and progressive readers.

After Publication Ceased

In September 1989, Renjian ceased publication because of financial pressure. Forty-seven issues, four years: the record of an era came to an end.

The reason for the closure was not only financial. The year 1989 was also the year of the June Fourth Tiananmen Incident. Taiwan's leftist forces fell into division, some intellectuals saw their illusions about the Chinese system shattered, and Chen Yingzhen's unification-left line faced even greater tension. In this political context, financial pressure made it even harder to obtain external support.

Chen Yingzhen later moved to Beijing and died there in 2016 at the age of 79. His political position continued to provoke controversy, but no one can deny his literary achievement or the historical value of Renjian magazine. Institutions such as the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and the National Central Library hold complete sets of Renjian and regularly organize related exhibitions and seminars.

After Renjian ceased publication, Taiwanese reportage literature did not come to an end. The talents it cultivated dispersed into media, NGOs, photography, and documentary film, and the "Renjian spirit" continued to work in different forms.

Today, when we see investigative reporting on Public Television Service, independent media attention to the disadvantaged, or documentary filmmakers entering remote rural communities to film, we can still find the shadow of Renjian magazine.

Key Numbers and Details

Several numbers help explain Renjian's position: 47 issues, four years, photography occupying nearly 40 percent of the pages, and a founder, Chen Yingzhen, who was a leftist unificationist. The numbers themselves already reveal the contradictions.

Although Chen Yingzhen had a strong political coloration, the content of Renjian's 47 issues almost never touched on the dispute between unification and independence, focusing instead on social issues. Its four editors-in-chief, Pan Tingsong, Kao Hsin-chiang, Chen Yingzhen under the pen name Hsu Nantsun, and Chung Chiao, maintained a consistent style, showing the clarity of the editorial direction.

In January 1987, issue 15 published an exclusive interview with Yen Wen-shan, editor-in-chief of the Independence Evening Post, revealing the inside story of the December 1986 Taoyuan Airport Incident. Renjian had originally planned to complete 50 issues before ceasing publication, but financial pressure ended it at issue 47, three issues earlier than planned.

Its circulation was not large, yet almost every issue drew media attention and social discussion. Many later works of Taiwanese reportage literature mention Renjian in their acknowledgments, regarding it as a source of enlightenment.

References

47 issues, four years, one person's persistence, a group's ideals, and the record of an era. Renjian magazine reminds us: real power does not lie in how loud a voice is, but in whether one is willing to bend down and hear the truest voices on the land.

Its influence lasted longer than its life.