Taiwanese Pop Music: The Island That Made Wedding Clothes for the World, Left in the End with Songs Others Cannot Sing

30-second overview: In 1997, Taiwan was Asia's second-largest and the world's 13th-largest record market; 80 percent of the world's Mandopop songs were written, arranged, and recorded here. Eight years later, the market had shrunk to one-quarter of its former size, the production center had moved to China and South Korea, and even Jay Chou at his peak sold only 300,000 copies per album, less than one-third of the million-copy standard of the golden age. Taiwan lost the contest of scale. But when a song elsewhere can be deleted because of one mention of "Tiananmen," one national flag, or one taboo, this island still holds something no one else can take away: freedom. This is a story about "whose voice counts," from 898 songs banned under martial law to the first Taiwanese-language album to win the Golden Melody Award for Album of the Year in 2025.

The day Hou Dejian wrote "Descendants of the Dragon" was December 16, 1978.

That night, the United States announced that it would establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and sever relations with the Republic of China. A Taiwanese young man in his early twenties sat down and turned the long-standing grief and anger of Chinese people being manipulated by foreign powers into a song¹. The chorus he originally wrote was "surrounded on all sides by the sword of slaves." The record company thought it was too sharp and asked him to change it to "the sword of foreigners." He refused. The final version became "the sword of appeasement"².

The song later changed owners three times. First, it was a song of grief born from diplomatic severance. James Soong, then director-general of the Government Information Office, thought the lyrics were not stirring enough, so he wrote another version praising national self-strengthening and patient endurance, and used it at speeches³. In 1983, Hou Dejian himself went to China. The song was banned in Taiwan and was not unbanned until after the lifting of martial law⁴. Later still, the lines "black eyes, black hair, yellow skin" were taken up by China as a symbol of blood-based nationalism, singing a different story altogether⁵.

The meaning of a melody has never been decided by the person who wrote it. It is decided by whoever holds power at the moment. The entire history of Taiwanese pop music is, more or less, a repeated verification of this sentence. It was once the factory that made wedding clothes for the world. Later, it could not even hold on to its own market. In the end, it found that what remained in its hands were the songs other people could not sing.

Lee Chien-fu's original recording of "Descendants of the Dragon." Official Rock Records channel. A song written for a diplomatic break later changed owners three times; that sentence is a miniature of the whole history of Taiwanese pop music.

The Island That Made Wedding Clothes for the World

Start with scale. Only then can one understand why freedom became the "last" bargaining chip.

From the 1980s onward, the entire Mandopop industry chain was highly concentrated in Taiwan: lyricists, composers, arrangers, producers, and recording studios were all here. Singers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Malaysia flew to Taipei to record, then took the finished product home for release. One Jonathan Lee alone held in his hands the signature works of Wakin Chau, Chief Chao, Sandy Lam, and Karen Mok⁶. This is not Taiwanese self-flattery: systematic industry observation in the British Financial Times orbit and academic journals have both called Taiwan the "epicentre" of Mandopop⁷. The Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development under Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs has its own figure: Taiwanese companies once held an 80 percent share of the Mandopop market⁸.

💡 Do you know how Aaron Kwok became famous? One of Hong Kong's "Four Heavenly Kings" first exploded in popularity after shooting a motorcycle commercial in Taiwan. A Taiwanese record company seized the moment and released his record, after which he became famous back in Hong Kong and across the entire Sinophone world. In that era, Taiwan was a "manufacturing machine" for Mandopop stars: people you thought of as Hong Kong stars often had a whole team of Taiwanese lyricists, composers, and producers standing behind them.

It was an era when selling a million copies was ordinary. Jacky Cheung's 1993 album The Goodbye Kiss sold 1.36 million copies in Taiwan; the description at the time was that, on average, one in every 20 Taiwanese people had bought it⁹. A-mei's Bad Boy sold 1.38 million copies in Taiwan in 1997, and remains the best-selling studio album in Taiwan's history¹⁰.

Teresa Teng, the diva whose songs were sung even across the Strait in the saying "listen to old Deng by day, little Deng by night," was the emblem Taiwan exported across Asia in the million-copy era. Photo: Unknown, early 1980s. Public domain (published in the United States, 1978-1989, with no copyright notice).

Then it collapsed.

Taiwan Panorama put it this way: "Taiwan's total record market output value rapidly shrank from NT$12.3 billion in 1997 to NT$3.15 billion in 2005"¹¹. Mirror Media added the coordinates: "Taiwan in 1997 was once second in the Asian record market, behind only Japan, and 13th in the world record market"¹². The chain of causes is clear: CD burners became widespread in 1998, Napster and pirated MP3s went online in 1999, and physical record sales "fell like an avalanche" in 2001¹³. Piracy became so severe that IFPI's Taiwan sales chart was suspended for a time in 1999.

The cruelest comparison was not at the moment of collapse, but ten years later. When the market had only one-quarter left, even the sales figures for kings and queens of pop shrank with it. Taiwan's golden age had seen albums routinely sell a million copies. By Jay Chou's generation, even the peak was only 300,000.

Source: Wikipedia album entries, Taiwan Panorama

📝 Curator's note
The common account often writes this period as "piracy killed the record industry." Piracy was certainly the fuse, but it cannot explain one thing: why did Taiwan not, like South Korea, grow an even larger industry after the collapse of physical records?

The real structure was this: Taiwan clung for too long to its position as the "leader of the Mandopop world," put all its chips on the growing Chinese market, and missed the train that turned music into global cultural export. South Korea increased its culture budget from US$14 million to US$84 million between 1998 and 2001, a full fivefold increase¹⁴. In 2018, Korean pop music ranked seventh globally, while Taiwan did not even make the top ten¹⁵. Both were small markets. South Korea went outward to fight for the world; Taiwan looked inward and waited for China. That difference in thought decided the next twenty years.

Host and Guest Reversed: How the Center Moved Away

A production center does not disappear on its own. It is pulled away by another, larger field of gravity.

By 2018, China's record market had become the world's seventh-largest and Asia's second-largest according to IFPI certification¹⁶. More important than the ranking was the transfer of discursive power. Veteran music figure Shao Yide described the present as if "there seem to be two Mandopop worlds. One is above the rivers and lakes... internet 'divine songs' produced in batches and distributed by algorithms; the other is in the hall... high-quality music refined through industrialization"¹⁷. Chinese platforms used immense traffic and capital to pull the center of the whole industry over. Taiwan went from being the center "everyone flew to for recording" to being a supplier that had to go to someone else's home field to make money.

Here one must be very careful about a statistical trap. The Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) announced that Taiwan's total pop music output value in 2023 was NT$28.8 billion, higher than the NT$12.3 billion in 1997¹⁸. At first glance this looks like "market recovery, surpassing the peak," but the two figures cannot be compared at all. The NT$12.3 billion in 1997 was pure physical record sales. The NT$28.8 billion in 2023 was the broad industry, including live performances (ticket sales alone were NT$6.7 billion), copyright, and digital streaming¹⁹.

In other words, Taiwan's music industry did regain some blood in the streaming era through concerts and copyright, but physical records, once its lifeline, did not come back. To describe NT$28.8 billion as "a market larger than 1997" is to compare apples and oranges. The honest version is: Taiwan lost the market in which it had once led all of Asia, and that fact has not been reversed.

Since scale cannot return, what gives Taiwan a place in Mandopop? The answer is hidden in the songs that other places do not dare sing, cannot sing.

We, Too, Were Once the Side Doing the Banning

To talk about Taiwan's "freedom," one first has to acknowledge an unflattering fact: Taiwan itself was once the one holding the red pen and deleting songs.

During the martial-law period, Taiwan Garrison Command reviewed songs together with the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Education, Ministry of National Defense, and other agencies. A cumulative total of 898 songs were banned²⁰. The most banned singer was Taiwanese-language king Wen Hsia, who had 99 songs on the blacklist²¹. The reasons for bans sound almost absurd today: "When Will You Return?" was suspected of alluding to Japanese militarism because of the characters ri jun; "Olive Tree" was banned for eight years because it sang of "wandering" and homesickness; "Not Coming Home Today" was read as alluding to China through the word "home," violating the policy of counterattack²². "Mother, I Am Brave and Strong Too," composed by Teng Yu-hsien, was banned for 33 years²³.

This censorship system had a clear legal basis and a clear exit timeline. The 1973 Publication Act and the 1976 Radio and Television Act were its basis; songs had to be submitted for review before release. Song censorship did not effectively end until 1990, with formal announcement in 1991²⁴. The clause in the Radio and Television Act limiting programming in so-called dialects was not deleted by the Legislative Yuan until July 14, 1993²⁵. The lifting of martial law itself took place on July 15, 1987²⁶.

⚠️ This is the most important premise for understanding Taiwan's freedom
Taiwan's freedom of speech was won step by step. From the lifting of martial law to the end of censorship to the deletion of language restrictions, the process took nearly forty years. In between, people were banned, blacklisted, and forced into exile over a song.

Precisely because Taiwan paid this price, it is especially clear today about what "cannot sing" feels like. It once stood on the side holding the red pen. This is not to negate today's freedom; quite the opposite. Only by knowing how freedom was obtained can one know how heavy it is, and avoid treating it as a given.

Able to Sing What Others Cannot

Put Taiwan's past, when it was once the censor, beside its present, and the contrast appears.

Today, across the Strait, a different and denser system of prior review is in use. China's National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) conducts prior review of lyrics, albums, and performances. In 2021 it introduced a KTV blacklist, removing songs with content such as "endangering national unity"²⁷. Independent musician Li Zhi had his works removed from all platforms in 2019 because of "The Square," a song about June Fourth²⁸. Jolin Tsai's "Womxnly," which speaks for gender equality, was banned in China. Even Mayday was once required to change the lyric "Tibet" to the homophonous "heart" in order to pass review and filing procedures²⁹.

This is why "freedom" has become Taiwan's last and hardest bargaining chip: some songs really can only be sung in Taiwan.

And freedom has weight. Its weight comes from those who chose to sing, then paid the price.

A-mei sang the national anthem at the presidential inauguration in 2000 and was subsequently blacklisted by China for nearly four years; concerts, advertisements, and endorsements were all halted until the ban was lifted in 2004³⁰. Deserts Chang, also known as Anpu, accepted a Republic of China flag handed to her by a fan at a 2013 concert in Manchester, England, and said, "This is the flag of my hometown." As a result, three scheduled Beijing performances were all canceled³¹. Crowd Lu and Chou Tzu-yu have also both been drawn into storms after being reported. And Teresa Teng, the diva whose songs were sung even in China in the saying "listen to old Deng by day, little Deng by night," sang on the stage of Hong Kong's 1989 "Democratic Songs for China" concert under a sign opposing military rule, and never held a concert in China before her death³².

The Golden Melody Awards are the most iconic stage in Mandopop, and it was here that Panai mentioned Tiananmen. Photo: Solomon203, 2021. CC BY-SA 4.0.

💡 Did you know? What best illustrates this is one night at the 2024 Golden Melody Awards. Indigenous singer Panai, on the stage of the 35th Golden Melody Awards, reminded everyone that the Tiananmen incident had also just reached its 35th anniversary, and said let's not forget³³. China immediately deleted her works from its platforms. Panai's response afterward pierced through the meaning of the entire event: she said Beijing's actions instead highlighted how precious Taiwan's freedom is³⁴. Being blacklisted instead became the best proof that "here, one can sing."

At that Golden Melody Awards, Lai Ching-te said in his remarks that music is life, and music is also unfettered freedom³⁵. The line sounds ceremonial, but placed in the context of Panai being deleted, A-mei being blacklisted, and Deserts Chang being canceled, it is an island that lost the market taking inventory of the only household property it still has left.

The other side of freedom is daring to speak. During the 2014 Sunflower Movement, Fire EX. and students from Taipei National University of the Arts wrote "Island's Sunrise" for the crowds occupying the Legislative Yuan. At the end of March, 500,000 people sang it together on Ketagalan Boulevard³⁶. The band released the song's rights free of charge for noncommercial use, and the following year it won Song of the Year at the 26th Golden Melody Awards. That a song filled with political demands, born from street protest, could take the crown at Taiwan's highest music hall is unimaginable across the Strait.

Fire EX.'s official "Island's Sunrise." Official Fire EX. channel. Written for the Sunflower Movement, sung by 500,000 people on Ketagalan Boulevard, and winner of Song of the Year at the 26th Golden Melody Awards.

To Make Money, You Have to Go to China

But it would be dishonest to speak too romantically about "freedom." Freedom has a cost, and that cost is incurred every day.

Market gravity is real. In 2023, about 120 Taiwanese bands and singers performed in China, the highest number since 2018³⁷. For many musicians, westward expansion to China is a livelihood issue, not a political statement. One manager told The Reporter bluntly: "In Taiwan you can only keep yourself from starving; only by going to China can you really make money, then bring the money back to Taiwan to make music"³⁸.

A new generation of musicians tries to find balance in between. Band vocalist Li Yang-hsuan said, "I would define the Chinese market as a bonus. If our main income all depends on that place, we will be tied down and unable to get away"³⁹. But balance is hard to maintain. Creator Chang Chia-hsiang lamented: "We are increasingly like event PR companies"⁴⁰. Among Taiwanese bands touring China, some choose silence on sensitive issues. A band manager who had supported Hong Kong and whose works were consequently removed told English-language media that he did not think this counted as self-censorship; it was simply "to ensure the safety of myself and my colleagues"⁴¹.

📝 Curator's note
This is the real dilemma of Taiwanese musicians, and it has no clean answer. On one side is "not starving in Taiwan, but not making money"; on the other is "making money in China, but having to keep your mouth shut." To scold those who choose to go west as "bootlickers," or to exalt those who insist on not going as "heroes," is too cheap, because the person making that judgment does not have to pay the rent.

The sentence "freedom is Taiwan's last bargaining chip" is true, but it has never been a free chip. Opposite it always stands a larger market, hand extended. What is precious about Taiwan is not that everyone chooses freedom. It is that here, the choice itself is still allowed.

"Singing Our Own Songs" Actually Meant Mandarin

After speaking so much about "freedom," one must loop back and add a bass line that runs from beginning to end: inside Taiwan, there has always been another struggle over "whose voice counts." Whether one can sing outward is one matter. In whose language one can sing is another.

During martial law, what was suppressed was not only politics, but also mother tongues. Between 1951 and 1963, a series of Mandarin promotion policies required schools to strictly prohibit so-called dialects⁴². Article 20 of the Radio and Television Act (1976) stated in black and white: "Domestic broadcast language on radio stations shall primarily be Mandarin, and dialects shall be reduced year by year"⁴³. In 1972, three television stations were required to broadcast "no more than two Taiwanese-language songs per day"⁴⁴. Scholar Chen Pei-feng's observation is that Taiwanese-language songs long struggled to survive under the contempt of intellectual elites and state power.

This gives the famous campus folk movement of the 1970s an irony that few people point out.

In 1975, Yang Hsien held the "Modern Folk Song Composition Concert" at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei, setting nine poems by Yu Kwang-chung to music and singing them, all in Mandarin⁴⁵. The following year at Tamkang University, during a Western folk concert, Lee Shuang-tse threw out the famous line: "Why are you spending twenty dollars to listen to Chinese people sing foreign songs?" (As for the Coca-Cola bottle in his hand, according to Tao Ching-ying's recollection, it was "brought offstage intact" and was not smashed; the "bottle-smashing" was later embellishment)⁴⁶.

"Sing our own songs" became the slogan of an entire generation. But that "our own," when sung, was overwhelmingly Mandarin. Business Today's retrospective puts it directly: "The folk song movement was actually a Mandarin song movement; Taiwanese-language songs were as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns"⁴⁷. At the Golden Rhythm Awards, an important stage for folk songs, Chien Shang-jen's "First Month Tune" was almost the only Taiwanese-language entry.

📝 Curator's note
The historical position of the folk song movement is beyond doubt. It did indeed allow Taiwan's young people to begin writing their own songs and move beyond the stage of covering Western and Japanese songs. But if one romanticizes it as the moment "Taiwan recovered its own voice," one misses the most crucial layer: the "self" recovered was a Mandarin-speaking self.

The Taiwanese-speaking communities that truly lived on this land and formed a majority of the population remained marginal in this movement. The moving power and blind spot of the slogan "sing our own songs" are precisely the same thing: it proves that even in a posture of resistance, Mandarin hegemony remained the unquestioned default.

From Third-Rate Songs to Album of the Year

The reversal of mother tongues has been a process of returning again and again after collision. No movement can settle it once and for all.

In 1989, Blacklist Studio released Songs of Madness, regarded as the starting point of the "New Taiwanese Song Movement." Its members included Wang Ming-hui, Chen Ming-chang, Chen Chu-hui, and Will Lin⁴⁸. On December 7, 1990, Lim Giong released "Marching Forward." It sold 400,000 copies and won Song of the Year at the 3rd Golden Melody Awards in 1992, proving that Taiwanese could sing not only sorrowful old songs, but also rock, urban brightness, and youth⁴⁹. In 1998, Wu Bai's Lonely Tree, Lonely Bird won Best Pop Vocal Album at the Golden Melody Awards and was described as a representative work of the "ten-year revival of the New Taiwanese Song Movement"⁵⁰.

Lim Giong's official MV for "Marching Forward." Official Rock Records channel. In 1990, it used Taiwanese to sing urban brightness and forward momentum, proving that Taiwanese could sing more than sorrow.

Institutions gradually caught up. In 2005, at the 16th Golden Melody Awards, awards were established for Best Taiwanese, Hakka, and Indigenous-language Album⁵¹. In 2017, at the 28th Golden Melody Awards, the language-neutral Album of the Year award was established⁵².

Then came 2025. At the 36th Golden Melody Awards, Siri Lee's Taiwanese-language album Suí won three awards in one sweep: Album of the Year, Best Taiwanese Female Singer, and Best Taiwanese Album⁵³. The Album of the Year trophy carried special weight: this was the first time a Taiwanese-language album had won the highest language-neutral honor⁵⁴.

Siri Lee's official "Suí." Official Siri Lee channel. In 2025, this Taiwanese-language album won the Golden Melody Award for Album of the Year, the first time Taiwanese stood atop the highest language-neutral honor.

⚠️ A point that must be stated accurately
What Siri Lee achieved was "the first Taiwanese-language album to win Album of the Year," not "the first mother-tongue album" or "the first non-Mandarin album." Before her, Indigenous-language albums by Sangpuy in 2017 and ABAO, also known as Aljenljeng, in Paiwan in 2020 had already won Album of the Year⁵⁵. To state the achievement too broadly would instead erase the path Indigenous musicians had already walked. The honest version is: the reversal of mother tongues in the highest hall of the Golden Melody Awards has been a relay, baton by baton. Indigenous languages arrived first; Taiwanese arrived later. Each baton was a recalculation of "whose voice counts."

From "no more than two Taiwanese-language songs a day" in 1972 to a Taiwanese-language album winning Album of the Year in 2025, half a century lies in between, along with an entire turn in language, power, and dignity.

It is also worth puncturing two widespread claims that in fact do not stand.

The first is the idea that "Taiwanese female singers rose in the 1990s." This is a mistaken historical view. Teresa Teng debuted in 1967, won the Golden Bell Award for Best Female Singer in 1980, and was the diva of all Asia. Fong Fei-fei debuted in 1971; Teresa Teng in the 1970s and Fong Fei-fei in the early 1980s were two successive generations of divas who defined the Mandarin music scene⁵⁶. Tsai Chin became famous in 1979 with "Just Like Your Tenderness." They were already mainstream divas. Female singers did not only "rise" in the 1990s.

The second myth, about Indigenous singers, is more subtle. A-mei is Puyuma, Chang Chen-yue is Amis, and Chen Chien-nien is Puyuma. Their success is often attributed to the idea that "Indigenous people are naturally good singers." Online, there is even a saying: "Attaching the label 'I am Indigenous' is almost equivalent to hanging up a guarantee that 'the singing is excellent'"⁵⁷. But the perspective of Golden Melody Awards judges was exactly the opposite. Taiwan Panorama quoted judges discussing wins by Chen Chien-nien and Samingad: "It had nothing to do with the fact that they are Indigenous; instead, we saw the originality of the music"⁵⁸. Reducing a person's talent to bloodline is another form of refusing to treat a person as a person, even when it wears the mask of praise.

Freedom Is the Only Thing Not Taken Away After Losing Everything

Return to Hou Dejian that night.

"Descendants of the Dragon" changed owners three times. Each time it changed hands, it was because someone held power greater than the singer's: the record company, the Government Information Office, the other side of the Strait. Who decides the meaning of a song has always been a question of power, not of music.

Over forty years, Taiwanese pop music has lived out both sides of this truth. It was once the one holding the red pen, banning 898 songs. Later, it put down the red pen and paid forty years of cost in exchange for "not censoring." It was once the factory that wrote songs for the whole world. Later, it even lost its own market to the other side of the Strait. It failed, unlike South Korea, to produce a BTS outward toward the world, and watched helplessly as the center moved away.

In terms of scale, Taiwan has long since ceased to be the largest market in the Sinophone world. That fact will not be reversed. But when a song about June Fourth disappears from every platform across the Strait, when saying "Tiananmen, don't forget" causes a singer to be deleted, when "Tibet" has to be changed into "heart" before it can be heard, the thing Taiwan holds that cannot be lost begins to show its weight.

In 2025, Siri Lee used a Taiwanese-language album to turn songs once dismissed as "songs sung by third-rate people" into Album of the Year. From Wen Hsia's 99 banned songs to this Album of the Year trophy, what happened in between was how an island spent half a century taking the matter of "whether something can be sung" back into its own hands, word by word.

What remains is not scale. It is freedom, the only thing not taken away after everything else was lost. And the most moving part of freedom has never been that it lets people win. It is that it lets people sing what others cannot sing.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan's Folk Song Movement: Whose Songs Were "Singing Our Own Songs"?
• The Evolution of Taiwanese-Language Songs: From a Banned Mother Tongue to Album of the Year
• Pop Music and the Golden Melody Awards: Whose Voice Counts, and Who Decides?
• Taiwan's Music Industry and the Streaming Era: Regaining Blood After the Collapse of Physical Records
• Teresa Teng: The Diva Who Sang Across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, Yet Never Performed in China Before Her Death

Image Sources

This article uses three public-domain / CC-licensed images, all cached under public/article-images/music/ to avoid hotlinking source servers. Videos are all standard YouTube embeds from official channels:

• Sunflower Movement crowd (hero) — Photo: tomscy2000, 2014, CC BY 2.0
• Teresa Teng, 1980s portrait — Photo: Unknown, early 1980s, Public domain (published in the United States, 1978-1989, with no copyright notice)
• Television broadcast cameras at the 32nd Golden Melody Awards — Photo: Solomon203, 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Videos: Lee Chien-fu, "Descendants of the Dragon" / Lim Giong, "Marching Forward" (official Rock Records); Fire EX., "Island's Sunrise" (official Fire EX.); Siri Lee, "Suí" (official Siri Lee)

References