Chen Yingzhen: The Pro-Unification Literary Conscience from Zhunan to Beijing

30-Second Overview: Chen Yingzhen (1937-2016), born Chen Yongshan, was born in 1937 in Zhunan Township, Miaoli County, and later moved to Yingge, then in Taipei County, where he grew up. He entered the literary scene in 1959 with “Noodle Stall,” and became famous in 1964 with “The General’s Clan,” a tragedy about the entertainment troupe lives of the mainlander veteran “Triangle Face” and the young Taiwanese prostitute “Skinny Little Girl.” In 1968, he was arrested in the “Democratic Taiwan Alliance case,” sentenced to 10 years, and released early in 1975 under a special amnesty after Chiang Kai-shek’s death. During the 1977-78 Nativist Literature debate, he intervened under the pen name “Xu Nancun.” In 1985, he founded Renjian magazine, pioneering reportage literature in Taiwan. In 1988, he founded the China Unification Alliance and served as its first chair. In 2006, he was elected a member of the Seventh National Committee of the China Writers Association; after suffering a stroke that same year, he moved to Beijing. After a second stroke in 2010, he remained bedridden for years and died of illness in Beijing on November 22, 2016.

Chen Yingzhen was one of the most controversial and influential left-wing writers in postwar Taiwanese literary history. Born Chen Yongshan in Zhunan Township, Miaoli County, in 1937, he moved during childhood to Yingge Township, Taipei County, due to family circumstances. His growth spanned the historical rupture between the late Japanese colonial period and the early postwar era. In works such as “The General’s Clan,” “Mountain Road,” and the Washington Building series, he analyzed Taiwan’s colonial psychology, class structure, and the historical condition of cross-strait division. Chen Yingzhen was not only a novelist and pioneer of the reportage literature movement; he was also a political intellectual who explicitly advocated Chinese unification. During Taiwan’s process of localization, this position was classified as “pro-unification” and diverged sharply from mainstream opinion in much of Taiwanese society. His works and thought deeply shaped the theoretical construction of Taiwan’s Nativist Literature movement, while also giving Taiwan’s later pro-unification camp a spiritual benchmark with genuine literary achievement.¹

The Intellectual Awakening of a Postwar Youth

Chen Yingzhen grew up in the complex era of postwar Taiwan, and this particular historical background profoundly shaped his worldview and creative direction. Born in Zhunan, Miaoli, in 1937, his childhood coincided with the final years of Japanese rule. After moving to Yingge as a young child, he experienced political upheavals such as the February 28 Incident and the White Terror during his adolescence. These historical events led the young Chen Yingzhen to begin thinking about questions of politics, society, and human nature.

During secondary school, Chen Yingzhen already showed a strong interest in literature and ideas. He read extensively in Chinese and foreign literature. He was fascinated by the concern for the lower classes shown by Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky, while Lu Xun’s works had a decisive influence on the formation of his thought. Chen Yingzhen himself mentioned many times in interviews that Lu Xun showed him “how literature could become a weapon of social critique,” which became the spiritual ground of his later writing.

In 1957, Chen Yingzhen was admitted to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tamkang College of Arts and Sciences, today’s Tamkang University.² During university, he not only excelled academically; he also began forming his own political and social views. He encountered Marxist theory and began using class analysis to observe Taiwanese society. This left-wing thought deeply influenced the direction of his writing over the following decades, and also became the intellectual foundation for his later move toward a political stance of “Chinese unification.”²

The Beginnings of Literary Creation and His Rise to Fame

In 1959, the 22-year-old Chen Yingzhen published his debut work “Noodle Stall” in the magazine Bihui, formally beginning his literary career. The story depicts the life of the owner of a small noodle stall. Although brief, it already revealed the creative feature that would define him: attention to people at the bottom of society.

In the early 1960s, Chen Yingzhen successively published a number of short stories and gradually built his reputation in the literary world. “My Younger Brother Kangxiong” portrays young people’s bewilderment under the impact of modernization, while “The Comedy of Tang Qian” explores the spiritual predicament of intellectuals. These works all showed his sharp power of observation regarding social problems.

Published in 1964 in issue 19 of Modern Literature, “The General’s Clan” was Chen Yingzhen’s breakthrough work and a marker of the maturation of his creative style. The story describes the tragic love of two people at the bottom of society: “Triangle Face” is a mainlander veteran approaching 40 who came to Taiwan with the Nationalist government in 1949, drifted into an entertainment troupe, and survived by playing the trumpet; “Skinny Little Girl” is a young woman from an impoverished family in Hualien, Taiwan, who was sold into prostitution because of her family’s circumstances. She refused to “sell herself” and escaped, eventually making a living in the same entertainment troupe by dancing as a female clown. The two meet and depend on each other at the bottom of society, and ultimately die by suicide together.

“The General’s Clan” was one of the earliest works in Taiwanese literary history to touch on the “condition of mainlander veterans in Taiwan.” With delicate prose, Chen Yingzhen depicted how, after the division across the Taiwan Strait, two lower-class lives that might originally have had nothing to do with each other came to converge on the same dead end because of the Chinese Civil War and the lower-class structure of Taiwan’s economy. In 1999, “The General’s Clan” was selected by the Council for Cultural Affairs for “30 Classics of Taiwanese Literature,” making it a representative work of Chen Yingzhen’s literary achievement.³

Mountain Road: A Belated Atonement for the White Terror

The novella Mountain Road, published in 1983, was one of Chen Yingzhen’s most representative works after his release from prison, as well as an important early text in Taiwanese literature to directly address the history of the White Terror.³

The central figure of the story, Cai Qianhui, is a family member of a victim of a 1950s political case: her lover Li Guomu was imprisoned during the White Terror and died in prison. Thereafter, Cai Qianhui spends the rest of her life in a form of atoning self-sacrifice, fulfilling the commitment that Li Guomu could not complete: going into the mountains to serve the people at the bottom of society. The story’s structure alternates between time and memory. Through Cai Qianhui’s perspective, Chen Yingzhen presents how the families of political prisoners bore a silent historical weight under high-pressure rule.

Mountain Road directly addresses the long-term effects of the White Terror on individual spirit and ethical choice. It is an important example of Chen Yingzhen’s combination of left-wing political stance and literary practice.³

Washington Building: A Critique of Transnational Capital and Compradors

The Washington Building series was an important body of work by Chen Yingzhen in the 1980s. Centered on a transnational corporate office building in Taipei, the fiction focuses on how American multinational companies operated in Taiwan, and on how local Taiwanese employees played the role of “compradors” within the structure of foreign-capital enterprises: acting as intermediaries for outside capital, serving the interests of transnational capital, and becoming alienated from their own land and people.

In this series, Chen Yingzhen clearly presented his critique of “dependent capitalism.” In his understanding, Taiwan’s modernization was a process of foreign-capital import dependent on transnational capital and mediated by a comprador class, lacking a foundation of autonomous local accumulation. This critique of the structure of foreign capital was of a piece with his left-wing political discourse after the 1980s, and made Washington Building a representative text of the socialist realist line in Taiwanese literary history.

The 1968 Democratic Taiwan Alliance Case

On July 31, 1968, the Nationalist government arrested Chen Yingzhen, Li Zuocheng, Wu Yaozhong, Chen Shukong, Qiu Yanliang, and others, 36 people in total, on the grounds that they had “organized readings of left-wing books such as Marxist-Leninist works and Lu Xun and disseminated communist propaganda.” This was the “Democratic Taiwan Alliance case” (some sources write it as the “Democratic Taiwan League case”). At the time, Chen Yingzhen was an editorial board member of Literary Quarterly. Because the case also affected other writers such as Huang Chun-ming and Wei Tiancong, it was also called the “Literary Quarterly Incident.”⁴

Note: the reason for the 1968 arrest was the “Democratic Taiwan Alliance case,” not the “China Unification Alliance” that Chen Yingzhen personally founded in 1988. The latter was a political organization established 13 years after his release from prison. The names are similar, but they refer to two entirely different events.

On December 31, 1968, Chen Yingzhen was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was successively transferred to Taiyuan Prison in Taitung and Green Island Lodge, the Green Island Reform and Re-education Prison. In prison, he did not stop thinking and writing; instead, he thought even more carefully about social problems and cross-strait relations. After Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975, Chen Yingzhen was released three years early under a special amnesty.

This imprisonment further consolidated Chen Yingzhen’s left-wing position and his political advocacy of “Chinese unification.” He began to think more carefully about Taiwan’s place in the Cold War order, as well as the shared fate of the Taiwanese people and oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. After his release in 1975, he returned to the literary world with more mature thought and a more distinct style. Works from this period, such as Mountain Road and the Washington Building series, all embodied his grasp of social reality and his concern for the fate of the people.

A Theorist of the Nativist Literature Movement

In the 1970s, the Nativist Literature movement emerged in Taiwan, and Chen Yingzhen was an important theorist and practitioner of this movement. He not only created a large number of outstanding works of nativist literature, but also provided theoretical guidance for the movement.

Chen Yingzhen believed that genuine nativist literature was not a simple depiction of rural life. It should reflect the true face of Taiwanese society and care about the fate of people at the bottom. He emphasized literature’s realist tradition, opposed the notion of art for art’s sake, and argued that literature should serve the people and social progress.

During the 1977-78 “Nativist Literature debate,” Chen Yingzhen intervened under the pen name “Xu Nancun,” publishing several key theoretical essays and firmly defending the value and significance of nativist literature. In the debate, he entered a long-running argument with Yeh Shih-tao over their divergent positions on “Taiwan consciousness” and “Chinese consciousness.” Yeh Shih-tao argued that nativist literature should be rooted in Taiwan’s own historical experience and develop an independent subjectivity for Taiwanese literature. Chen Yingzhen, by contrast, believed that nativist literature was a local expression in Taiwan of “Chinese national literature.” This debate became the starting point of the later split between “nativist” and “pro-unification” camps in Taiwanese literary circles, and its influence continues to the present.⁵

Magazine Editing and Cultural Promotion

Beyond fiction writing, Chen Yingzhen also devoted himself to editorial work and to promoting progressive culture. In 1985, he founded Renjian magazine. Through the form of reportage literature, the magazine closely reported on a range of problems in Taiwanese society, including labor issues, environmental issues, and Indigenous issues.

Renjian magazine’s publishing philosophy embodied Chen Yingzhen’s consistent cultural position: cultural workers should go among the people, understand their suffering, and use words and images to record real social life. Although the magazine ceased publication after only five years (1985-1989), its influence continues to this day and it is regarded as a milestone in Taiwanese reportage literature.

Through Renjian magazine, Chen Yingzhen cultivated a group of outstanding cultural workers, including photographers, writers, and journalists. These people later continued to practice Chen Yingzhen’s cultural convictions in different positions across Taiwan’s cultural world.⁶

Literary Achievement and Historical Position

Chen Yingzhen’s place in Taiwanese literary history is eminent. Together with Pai Hsien-yung, Huang Chun-ming, Wang Zhenhe, and others, he formed an important lineup in modern Taiwanese literature. The difference is that if Pai Hsien-yung was concerned with the spiritual world of urban intellectuals, and Huang Chun-ming depicted the everyday charms of ordinary people’s lives, then Chen Yingzhen was concerned with structural problems in society as a whole.

His works possess a strong spirit of social critique and a deep humanitarian quality, injecting realist content into Taiwanese literature. Although most of the characters he wrote were people from the lower classes, they all have vivid personalities and profound inner worlds, reflecting the author’s understanding of human nature.

Chen Yingzhen also had a far-reaching influence on later Taiwanese writers. Many writers drew nourishment from his works and learned from his creative attitude of paying attention to social reality and caring about the suffering of the people. Nativist literature writers such as Yang Qingchu and Song Zelai both said they had been inspired by Chen Yingzhen.

Chair of the China Unification Alliance and 10 Years in Beijing

In 1988, Chen Yingzhen personally founded the “China Unification Alliance” in Taiwan and served as its first chair. The organization advocated “cross-strait unification and the rejuvenation of China,” and was one of the largest pro-unification political groups in Taiwan after the lifting of martial law. It remains in operation today. The founding of the China Unification Alliance marked a key turning point in Chen Yingzhen’s shift from writer to political intellectual. He was no longer simply a left-wing fiction writer; he chose to stand at the core of Taiwan’s pro-unification camp.

In 2006, Chen Yingzhen was elected a member of the Seventh National Committee of the China Writers Association, a position within the institutional structure of the People’s Republic of China with political implications. That same year, after suffering a stroke in Taiwan, he moved to Beijing for treatment and recuperation. In 2010, Chen Yingzhen suffered a second stroke and thereafter remained bedridden for years, never returning to Taiwan before his death in 2016.

On November 22, 2016, Chen Yingzhen died in Beijing at the age of 79. Mainland China arranged high-level commemorations after his death: his body was covered with the Chinese Communist Party flag, his ashes were interred at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, and Xi Jinping sent a message of condolence. These posthumous honors showed the Chinese Communist Party’s affirmation of Chen Yingzhen’s political position, and also made him an exceptionally symbolic figure in cross-strait cultural and political contestation.

Chen Yingzhen’s life trajectory - born in Zhunan, Miaoli; raised in Yingge; writing in Taipei; imprisoned on Green Island; founding Renjian in Taipei; bedridden in Beijing; buried at Babaoshan - was one of the most controversial individual choices among Taiwan’s postwar left-wing intellectuals. His literary achievement is undeniable, but his political stance of Chinese unification diverged sharply from mainstream opinion in much of Taiwanese society. Taiwan’s nativist camp has long maintained a critical stance toward him; nativist critics such as Yeh Shih-tao and Peng Ruijin repeatedly wrote essays debating Chen Yingzhen’s argument for “Chinese national literature.”

Awards and Works

Chen Yingzhen received several important forms of recognition for his literary achievement:

• 1979: Won the second Wu Zhuoliu Literary Award for “Night Freight”
• 2009: Received the 10th Hua Zong World Chinese Literature Award (organized by Malaysia’s Sin Chew Daily, regarded as an important award in the Chinese-language literary world)

His representative works include the story collections The General’s Clan, My Younger Brother Kangxiong, The Comedy of Tang Qian, Night Freight, the Washington Building series, Mountain Road, Zhongxiao Park, and others; his collections of criticism include The Paranoia of Intellectuals, published under the pen name “Xu Nancun.” In 2017, INK Literary Monthly Publishing released the 23-volume Complete Works of Chen Yingzhen, the most comprehensive primary material for the study of Chen Yingzhen.⁷

References

Further Reading

• National Museum of Taiwan Literature - Chen Yingzhen - Chen Yingzhen’s life, chronology of works, and manuscript collections
• Pai Hsien-yung - A major Taiwanese literary figure of the same generation, known for Taipei People