A General History of Taiwan's Media: Five Turning Points from Church Papers to Self-Media

30-second overview: Taiwan's first newspaper was the Taiwan Church News, launched on July 12, 1885, printed in Pe̍h-ōe-jī so that people who could not read Chinese characters could also read it. During the Japanese colonial era, four major daily papers appeared alongside the Taiwan Minpao, run by Taiwanese themselves. The postwar period entered a decades-long newspaper ban; martial law was lifted in 1987, and the newspaper ban was lifted on New Year's Day 1988. Marketization after liberalization brought cutthroat competition and monopoly controversies, while trust surveys show that although forms have multiplied, trust has not returned.

1885: A Newspaper Printed in Pe̍h-ōe-jī

On July 12, 1885, British Presbyterian missionary Thomas Barclay (巴克禮) founded the Taiwan Church News (《臺灣府城教會報》), Taiwan's first newspaper and the longest-running newspaper in Taiwan's history.¹

From the outset it was published in Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字, a romanization system for Taiwanese Hokkien). In his inaugural editorial, Barclay gave a direct reason: Chinese characters are hard to learn, few people can read them, so books must be printed in Pe̍h-ōe-jī.¹ This sentence states the first problem of media history clearly: a publication must first solve "who can read it" before addressing "who can run it."

The paper was issued monthly. In May 1932 it was renamed the Taiwan Church News (《台灣教會公報》). In 1942 the Governor-General's Office ordered its suspension due to the war. It resumed publication in December 1945 as the Taiwan Church Monthly (《臺灣教會月刊》). From December 1969 it switched to Mandarin Chinese, and from December 1973 became a weekly; cumulative issues have exceeded 3,300.¹

Japanese Colonial Era: Official Papers and the People's Paper

In the early colonial period, the Governor-General introduced mass media, with Japanese-run papers serving as the colonial government's mouthpiece, primarily in Japanese, while strictly restricting Taiwanese from publishing newspapers. At the time there were four stably operated daily papers: the Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpo (《臺灣日日新報》) in the north, the Taiwan News (《臺灣新聞》) in the center, the Tainan News (《臺南新報》) in the south, and the East Taiwan News (《東臺灣新報》) in the east—this was the beginning of Taiwan's modern newspaper industry.²

The most famous civilian-run paper was the Taiwan Minpao (《台灣民報》). Its predecessor was the Taiwan Youth (《臺灣青年》), founded in Tokyo in 1920 by Lin Hsien-tang (林獻堂) and others who formed the New People Society, with Tsai Pei-huo (蔡培火) as editor and publisher; in 1922 it was renamed Taiwan (《臺灣》); and in April 1923 the Taiwan Minpao semi-monthly was launched in Tokyo.²

This paper's predicament illustrates the speech space in a colony. In December 1923, Japanese authorities arrested participants in the Taiwan Parliament Petition Movement, known as the Security Police Incident (治警事件); many Taiwan Minpao staff were detained and sentenced, and the paper suspended publication for a time.² After repeated efforts, in July 1927 Governor-General Ushiyama Mitsushin (上山滿之進) finally agreed to allow the Taiwan Minpao to be published in Taiwan.³

A 2018 PTS report cited National Taiwan University history professor Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮): it was "a newspaper run by Taiwanese themselves," and also a medium for political and social movements. Its pages mixed Taiwanese, Japanese, and vernacular Chinese; because of Governor-General restrictions, it took four years after its Tokyo launch to move editorial operations back to Taiwan.⁴

Postwar: Newspaper Ban and Tangwai Magazines

From the Japanese withdrawal in 1945 until the lifting of martial law in the late 1980s, Taiwan's news media, constrained by the newspaper ban and other restrictions, were mostly owned by the ruling party and the government. During the martial law era, media became tools of speech control and propaganda; media oversight bodies at the time mainly examined content, rarely critiquing media structure.²

Critical magazines still existed during this period, such as Free China (《自由中國》), Penglai Island Magazine (《蓬萊島雜誌》), and Formosa Magazine (《美麗島雜誌》), but most were suppressed by the government of the day.²

In 1987, then-President Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) announced the lifting of martial law. However, Cheng Nan-jung (鄭南榕) pointed out at the time that if only the newspaper ban were lifted without amending the Publication Law provisions allowing the Government Information Office to sanction newspapers directly, it would be no different from not lifting the ban.² The newspaper ban was formally lifted on New Year's Day 1988. Because of a consecutive holiday, the government only began accepting new newspaper applications on January 4; seven newspaper companies and one news agency filed paperwork on the first day.⁵

After Liberalization: Marketization and Monopoly

Before the newspaper ban was lifted, there were only 29 Chinese-language newspapers in all of Taiwan; within a year of liberalization, 98 new papers applied for registration.⁵ The surge in quantity brought cutthroat competition, triggering media chaos, and later monopoly controversies and anti-media-monopoly movements.²

There were two institutional milestones. In 1999, the Third Legislative Yuan passed the abolition of the Publication Law; publications no longer required registration, and relevant provisions reverted to other laws.² Subsequently, based on the demand that "party, government, and military withdraw from media," the government and ruling party successively sold off state-owned media and party media, including the "Old Three" television stations, moving media toward privatization.²

Structurally, the key point of this phase is not "media increased," but that the question of "who can own media" was placed on the table for the first time. Lifting the newspaper ban solved the right to found; marketization then confronted the problem of ownership concentration.

Trust Today

After media forms evolved into the self-media era, Taiwan's media face another problem: trust.

In 2019, the Taiwan Media Watch Foundation surveyed public evaluations of Taiwan's media on a 0–10 scale; the average was 5.58.² In the Reuters Institute's 2022 Digital News Report, overall trust in news among Taiwanese was only 27%, ranking 42nd out of 46 surveyed markets; the report described it as remaining "amongst the lowest in our multi-market survey."⁶

Placing these two numbers back into the preceding four sections reveals a clear line: from Pe̍h-ōe-jī to Japanese official papers, from newspaper ban to liberalization, from marketization to monopoly controversies, every change in media form has accompanied a redistribution of political power. And the trust problem will not resolve itself simply because platforms multiply.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan Media and Press Freedom — The same history from the angle of freedom and control
• History of Taiwan's Television Industry — The industry line from the Old Three to cable television
• Cheng Nan-jung — Key figure for freedom of speech before and after the lifting of martial law

References