| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立台北師範學院 === 台灣文學研究所 === 93 === The 1950’s in Taiwan was noted as a “Movement Era “, full of all kinds of propaganda and campaigns that the KMT government launched and promoted for anti-communism. Among all the propaganda and campaigns that have exerted much impact on the literary fields, I think two movements were the most important: namely, the “Cultural Sanitation Campaign” and “Military Literature Movement”. The “Cultural Sanitation Campaign” used colors to expound and discourse literature, thus segregating 10 kinds of magazines as “devils” and banning them from publication. In this thesis, “The China News Weekly” was chosen for careful study because of its dangling position in the gray area. I have thoroughly studied a series of publications of this magazine and wished to use it as a starting point to reassess the “Cultural Sanitation Campaign”, especially probing into the arguments on “colors” so as to understand more about the literary fields in the 1950’s and the controversy over the reading tastes between seriousness and popularization.
In November of 1953, Chiang Kei-sheik published "Two Addenda to the Principle of Livelihood", which not only exerted a great influence on the market rules of literature but also set a general guideline for literature in Taiwan in the 1950’s. At that time, the primary difficulties that many literary critics faced were the works that they regarded as vulgar and inferior were in fact most widely read among the general public.
We know that “the literature popularization” is never a new issue at all. However, the contents discussed in the early post-War period (1945-1949) were basically different from those in the 1950’s. The most noteworthy was the effort that the KMT government put into combine so-called “popular literature” with the Three People's Principles. The mission to transform Three People's Principles into a kind of “popular literature” was at that time assigned to Mr. Zhang Dao-fan, who successfully made a new genre of novels to serve the purposes of politics. The literary fields in the 1950’s were thus turned into a propaganda tool to fight against communism. The so-called “anti-communist uniform literature”, which caused a great crisis to the creativity of writers at that time, was therefore well positioned in the market while various literary styles were also flourishing and thriving. In short, the literary fields were full of interlocking and confusing phenomena in the 1950’s.
My research showed that “Military Literature” in the 1950’s would not have established itself so well, if the “Cultural Sanitation Campaign” had not wiped out all the obstacles on the street ahead for it. In other words, the two movements have been intermingled to help each other. Even after the “Cultural Sanitation Campaign” eventually faded away, the use of “colors” to narrate and to debate has deepened into important argumentation at that time and has even run deep into the native literatures of the 1970’s.
In the 1950’s, “suppression books” were another big issue. Books written by either native Taiwanese or mainlanders were checked and detained without any clear justification. If any reasons or regulations were cited, they were ambiguous and would change overnight. Banned books at that time were so huge in quantity and so diverse in contents that nobody could give out a clear demarcation line between “good” and “bad” books. For example, three books named “The Upheaval”, “Snowstorm”, and “The Legend of the Wild Horse”, respectively, were banned because they had stepped over the borderline without knowing by themselves. Other reasons that were given for detention of the books might be inappropriate themes, inappropriate subject matters, inappropriate ideology, incorrect wordings, or any other excuses related to the writers in person. On the contrary, a famous book, named “Female Communist”, written by Mr. Chen Te-Wu, was highly acclaimed and very much promoted by the KMT government as a super model in 1949. I have made a comparison between “Female Communist” and “The Legend of the Wild Horse”, trying to figure out their differences in terms of how the Three People's Principles was transformed into popular novels. Furthermore, I have also tried to analyze the contents of those novels in the 1950’s in terms of how they expressed romance, colors, taboos, lusts, and country, and what kind of “security mechanism” the writers used to protect themselves.
In addition to “anti-communist uniform literature”, the literatures of the 1950’s had a strong inclination to fawn upon the U.S.A. The last part of this thesis, therefore, concentrated on probing into how the novels of the 1950’s depicted the pro-USA sentiments and what and how the so-called “Intellectuals” at that time thought and behaved.
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