Chen Yingzhen and Taiwan’s “Sixties”: Self-realization of the Postwar Generation in Taiwan
ZHENG Hong-sheng (Translated by Szu SHEN)
Abstract Chen Yingzhen has been regarded as the Taiwan’s utmost representative leftist intellectual. However, this article tries to reconstruct Chen’s historical significance in Taiwan’s Sixties in a broader perspective. Taiwan’s Sixties was a peculiar period. While there was a global youth rebellion, Taiwan’s post-war baby boom generation, who have just been re-educated as Chinese, were going through a cultural “renaissance” and started to practice what they have digested, and to realize their creativities in all aspects, and this could be called the generation’s self-realization. Chen Yingzhen was one of their initiator and leader, and a very significant one. The fact that there were no dominating ideologies during this period allowed room for this wave of creativity to flourish.
Keywords: Chen Yingzhen, the Sixties, Post-War Baby Boomer, Generation, Self-Realization, Modern Folksong
Author’s biography
Zheng Hong-sheng [鄭鴻生], a freelance writer living in Taipei. He is the author of Ballads of Youth (2001), Remembrance of my year on the Prison Island (2004), One Hundred Years of Estrangements (2006), My Mother’s 60 Years of Clothes-Making (2010), and Searching for Da-fan Boys (2012) (all in Chinese).
Translator’s biography
Szu Shen [沈思] is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She has published in West Coast Line and her translation work has appeared in Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies. Her current research project seeks to examine the transnational movement of uranium and its impact on indigenous communities across the Asia-Pacific.