Horizontal transplantation or vertical inheritance - Modernism and debates in 1950s Taiwan

The 1950s were an especially delicate historical period for Taiwan. At the end of the second Sino-Japanese conflict (1937–1945), the island, after having been a colony of the Japanese Empire for half a century, became once again part of China, as the refuge of the KMT government of Chiang Kai-shek, which fled the continent after the CCP came to power. From the outset, the KMT government claimed to the world the status of an adversarial “parallel” to Mao’s China, a bulwark and guardian of a millennial tradition threatened by the communist revolution. The arrival in Taiwan of two million mainland-ers triggered important social, political, and cultural changes, including the nearly abrupt shift from the Japanese language and culture imposed by the former colonial government to the Chinese language and culture imposed with equal force by the KMT. It was a new deep laceration that added another facet to the island’s complex cultural profile, already marked by a strong hybridization.