After the war, Taiwanese literature was always diminished to the status of a regional literature under the absolute dominance of a China-oriented orthodoxy advocated by the government; it was sometimes called "hsiang-t'u (regional) literature,"and sometimes "pen-t'u (nativist) literature." It was only towards the end of the 1980s that it gained its proper name of Taiwanese literature. That the concept of a Taiwanese literature was established twice, separated by half a century and under different political regimes is a phenomenon that must be taken into account when surveying the development of Taiwanese literature. This same debate in other regions or countries probably would not happen more than once; it is only in the case of Taiwan that the debate over hsiang-t'u literature or a literature in colloquial Taiwanese would always crop up again and again once literature had reached a certain stage, and those that came later had no idea of what their predecessors had discussed. The 1977 debate over hsiang-t'u literature is the most typical example of this, for the two sides of the debate were quite unaware that Taiwan already had such a precedent in the 1930s. Those who upheld the government's policy on culture worried about hsiang-t'u literature's tendency towards "worker-peasant-soldier literature"(kung-nung-ping wen-hsüeh), while the leftists worried about a tendency towards divisiveness that a hsiang-t'u literature would bring about. During the debate at that time, no one drew upon the experience of Taiwan's hsiang-t'u literature debate of the 1930s; a complete break in Taiwanese literature was fully manifested in the debate of the 1970s. One need only go back and sift through the documentary evidence from the period of the Japanese occupation for it suddenly to dawn on one that this debate had occurred before. Taiwanese literature now finds itself at this juncture, where what was broken off is being reconnected, putting in sharp relief its special characteristics.

Someone actually did try and sort out the history of Taiwanese literature during the period of Japanese occupation. Huang Te-shih published "Bankin no Taiwan bungaku undôshi"(A History of the Recent Taiwanese Literary Movement), Taiwan bungaku (Taiwan Literature), Vol. 2, No. 4; in the post-war period Wang Pai-yüan summarized the cultural movement during the Japanese occupation in an article published in Section 17 "Wen-hua p'ien"(On Culture) of the 1947 T'ai-wan nien-chien (Taiwan Yearbook); and during 1954-55 scholars with Wang Shih-lang, Liao Han-ch'en, and others of the Taipei Documents Society as the central figures published in T'ai-wan wen-wu (Taiwan Cultural Relics) summaries of the New Literature, New Drama, Art, Music, and Dance movements. Yet none of these attracted the attention of the younger generation. It was not until after the hsiang-t'u literature debate that a scholar of political science Ch'en Shao-t'ing made use of the above-mentioned materials to write T'ai-wan hsin-wen-hsüeh yün-tung chien-shih (A Short History of Taiwan's New Literature Movement), Lien-ching, 1977; and the art historian Hsieh Li-fa,

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