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The Wound of the Left

The essay argues that contemporary Taiwanese theater’s handling of White Terror memory and transitional justice often neutralizes the historical and political force of left-wing struggle, exposing the difficulty of making socialist, anti-imperial histories intelligible within Taiwan’s dominant cultural frame.

刻寫左翼之殤：轉型正義及其相關劇場的批判語境

表演藝術評論台 · By Jian Weiqiao · 21 April 2025 · read the original in Chinese →

Text by Jian Weiqiao (2023 Project Critic)文簡韋樵（2023年度專案評論人）

當劇場處理不義歷史的審視與轉型正義的回應成為文化場域的重要焦點，表演藝術評論界亦積極介入其中。這些討論涉及美學與歷史之間的辯證關係，更進一步反映出史觀與立場分歧何如何對記憶政治工程產生多重回響與批判，無可避免地成為不同立場創作者和劇評人交鋒的核心場域。

As the theater’s examination of unjust history and its response to transitional justice have become important focal points in the cultural field, performing-arts criticism has also actively entered the fray. These discussions concern the dialectical relation between aesthetics and history; further, they reflect how divergences in historical outlook and political position produce multiple echoes and critiques within the project of memory politics, and have inevitably become a central arena of confrontation among creators and theater critics of different positions.

何謂「站在國家對立面」？

What does it mean to “stand opposite the state”?

In “The Storyteller Borrows Authority from Death,” Huang Si-nong of Against Again Troupe declares: “For me, in creating works of white memory, my footing is already on the opposite side of the state, on the opposite side of Liefenstahl.” [1] Yet the standard by which “the opposite side of the state” is to be defined is precisely the core of the fundamental cognitive divergence between him and theater critics. In fact, left-wing critics adopt a socially structural perspective, holding that a work should not stop at exposing how state atrocity made tragedies of individuals or families, nor immerse itself purely in affective registers such as “healing” and “mourning”; still less can it evade the class contradictions behind the White Terror, the political struggle between left and right consciousness, and the manipulation of U.S. imperialism under the Cold War system. [2]

These historical and political factors, so often obscured by mainstream discourse, are precisely the limitations of the transitional-justice policies advanced by the current ruling party: “taking a Western conception of human rights as the benchmark, while refusing to face the left-wing purges of the Cold War anti-communist era.” [3] If theatrical creation stops at presenting the emotional experience of the oppressed, or reduces the White Terror to a binary framework of perpetrator and victim within a local political phenomenon, it may invisibly castrate the ideological substance borne by left-wing social movements and political prisoners, stripping history of its radical political dimension and, unintentionally, falling in step with the main melody of transitional justice’s narrative of “suffering.” Gradually, this treatment dissolves the vigilance we ought to maintain toward history and present structures of power, and thus becomes a cultural mechanism for domesticating the people’s agency. Wu Si-feng also observes: “In this reconstruction of Taiwan’s white history, at a new stage in the building of community, the dirty impurities are gradually erased: aseptic and bright.” [4]

Even if aesthetics or philosophy can deal with historical time, memories of collective trauma, or the remaking of landscape, without the support of historical consciousness the work can ultimately lapse only into fleeting sensory pleasure or technical display, lacking political tension.

The doubts Zhang Zong-kun raises from the touring performances of Against Again Troupe’s Understandable Songs: Singing the Unfinished Stories of White Memory’s Departed and Future Songs are these: “The violence of healing also brings a reductionist violence in narrative; in order to ‘let more people know,’ most creations still insist on hovering among shallow propositions such as exposing state atrocities and opposing the party-state.” [5] On the one hand, creation assumes the stance of the “enlightener,” implying a certain condescension toward the audience and casting the artist as an educator standing outside the people. On the other hand, genuinely critical artistic practice should not merely supply easily digestible historical knowledge, nor allow the audience to “stand in for” the suffering of victims and thereby gain psychological satisfaction; it should break open the audience’s existing cognitive frame, disclose the historical and ideological dimensions simplified and erased within collective memory, and summon once more those who once possessed social ideals and historical agency. A sacred and inviolable “narrative”?

In genres that involve the restoration of unjust history and transitional justice, critics’ critiques extend further to the choice of aesthetic form. Wang Mo-lin, for instance, argues that Kao Chun-yao’s Princess Thank You (2023), with its “classical language that has a cleansing effect,” serves right-wing nationalism as an imagined cultural artifact; in reality, as a “White Terror play” across time and space, it provides a fantastical modern language and may further form a certain connection with the play-within-a-play. [6] The creator chooses newly composed nanguan to heighten sorrow, sets the loyalty and steadfastness in the Song-Yuan southern drama Zhu Bian against the defection of the underground party member “Old Zheng,” and applies a “purifying” treatment with tragic aesthetics. Although this can arouse the audience’s pity and sympathy, in Wang Mo-lin’s view it in effect rationalizes and depoliticizes the informer’s betrayal and is haunted by defeatism. He sharply points out: “The language of the left has here already been completely lost.” [7] Excessive poetic lyricism and the construction of a psychological space of stream of consciousness not only hollow out the revolutionary content, but, through the emotional dilution of classical phonology, shape a historical subject “full of self-pity, endlessly speaking sets of empty doctrines of life.” [8]

In fact, the severe scrutiny that Wang Mo-lin and others direct toward left-wing narratives in contemporary theater may arise from their adherence to idealist sentiment, from their refusal to allow revolutionaries who sacrificed themselves for belief, and the historical meaning they bear, to be simplified, distorted, or consumed in narrative. This almost sacralizing posture of defense both embodies the moral responsibility of guarding the left and reveals the contest and struggle over the right to interpret history in the contemporary political context. When the structure of feeling of “anti-communist and pro-American” sentiment is deeply rooted in Taiwanese society and hard to dispel, how are we, in the public sphere, to allow others to understand and feel what we wish to convey: that “left” which is regarded as eliminated by history and appears politically incorrect?

Although theater criticism does not exert direct pressure on creators, the crux lies here: whenever an underground-party figure appears onstage in simplified, affected, or emotionally abusive form, if the work merely mobilizes the audience’s compassion while lacking depth of thought, must it inevitably be seen as a betrayal of the left and be labeled “right-wing” or as propaganda for the ruling bloc, and so forth? Such a critical standard places creators in a dilemma: in the cultural climate of contemporary neoliberalism, if they overemphasize the political ideals of left-wing figures, they may be accused of serving as doctrinaire mouthpieces; yet if they adopt a lyrical, romantic, or poeticized treatment, they may be denounced for violating the essence of revolution, compromising with the system, and often be cast as some kind of spectacularized representation. When critics approach “White Terror plays” with a preset position, are they not perhaps being overly paranoid and resentful, thereby blocking the bridge of communication with creators? More than that, they may invisibly push creators to the opposite side of class issues, so that a space for dialogue that should have been opened is instead sealed off by the tension of affective positions.

Princess Thank You (provided by Poor Theater; photograph by Kang Chih-hao). The Paralysis of Left-Wing Politicality《感謝公主》（窮劇場提供／攝影康志豪）左翼的政治性癱瘓

Facing the rapid decline of Taiwan’s “left eye,” [9] Chung Chiao, a theater practitioner who emerged from the Renjian system, intends, beyond the main melody of transitional justice, to use drama to “examine the particularity of left-wing revolution under ‘de-imperialization,’ and, from the content and context of the people and the nation, to reaffirm human-rights values proceeding from a Third World perspective.” [10] Has such a concept been embodied in the works of the Assignment Theater he leads?

Take The Carriage Rehearsal, directed by Lin Ching-chieh (2016), as an example. After seeing it, Old Zheng wrote: “Through a nearly abstract, ‘dehistoricizing’ operation of ‘Chung Hao-tung’s individual subjectivity,’ The Carriage Rehearsal, castrating itself, creates through its dramatic ‘texture’ a replication of ‘non-understanding’; this is probably inevitable.” [11] And in the 2020 version of Fan Tianhan and His Brothers, directed by Wang Wei-lian, Chang Chih-chi’s review says: “Lin Shu-yang, who spent thirty-four years in prison and left behind a profound ideological legacy, is in the play reduced to a marginal figure whose words fail to become words, and who is neither accepted nor identified with by the young actors.” [12] Not only are left-wing political prisoners rendered “beyond recognition, without spirit, even somewhat ridiculous”; [13] when actors, standing on their own contemporary identities, interrogate historical figures, the “alienation” technique originally intended to prompt critical reflection in the audience may quietly turn into a form of symbolic violence resembling public humiliation.

Even when Wang Mo-lin takes up again the form of the 1980s report drama, attempting in Black: Black Youth Wandering Between Poetry and Revolution to use the bodies of the people and historical testimony to mold the anarchist activists of the Japanese colonial period, he still never effectively manifests Wang Mo-lin’s own consistent political position. Perhaps precisely because the differences in identification within the collective creation of nonprofessional actors constrain the display of thought in the play, it appears vague and ambiguous when interpreting the left-wing path of the anti-Japanese movement. As a result, the experiences of resistance in the play lapse into a futile repetitive representation, not only diminishing resistance to the Japanese empire into a nihilistic fantasy, but also cutting off the space for reimagining the body as an instrument of resistance and weakening the historical perception and potential for action that theater might originally have inspired.

In addition, Red Youth by the Taiwan Applied Theatre Development Center has also drawn questions from audiences: by the final development of the plot, it is only through blood relations that the third generation can gradually understand the red background possessed by the first generation, rather than through ideas themselves genuinely persuading the audience to understand the core values of their faith and action. Is this out of the creators’ fear of being labeled ideological? Even at the final moment when the underground party member Fang Xiaomin is executed by firing squad in the play, what he cries out is the phrase broadly acceptable in Taiwanese society, “Down with imperialism,” rather than the controversial phrase in Taiwan, “Long live the Chinese Communist Party.” [14]

To comment on these works one by one is not meant to flog them once again, but to reveal through them the predicament of creators with left-wing consciousness in contemporary theater: a fundamental limitation and internal contradiction faced by the writing of transitional justice itself, and also the reason why the red left, socially or culturally, has always found it difficult to establish an effective dialogue with Taiwan’s mainstream society or to find a shared language. Especially amid the present political atmosphere of rising right-wing populism and xenophobic sentiment, they appear still more isolated and struggling. Thus, when theatrical works tend to use affective appeals and narrative modes readily accepted by the public as strategies of communication, they may evasively avoid those highly politically sensitive “land mines,” causing revolutionary history gradually to slide toward a “village-worthy” representation, losing its transformative force and ultimately sinking into a collective gloom powerless to change the status quo.

The 2024 public performance of Red Youth (National Cheng Kung University Taiwanese Literature Lecture Hall) (provided by the Taiwan Applied Theatre Development Center; photographs by Yang Ren-lin and Liu Rong-zhen). Affective Traps and the Dissolution of Politicality《紅色青春》2024年公演（成功大學台文講堂）（台灣應用劇場發展中心提供／攝影楊人霖、劉容真）感性陷阱與政治性的消解

As the Cold War partition system continues to dominate the framework through which Taiwanese society understands history, the spiritual legacy of the “red hat” gradually loses its multilayered interpretive meaning. Amid the fragments and ruptures of memory, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to begin a genuine historical dialogue. Starting from aesthetic reflection, we must ask further: while constructing, questioning, and sensing historical images in artistic practice, how can we continue to dialecticize what seems an old tune but has not yet ended: “Cold War, colonialism, and imperialism”? This is the most central concern of left-wing critics. In their eyes, beneath the surface democratization of Taiwanese society there still exists what Guo Liang-ting calls, after the lifting of martial law, the “long martial law” in which “the White Terror changed into another face,” [15] causing the socialist historical perspective and political imagination to be systematically repressed and excluded.

Looking back, the overwhelming majority of political prisoners executed by firing squad in the 1950s were Communist Party members and their followers, comrades, and successors. If dramatic works view the history of the White Terror only through the surface appearance of human-rights persecution, we cannot deeply analyze how left-wing narratives in contemporary theater involve historical debt. Still less can we transcend the ideological framework constructed by the official cultural machine, with the result that an accounting with Japanese colonial rule and U.S. Cold War hegemony remains entirely absent; today, transformed in form, they lie concealed within the neoliberal global order, waiting for the chance to operate.

Therefore, to take “the wound of the left” as a title is not merely to utter words of mourning for the defeat of socialism in the last century and the passing of idealists. It is, rather, through tracing the ruins of memory destroyed by the White Terror, amid the left’s resentment and bewilderment, to grope for those ruptures and silences from which not even embers could remain, and for the multitudes who were buried along with their spiritual legacy. When left-wing narrative is dramatized, only by summoning anew the sparks of thought of those who were repressed and denied the right to write history can the language and action of the Third World recover, in the present, their historical weight and political edge, opening a space in which a people’s view of history may freely contend.

Notes注解

1. Huang Si-nong, “The Storyteller Borrows Authority from Death: A Creator’s Response to the Necessity of ‘Transitional Justice’ Cultural Policy,” PAR Performing Arts Magazine (February 18, 2025).

2. As an outpost of the United States’ global anti-communist strategy, Taiwan, during the White Terror and authoritarian rule, consolidated the regime with American support, continued the civil war, and used the state apparatus to exterminate red socialist forces on the island. As Chen Chieh-jen points out: “The ruler behind it all, the United States/capitalism, skillfully avoided responsibility for supporting the martial-law system and successfully transformed its identity into that of an aid to Taiwan’s ‘democratization,’ continuing to advance the process of capitalist globalization in Taiwan.” This reveals the international-political dimension systematically ignored in contemporary transitional justice and its theatrical works. Cheng Hua-hui, ed., Art and Society: Essays and Interviews by Contemporary Artists (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2009), p. 75.

3. Chung Chiao, “Though the Flowers Wither, I Have Never Forgotten You: Seeing Left-Wing History Beyond Transitional Justice in the Theater,” Independent Opinion (August 24, 2020).

4. Wu Si-feng, “The ‘Post’ Theater of Transitional Justice,” Artouch (February 24, 2023).

5. Zhang Zong-kun, “A History of Violence, a Seamless Theater: A Review of Understandable Songs: Singing the Unfinished Stories of White Memory’s Departed and Future Songs,” Artouch (March 8, 2022).

6. Wang Mo-lin, “Left-Wing Aphasia Unable to Escape the History of Martial Law: On White Terror Drama,” CLABO Experimental Wave (August 19, 2024).

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. On the metaphor of the “left eye,” Chen Yingzhen once said: “In 1950, under the armed guard of the United States, Taiwan cleansed Marxism in a pool of blood and ushered in more than fifty years of long rule by American liberalism and market ideology. Taiwan’s intellectual and cultural circles were thus gouged of their ‘left eye’; for many years they became accustomed to seeing the world with the ‘right eye,’ losing the capacity for critique and reflection.” Chen Yingzhen, “I Am Absolutely Not a Righteous Man: Preface to Taiwan’s Melancholy,” included in Li Xiangping, Taiwan’s Melancholy (Taipei: Renjian, 2003).

10. Chung Chiao, “Facing a History of Suppression and Killing: From Fan Tianhan to Wall in the Play,” New International (August 30, 2020).

11. Old Zheng, “This Road Is Closed: Whose Story Does The Carriage Rehearsal Tell?” Coolloud (May 15, 2016).

12. Chang Chih-chi, “Fragments of History in a Colored Fog: On the 2020 Version of Fan Tianhan and His Brothers,” Coolloud (October 20, 2020).

13. Ibid.

14. The political slogan “Long live the Chinese Communist Party” can be traced back to the 1922 Manifesto of the Second National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, and was a core political program established by the Chinese Communist Party during the period of revolutionary struggle. According to the oral-history materials of Mr. Chen Ming-chung, a Taiwanese political victim, during Taiwan’s White Terror period some underground party members shouted this slogan before execution, manifesting their revolutionary convictions.

15. Guo Liang-ting, History Has Never Ended: The Liberatory Geographies of Wang Mo-lin and Chen Chieh-jen (New Taipei: Zebra Crossing Press, 2025), p. 79.

The Wound of the Left

Text by Jian Weiqiao (2023 Project Critic)文 簡韋樵（2023年度專案評論人）

Princess Thank You (provided by Poor Theater; photograph by Kang Chih-hao). The Paralysis of Left-Wing Politicality《感謝公主》（窮劇場提供／攝影康志豪） 左翼的政治性癱瘓

Notes注解

Text by Jian Weiqiao (2023 Project Critic)文簡韋樵（2023年度專案評論人）

Princess Thank You (provided by Poor Theater; photograph by Kang Chih-hao). The Paralysis of Left-Wing Politicality《感謝公主》（窮劇場提供／攝影康志豪）左翼的政治性癱瘓