How did regional writing portray Taiwan’s shift from rural to urban life?

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Scene from Romance of the Three Kingdoms — Chinese literature *Zhang Fei on the Long Sloped Bridge Turning Away One Million Wei Troops with a Powerful Stare*, woodblock colour print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1884. It depicts a scene from the novel *Romance of the Three Kingdoms*.

In the late 1960s, Taiwan saw the emergence of regional (hsiang-t’u) writing, a literary movement that focused on the Taiwanese countryside to explore the profound social and psychological consequences of the island's rapid transition from a rural to an urban-based society.1

This nativist school of literature captured the tensions and transformations inherent in this shift. A representative work of this movement is Huang Ch’un-ming’s Ni-szu i-chih lao-mao (1980; The Drowning of an Old Cat), which exemplifies how these authors used regional settings to document the impact of modernization on traditional life. By grounding their narratives in the rural experience, these writers provided a critical lens through which to view the changing landscape and identity of Taiwan as it moved toward urbanization.1