Chen Yingzhen born 1936, is a Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

ese author. Since the 1980s, he has been viewed by many as "Taiwan's greatest author", according to Jeffrey C. Kinkley. Chen is also notable for serving a prison sentence for "subversive activity" between 1968 and 1973. He has been active since the late-1950s.

Chen was again imprisoned in 1979.

The Collected Works of Chen Yingzhen is 15 volumes long, and was published in 1988. Some of his stories were also included in Lucien Miller's Exiles at Home.

Biography

Chen Yingzhen was born in northern Taiwan, the son of a devout Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 minister. Despite this, he never was a Christian himself while growing up. He was arrested in 1968 by the Kuomintang

Kuomintang

The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...

for "leading procommunist activities", and was imprisoned until 1973.

Style

Some critics have seen Chen's work as featuring important moral dimensions while lacking technical proficiency. For example, Joseph S. M. Lau said of Chen, "his output is relatively small and his style is at times embarrassing, yet he is a very important writer...Almost alone among his contemporaries, he addresses himself to some of the most sensitive problems of his time".

Thought

Chen has been supporter of the notion of a unifying Chinese national identity in Taiwan, as opposed to "nativist" writers like Zhang Liangze, who support the development of a native Taiwanese consciousness.