ABSTRACT
From 1977 on, he attacked "Westernization" and called for a "national style." In this later phase, Chen's fiction and essays concentrated on social problems, particularly in his "Washington Building" series, which satirizes U.S.-based multinational corporations and their Taiwan hangers-on. Many readers were disenchanted, having found better literary quality in his earlier writing. In the 1980s, Chen Yingzhen also launched the much admired journal Renjian (The world), a sort of Taiwanese National Geographic with glossy photo essays, but having a sharp social and environmentalist focus. The journal finally had to close down in 1989, due to declining interest on the part of Taiwan's newly affluent society.
