This article explores how state institutions and party organs of the Kuomintang used various means of exercising power and projecting authority in order to shape the literary scene and literary production in Taiwan during the early post-war period (1945–1949). Censorship is examined from two complementary perspectives. First, integrating the Taiwanese case into a broader political and social context, the presentation focuses on the legal framework of the publishing law of Republican China and on regulations propagated in local official bulletins. Second, the article analyses censorship as a practice and set of procedures. This second part is based on the archival files of Taiwan Historica, which holds official documents from both early post-war governments. The archival material unveils some of the motivations behind censorship practices, and helps us to understand chosen strategies to legitimise sociocultural norms.

Many of today’s most successful Taiwanese companies are linked to prominent kin groups. Expanding existing historical scholarship, which has focused on elite families individually, the article opens up a broader perspective by investigating Taiwanese elites as a social group, albeit a heterogeneous one. Based on a dataset comprising family members and their relationships, the article first describes this marital network of 1,271 families. Subsequently, following a Bourdieusian approach, it analyses distinct elite groups and their engagement in multiple fields of activity, information about which is stored in TBIO (Taiwan Biographical Ontology), a biographical database established by the author. The analysis reveals the existence of characteristic combinations of capital—dubbed here ‘portfolios of prestige’—which allowed these families to gain and maintain their positions of influence. In combining Digital Humanities methods and sociological approaches, the article thus identifies salient structural features of Taiwanese elites which have rarely been highlighted and opens up new prospects for future research.

This study identifies and interprets dominant developments in the Taiwanese literary field by examining data included in publication catalogs of literary journals and supplements from 1940 to 1953. Utilizing social network analysis, it focuses on both ruptures caused by crucial political events and continuities that spanned these ruptures. The study revisits central tenets of Taiwanese literary history and, by seeking to articulate structuring principles, also unveils new perspectives on how to map and interpret the dynamics of literary systems and the ways in which they mesh with society. It thereby exemplifies how digital humanities can guide researchers toward new historical insights.

Language, Ideology, and Society• As language ideology often concerns the "[r]epresentations…that construe the intersection of language and human beings in a social world" (Woolard 1998: 3), a thorough understanding of the ideological landscapes instantiated in a particular community or time period may require a comprehensive comparison of their distinctive linguistic features with a reference norm.

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