1986 is an important year for us to study modern Taiwan. In this year, the martial law was lifted. That means there is a major breakthrough in democratic reform and political liberalization when the Democratic Progressive Party is formed and becomes the first genuine opposition party. The KMT authorities also liberalized the publication of newspapers. All of the above let us know that Taiwan had become a real modernized state / area. At the same time, Edward Yang’s “Taipei Story” “ the Terrorizer” finished.
In any case, the Taiwan “ new wave” has tended to mark its images as specific to the Island, in ways quite distinct from the mainland evocation of the landscape. The city is also focused differently here (and Terrorizer will be an index of its richness and possibilities), for the obvious reasons that Taipei does not possess the profile or the historical resonance and associations of the great traditional mainland cities, nor is it an all-encompassing closed urban space of a vitural city-state like Hong Kong. Still, its dominance has effectively transformed the natural countryside into a kind of extended suburban space, one in which the survival of more traditional agricultural villages is nonetheless sublimated and somehow modified by their linked association in an intricate web of electric trains that lead into the capital.
