Since the 1980s, the literary exchanges and influence between Chen Yingzhen (陳映眞) and Wang Anyi (王安憶), two authors of Taiwan and mainland have received a series of attention and discussion from literary critics. Notable among them is the literary discourse on Christian religious spirit, which occupies an important significance in the literary world they have constructed respectively. For example, the spirit of “humanitarian socialism” and the “love of Divine” (神靈之愛) embodied in Chen Yingzhen’s literature in order to overcome the indulgence of material desires and corruption and degeneration under the capitalist system, or the “secular love” (世俗之愛) as the “post-utopian” discourse explored in Wang Anyi’s literature to replace the vacuum of socialist revolutionary ideology, and so on can be said to be the embodiment of such Christian spirit
Nevertheless, from another perspective, these values and ideals can be interpreted as another kind of inheritance or extension of utilitarian secularized religious discourse hidden in Chinese traditional spirit. In this way, what is vague and lacking in their Christian religious images of Chen Yingzhen and Wang Anyi’s literature is the belief in Christian religious noumenon centered on the Incarnation and the Resurrection events of Jesus. In fact, such contradictions and entanglements in Taiwan and mainland literature represent the coexistence and conflict between individual Christian beliefs and the discourse of Chinese nationalism and socialism, which involves the characteristics and limitations of the overall cultural structure of modern and contemporary China.