Abstract: The New Trends of Literature (1956.2.18—1959.5) was honored as a representative modernist journal in Hong Kong in 1950s. By investigating the journal, this paper provides a new horizon for its literary value and significance. The editors and writers of the journal formed a literary community of young people crossing Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland, who connected modern aesthetic appreciation with realistic concerns of the time, compared modern literatures in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the whole world, and pursued to reconstruct a literary paradise and a utopia of the spirit of freedom and democracy. In addition, this paper also discusses the operation of the New Trends of Literature during the Cold War, the structure of local literary domain and the significance of literary subjective creation, and examines the multi-relationship among the faculties of the journal, the left-wing and right-wing cultures in Hong Kong, American aids or dollar culture, the mainland aesthetic tradition, and literary circles in Taiwan and the world.

Key words: Hong Kong, Cold War, literary utopia, MA Lang