In recent years, scholars in Taiwan and the United States have forged new ways of understanding and developing academic approaches to the study of modernism. This recent research has revealed that understanding postwar Taiwanese modernism requires knowledge not only of pre-early twentieth century modernist literature in the West, but also must take into account the Cold War Era modernism as a whole. Only in this way does it become possible to clearly observe the ＂return＂ of Taiwanese modernism after the war. Consequently, while based on this recent research on modernism, the present article focuses on a question that has received scant attention: that is, what factors led to modernism's rise to prominence in Cold War literary and artistic circles? In approaching this question, this article concentrates the early period of the modernist movements arising in the Cold War era. This article attempts to provide a framework for answering this question, by placing modernism into the geo-political structure of the Cold War, and extending this range of observation from the United States and Taiwan to include China. Furthermore, this article explores how the two opposing ＂camps＂ of the Cold War stimulated and gave rise to the modernism movements in Taiwan and China. Therefore, this study attempts to clarify the following questions: What sorts of ideologies and political atmosphere did the Cold War form? How did Taiwanese and Chinese writers under different political regimes understand modernism? What sorts of cultural imaginings of modernism led to its rise to prominence on both sides of the Taiwan Strait? What sorts of new literary breakthroughs did this imagining of modernism bring about?