He was a notable activist in the Tangwai movement that took to the streets in the mid-1970s in opposition to the KMT dictatorship and for democracy and the rights of workers, peasants and fishers.
Liang was active in the folk music movement scene and is known in Taiwan for writing the lyrics of the song Meilidao (Beautiful Island美麗島).
In 2011, Liang noted on his blog's website that he had returned to Bai Qiu, translating more of his poems – this time together with the German scholar Wolf Baus.
Since 1976, Wang Jinping, the feminist activist and Tamkang teacher Lee Yuan-chen (Li Yuanzhen 李元貞 – the founder of Women Awakening), Liang and their friend Li Shuangze (李雙澤) formed what Tao Wei - the liberal chairman of Tamkang's German Department at the time - called, with a smile, a "Gang of Four".
After his arrival in Tamshui in 1976, Liang was determined to help friends such as Li Shuangze to push ahead with their attempt, started in 1975, to convert the Western-oriented Campus Folk Music Movement into a socially critical folk song movement of singer-songwriters find an audience eager to embrace and develop their own songs.
As one of the critics of non-political English-language folk rock (and of often quite sentimental pop music), Liang, just like his friend and collaborator Li Shuangze(李雙澤, b.
The songs were made famous by Li and then, after his death, by Yang Zujun, who was in the mid- to late 1970s a student at Tamkang University (淡江大學 ).
Due to the Tangwai scholars, Chen Da, an old but soon noted Taiwanese folk singer, was invited to perform on campus in Tamkang.
It was "a closeness to the regionalist culture" that linked the four Tamkang activists Lee Yuan-chen (李元貞), Liang, Li and Wang Jinping to Native critical and realist literature, to Taiwanese folk music (Chen Da), and to the Democracy movement.
In 1987, many years after Li Shuangzi's premature death in 1977, and thus in the period when Martial law in Taiwan was about to be suspended,[3] Liang and Lee Yuan-chen published his collected works, together with a biography.
As the faculty website of National Dong Hwa University points out, Liang compiled 日據下臺灣新文學──詩選集 (Rì jù xià táiwān xīn wénxué ──shī xuǎn jí /The New Literature in Taiwan under the Japanese Occupation – a poetry anthology) in 1979.
in Xiachiao (夏潮 Hsia-ch’ao) #6, Sept. 1976, he published Taiwan xiandai shi de qibu Lai He, Zhang Wojun he Yang Hua de hanwen baihuashi (台灣現代詩的起步賴和, 張我軍和楊華的漢文白話詩 / The Beginnings of Taiwan's modern poetry: Lai He, Zhang Wojun and Yang Hua's Chinese poetry in the vernacular language) in 1994.
Jiang's works include:[8] On 28 December 2010 Liang commented: "Habe vor, den ersten Zyklus (Neuer Frühling) der Sammlung "Neue Gedichte" (1844) von Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) zu übersetzen.
Hoffe, dass es einen neuen Frühling für jeden Menschen gibt, Brot, Rosen und Zuckererbsen."
(Content 內容: Foreword 1; The Song of Songs 4 ; Greek: 7 (Sappho, Elytis ); English: 10 (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Burns, Byron, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson); German: 19 (Walther, Hildegard, Carmina Burana, Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Müller, Heine, Rilke, Hesse, Brecht); French: 36 (Villon, Ronsard, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Aragon, Prévert); Spanish: 46 (Lorca, Alberti, Machado, Borges, Neruda))