The recent tide of student protest in Taiwan over a trade in services agreement with China has captured the attention of nearly everyone in Taiwan and even the foreign media. The number of student demonstrators has been large. They have occupied government offices and have partially paralyzed the political system.
Observers are pondering why the students are so energized and what is behind their movement.
The following are some of the theories:
One, the pan-green camp, or the opposition parties, orchestrated the student protest. It is the pan-greens’ modus operandi. They are good at it. They want to mold public opinion and embarrass President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The pan-greens, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in particular, organized street protests to oppose the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement in 2010. This protest is similar in its origins and purposes. The students’ well-planned actions seem to reveal a level of professionalism that only a party or parties could provide.
The timing also suggests pan-green leaders seek to help candidates running in the Nov. 29 seven-in-one elections. It is already election season and the parties are organizing and planning campaigns — the pan-green camp needs unity, which is lacking.
It is not clear who will prevail in the election. It is thought that the November elections will have an impact on the 2016 presidential and vice presidential elections. These will decide much about Taiwan’s future. Both factors amplify the need for winning.
Two, the student protest started spontaneously. The pan-greens saw it as an opportunity or duty to support it once it gained momentum and attention.
The basis for the students’ dissatisfaction is Taiwan’s poorly performing economy, lack of jobs for graduates, opportunities drying up everywhere, except in China, while Taiwanese companies dealing with China provide jobs some students do not want, a general malaise, and dysfunctional politics. Clearly the students’ protest mirrored public displeasure with the situation in Taiwan and the performance of government.
Some student leaders saw an opening to show their skills to qualify themselves as future politicians or get media attention. Indeed, they have accomplished both in spades.
It is also springtime and there had not been any significant student protests for a while. These variables have helped explain student protests in the US and other Western countries.
Three, the feud between Ma and Legislative Yuan speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) precipitated the protest. Clearly it was a prelude, and had divided the students, as they already were, due to the state of education in Taiwan, along ethnic lines that paralleled the prevailing “ideologies” on campuses: unification with China or independence.
Students were upset with Ma for using what they termed “intelligence techniques” to gather information on Wang. Thus, Ma’s “spying on citizens” trumped evidence of Wang’s corruption as being more wrong for the students. This also mirrored deep concern around the world about governments gathering too much information on citizens. This concern increased after the Edward Snowden case and evidence of the US National Security Agency’s infamous overreaching.
Four, the student protest was — planned may be too strong a word — allowed, even encouraged, by the KMT. This may seem counterintuitive; but here are three reasons for saying this.
The student protest against the pact with China was sure to anger Chinese leaders — it did. The DPP was trying to improve relations across the Taiwan Strait knowing that its hostile China policy had hurt the party and former chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) 2012 presidential bid. The DPP leaders acknowledged this and were making efforts to fix it. The student protest has undermined this.
The protest hurt the DPP’s efforts to improve relations with the US — also assumed to be a DPP handicap. Washington is promoting a trade agreement with Asia called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. US President Barack Obama’s administration is asking Congress to approve it as a package and not examine and vote on each part. The US wants Taiwan to join. In other words, Obama is facing the same problems as Ma in trying to get a trade agreement passed without it being picked apart and politicized.
The KMT would like to see the DPP alienate the business community in Taiwan — which its stance on the service agreement is doing. Business favors the treaty. Businesses are less likely to donate money to the DPP’s election campaigns because of the protest and the DPP’s role in it.
Protest movements are often difficult to dissect in terms of their causes and aims. Taiwan’s student protest fits this mold.
Obviously the students’ motives are multifaceted. Likely all of the above theories are to some degree correct, even though on face value they seem contradictory.
John Copper is the Stanley J. Buckman Professor of International Studies (emeritus) at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
RSS