Many articles have been published this week saying that Monday was the 10th anniversary of the occupation of the legislative chamber that marked the beginning of the Sunflower movement. While they deal with the reasons behind the movement, the role of the students and the repercussions today, there are aspects that bear fleshing out.
While the movement started with a protest against the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) attempt to push through a controversial cross-strait service trade agreement and the non-transparent nature of the process, it was not instigated by political parties or political figures. Although it was students who occupied the building, the movement itself was initiated at least in part by civic groups and non-governmental organizations.
Also, although the occupation began on March 18, 2014, it did not end until almost 23 days later, on the evening of April 10. During those three weeks, the entire nation was transfixed.
With the exception of one night in particular, things did not turn violent, but at the time, nobody had any idea how things would transpire. People were asking how the authorities in other countries might have reacted to their congress or parliament being paralyzed by protesters. The longer the occupation went on, the more fraught the situation became, with fissures showing in society, within the KMT, among the movement itself, between interests in business, academia and politics, and even internationally.
Even those largely sympathetic to the students were uneasy about the unprecedented nature of the interruption to the operation of the state and the sense of unease only grew. What happened in those three weeks was a distillation of all the political, intergenerational, historical and nationalist tensions that have resulted from 300 years of Taiwan’s complex and nuanced story. The situation could have spun out of control.
For almost the duration, the building had emblazoned on an external wall Chinese characters reading: “When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty.” It was not a good look for a nation that prides itself on its democracy, but the contrast was the point.
Then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) initially refused to engage with the occupiers, but eventually agreed to talks, albeit stubbornly holding on to his plan to pass the agreement. Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) called on Ma to listen to the occupiers’ objections; then-legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) won plaudits for his handling of the matter, directing the police not to intervene and allowing the international press, as well as food and drink, onto the occupied legislative floor, but in so doing inflating tensions between himself and Ma. Then-premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) did the opposite, directing police to forcibly remove an offshoot occupancy of the Executive Yuan in the early hours of March 24, winning Ma’s gratitude, but the condemnation of others for unleashing violence on members of the public, as well as the threat of a lawsuit for attempted murder from one injured actvist.
University professors held civics classes outside, teams of lawyers offered their services to students in legal trouble as a result of the occupancy, China Unification Promotion Party founder Chang An-le (張安樂) threatened the students with violence, the then-opposition Democratic Progressive Party was accused of trying to gain political advantage and Merrill Lynch said that the situation could possibly affect Taiwan’s GDP.
China said it wanted the agreement passed.
This all happened at a time that the young generation was regarded as largely uninterested in politics. That was proven to be false.
KMT legislators are trying to revive the agreement, literally at their very first opportunity since their failure a decade ago. Has the KMT learned nothing?
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
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
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
RSS