Thammasat University students interested in political science, democracy, sociology, history, Asian studies, economics, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 20 October Zoom webinar conference on From Wild Lilies to Sunflowers: Taiwan’s Youth Movement and the Making of Democracy
The event, on Thursday, 20 October 2022 at 7pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Faculty of Oriental Studies, the University of Oxford, the United Kingdom.
The TU Library collection includes a book on the Taiwan youth movement by Professor A-chin Hsiau, who teaches at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, in Taipei.
Students are invited to register for the webinar by writing to the following address:
information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
The speaker will be Professor Ming-sho Ho, who teaches sociology at National Taiwan University.
The TU Library collection includes a copy of Dr. Ho’s book, Working Class Formation in Taiwan: Fractured Solidarity in State-Owned Enterprises, 1945-2012.
Among Dr. Ho’s other published research is an article that appeared last year on Universities as an Arena of Contentious politics: mobilization and control in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition movement of 2019.
Here is the article’s abstract:
This article examines the role of university students during the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong, analyzing their strategy to mobilize schools’ physical, symbolic, and interpersonal resources, and how the authorities reacted by restricting and redefining key resources. Universities have served as a safe space since police officers traditionally are not allowed to enter them. Some schools are also strategically located to allow for more disruptive protests. Since Confucianism venerates the moral value of learning, universities are perceived as a hallowed symbol of intellectual conscience, justifying students’ defiance. Universities are commonly seen as warm families whose leaders are obliged to protect students. Finally, universities sustain a rich network of cross-mobilization. The regime restricts access to resources by tightening campus control and reshuffling university leadership, and redefined the symbolic meanings by discrediting higher education. We find interpersonal relationships constitute the most resilient resource because they are embedded in everyday life common identities.
In another article published in 2020, Dr. Ho studied From unionism to youth activism: Taiwan’s politics of working hours. Here is the abstract for that article:
This article examines two major protests related to working-hour reforms in Taiwan in 2000 and 2016–18, paying particular attention to the shift in the composition of protesters from union members to youth activists. The decline in mass membership and the failure to consolidate a national federation have diminished the political presence of labour unions. The emergence of youth protest movements, both before and after the 2014 Sunflower Movement, made possible the advent of Taiwan’s youth as political actors. The reconfiguration of Taiwan’s working hour politics has paralleled the global transition from the classical organization-based collective action to the digitally enabled ‘connective action’. The concluding section provides reflections on the impacts as well as the limitations of this newer form of labour politics.
Dr. Ho wrote about The Activist Legacy of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement in a 2018 article posted the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan international affairs think tank headquartered in Washington D.C. with operations in Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East as well as the United States:
Like Hong Kong, South Korea, and elsewhere, Taiwan has been jolted by massive protests and a bout of renewed citizen activism in recent years. In March 2014, young protesters upended the island’s political landscape by temporarily seizing control of the national legislature. Their activist opposition to a pending free trade agreement with China attracted broad public attention and support, helped prompt a change in government in early 2016, and unleashed a wave of young activism that continues to reshape Taiwanese politics.
Crucially, many youthful protesters of the Sunflower Movement have remained energetically committed to several avenues of political action since 2014. Participants have driven new forms of protest and activism, played meaningful roles in both new and existing parties, and encouraged the government to reassess key policy issues, including nuclear power and education. Taiwan provides a model of how activists can sometimes transition from extra-institutional protests to conventional forms of political participation.
The Sunflower Movement set off a political tidal wave. Beginning in mid-March, hundreds of student protesters physically occupied Taiwan’s national legislature for roughly three weeks to oppose a proposed free trade agreement with China. Student leaders’ nimble protest tactics and commitment to nonviolence and civic-mindedness helped the ensuing large-scale civic movement win mass support. A late 2014 poll indicated that more than half of Taiwanese respondents (53.3 percent) supported the movement. Despite the efforts of then president Ma Ying-jeou and the Kuomintang (KMT) ruling party, the Sunflower Movement helped encourage public scrutiny of closer economic integration with China, hamstring the trade proposal, and stymie subsequent efforts to liberalize trade with Beijing. The January 2016 election eventually ushered in even greater political change. President Tsai Ing-wen and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)—Taiwan’s independence-leaning, longtime opposition force—wrested power from the KMT and gained control of the legislature.
But even before the January 2016 election, the Sunflower Movement gave way to an inspiring explosion of enthusiastic activism. Amid this political renewal, Sunflower Movement participants formed a number of new organizations that similarly emphasized direct democracy, social justice, and Taiwanese identity. Five of the most influential such groups were Taiwan March (daoguo qianjin), Democracy Tautin (minzhu douzhen),1 Democracy Kuroshio, Youth Against Oppression in Taiwan (taizuo weixin), and the Formoshock Society (fuermosha huishe).
The proliferation of these groups reflected the number and the diversity of the Sunflower activists. Taiwan March was led by celebrities and collected signatures nationwide to lower the legal threshold for initiating a referendum. Democracy Kuroshio was mainly composed of southern Taiwanese who felt marginalized during the occupation of the legislature. Meanwhile, Democracy Tautin staged high-profile protests against then president Ma’s cross-strait policies. These groups helped preview the notable political changes to come. However, most of them ceased to be active once the Tsai administration took office in May 2016, mostly because their participants were absorbed into the DPP and other newly formed political parties.
Other new post–Sunflower Movement initiatives proliferated as well. A coalition of nongovernmental organizations launched a campaign for constitutional reform in response to the movement’s demand for a citizens’ constitutional conference. A related movement sought to lower the voting age from twenty to eighteen. Some of this activism predated the March 2014 occupation of the legislature, including efforts to strengthen public supervision of lawmakers. One newly founded watchdog group called Watchout (wocao) aimed to utilize digital communications tools to improve public understanding of the legislature.
The durability of this wave of activism suggests that it had deep societal roots and was not really about just a single trade agreement. The trade controversy underscored several interrelated social problems that paved the way for this youthful activism and engagement. These intractable problems included worsening economic inequality; opaque, unjust, and unaccountable governing institutions and procedures; and a growing but threatened sense of Taiwanese identity. The eruption of the Sunflower Movement represented the climax of a protest cycle that started with the KMT’s return to power under Ma years before in 2008. Taiwanese student activism—which had been largely dormant since the 1990 Wild Lily Movement—gradually resurfaced and expanded to include a growing number of young participants. Taiwan’s highly educated, but economically insecure, young people have been at the forefront of this insurgent civil society. This youthful movement has been enabled by digital media and driven by a generational sense of relative deprivation among young activists, as the rapid economic growth and upward class mobility that their parents’ generation enjoyed have been denied to them…
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)