Wild Strawberry Movement: Transitional historical event or destabilising

5. Chapter 5 - Wild Strawberry Movement (野草莓運動)

5.3 Wild Strawberry Movement: Transitional historical event or destabilising

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

Study Centre, in 2008, 48.4% of Taiwanese perceived themselves only as Taiwanese. In 2014, 60.6% of Taiwanese perceived themselves only as Taiwanese. In 7 years, the percentage increased 12.2%. This dynamic is interesting due to the fact that, from 2001 to 2008, the percentage remained stable, it only increased 2.1%. Conversely, the number of people who perceived themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese began to decrease. From 2008 to 2014, the percentage decreased from 43.1% to 32.5%.

Therefore, it seems that 2008 was a turning point for Taiwan.

When looking at this data, it is difficult to evaluate the specific reasons for these trends.

However, there are three key plausible explanations: (1) The "Taiwanization" that was promoted by the DPP during the 2000 and 2008 began to develop among society and in particular among young people. (2) As an action of opposition to the mainland policies promoted by President Ma since 2008, society developed a higher Taiwanese self- identity. (3) It is possible that despite the limited impact of the Wild Strawberry Movement, still, some individuals embraced their pro-Taiwan values.

5.3 Wild Strawberry Movement: Transitional historical event or destabilising event?

In order to evaluate the impact of the student movement and whether or not it can be considered as the beginning of a new political generation, it is important to determine if the Wild Strawberry Movement was a historical destabilising event. Despite Yang Tsui (楊翠) in his editorial articled published in the Taipei Times revealed a certain degree of optimism regarding the future of the "Wild Strawberry Generation". The Wild Strawberry Movement's success was rather limited and subsequently, that constrained the impact of the student movement on society. There were some elements that reinforced this idea.

First, their demands were primarily focused on the political sphere and not on the social sphere. In particular, they focused on the law regarding the Assembly and Parade Law ( 集會遊行法). The movement suggested four main amends: (1) Change the permit system to a notification system. The government has no right to examine the peoples’

motivations beforehand, and declare unfavourable demonstrations to be illegal before they even take place; (2) Reexamine the current provisions for restricted areas.

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

Demonstrations and marches allow unarmed citizens without any other means to make their grievances known and petition for redress. The current restricted areas do not allow the people to challenge governmental agencies; (3) Clarify permissible actions by the police in enforcing the law.

Do not grant a blank check for the police to exercise whatever methods they see fit; (4) Make the new law an administrative law, rather then penal law.

Compared to other laws, the current Assembly and Parade Law calls for heavier punishment for the same illegal actions, violating the principle of proportionality.¹¹¹

The Wild Strawberry Movement did not succeed in achieving their main goal.

Consequently, the protest closed because of the organisation. One of the reasons why the student movement did not succeed was because of its lack of efficiency during the decision-making process. The student movement was deeply rooted to the internet and subsequently the decision-making process and organisation occurred within cyber-space. However, instead of benefiting the movement, it was rather a limitation since the leaders were overwhelmed by the lack of organisation,¹¹² which led to distrust and internal discord among participants. Although the “Wild Strawberry Movement” did not achieve their proposal, it was a milestone for using the internet for social movements in Taiwan.¹¹³

Secondly, it can be argued that, despite some political values such as self-identity and political dynamics, social activism began to change in 2008, and increased during the following years, yet, the Wild Strawberry Movement did not have the same impact on society as it would have the Sunflower Movement in 2014. It did not succeed in penetrating into society. When the student movement was over, the students went back to the school and universities and formed new groups, magazines, discussion groups or joined the DPP. However, that activism remained in the realm of the schools,

111 Free Speech in Taiwan. "Action statement from the Wild Strawberry Movement". November 10, 2008 https://freespeechintaiwan.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/action-statement-from-the-wild-strawberry-movement/

112 Chia Chi, Yen ." Wild Strawberry Movement: a milestone of Taiwan social movement." July 14, 2013 http://kateyen.weebly.com/1/post/2013/07/wild-strawberry-movement-a-milestone-of-taiwan-social-movement.html

113 Ibid.

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

universities and some social associations. In addition, after the end of the protests, the students had the impression that they had lost against the establishment because they did not achieve any significant change in the political sphere. A clear example is that Ma administration kept deepening the relations with mainland China during the following years.

It is clear that the political values of the students who were involved in the protests were different from those majority belonging to the 4th political generation. Political values and attitudes such as political engagement and self-identity became more relevant for some sectors of the youth in Taiwan during 2008 and 2014. Nonetheless, the impact of the student movement was rather limited. Therefore, it can be stated that the Wild Strawberry Movement, despite its potential, it cannot be considered as a destabilising historical event. However, some elements suggested that the Wild Strawberry Movement was a transitional event in which the generational factor played an important role. Indeed, its transitional nature dwells in the fact that as it will be explained later, after 2008, Taiwan experienced the re-emergence of new social and political movements and that student movement was one of them. On the other hand, the Wild Strawberry Movement cannot not considered as a destabilising historical event or a

"critical situation" but as a transitional period of "inter-generational struggle". The student movement was located in the period in which the paradigm could not overcome the old paradigm, a clear example is that they did not change the political situation in Taiwan. The "old paradigm" still prevailed.

Regarding the location of Wild Strawberry Movement's members within the political generations model, there are two possible options. Either, they can be located into the 4th political generation as a generational unit (they did not share the same political values of the majority) or they can be perceived as an "avant-garde" that planted the roots for the emergence of Sunflower Movement in 2014. See Table XI.

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

64 Table XI: Generational Unit: Wild Strawberry

Source: Author

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

65 6. Chapter 6: The Sunflower Movement 6.1 Sunflower Movement's history

2014 was an important year for the political development of Taiwan. On March 18th, students broke into the Legislative Yuan (Parliament) and occupied the chamber for 23 days. They also occupied the Executive Yuan (cabinet) on March 23, however, following that were evicted. Both occupation and protests were triggered by the hasty passage by the Home Affairs Committee of the Legislative Yuan to pass a bill on the Cross Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA, Haixia liangan fuwumaoyi xiehui 海 峽兩岸服務貿易協議) with China, designed to open up the service sector across the Taiwan Strait.¹¹⁴ They argued that the pact was negotiated in secret and will allow China to gain greater political control over the island.¹¹⁵

The student movement was coined as the Sunflower Movement (Taiyanghua xueyun 太 陽花學運) by the media because in the first week of the Legislative Yuan's occupation, a supporter brought bunches of sunflowers to the Legislative Yuan building to symbolise the need to let sunlight into the black box of KMT negotiations between Taiwan and mainland China. The colour yellow and the sunflower were promptly incorporated into the design of the protest movement, which became known as the Sunflower Student Movement (Taiyanghua xueyun 太陽花學運). Rather than use the Chinese name for the sunflower (xiangrikui 向日葵), the activists coined the term taiyanghua 太陽花 (a literal translation of the English word ‘sunflower’)¹¹⁶. The students promoted the protests on social media. They turned to social media to garner public support. In a single three-hour period, a crowd-funding website collected NT$6.74 million to pay for advertising, including a full-page spot in the New York Times international edition entitled “Democracy at 4 am,” showing the students being hosted by water cannons at the Executive Yuan.¹¹⁷

114 John Fuh-sheng Hsieh. "Taiwan in 2014: A besieged President amid political turmoil" Asian Survey 44, no. 11 ( 2015): 144.

115 J.R, "Sunflower Sutra" The Economist, April 8, 2014. , http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2014/04/politics-taiwan

116 Mark Harrison, "The Sunflower Movement in Taiwan" The China Story, April 18, 2014.

http://www.thechinastory.org/2014/04/the-sunflower-movement-in-taiwan

117 Glenn Smith. "Taiwan's Sunflower Movement" Foreign Policy in focus, May 29, 2014.

http://fpif.org/taiwans-sunflower-movement/

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

The students demanded government transparency in the review of the trade bill between Taiwan and China. “Oppose the Trade Pact, Save Taiwan” and “Protect our Democracy, Retract the Trade Pact” were the key slogans on display throughout the protest. The agreement was called by its critics a "Black Box" (heixiang 黑箱) to symbolise the lack of transparency by which President Ma and his KMT party were pushing the Cross Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA, Haixia liangan fuwumaoyi xiehui 海峽兩岸服務貿易協議)¹¹⁸. The CSSTA was negotiated and signed behind closed doors in Shanghai on July 21, 2013, by representatives from Taiwan’s quasi-state agency, the Straits Exchange Foundation, and its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait. The CSSTA would open eighty sectors of China’s economy to Taiwanese investment, and sixty-four sectors of Taiwan’s economy to Chinese investment, including hotels, tourism, printing, and medical services¹¹⁹.

During the occupation, both occupiers and the Ma administration refused to budge, Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷) and Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) announced a major rally for Sunday, March 30. It turned out to be the largest nonpartisan, pro-democracy rally in Taiwan’s history. According to the organisers’ count, corroborated by The Diplomat and The Wall Street Journal, at least 350,000 protesters ended up swelling the streets in front of the Presidential Office with songs, speeches, and a call for the nation’s elected leadership to listen to demands of the students.¹²⁰

Following the March 30th rally organised by the Sunflower Movement, the Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), a KMT member, visited the legislature and promised to not call for future bipartisan review of the CSSTA until the oversight mechanism had been implemented. Wang’s announcement caught the Ma administration off-guard and the KMT accused the speaker of “betraying” the party.

118 Glenn Smith. "Taiwan's Sunflower Movement" Foreign Policy in focus, May 29, 2014.

http://fpif.org/taiwans-sunflower-movement/

119 Ian Rowen, "Inside Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement: Twenty-Four Days in a Student-Occupied Parliament, and the Future of the Region" The Journal of Asian Studies 74, no.1 (2015): 6.

120 Ibid, 14.

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

However, the Sunflower Movement regarded Wang’s declaration as an act of goodwill and soon afterwards announced that it would vacate the legislature on April 10th .¹²¹

The emergence of the Sunflower Movement in 2014 was due to three main factors.

Firstly the context of current Cross-Strait relations, the movement was also spurred by deep-rooted distrust of China by Taiwanese who feared the accord would increase Taiwan’s dependence on China, and will hurt the island’s economy and national security. Secondly, the domestic context, many young students worried about their own future: the widening disparity between rich and poor, low starting salaries for the young, skyrocketing housing costs, and so on¹²². Thirdly, the social activism prior to the Sunflower Movement. Each of these factors are crucial in understanding the Sunflower's Movement's emergence.

6.2 Domestic context

Regarding the economic domestic forces, the Sunflower's political generation believes that they will be worse off than the generation of their parents. Resultant of high housing prices and low salaries. In addition, the young generation that was involved in the protests has been dubbed by some media as the "22k generation", named for the meager monthly salary of 22,000 Taiwan dollars, or $730, that university graduates can expect to make. Those two rather unflattering labels summed up the reality many young Taiwanese faced. Generally speaking, their parents had furnished them with a solid education and material comfort in an age of relative abundance, but Taiwanese youth are entering the workforce at a crossroads for the island’s economy and at a time of economic hardship for young people around the globe, and their anxiety is starting to show.¹²³ On the other hand, the young generation of Taiwanese has also been affected by capitalist globalisation. It has thrown young people in industrialised economies around the world into a new and unpredictable economic arena. In Taiwan, however,

121 J. Michael Cole. "Sunflowers end occupation of Taiwan's legislature" The Diplomat , April 11, 2014. http://thediplomat.com/2014/04/sunflowers-end-occupation-of-taiwans-legislature/

122 John Fuh-sheng Hsieh. "Taiwan in 2014: A besieged President amid political turnmoil" Asian Survey 44, no. 11 ( 2015): 144.

123 Rachel Lu, "Taiwan's squishy youth get fierce". Tea Leaf Nation, April 9, 2014 http://www.tealeafnation.com/2014/04/taiwans-squishy-youth-get-fierce/

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

globalisation is perceived in bilateral terms. The anxiety among young Taiwanese is directed almost entirely towards the PRC.¹²⁴

Another important aspect that fuelled the Sunflower Movement was the perception among the students that Taiwanese democracy was worsening. The British scholar Dafydd Fell, suggested that democracy in Taiwan suffered a reversal after Ma's election in 2008. The sense of renewed optimism over the state of Taiwan’s democracy that followed the KMT’s return to power in 2008 was short lived. Public satisfaction with the performance of President Ma fell even more rapidly than that of Chen (TVBS Poll Centre 2010). It tended to hover between 20 and 30 per cent, reaching an all-time low of 16 per cent in August 2009. These are the kind of levels of public approval that Chen had for much of his second term. It is not surprising that the DPP has accused the KMT of reverting to authoritarian governing practices. Such claims are more than just sour grapes – Freedom House’s 2010 Freedom in the World report downgraded Taiwan’s civil liberties ranking from 1 to 2. In addition, also reflective of this perception of democratic backsliding was US Senator Sherrod Brown’s talk of Taiwan’s democracy being “in peril”. The idea of Taiwan moving away from liberal democracy has been reinforced by a string of remarks made by KMT leaders that praised Singapore’s political system as something that Taiwan can learn from¹²⁵.

6.3 Cross-Strait relations

Regarding Cross-Strait relations, the young generation of Taiwan has witnessed how Ma's administration has attempted to forge new economic ties with mainland China.

The new Ma administration has had the greatest impact on Taiwan’s external relations.

The term “external relations” refers to both Taiwan’s international relations and its cross-Strait relations¹²⁶. The economic normalisation between Taiwan and mainland China has been one of the most important aspects of Ma administration. President Ma laid out an incremental strategy, "first the urgent, then the less urgent; first the easy;

then the difficult; first Economics, then Politics" (xianji houhuan, xianyi hounan,

124 Shelley Rigger, "Taiwan's rising rationalism: generations, politics, and "Taiwanese Nationalism". Policy Studies 26 (2006): 54.

125 Dafydd Fell, "Taiwan’s Democracy: Towards a Liberal Democracy or Authoritarianism?"

Journal of Chinese Affairs 39, no.2, (2010): 191.

126 Ibid, 191.

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

xianjing houzheng). In 2010, Taiwan and China signed a historic Economic Cooperation Framework (ECFA) with additional agreements on trade in service, trade in goods, investment protection and dispute settlement to be negotiating the exchange of representative offices (SEF's and ARATS's offices on each other's jurisdiction). In addition, Ma stated that economic engagement with China is the best way to help Taiwan to maximise its economic opportunities and its security threat. His administration also argued that passage of Cross-Strait services trade agreement (CSSTA) and other follow up economic agreements were important to opening the door for regional economic integration such as entry into TPP and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP.¹²⁷

However, the closer relations developed by President Ma have been criticised by some sectors of the Taiwanese society and international scholars. On one hand, a number of the KMT’s critics have claimed that closer relations with China are undermining Taiwan’s democracy. For instance, US scholar Richard Kagan wrote: How can a democratic country be so blind as to seek close relations with a government that is one of the most authoritarian societies in the world? Who will benefit? Which is the likelier scenario—that China will force Taiwan to become less free, or that Taiwan will help China become more democratic?¹²⁸. On the other hand, the CSSTA has also undergone criticisms. The most potent criticism of the CSSTA is not that its proponents neglected to use the democratic process in its signing but the fact that the agreement may well have serious negative impacts on certain members and sectors of Taiwanese society.

Given that the explicitly stated purpose of the agreement is to open the gates to cross-strait investment, opponents envision a flood of Chinese businesses entering the Taiwanese market and competing with Taiwanese local businesses. The fear of an economically powerful neighbour is a rational one. Latin American countries, for example, have long had to cope with the challenges of living under the shadow of U.S.

127 Vincent Wei Cheng Wan, "Recent Developments in China's relations with Taiwan and North

Korea" USCC, June 5, 2014

http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/transcripts/Hearing%20Transcript_June%205,2014 pdf

128 Dafydd Fell ."Taiwan’s Democracy: Towards a Liberal Democracy or Authoritarianism?"

Journal of Chinese Affairs 39, no.2, (2010): 194.

‧

國

立政治大學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

economic and political influence. Though the analogy may seem far-fetched, the ongoing impasse in cross-strait relations is not altogether different.¹²⁹

6.4 Previous social movements as a political learning

The Sunflower Movement cannot be explained without the previous social movements that attempted to change the political landscape of Taiwan after Ma's first election in 2008. It can be argued that the Sunflower Movement emerged due to a combination of two main factors. Some students were already politically socialised as a result of being engaged in previous social or political movement. In this regard, the experience that some students gained during the Anti-Media Monopoly Movement (fanmetilongduanyundong, 反媒體壟斷運動 ) was vital. That social movement campaigned around the issues of media freedom and democracy. The protests were sometimes explicitly, and often implicitly, directed at the Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團). But they also embraced a range of issues related more broadly to freedom, democracy, nationalism, party politics and the role of the state. As is often the case in media debates, the protests evoked an idealised public sphere, one supposedly enabled by a media free from corporate and political influence. Specific to Taiwan are concerns about the influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over

在文檔中太陽花學運新生代對於兩岸關係的政治價值觀及態度影響一個新政治世代的崛起？ - 政大學術集成 (頁 64-0)