Inside Taiwan's Sunflower Movement: Twenty-Four Days in a Student-Occupied Parliament, and the Future of the Region

Abstract

“Say goodbye to Taiwan,” wrote political scientist John Mearsheimer in a widely read article in the March-April 2014 issue of The National Interest. Threatened by China's rising economic might and abandoned by a weakening United States, one of Asia's most vibrant democracies was facing, in his “realist” analysis, an almost inevitable annexation via economic if not military force. “Time,” he wrote, “is running out for the little island coveted by its gigantic, growing neighbor.” But only days after publication, on March 18, activists and armchair analysts alike said hello to a new reality.

Bureaucratic Speech: Language Choice and Democratic Identity in the Taipei Bureaucracy

“…4242The success of the recent Sunflower Movement, in which student activists occupied the national legislature to protest the closed‐door passage of a trade agreement with the PRC, exemplifies that conversation at the national level (Rowan ).…”

PLS and OPLS Discriminatory Analyses on Political Sustainability in Taiwan

“…The aftermath of the "Sunflower Movement" has several side effects. The movement was deemed as the main reason for the Democratic Progressive Party to win the landslide victory in the 2014 election [28,29]. (vi) Integrity: Sustainability is an obviously normative concept and includes the particular moral attitude to the future.…”

Collective Identity, Organization, and Public Reaction in Protests: A Qualitative Case Study of Hong Kong and Taiwan

“…The site of the Taiwanese occupation itself-national legislature-became the base for the movement's leadership, where they gathered to discuss strategies, announce decisions, and organize their leadership in assemblies (Ho 2015). The site was converted into a command center: security teams guarded each entrance, an information team was responsible for control of the site, a medical station housed rotating crews of psychologists, physicians, nurses, translators and journalists from the NTU Law School, an outreach team for communicating with overseas Taiwanese students (Rowen 2015). However, because it was a neutral space, the movement was associated with transparency, being better received among the public, and circumvented interference with people's daily lives.…”