New Immigration, Civic Activism and Identity in Japan: Influencing the ‘Strong’ State (original) (raw)

Comprehensive, eyewitness account of the 24-day student and civil occupation of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan. The occupation, which began as a protest against the botched near- passage of a services trade deal with China, went on to spawn the biggest pro-democracy protest rally in the island’s history, reframe popular discourse about Taiwan’s political and social trajectory, precipitate the midterm electoral defeat of the ruling KMT party, and prefigure unprecedented protest in nearby Hong Kong.

Over the past twenty years, there have been two important trends in Taiwan’s political economy whose contradictory implications provide an important explanation for the dramatic events of 2014. The logic of each pulls Taiwan in different directions. In this paper, we describe one of the two contending trends of integration and identity. We then discuss the institutional inheritance from the authoritarian era which we believe is a factor that makes policymaking in Taiwan quite difficult. We conclude by analysing how these phenomena interacted to produce the dramatic events of 2014.

The Sunflower Occupy Movement broke out in March 2014, shaking Taiwan’s political landscape and its relations with China. The Sunflower Movement preceded the Umbrella Movement in just a few months. These two campaigns fought for democracy and autonomy from China, both were mobilized by civil forces and led by the youth, and activists from both places interacted frequently for mutual empowerment. The former caused the suspension of a trade agreement between Taiwan and China, a severe blow to Beijing’s irredentism, while the latter failed to achieve the goal of direct election of the chief executive. This article will demonstrate that momentum for a contentious mobilization against CCP-KMT cooperation had been accumulating for several years before the outbreak of the Sunflower Movement, thanks to the activism of civic groups. That movement in turn transformed social attitudes toward China. First, the article accounts for the movement’s emergence and immediate impact, and analyzes strategic interactions in light of short-term political opportunity. It then illustrates the “long path to the Sunflower Movement” by focusing on the turn of discourse, the surging protest cycle, and new protest repertoires leading to the Occupy actions. Thirdly, it elucidates the transformative nature of the movement. The final section will compare the cases of Taiwan and Hong Kong in terms of youth politics, civil society, and the China impact.

The 2014 Sunflower Movement succeeded in blocking Taiwan's Congress from ratifying the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA), a bill that proposed to liberalize trade with China. Since most of the participants in this movement were students and NGO members, they had limited economic and political resources to influence policy change, which makes their success in stopping a trade deal remarkable. Many attribute this important success to an elite alliance with politicians inside the government, fueled by a personal rivalry between political elites. However, I argue that changing public opinion is the more important force behind the creation of the alliance. With original data from interviews with political elites, their staff members, and activists in Taiwan, in addition to secondary information, I confirm public opinion to be the major reason for the political alliance. This case illustrates that in some circumstances, public opinion outweighs the importance of elite riva...

The civil society's reaction to the opposition parties' "parliamentary reform" was swift. Between May 17 and 28, Taiwan experienced what, on the surface, resembles a new "Sunflower" spring-the major popular protest of 2014. That movement saw students, and later the broader civil society, invade, occupy, and surround the Taiwanese parliament (Legislative Yuan, LY) to oppose the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)’s hasty and plenary-session- free ratification of an agreement with China, signed under then-President Ma Ying-jeou (2008-2016). That agreement would have opened Taiwan’s main economic sector, services, to extensive Chinese investment. The movement lasted three weeks and is one of the very few “occupy” movements worldwide to have achieved its goals—in this case, canceling the ratification of the treaty, blocking the agreement’s implementation, and compelling the KMT-dominated parliament to adopt a mechanism for reviewing all cross-straits agreements.

This article uses images of policing produced in the context of Taiwan’s Sun- flower Movement to explore the place of police in democracy. I distinguish five different ways the police–society relationship came to be represented over the course of this movement. I argue that these images of police were performative: they had real effects on the trajectory of the event. To understand these effects, I use a theoretical framework which links the rise of internet technologies to a shift in the cultural dimension of state formation. From this perspective, the driving force of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement appears as a symbolic disjunc- ture between two contradictory ideals of democracy. On the one hand is a radical ideal, in which a constituent power is founded directly in the meaningful processes of public will formation. On the other hand is a liberal ideal, in which the relative autonomy of a constituted state is necessary to protect civil order against political chaos. The police are situated at a point of material contradic- tion between these radical and liberal imaginaries. To the degree that police powers are based on the rule of law, they are founded in the liberal ideal, which makes them vulnerable to the “imagefare” tactics of radical-democratic social movements.