Ten years ago, a student-led protest to stop Taiwan’s legislature from passing a trade pact with mainland China sparked one of the biggest social movements in the history of the island.
The 2014 Sunflower Movement, its name stemming from a flower given by a florist to the student protesters as a symbol of hope, was born that spring.
Dozens of demonstrators stormed the legislative chamber in mid-March and occupied it for three and a half weeks. They demanded putting the brakes on a trade agreement that the government of the day, run by the Beijing-friendly party Kuomintang (KMT), was trying to pass without following the usual clause-by-clause review.
Hundreds of thousands of other Taiwanese showed solidarity with the students by marching on the streets, and the government eventually suspended the trade deal. Parliamentary speaker Wang Jin-pyng promised to implement rules to monitor the passage of the agreement, and thus the protesters vacated the chamber on 10 April. The trade deal was not passed in the end.
From Taiwan, the reverberations of democracy spread to Hong Kong, ushering in the city’s own civil disobedience campaign, Occupy Central, in September that same year to oppose proposed electoral reforms.
Alex Chow, then a Hong Kong student leader and one of the main organisers, saw Sunflower as an impetus to the 79-day Occupy Central, also known as the Umbrella Movement. “Some young people in Hong Kong, including me, were inspired by the action exemplified by Taiwanese protesters in March 2014,” he said.
In the aftermath of Sunflower, Hong Kong and Taiwanese activists bonded through their shared interest and challenges, a relationship Chow described as “a priceless asset”.
“The trust between these people is solid because they met at a very young age, and the bonding has translated into a lot of transnational campaigns, including some advocacy efforts for Hong Kongers in Taiwan.”
Galvanising discontent
Neither Hong Kong nor Taiwan were strangers to mass demonstrations. The Taiwanese had lived through protest after protest, big and small, in the two years before Sunflower, said Lai Yu-fen, a former spokesperson for the movement. She vividly remembered the anxiety and frustration brewing at the time.
“Those protests brought together strong dissatisfaction with the KMT government in 2014,” Lai said. “A lot of us were feeling very hopeless about Taiwan’s future, and since the cross-strait trade pact was strongly associated with China, that triggered a deep sense of nationalism during the Sunflower Movement.”
Even as pessimism was rife, people who were then college students said they could never have imagined witnessing Sunflower. Jeremy Chiang, a freshman at the diplomacy department of National Chengchi University a decade ago, said his generation used to think politics was a dirty business.
Sunflower caused a whole generation of Taiwanese people to become more alert to politics, mainland China and its influence on their island, he said. “It was an unprecedented event that inspired many people from my generation to take an interest in Taiwanese history, cross-strait relations and other social issues in Taiwan.
“Before the movement, cross-strait exchange was at its peak, but since then, discussions about cross-strait relations have moved towards the importance of safeguarding Taiwanese values.”
Chiang was one who started paying attention to international affairs from that point on. “I began to consider working in sectors related to international affairs so I could perhaps contribute something useful to Taiwan,” said Chiang, now a policy researcher in Taipei.
On her part, Lai got herself involved in the operations of the pro-sovereignty Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2015, first as an intern. She later campaigned for the party during the 2016 presidential election, in which the DPP beat the KMT and returned to power under President Tsai Ing-wen. Lai is now a programme officer at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Taipei.
“The movement made many Taiwanese, be they studying abroad, teaching at universities or working as journalists, realise they wanted to do something for Taiwan,” she said.
A society politicised
Some people went further, setting up new political parties. Taiwanese observers said one of Sunflower’s most important legacies was the emergence of alternative parties and a new wave of politicians who had led the movement.
Jou Yi-cheng, a former student activist and participant of the 1990s Wild Lily Movement in Taiwan, ticked the newcomers off: New Power Party, Social Democratic Party, Taiwan People’s Party. “If the Sunflower Movement didn’t take place, these political parties and new politicians would not have emerged,” Jou said.
In his view, the political awakening challenged the status quo; however, it did not create irreversible changes. Unlike the Wild Lily Movement, which led to Taiwan’s transition from authoritarianism to pluralistic democracy, Sunflower failed to capitalise on the massive energy coursing through society to push for more changes in the political system.
“The protesters stuck to their goal of stopping the passage of the cross-strait trade pact, but did not try to think about factors behind the controversial agreement,” Jou said. The new politicians did not find ways of sustaining their parties, he added, citing “internal disputes among political leaders such as Huang Kuo-chang and Freddy Lim”, which resulted in young politicians leaving the New Power Party and the party shrinking.
“Although the Sunflower generation had the conditions to create a brand new political force, they did not figure out a unique path of their own, causing much political talent to leave the party and join the DPP,” he said.
The New Power Party did win some legislative seats in the 2016 and 2020 elections, but failed to secure any this year. Observers wondered whether it could remain competitive.
Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Chengchi University, said: “If we look at different outcomes that have happened since the Sunflower Movement, from the formation of political parties to the push of young politicians into the DPP, none of these things are concrete policy changes.”
Nevertheless, the movement created a new approach to politics among the Taiwanese, especially the millennials, he said. “It has essentially politicised how people see the world and see Taiwan.”
A catalyst for Hong Kong’s social movement
Hong Kong experienced a different trajectory. In the summer of 2014, a group of activists travelled to Taiwan and met Sunflower participants, said Chow, the former student leader. Foremost in their minds were reforms to the city’s electoral system, proposed by the standing committee of the Chinese parliament in August 2014.
“We thought the strategies and tactics used by Taiwanese protesters during the Sunflower Movement could help move the conversation forward in Hong Kong, since we were in the process of figuring out how to proceed with the Occupy Central Movement in March 2014,” he said. “We visited different stakeholders in the movement and tried to understand their strategies and how they addressed internal tensions.”
The visiting Hong Kongers paid attention to tactics that might be replicated in their city despite differences between the two places, he added. “Some of the important lessons for us included how the Taiwanese organisers sustained or transformed the protest when they felt that the movement was dying down, and how they deliberated some difficult scenarios.”
Back in Hong Kong, students began a series of protests that took on a life of its own, occupying key streets and thoroughfares for more than two and a half months.
The dilemma of whether protesters should remain at the original protest site or move elsewhere later emerged, according to Chow. “The Sunflower Movement and Umbrella Movement had a shared challenge in terms of how to address internal divisions,” he said.
Apart from catalysing the Umbrella Movement, Chow said Sunflower strengthened the relationship between young activists from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“The companionship between the younger generations in Hong Kong and Taiwan is established through our shared interest and the shared challenges that we face, including the rising threat from China,” he said. “The connection didn’t come out of the blue. It has to be traced back to 2014 and I think the connection can turn into a formidable coalition in the long run if it can sustain itself.”