All collective action is an intersection between personal biographical experience and history. Fourteen years ago, at its height, the Taiwan (or Wild) Lily Student Movement, which demanded a fully-elected legislature, claimed a following of 5,000 to 6,000 students and over a hundred professors. Close to 10,000 residents also congregated in the square in front of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial to lend their silent and unconditional support to the students.
I thought it would be easy to assess the history of the movement, because history is frozen in the past. Individual lives, however, do not freeze. To pass judgement on an individual who long ago stopped being a student, it is important to clarify what belongs to the collective historical experience and what belongs to the personal biography.
Some people have recently used strong language to criticize the Taiwan Lily Movement generation as represented by a few Democratic Progressive Party(DPP) members who have voiced doubts regarding the "hunger striking" students at the memorial for having degenerated or having been hijacked by the DPP. This is unfair to all those who participated in the Wild Lily movement.
Among the 5,000 to 6,000 students participating in that movement, only a minority has entered politics. A majority have entered other fields, such as community education, academia, culture or the media, or have returned to the private sector. It is very hard for these individual decisions to gain social recognition as a collective experience.
Attempts at repudiating a generation as having lost their ideals, or overly romanticizing the experiences of a generation, ignore the dynamics of the historical process and the diversity of personal experiences. Such judgments are logically erroneous because they deduce the collective from the individual, and use the collective to assess the individual.
The Taiwan Lily Student Movement was in fact only one part of the history of student movements in the 1980s. Student movements in the 1980s focused on three basic issues, the common core of which was a review of the status of students. They focused on university reform, in order to show that students were the main body in universities; social practices, in order to examine the relationship between students and society at large; and democratic reform, in order to display students' status as citizens.
At a crucial political juncture, the Taiwan Lily student movement drew on the energy accumulated by student activism during the 1980s to call on college students' dissatisfaction with the authoritarian system and their common vision for the future of Taiwan, thereby breaking the political stalemate in one fell swoop.
The Taiwan Lily movement was the first among the 1980s student movements to develop into a mass movement. For the first time, the public showed up en masse at a student movement. Student leaders who spent a long time in student activism still see it as a battlefield from which their ideological direction is extending. They remain omnivores within the idealist areas of leftist thinking, liberalism, Taiwan consciousness and feminism, criticizing each other and developing together in universities, society and politics.
But for students participating in a protest movement for the first time, the Taiwan Lily movement is a unique youthful memory: many people were unsatisfied with the movement's leaders, but still gave their approval through grassroots democratic decisionmaking, and many people were dissatisfied with newly-elected president Lee Teng-hui's (
As a result of the vilification going on in the media, many people were for the first time experiencing the piercing pain of wounded ideals. For each participant, this crossing of the swords of reason and emotion, and this dialogue between ideals and reality, represented a democratic awakening. Such were the frustrations of democratic enlightenment and idealism that converged to give birth to the Taiwan Lily movement as a collective memory.
Looking back, the period from the 1950s to the 1970s saw many protests by young intellectuals that never won recognition in the mainstream consciousness of society, and the youth of many young people was squandered in a prison cell. The fact that the Taiwan Lily movement, clashing with the authoritarian system, was fully dissolved and won its legitimacy as a student movement was a blessing. This historical blessing has allowed some people to steal a peek at the secrets of the workings of power. But it also allowed some people an opportunity to consider the ideological coarseness of dogmatic struggle and to humbly regain an understanding of the true contradictions in society.
I don't understand the young generation, and there may also be some discrepancies between the way I and the hunger striking students assess the current political situation. But, I still feel our society should value any possibility of the appearance of a new student movement, even if that movement were a force in opposition to society itself. The fact that the young generation are willing to call themselves Taiwan Lily is to the shared pride of all participants in the Taiwan Lily student movement.
However, each individual in our society, including those who participated in the Taiwan Lily movement, also has the right to put forward their observations regarding and hopes for any kind of social movement, including student movements. Personally, I do not think that the possible party affiliation of participants in a student movement should be the criterium for assessing the morality and legitimacy of that movement.
The challenge now facing Taiwan is more complex and more difficult than challenges in the past. Given the turbulent situation with the ethnic tension and the political trust crisis domestically, and the rapidly progressing globalization internationally, we have to rely on the collective wisdom of our society to find ways of overcoming that challenge.
Taiwan's hope lies in more and more young people being able to free themselves of the fetters of history and transcending the previous generation's mode of action.
In the past, we, the generation from the time around the lifting of martial law, found much food for thought and the courage to act, which allowed us to grow, from the previous young generation circling the unification-independence and left-right issue in post-war Taiwan.
Our generation now has the responsibility to help the young generation of today stand on our shoulders and lead the way for the future direction of Taiwan.
Fan Yun is an assistant research fellow in the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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