The students involved in the Sunflower movement have announced they will be leaving the Legislative Yuan with honor and taking their battle to the outer perimeters of the building. Their decision is understandable.
However, while the student movement has achieved certain results, it is still quite far from its goals and if it mishandles the situation now, it will lose what gains it has achieved.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is utterly shameless and controls the Chinese National Party (KMT) caucus. It is thus possible everything will go back to how it was before. If that happens, the student movement will have to start all over again and will take on a much more radical form, or a “revolution.”
Ma is a hypocrite. So far, he has gotten what he wants while playing the victim. He has not had to say anything himself; he has left it to his KMT cronies to insult the students and anger the public.
Two-bit gangsters are bullies. When dealing with them, you need to be willing to call their bluff. The students lack experience dealing with such people.
At press conferences, the students have resorted too much to reason and have failed to exploit their position of power. The fear is that they will falter. If they do lose, this is when they will use a “revolution” to warn Ma’s “conglomerate.”
Before the Sunflower movement, many younger people tended to seek a sense of security. The experience of the movement has changed that.
They have started to pay attention to important national affairs and to their own futures. They are no longer being led astray by the government’s rhetoric about increasing Taiwan’s economic growth, which has been little more than a smokescreen Ma employed to determine their fates.
Now that 500,000 people have shown they are sick of being constantly deceived, even more people will come out and defend Taiwan’s sovereignty and their own rights and interests.
Now these people are angry, it will be impossible for everyone to remain being “peaceful” and “reasonable.” Only a cold, calculating person like Ma could pull that off.
Ma totally refuses to back down because he has made a promise to Beijing. The cross-strait service trade agreement was signed on June 21 last year and was to become effective three months later, on Sept. 31.
This is why Ma “denounced” Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) in the middle of September last year.
After that failed, Ma changed his promise to Beijing, aiming to have the agreement pushed through February’s legislative session. This is why Ma has ordered it be passed by June. If Ma fails to deliver, Beijing will give up on him and that is what history will remember him for.
Beijing has lost confidence in Ma.
Reports from Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily (星島日報) have said that Fujian Province Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chief You Quan (尤權), who was originally going to lead a delegation to Taiwan, canceled his trip at the last minute because of the movement, and that delegations from China’s Jiangsu and Henan provinces, which planned to visit this month and next month respectively, are observing the student movement closely.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍), who originally planned to visit Taiwan in the middle of this month, may also postpone his trip.
This is one of the results the Sunflower movement has achieved. The students are rational, so they will not be “opposed to all things Chinese.”
However, their determination to protect Taiwan’s sovereignty will not waver, and will only become stronger.
Paul Lin is a political commentator.
Translated by Drew Cameron
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this