On Wednesday night, student movement leader Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) left the legislative floor and entered Jinan Road, one of the streets surrounding the occupied Legislative Yuan where performance stages have been set up for the public, professors, NGO workers and artists to express their opinion, give talks and perform.
He was soon recognized by a group of people standing and sitting a few stalls away from the back of Jinan Road’s main stage, away from the spotlight splashing for the front rostrum.
Lin was asked to join among them, and jokingly, to take off his famous green coat, which has caused a fashion stir among netizens.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
Lin has received a great amount of media attention since March 18th, the day the students stormed into the building housing the Legislative Yuan.
The group of people here, without an elevated podium for the speaker, gathered under a banner that reads “the liberated area of the untouchables (賤民解放區).”
They have been staging “the liberated forum next to the public toilet” since March 27, three days after the attempt to occupy the Executive Yuan.
Lin appeared for a reason.
The Executive Yuan incident on March 24 was said to be led by groups other than the one occupying the Legislative Yuan.
The latter had been consulted and did not support the action, but did release a statement after the incident saying that they would stand by their comrades.
However, it was the start of a series of conspiracy theories about factional struggles within the movement regarding what to do next, which some media labeled a “dove-hawk dispute” and discontent toward the opaqueness of the decisionmaking “center.”
The collaborating groups that set up the makeshift forum, including the National Alliance for Workers of Closed Factories (NAWCF), Taiwan International Worker’s Association, PLURS Electronic Music Anti-nuclear Front, the Hua Guang Community Self-Help Association, Losheng Youth Alliance and labor unions, were among those at the center of such rumor.
Emphasizing that they are not planning to “seize the power from the ‘center,’” the coalition who launched the liberated forum have indeed been dissatisfied with how the sit-in outside the occupied building has been conducted and its order maintained.
The order, cleanliness and the demonstrators’ self-discipline shown in the March 30 demonstration were the culmination of the protesting sit-in on the streets that has been staged for days since the March 18 legislative chamber siege.
Garbage is collected and recycled, smoking is frowned upon, areas clearly demarcated for walking and sitting and emergency medical routes lined and vacated for fast transport should accidents happen, leading some people to say that going to the sit-in was like going to a concert.
Some complained about how they were yelled at by the “order-maintaining volunteers” for staying in the emergency medical routes.
The groups now occupying the space beside the public toilet decided to challenge the protest movement’s power structure, spending several days discussing and questioning topics such as the reasonability of how the space is divided, whether the presuppositions of peace, rationality and non-violence have confined the possibility of the movement and how the decision-making mechanism can be more democratic.
Video footage of the Wild Lily student movement 24 years ago was played that night, with Lu Chih-hung (盧其宏), the adviser of the Taoyuan Labor Union, saying that the students at the time had a transparent and democratic decision-making mechanism, with each school having a representative responsible for conveying their peers’ opinions to the final decision-making group.
The talks and discussions were unsettling for some.
Their debate and negotiation with the main stage staff have relaxed the restriction on the emergency medical route, which is now no longer roped off.
However, the challenge was viewed by some as a “power-seizing attempt,” an accusation that NAWCF spokeswoman Chen Hsiu-lien (陳秀蓮) repeatedly denied on Wednesday night while talking to the crowd.
“What we’re doing here is implementing a form of direct democracy and civic deliberation in which everybody can get involved. We don’t need an elevated podium to speak from the top. What we want is equal participation,” Chen said.
“This is not just a student movement, but one that involves participants from all walks of life. We understand each other through dialogue and do not easily label or exclude others… People are the subject of this movement and each has the right and power to make his or her voice heard,” according to the public statement of the “liberated area.”
That means the audience was not just a group of listeners, but were debaters who could challenge on the spot even the views coming from the speaker invited by the host groups.
With the discussion topic that night, as a friendly gesture to the movement, redirected from challenging the established order at the scene to scrutinizing the cross-strait service trade pact — although the agenda setting was actually achieved by a show of hands — the groups had set to talk about the “Chinese factor” in the anti-pact demonstration.
Manifestly left-wing, the coalition speakers cautioned protesters against falling for an “ultra-nationalistic sentiment” with a “Taiwan versus China mentality,” and urged them to see the movement as a class struggle pitting the cross-strait capitalists against the employed laborers of both countries.
The class-struggle view that tried to downplay the “Taiwan versus China mindset” was met with remarks saying the view neglects the existing political reality of China not only being a country that follows the road of neo-liberalism, but also as a party-state that has a tight and comprehensive control over its enterprises and economy.
Ad hominem attacks against Chinese were also heard, but were quickly and widely condemned by other participants.
The discussion began on Wednesday night and, as some of those in the previous days, continued well into the small hours the next day.
Despite facing some doubts about the forum’s “baseness” when the talks were weighted with such theory-laden terms as “commercialization,” “bureaucratization” or “people’s commune,” with a listener at one point asking the speaker what he meant by “left-wing,” the forum nevertheless represents one of the many dissenting stances that have enriched and made possible the stunningly vibrant movement.
The morning after he went to the “liberated area,” Lin told reporters, who phrased the recent developments of the movement in terms of “internal divisions,” that there is “no such thing as a fight over the approach.”
He said that as the movement belongs to everybody, rather than phrasing it as “different approaches,” the better way to describe it would be “a concerted attack from different routes.”
Stressing that social activists are highly critical and therefore their criticisms are crucial to the movement, Lin said those in the occupied building would re-evaluate the decisionmaking mechanism and organizational division of labor.
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