The student-led Sunflower movement lasted for 23 days, from when the protesters first entered the Legislative Yuan in Taipei at 9pm on March 18 to the time they peacefully withdrew from the chamber, victorious, on Thursday last week at 6pm.
The movement will almost certainly be written about in history books and future generations will make of it what they will. History will judge whether it is successful.
Those who were there when the movement was happening can compare and assess the roles played by the four main players: the students, the authorities, the media and the criminal underworld.
One can look first at the nonviolent party — the students — and their actions. Colliding with a crippled, moribund system, and trying to rein in what they saw as out-of-control legislators, the students took it upon themselves to occupy the legislature.
They did this not for themselves, nor for any political party: They were motivated by pure and lofty ideals that stand up to scrutiny. Some feel that their behavior was criminal, while others believe they should be lauded for trying to protect democracy and justice. However the students are judged in the courts, history will be the final arbiter.
At the very least, Taiwanese can look back on the student movement and say that it was peaceful. This is difficult to refute. Were the slogans of the movement non-peaceful?
They objected to the lack of transparency in government and to the cross-strait service trade agreement in its present incarnation. They also wanted to see legislation of an oversight mechanism for cross-strait agreements before the review of the trade pact continues.
When the police at the legislature changed shifts, the students made way, applauded them and gave words of encouragement and empathy. Was this violent? Or when they raised their hands and called on the police to withdraw? When students and other demonstrators locked arms as they sat on the ground, trying to resist the police’s attempts to remove them using water cannons, was this violent?
On the afternoon of March 27, the leaders of the movement, Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) and Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), called a press conference in which they said 100,000 people, all dressed in black, would take to the streets on March 30 to join a march along Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei.
Sure enough, three days later, people turned up on the streets, all dressed in black, but there were not 100,000; there were five times that many. These people came in answer to the students’ call. They were not mobilized by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). To say that the DPP’s hand was behind this is to give the party too much credit; to say that it was people acting like sheep is to give Taiwanese too little.
It would be closer to the mark to say that the outpouring of support was in response to a feeling of empathy with the peaceful protest, as well as a denunciation of the use of state violence against the splinter group that tried to occupy the Executive Yuan on March 23. The nonviolent spirit of the movement was reflected in the 500,000-strong march that Sunday. Nobody was hurt, and as soon as the time for the march to end came, people dispersed in a peaceful, orderly fashion within 20 minutes, leaving behind no trash.
This year, it is the state that was disorderly, not the students.
Next, consider the exercise of state power. In dealing with the unarmed protesters who forced their way into the Executive Yuan compound, it was fine for the riot police charged with removing them to “tap them on the shoulder and advise them to leave,” to quote Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺); it was also OK to frog-march the students off the premises. It was even acceptable for authorities to bodily remove them, carrying demonstrators by their arms and legs.
Sending in the water cannon, however, was disproportionate and heavy-handed. Clouting people with riot shields, drawing blood, breaking teeth with truncheons, encircling students with riot shields or dragging them into side streets and beating them — if these actions are not examples of state violence, then what are they?
When everyone has a camera on their phone, it is difficult to keep this kind of state violence under wraps. The Internet has made it impossible for the state to try and project a vision of utopia.
Next to be scrutinized are the media. The media are allowed to have their editorial lines, but that does not mean they can divert from the truth. It goes without saying that media outlets cannot tell blatant lies and mislead their audience, reneging on their sacred role as the fourth estate. Back when they functioned merely as the mouthpiece of autocrats and dictators, local media would revel in labeling all political dissidents as communist sympathizers in bed with Beijing.
Nowadays, of course, large swaths of the media are exactly that, being pro-China — how short some memories are — and these sections of the press went out of their way to paint the Sunflower movement “DPP green” and even — why stop there — accuse individuals among them of lewd behavior in public.
These outlets deliberately chose to report the news in a biased, narrow way and seem to have forgotten that the nation is no longer under a dictatorship that will not countenance dissent.
Media outlets are welcome to have their own perspective on events, but not to the extent that the general public cannot hold a different view. Public trust in the media — with its political biases — has never been as low as it is now, when everyone has a camera and a comment.
Finally, there are the gangsters. On April 1, former gang leader and fugitive Chang An-le (張安樂), also known as the “White Wolf,” led a group of several hundred people to the stretch of road outside the Legislative Yuan and proceeded to attempt to intimidate the students sitting quietly outside, using coarse language.
During the time they were there, a student was beaten and some people were heard shouting death threats. Some members of the media captured this on camera, but it seems that neither the police nor Minister of Justice Luo Ying-shay (羅瑩雪) saw or heard anything. They certainly did not do anything about it.
However, none of these threats had the desired effect and the student-led demonstrators refused to cave in.
It was an embarrassing episode that backfired on the authorities by opening them to accusations that they supported criminal elements in society and that the underworld is in favor of the cross-strait service trade agreement.
Chang arranged this assembly of people in public without first applying for a permit and the police did nothing to break up his gathering. All of this seems to corroborate the widely held belief that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is corrupt. It is a grave situation, for if the underworld supports the pact, that is no real matter, but if the establishment supports criminals, the nation faces a far more serious issue.
The Sunflower movement, peaceful in itself, has thrown all kinds of nasty aspects about Taiwanese society into focus.
On April 6, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) assured the students he would not convene a meeting of party caucuses to discuss the service trade pact until legislation on draft regulations governing oversight of cross-strait agreements had been completed, finally bringing the Sunflower movement to a peaceful conclusion.
This ending proves one thing: A peaceful movement is a more powerful force than the criminal underworld, the prejudiced media and the suppressive state.
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired National Hsinchu University of Education associate professor and a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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