If visitors to the National Museum of Taiwan History (國立臺灣歷史博物館) in Tainan learn just one thing from a new exhibition titled Oppression and Overcoming: Social Movements in Post-War Taiwan (迫力破力: 戰後臺灣社會運動特展), it’s that the rights and freedoms the country’s citizens now enjoy didn’t emerge through some process of nature.
“We have [these rights and freedoms] thanks to a lot of people’s efforts,” says Chang Ying-chih (張瀛之), one of four curators who put the exhibition together.
The exhibition — which opened last week and runs until May 17 next year — combines archival images and footage with objects from the museum’s collection, as well as items borrowed from participants in social movements. Much of the interview video footage was recorded specially for the exhibition.
Photo: Steven Crook
DEMOCRACY IN MOTION
Taiwanese living overseas were active in political and social movements throughout the Martial Law period.
The exhibition includes a lithographic machine used by Taiwanese in Belgium to print leaflets and the Voice of Taiwan (台灣之音) cassette tapes through which Taiwanese living in North America shared uncensored news about events in the country. By calling one of more than a dozen telephone numbers, someone in Canada or the US could listen to the latest recorded broadcast.
Photo: Steven Crook
A 1983 first-edition handbook for activists, filled with legal advice for those under arrest, is displayed alongside the current 2015 edition.
Mini-documentaries introduce landmark movements such as the 519 Green Movement (519綠色行動) in the 1980s, when Cheng Nan-jung (鄭南榕) and others demanded an end to Martial Law. One of those captured on film addressing the crowd is a youthful Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), former premier and current Representative to Japan. Another screen shows a farmers’ protest a few years later, during which demonstrators hurled cabbages at the police and then used walking tractors to push back their riot shields.
As Taiwan studies scholar Dafydd Fell pointed out in a March 20, 2014 opinion piece in this newspaper, the government’s restrained response to these demonstrations was “a huge boost for Taiwan’s international image,” especially compared to Beijing’s violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Photo: Steven Crook
“The way in which [then] president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) met Taiwan’s student protesters and engaged with their demands represented a stark contrast. While China chose suppression with tanks, Taiwan chose dialogue and democracy,” Fell wrote.
The section devoted to gender rights and marriage equality is, of course, much more recent, and veteran LGBT rights campaigner Chi Chia-wei (祁家威) was one of the guests-of-honor invited to attend the exhibition’s official opening. Two rainbow telephones on display aren’t artifacts of the struggle for acceptance, however, but devices through which visitors can listen to recorded oral histories of four people talking about their role in the LGBT movement.
The controversy that surrounded the partial demolition of Losheng (Happy Life) Sanatorium (樂生療養院) in New Taipei City in the 2000s was in some ways a watershed moment in the development of civil society in Taiwan. The sanatorium, which was founded during the Japanese colonial period to isolate patients suffering from Hansen’s disease (also known as leprosy), stood in the way of a planned depot for Greater Taipei’s metro system.
Photo: Steven Crook
Activists outraged by the compulsory relocation of elderly patients who’d lived in the sanatorium for decades joined hands with those who thought its unique architecture warranted preservation. One long-time resident, Mao Wan-chih (茆萬枝), made a unique contribution to the fight by building dollhouse-sized models of his neighbors’ homes and wheeling them through the streets of Taipei to raise awareness about what was happening. Several of his model houses are on display here.
The red, white and green flag of the Taiwan Association for the Promotion of Indigenous Rights (台灣原住民族權利促進會) hangs above displays that focus on Aboriginal activism. An impressive recent campaign was led by Mayaw Otaw, an Amis man. In July 2016, he and his supporters walked 721km from Hengchun (恆春) in Pingtung County to Taipei via Taiwan’s east coast, seeking “historical justice” over lands taken from Aboriginal communities long ago.
A significant part of the labor movement display is given over to a dispute between China Airlines and its flight attendants in 2016. Some Taiwanese working less glamorous jobs weren’t especially sympathetic to the flight attendants. Others said the protests only received significant media attention because those taking part were young, attractive females. Chang, however, believes the media coverage galvanized Taiwan’s labor movement and “inspired a lot of labor groups.”
Photo: Steven Crook
“A lot of workers realized that, if you get together, you’ll be much stronger,” she says.
It’s no surprise that the penultimate room of the exhibition is dedicated to the Sunflower movement’s occupation of the Legislative Yuan in 2014. The items here are among more than 7,000 collected and digitized by Academia Sinica, then transferred to the museum.
Many of the most fascinating details in this exhibition haven’t been translated into English, so for international visitors who don’t read Chinese, it could be a glass that’s half-empty. From a local perspective, if anything is missing from this well-presented survey of Taiwan’s social movements, it’s the ongoing campaign being fought by disabled people and their allies for greater accessibility.
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