Sunflower Movement Research Articles

Why did Taiwanese Youth Protest in 2014? Emergence of protests from the Perspective of Mobilization Structures and Shared Grievances

The purpose of the paper is to restudy the reasons for youth activism in Taiwan in 2014, which led to the so-called Sunflower Movement. The study is based on desk research and semi-structured interviews and expert interviews conducted by the authors, and in the framework of the Daybreak Project. Additionally the analysis on the social media posts during the movement was conducted. Data were analyzed through the Bert Klandermans’ model on reasons for collective mobilization. The supply side of mobilization was divided into the role of mobilizing structures and the appeal. The demand side was analyzed through: sociopolitical characteristics of the participants; social embeddedness; shared grievances and shared emotions; group identification. The paper assumes that participation in the protests was a result of mobilizational structures – student discussion groups and the sense that the authorities were violating procedural justice principles – mainly in connection with the processing of the CSSTA.

Deliberation in Social Movement:A Comparison of the D-Street in the Sunflower Movement and the General Assembly in the Wild Strawberry Movement

Deliberation in Social Movement:A Comparison of the D-Street in the Sunflower Movement and the General Assembly in the Wild Strawberry Movement

In Times of Political Crisis, Why People Support the Police: Police Legitimacy in Taiwan

The current research examines the support for the police during a political crisis. Relying on a random sample collected from the Taipei metropolitan area a month after the Sunflower Movement in 2014, we have found that perceived police legitimacy functioned well, whereas the political party preference, a proxy measure of powerholder legitimacy, exerts the strongest positive impact on the support for the police during the crisis. We conclude that political orientation structures perceived legitimacy and sustains the support for the police during the social movement. In addition, policing by virtue, an alternative model of democratic policing is discussed within the context of Taiwan. The study leads us to believe that the Confucian culture is not destined to be authoritarian and violent, but is capable of regenerating itself as an alternative form of democratic policing, and possibly more broadly, governance.

Political trust and attitudes toward civil disobedience: evidence from Taiwan

ABSTRACT While civil disobedience has been widely studied by political theorists, little scholarly attention has been paid to empirical investigation of civil disobedience. This study represents one of the very few attempts to examine the determinants of individual attitudes toward civil disobedience. This study examines the relationship between political trust and sense of civil disobedience and argues that people with higher levels of political trust exhibit lower levels of civil disobedience because they tend to feel satisfied with the political system and have less incentive to challenge the government. Using two original datasets collected immediately after the Red Shirt Movement in 2006 and the Sunflower Movement in 2014 in Taiwan, this study consistently finds a negative relationship between political trust and individual attitudes toward civil disobedience, implying that political trust plays an important role in decreasing individual motivation to disobey the laws or the government. Besides, this study finds that people supporting the opposition camp have higher levels of civil disobedience, whereas those supporting the incumbent’s camp display lower levels of civil disobedience. This suggests that an individual’s level of civil disobedience depends on which party is in power. Overall, this study provides new insights into the basis for civil disobedience.

Photojournalism and Social Movement as “Theatre”: A Critical Reading of “The Sunflower Movement” Photographs

Photojournalism and Social Movement as “Theatre”: A Critical Reading of “The Sunflower Movement” Photographs

Caught between two superpowers: Taiwan's left in an age of US-China tensions

Taiwan's major social movements in the past decade were reacting against the possibility of Taiwan's democratic freedoms being lost to China or its domestic proxies. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), currently led by Tsai Ing-wen, have challenged the Kuomintang for power, but have not been able to move beyond the binary of for or against independence. The Sunflower movement and 'Third Force' parties sought to create a space for left and democratic politics, but this appears to be closing down. The Trumpian figure of Han Kuo-yu has been a major problem for the left. There is no easy way out of these dilemmas in an era characterised by increasing US-China tensions.

Free Speech and Social Movements — Demonstration by Occupation in a Democracy

Protest by occupation of public spaces has been a feature of 21st century activism around the world. The Occupy movement, ‘Arab Spring’, Occupy Central in Hong Kong and the Sunflower movement in Taiwan have sparked popular interest in such demonstrations. However, there has been relatively little legal analysis of American occupation-based protests and the role of social movements in a democracy. The article takes the Occupy movement as its case study, examining intermediate court Occupy cases to show how political expression is limited by the US Supreme Court’s free speech principles. It argues that First Amendment free speech principles are ill-suited to protecting the protest activities characteristic of contemporary social movements, and should be revised. The article is interdisciplinary, drawing on the work of well-known social scientist Charles Tilly. It is presented in three parts. The first explains Tilly’s theory of a social movement, then focusses on the intersection between social movement campaigns and the right to free speech. The second part analyses the definitions of freedom of speech developed by the US Supreme Court, relying on Tilly’s work to show that the definitions do not fully recognise the expressive nature of social movements. The failure of the intermediate court Occupy cases can be explained by the courts’ inability to appreciate the significance of occupation-based protest, due to their reliance on the Supreme Court doctrine. The third part contends that Supreme Court principles need to be revised to fully recognise the contribution of the social movement to American public discourse. The article contributes to the journal theme by providing an analysis of the role of today’s social movements as agents of change. It highlights the opportunities for those movements—and the limits on them—to bring about social change through free speech litigation.

Remaking higher education for the post‐COVID‐19 era: Critical reflections on marketization, internationalization and graduate employment

This Special Issue was conceived and developed following a series of international conferences held in Asia, with a particular focus on critically reflecting upon higher education development in the region from broader social and political economy perspectives. Some of the papers in this Special Issue were selected from presentations in the East Asia Social Policy (EASP) Research Network Conference successfully held in Taiwan in 2018, while others were chosen from international events held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong presenting critical reviews and reflections on internationalization, marketization and graduate employment of higher education in Asia. This introductory article puts the discussions of the selected papers in this issue in context, with critical reflections on the key issues being examined in these papers. The Special Issue is published when the world is still confronting the unprecedented global health crisis resulted from the outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article discusses the higher education development trends in Asia through the massification, diversification and internationalisation processes in transforming the higher education system and examines how these development trends are affected by the COVID‐19 crisis.

Ho, Ming-sho: Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Article Ho, Ming-sho: Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement was published on September 1, 2020 in the journal Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques (volume 74, issue 3).

Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. By Ming-Sho Ho. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+269. $104.50 (cloth); 39.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewChallenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. By Ming-Sho Ho. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+269. $104.50 (cloth); 39.95 (paper).Xi ChenXi ChenChinese University of Hong Kong Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 126, Number 2September 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/710125 Views: 155Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Can the Young Adults Speak? Poetry from the Sunflower and Umbrella Movements

This article explores political aspirations of young adults of Taipei and Hong Kong by analysing the poems written during the Sunflower Movement and the Umbrella Movement. Poetry is a vehicle to convey ideas to the audience. Reading these poems from Taipei and Hong Kong, one can notice several distinctive characteristics. First, the poets have established a broad dichotomy: the upper and the lower, violence and resistance, eloquence and silence, lies and truth, and hypocrisy and morality. Second, poetry is a field for multiplicity. Focusing more on everyday practices, sometimes vulgar, filthy, and obscene, these poems correspond to Bakhtin’s theory of carnival in which wordplay, mimicry, and irony open a space for renewal and rebirth. Additionally, Derrida’s concept of dissemination can help to examine the linguistic slippage that indirectly subverts authority. After investigating protest poetry, the author asks if the young adults can speak. The youth’s voices can definitely be heard when it comes to the concept of “the democracy to come”. The “democracy to come,” conceptualised by Derrida to replace the notion of the future, cannot be reduced to a simple idea, but remains unpredictable, so as to allow itself always to be full of possibilities.

Democratizing politics and politicizing education: Critical pedagogy for active citizenship in the Taiwanese Sunflower Movement

This article is the first to employ a Freirean framework to discuss the Taiwanese Sunflower Student Movement and its political, pedagogical and social significance. We analyse lecturers’ and students’ perspectives and experiences of civic responsibility in order to explore the relationship between critical pedagogy and student participation in the movement. The latter is an important development in politics and student activism, as it touched the lives of an entire generation of young Taiwanese and highlighted the value of active citizenship in the fight to improve democracy as praxis for social justice. This article makes a threefold contribution: first, it adds to our understanding of the processes through which movement participants cultivate their critical consciousness; second, it offers a new angle on a politically significant moment in Taiwanese history; and third, it uses this movement to illuminate forms of oppression that exist in society and education and ways to transform it.

Untangling Taiwan’s Hybridity With Structural Dysfunctions

Taiwan’s exceptionally high Internet penetration and social media adoption rates, combined with the growing centrality of digital tools and networks in shaping national politics, make it an interesting case for Internet researchers. This essay considers Andrew Chadwick’s notion of The Hybrid Media System in the context of recent political events in Taiwan. While Chadwick’s analysis is particularly useful in understanding political anomalies like the Sunflower Movement, we argue for the value of considering more substantial long-standing structural issues in attempts to understanding the political media landscape in Taiwan. Using the examples of online astroturfing during political campaigns and the spread of disinformation during the Kansai airport incident, we point out that long-standing structural factors such as the dysfunctional practices of journalists in newsrooms, the clear political slants of media in accordance with media ownership, and the traditional political power rooted in the society hold enduring sway on how politics is mediated.

Social Movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong

We propose the logic of communitive action to analyze digitally networked social movements. Through an examination of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, we offer an explanatory framework of community consciousness that elucidates a new type of leadership, and discuss crowdsourcing as a supplement to the theory of social movements in the digital age.

Book review: Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Book review: Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

From unionism to youth activism: Taiwan’s politics of working hours

This article examines two major protests related to working-hour reforms in Taiwan in 2000 and 2016–18, paying particular attention to the shift in the composition of protesters from union members to youth activists. The decline in mass membership and the failure to consolidate a national federation have diminished the political presence of labour unions. The emergence of youth protest movements, both before and after the 2014 Sunflower Movement, made possible the advent of Taiwan’s youth as political actors. The reconfiguration of Taiwan’s working hour politics has paralleled the global transition from the classical organization-based collective action to the digitally enabled ‘connective action’. The concluding section provides reflections on the impacts as well as the limitations of this newer form of labour politics.

Communication Battles on Facebook in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

Many have suggested that communication on social media could mobilize participation in social movements. Often overlooked is the use of social media communication by opponents of social movements to counteract the change advocated. Collecting data from the Facebook Graph API, this study examines both types of communication on public pages of Facebook in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan in 2014. It analyzes the content of public messages (1,389 from Hong Kong and 999 from Taiwan) collected on 10 pro- and neutral/anti-movement pages in each movement to study the framing process of the movements in the flow of communication. Changes in frames from posts to comments and then replies provide evidence of frame contestation, which are discussed in terms of counter-framing by counter-movements in online social networks. This is the first comparative study of communication in social movements of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Review: Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement by Ming-sho Ho

Review: <i>Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement</i> by Ming-sho Ho

HOW PUBLIC OPINION SHAPES TAIWAN'S SUNFLOWER MOVEMENT

AbstractThe 2014 Sunflower Movement succeeded in blocking Taiwan's Congress from ratifying the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA), a bill that proposed to liberalize trade with China. Since most of the participants in this movement were students and NGO members, they had limited economic and political resources to influence policy change, which makes their success in stopping a trade deal remarkable. Many attribute this important success to an elite alliance with politicians inside the government, fueled by a personal rivalry between political elites. However, I argue that changing public opinion is the more important force behind the creation of the alliance. With original data from interviews with political elites, their staff members, and activists in Taiwan, in addition to secondary information, I confirm public opinion to be the major reason for the political alliance. This case illustrates that in some circumstances, public opinion outweighs the importance of elite rivalry in influencing political elite decision-making, and it could represent a key mechanism of democratic policy-making.

COMMENT: WHY WAS THE SUNFLOWER MOVEMENT SUCCESSFUL?

COMMENT: WHY WAS THE SUNFLOWER MOVEMENT SUCCESSFUL?