10 years on: How Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement sowed the seeds of a new civil society

A student protester must be able to chant slogans with an air of certainty. A pragmatic legislator has to navigate the ambiguities of politics. Lin Fei-fan has managed to do both.

Lin, a former leader of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, has been deputy-secretary general of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) since 2019. The DPP in January won an unprecedented third presidential term, and despite its activist origins now represents the establishment. 

Like many DPP politicians, Lin has been fiercely criticised by Beijing. “I just learnt that the Taiwan Affairs Office said I was harming Taiwan,” he told HKFP in late March, referring to the agency in mainland China tasked with handling cross-strait relations. 

In a far cry from his days as a student leader, Lin now wears a suit and appears to be a master of political discourse. He ran for a seat in Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan, in the 2024 elections, although he dropped out after a case of sexual harassment within his team came to light.

On March 18, 2014, though, he was dressed in a khaki jacket and jeans. And rather than trying to get elected to parliament, he and hundreds of other students stormed it. 

They did so to protest an agreement which would have strengthened economic integration between Taiwan and mainland China. On April 6 that year, parliamentary speaker Wang Jin-pyng conceded to the students’ demands: a review of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) would not go ahead until a mechanism for public oversight had been developed. 

“The Sunflower Movement provided an important boost to civil society,” said Dafydd Fell, director of the Centre for Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. “While most protests had been ignored, it showed that the protesters could be successful and achieve at least some of the movement’s core goals.”

Integration anxiety

While the movement set an important precedent internally, it also laid bare the anxiety in society at large over potential integration with Beijing. 

Many people attribute the election of the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen in 2016 to the Sunflower Movement. “It was a major earthquake in the political landscape,” said Ho Ming-sho, a professor of sociology at National Taiwan University and a DPP supporter. “Prior to the movement, there was no expectation that the DPP would come back to power.”

Alexander Huang, Director of International Affairs for the Kuomintang (KMT), the party in power in 2014 and the DPP’s chief rival, agreed. In 2014, the DPP was plagued by corruption scandals and Taipei’s relationship with Beijing was warming up.

“We didn’t expect the rebellion,” said Huang.

Since his party retook the presidency in 2008, rapprochement with China seemed like something on which most people agreed. “In less than six years, 23 agreements with the mainland were signed; the KMT felt like people were going to accept more of them,” he recalled. 

“The main worry at the time was that Taiwan would be sold out by the KMT and we Taiwanese would lose our country and our sovereignty. So that’s the basic reason why people fought against this agreement,” said the DPP’s Lin. 

The CSSTA was one of the two treaties following the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement signed in 2010 by Beijing and Taipei. The service part of the CSSTA raised security concerns: the agreement would have allowed mainland Chinese people to invest easily in Taiwan and bring a maximum of three employees to the island, notably granting them residency and healthcare. “We would have had a flow of migrants; it would have changed Taiwan’s landscape,” said Ho of the NTU. 

Another part revolved around opening up the advertising industry, with protesters fearful that companies reliant on ads, and notably the media, would be subject to Beijing’s pressure. This concern was strongly denied by the KMT. “Taiwan should welcome every type of expression, we can’t stop a country from advertising,” said Lee Suen-cheng, a lawyer at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research and a member of the KMT.

“Welcoming exchanges is the only way to gain influence across the Strait,” Lee said, adding that freedom of speech was guaranteed by the island’s constitution. The KMT still hopes, in the long term, to bring political liberalisation to China. 

While the KMT’s assumption is that more dialogue with the Chinese government is beneficial for Taiwan’s security, the DPP has sought to align the island with Western countries, notably the US. Mainland China, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province to be unified by force if necessary, refuses to communicate with Taipei unless it adheres to Beijing’s One China principle, which the DPP rejects. 

See also: Taiwan unlikely to see ‘full-scale invasion’ by Beijing in next few years, defence expert says

The relationship between the two governments has deteriorated drastically since 2016. Chinese warplanes regularly enter Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone and Beijing exerts economic coercion on Taiwan. 

More hostility towards mainland China

For almost five years now, mainland Chinese citizens have been a rare sight in Taiwan. China in August 2019 banned visits because of political tensions ahead of the Taiwanese elections of January 2020. Covid-19 further reduced exchanges. Today, Taiwanese are allowed into mainland China, but mainland citizens can only visit Taiwan with a student, dependent, or special visa. 

“There is more hostility toward mainland China,” Lee said, when asked what had changed in Taiwan society since the Sunflower Movement. 

DPP supporters, however, see closer links to China as a threat to Taiwan’s democratic system and say the Sunflower Movement saved the island from being swallowed up by the mainland’s economy. “Both sides would have been tied very closely and Taiwan would be at a point of no return,” said the NTU’s Ho. “The KMT falls into a trap set by Beijing, because the economic incentives are for a political purpose.” 

Daniel, a Taiwanese PhD student, told HKFP: “The Sunflower Movement undoubtedly reinforced my Taiwanese identity.” Back in 2014, he was studying Chinese literature but the movement introduced him to sociology and Taiwan’s own history. He now researches the history of Taiwanese social movements.

According to an annual survey by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, people identifying only as Taiwanese – as opposed to Chinese or both Taiwanese and Chinese – rose to 60.6 per cent in 2014. That number has fluctuated over the years but generally gone up since Taiwan democratised in the 1990s. It now stands at 61.7 per cent.  

Parties advocating warmer ties with China still attract significant support. The presidential election victory by the DPP’s Lai Ching-te was in part due to the opposition’s failure to unite behind a single candidate. Some 59 per cent of the voters chose either the KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih or Ko Wen-je of the recently formed Taiwan’s People Party (TPP) over the DPP.

The KMT also won a majority of the seats in the Legislative Yuan, while parties like the New Power Party or the Taiwan State Building Party – founded in the wake of the Sunflower Movement – won none. 

Youth frustration

In the past 10 years, the overall international context has changed dramatically. “The Sunflower students didn’t worry about the intrusions in our Air Defense Identification Zone,” said Huang. “We were in a much more peaceful situation. Young people could be more focused on public affairs. During that movement, there was no China-US trade war, no Trump.” 

Starting this year, the DPP administration has extended the conscription period for young men from four month to one year. In January, many in Gen Z voted for the TPP’s Ko as dissatisfaction with the DPP rose. “My younger students all have a strong sense of Taiwanese identity,” said Huang, who also teaches strategic studies at Tamkang University. “But they are also very frustrated with the DPP, they feel sacrificed by the military reforms, they are afraid they won’t find any good job.” 

During the campaign, the TPP again brought up the CSSTA, advocating a democratic reconsideration of the agreement, while the DPP renewed warnings of its dangers. 

This March 18, only a few hundred people, mostly former protesters, showed up to mark the 10th anniversary of the Sunflower Movement. But to many, this doesn’t mean it has died out. “The Sunflower is an important event that changed the Taiwanese political environment,” said Lin Yen-ting, a photographer and former protester. 

“A careful reading of the DPP’s candidate nomination and campaign messages in 2024 shows that it still is guided by the legacy of the Sunflower Movement,” said Fell of SOAS. Like Lin, some of its leading lights joined the DPP in recent years. More surprisingly, Huang Kuo-chang, a Sunflower leader and a former member of the New Power Party, opted to join the TPP and was elected as a legislator in January.

“The fact that [Ko] chose to nominate one of the three best known Sunflower leaders as a TPP legislator shows the enduring legacy of this movement,” Fell said. 

Overall, the movement provided a real boost to progressive activism in Taiwan and to a sense of its distinctiveness. A few weeks after the Sunflower Movement, anti-nuclear protests erupted in Taiwan. In 2019 Taiwan legalised same-sex marriage, the first place in Asia to do so. And even traditionally conservative parties like the KMT were forced to become more attuned to what younger people are thinking. 

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