[外媒] Taiwan’s Sunflower Protests: A Q&A with Shelley Rigger
http://goo.gl/CLQlRp
這篇文章在用Q&A的方式向讀者介紹太陽花學運，文章很長，有興趣的請自行閱讀
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom - April 11, 2014
Twenty-five years ago this month, a student-led mass movement began in
Beijing that would capture the attention of the world and lend wide
recognition to the name “Tiananmen Square,” the site of important Chinese
government buildings, revolutionary shrines, and the struggle’s largest
rallies. As the quarter-century anniversary of that protest—and the June 4
massacre that crushed it—drew near, it was student-led demonstrations across
the Taiwan straits that made headlines. Their main gathering place was in
Taipei, where activists occupied not a plaza near official buildings but a
government complex itself.
To help explain the causes and meaning of the protests in Taiwan, and how
they can best be compared, contrasted, and connected to the famous Chinese
struggle of 1989, I’ve turned to Shelley Rigger of Davidson College, a
political scientist, Taiwan expert, and author of Why Taiwan Matters: Small
Island, Global Powerhouse (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
Ed. note: This interview took place before protesters ended their occupation
of the legislature yesterday. A number of the issues they raised remain
unresolved, and organizers assert that the Sunflower Movement will continue.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom: First off, can you give a quick run-down of what
triggered the protests in Taipei? What is the main concern or grievance of
those who took to the streets and then occupied the Legislative Yuan?
Shelley Rigger: The protesters have substantive grievances, but the catalyst
for taking over the legislative chamber was a procedural problem, so let’s
start there. The legislature was reviewing an agreement Taiwan had
negotiated with Beijing to open trade in services between Taiwan and
mainland China (they’re already huge trading partners, but service companies
are limited in what they can do). The majority party—the KMT, which also
controls the executive branch—had promised to subject the agreement to a
line-by-line review. During that process the minority party—the Democratic
Progressive Party, or DPP—used disruptive tactics to slow things down. On
March 18 the KMT legislator in charge of the review lost patience and moved
for a vote in the full legislature. That’s when the students stormed into
the legislature and blocked the doors. They’ve been there ever since, though
as I write this on April 7, there is word that, having secured concessions
on some demands, they will be leaving later this week.
In short, the immediate cause of the crisis was the breakdown of the review
process the KMT had promised. The students accuse the KMT of overriding the
democratic process to ram through legislation. But obviously there’s more
to it than that. We need to ask why this particular piece of legislation was
so sensitive.
JW: Okay, why exactly did it hit a nerve?
SR: At the heart of the crisis—and given that the students, even if they
leave on Thursday, will have spent over three weeks occupying Taiwan’s
legislature, it surely qualifies as a crisis—is Taiwanese people’s deep
anxiety about their relationship with the People’s Republic of China. The
PRC’s position is that Taiwan is part of China, and that it needs to be
unified with the PRC politically, one way or another, but no one in Taiwan
is eager to see that happen. Taiwanese feel themselves to be a distinct
society—many would even say nation—from the PRC, and they don’t want to
change their political system or become subject to leadership from Beijing.
So they are hypersensitive to moves that seem likely to bring that outcome
closer, and trade agreements fall into that category.
JW: Is there more to it than this?
SR: There’s also a substantive critique to be made. The trade in services
agreement is the latest in a series of trade pacts between the two sides.
Most of them are pretty favorable to Taiwan, on balance, because Beijing is
hoping to generate goodwill toward the mainland. Still, they’re like any
other trade agreements: they have winners and losers, and the losers tend to
be people who are already losing out economically. So while the net result
may be positive for Taiwan’s GDP, if most of the benefits go to those who
are already wealthy, while the losses accrue to the working class, it makes
sense that a lot of Taiwanese would oppose the pacts. But it’s not an open
and shut case—even the minority party is not opposed to the agreement, just
certain parts of it.
The students occupying the legislature are motivated by all three of these
concerns: worries about the KMT using its majority to enact legislation
without due deliberation; fear that the PRC will use trade agreements as
Trojan horses to influence Taiwan politically; and dissatisfaction with
trade policies that hurt the middle and working class.
JW: Why has it come to be called the “Sunflower Movement,” and is that the
only name for it?
SR: Taiwan has had a series of student movements since the beginning of its
democratization process. In the early 1990s it was the Wild Lily movement.
The Wild Lilies built a giant flower, like an Easter lily blossom, to
emulate the Goddess of Democracy statue erected in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
About ten years ago there was another student movement, the Wild
Strawberries. That one was a really clever name: they were referencing the
popular stereotype of Taiwanese youth as the “Strawberry Tribe”—nice to look
at, but soft and quick to rot. This year’s group is following that same
pattern—calling themselves Wild Sunflowers, with the idea that sunflowers
represent transparency.
JW: Is the takeover of the Legislative Yuan the most important thing that
has happened in the struggle so far? Is it an unprecedented act or something
that has happened before? And what’s the symbolic significance of occupying
that particular building?
SR: This is a new tactic. Taiwan has seen plenty of demonstrations in the
past, but no one has occupied government buildings before. I actually find
this development worrying, because it is reinforcing the sense that Taiwan’s
democratic institutions are incapable of providing representation and
governance. The students are claiming to embody democracy, but in fact it’s
not clear how many people agree with them. People admire them, but I’m not
convinced their demands have widespread support. The legislators whom they
are preventing from working were elected, and the elections were generally
clean, fair, and competitive. Maybe people would vote differently today, but
if we start down that road of overthrowing elections if we don’t like
the results, democracy is in trouble. No outcome would please the PRC more
than for Taiwanese to decide that democracy doesn’t work.
JW: Sticking to the chain of events, what stands out to you most so far as
surprising or special, whether about the tactics protesters have used, the
social composition of the demonstrations, or the way the authorities have
responded?
SR: I think it’s extraordinary that this is still going on, and it
illustrates the degree to which Taiwanese politicians give deference to
student movements. Students are a privileged group in politics—they are
assumed to be pure, not motivated by personal gain or ambition. The fact
that this crisis has dragged on three weeks might be surprising to people in
other countries, where protesters routinely get hauled away after a few
hours, but in Taiwan, even people who don’t agree with their goals can
admire their conviction. Breaking up the demonstration would be extremely
costly to the KMT.
JW: I began with referring to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen
protests across the straits, but that may just be because that is on my mind
as I’m preparing to take part in upcoming workshops on 1989 (in Ann Arbor
and Philadelphia). Are there parallels or links worth thinking about? Are
there things that make them radically dissimilar, given such obvious
differences as Taiwan being a multiparty state? One thing on my mind are the
demonstrations that took place in Taiwan in the wake of the Tiananmen
upsurge, which some have argued—most notably Theresa Wright in The Perils of
Protest—were related or at least worth placing beside the more famous
events that unfolded in Beijing and many other mainland cities in 1989.
SR: One thing that seems very parallel is this special status for students
in politics. Back in ’89, the CCP was at great pains to avoid shedding
students’ blood, and after the crackdown they spent what seemed to many
foreign observers an inordinate amount of effort refuting accusations that
students had died. They had no problem admitting the army killed lots of
workers and ordinary Beijing residents, but to this day, they deny that
student protesters were killed. The reason is that students really are a
protected political category.
But obviously, there are limits to what even student protesters can do. We
saw that in Taiwan last month when a second group of activists—not
coordinated with the first—rushed into executive branch offices near the
legislature. Unlike a legislature, which (as we’ve seen in the United
States) can be shut down for weeks without easily discernible consequences
for society, executive agencies need to function. Those demonstrators were
rousted in a hurry, and not gently.
I really doubt the Taiwanese students are paying a lot of attention to the
Tiananmen anniversary. For them, the Tiananmen crisis happened in a foreign
country. It is a data point helping justify why they don’t want to be
annexed to the PRC, but it’s not part of their history or experience. They
are fighting for their own future, for their own homeland, which is Taiwan.
JW: Can you tell us what you are keeping an eye on in particular, a move
that seems likely by protesters or their opponents, something to be prepared
for?
SR: To bring these demonstrations to an end, the students will need to
yield. They will need to accept something short of unconditional surrender.
The speaker of the legislature has already promised to not allow any more
trade agreements to be considered until there is a new law governing the
process of making and reviewing those agreements. Will that be enough?
Precisely because the students have this reputation and image as being
politically pure, it’s very hard for them to compromise—just as it’s hard
for them to participate in electoral politics, even though ultimately that’s
what they’ll have to do if they want to change the direction of the
political system. If they were doing something on campus or even in a public
square downtown, there wouldn’t be any urgency, and they could take their
time figuring all this out. But it’s hard not to think they stormed into the
legislature without an exit strategy, and that’s scary, because they can’t
stay there forever.
JW: It’s obvious that this is important to Taiwan, and to the PRC. Is there
any larger resonance to these demonstrations?
SR: To me, what’s really important about these demonstrations—and the
debates over PRC-Taiwan economic ties in general—is what they say about
globalization and “free trade.”
Taiwan is not that different from other postindustrial democracies. It is
suffering from widening income inequality, slow growth, wage stagnation,
unemployment, inflated housing prices—all the problems we see in the United
States, Europe, Japan. The difference is that it’s very easy for Taiwanese
to view these problems as consequences of their dependence on the Chinese
economy. Ironically, the existence of a clear political threat allows them
to be less blinded than people in other countries by a neoliberal ideology
that says these pathologies are inevitable and that there’s nothing
governments can do about them. Because China looms so large for them, both
economically and politically, they have been able to brush aside the
obfuscations and learned helplessness that are immobilizing their
counterparts in other countries and demand that their government protect
them.
On the other hand, it’s really not China that’s driving Taiwan’s economic
malaise—it’s globalization and twenty-first-century capitalism. So I’m not
sure that refusing to integrate further with the PRC economy will solve
their problems, but I admire them for standing up and saying, “Stop!”
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine and
author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to
Know.
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