2015-03-18
Protesters rally outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, March 18, 2015.
RFA
Demonstrators in Taiwan on Wednesday staged a public rally to mark the first anniversary of their “Sunflower Movement” occupation of parliamentary buildings in protest over proposed closer trade ties with mainland China and amid fears of Beijing’s growing influence in the island’s political life.
Hundreds of mostly student protesters rallied outside the Legislative Yuan in downtown Taipei, calling on Taiwan’s nationalist Kuomintang (KMT)-led government not to sign any deals with Beijing ahead of presidential elections in 2016.
The anniversary comes amid fears that China is seeking to extend its soft power and economic influence in Taiwan in the wake of the movement, which occupied executive and legislative government buildings for several weeks in March 2014.
Activists are now demanding legislation to prevent any more deals being struck with China in secret, in particular ahead of next year’s presidential elections in Taiwan. By law, KMT President Ma Ying-jeou is not permitted to run for a third term.
Rally spokesman Lai Chung-chiang told the crowd that the law should be passed by the end of this year.
“This law would be aimed at preventing Ma from selling out Taiwan’s interests to China,” Lai said as he addressed the crowd.
Presidential spokesman Charles Chen said the government was willing to listen to opinions from all sectors of society.
“We have an open-minded attitude to dialogue with civil society groups,” Chen told reporters. “President Ma himself took part in a student movement when he was young.”
But he added: “Young people should carry out their movements in a rational and peaceful manner.”
Occupation protest
Protesters who occupied the government’s administrative headquarters, the Executive Yuan, on March 23, 2014 were evicted the next day following clashes with more than 1,000 riot police who deployed water cannon and baton charges against them, despite their lack of resistance.
Former student leader Chen Wei-ting said on Wednesday that the students’ presentation of the second occupation as spontaneous and unconnected to the legislature protest had been a mistake.
“The tacit agreement we had at the time was that we would present the two occupations as separate, independent protests, but this has since been seen as a harmful decision,” Chen told RFA at the anniversary rally.
“We think that this decision was overly naive and wrong,” Chen said. “Our verdict on the Executive Yuan incident is that we didn’t think it through carefully enough.”
Six months later, the Sunflower Movement was followed by the student-led Occupy Central pro-democracy in Hong Kong, which brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets at its height, as part of a campaign for fully democratic elections in 2017.
Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement occupied major highways for more than two months, but ultimately failed to move Beijing over popular demands for fully democratic elections in 2017.
The former British colony, where China-linked business interests can be threatened by a pro-democracy stance, is often cited by Taiwanese activists as an example of the potential loss of freedoms of expression, self-determination and a democratic future under Beijing’s influence, however indirect.
