ABSTRACT
On 18 March of 2014, a group of students and civil society organization (CSO) activists broke into the building of the Legislative Yuan (LY) in Taiwan and then occupied the assembly hall for more than three weeks to protest against the passing of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) in the legislature. This is the famous 318 Sunflower Movement, better known as the Sunflower Movement. This chapter argues that the occupation of the LY, which was dominated by the action of students, was not merely a student movement (Wright 2014: 193) or a student-led movement (Romberg 2014: 2). Actually, and more importantly, it was a culmination of a long series of contentions and a confluence of diverse streams of many CSOs in the past few years. These CSOs that flocked together in the Sunflower Movement were originally of very different backgrounds, both in terms of the issues they were concerned with and in the major ideas or ideology that drove them. It was the multiple impacts of the ‘China factor’ that actually brought them eventually together and made the Sunflower Movement possible. The Sunflower Movement, therefore, should be understood as a collective self-defence by Taiwan’s civil society against the multiple impacts of the ‘China factor’, and the Janus-faced ‘China factor’ in the Sunflower Movement has allowed the CSOs to develop a wider and closer solidarity network.
