The Many Afterlives of the Sunflower Movement?
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
- Venue
- Main Building, SOAS University of London, 10 Thornhaugh St, London WC1H 0XG
- Room
- Djam Lecture Theatre (DLT)
About this event
The Sunflower Movement will soon approach its ten years anniversary next year.
Since then, one has seen a number of major shifts in Taiwanese political life, including the DPP under Tsai Ing-wen winning the presidency in 2016, which also proved the first time that a non-KMT political party held the majority in the Taiwanese legislature.
The DPP is sometimes seen as sweeping to power on the basis of momentum after the movement, with the movement seen as marking the entrance into politics of a generation of Taiwanese young people. That being said, in the years since 2014, one has seen the eclipse of third party projects that originated out of the Sunflower Movement, as well as criticisms of the “commodification” of the movement as a brand.
As we near years on, then, are we entering a “post-Sunflower” period? Or is that the movement has had a number of unexpected afterlives, which point to its continued influence?
Speaker's Biography
Brian Hioe
Brian Hioe is one of the founding editors of New Bloom, an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific, founded in Taiwan in 2014 in the wake of the Sunflower Movement.
He is a freelance journalist, as well as a translator. Hioe has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018 and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the University of Nottingham's Taiwan Studies Programme.