Sunflower Movement Research Paper

Sunflower Movement as the significant milestone in the democratization of Taiwan. "Sunflower" means the symbol of hope and it is also a connotation of Wild Lily student movement in 1990 (Sui, 2015). Sunflower Movement is the protest driven by a group of young generation of Taiwanese which are students and civic groups. The movement is mainly reaching out to the young generation of Taiwanese. Black Island Nation Youth Front and Citizen 1985 are the two main student activist groups. They ask for self-restrain and peaceful demonstration among the Taiwanese young adults for this Sunflower Movement, so the street protestation creates a strong sense of serenity and is marked by propriety and peacefulness that is different from the civil demonstration
Why is these youngsters? The young generations worry about the global competition and job security if Taiwan's government compromise everything with China. The young are worried about their future in career field and dissatisfied with the available number of qualified jobs and decreasing of salary. According to TISR (2014), 50.4% of respondents worried about CSSTA would bring influence to their jobs or business and 42.2% worried that CSSTA would cause Taiwan's situation same with Hong Kong. Plus, the 21st era young generations are exposed to free and democratic society in Taiwan that which is totally different with their parent's life. So, they might have different perspectives and higher expectation of democracy. The older generations (parents or grandparents generation) did not support integration of independence as they prefer to maintain the status quo. Instead of preserving the status quo, what play in the youngster mind is maintaining the status quo would inevitably accelerate the pace of reintegration with mainland China. The old generations want to have free speech and voting right for their term of democracy; whilst, apparently, the actions of young Taiwanese nowadays have shown that they want more than these, they are dauntless to make any effort to achieve their expectations of democracy. Sui (2015) gave a statistic that about 90% of students in junior and senior-high school
Despite the yawning gap of political contention between Taiwan and China, China is Taiwan's top trade partner, accounting for approximately 40 percent or about $130 billion of exports annually (Yan, 2015). Moreover, Taiwan has invested billions of dollars in the mainland China (Jiang, 2015). Taiwan increased the number of mainland tourists it allows, thus the tourism industry on this island flourishing. There are many flights go and return between this two states daily. From the report of Jiang (2015)，millions of tourists from mainland China float into Taiwan after the resumption of direct flights although they do not accept each other's passports. Undeniably, Taiwanese's economy and livelihoods are intertwined with China's