The Sunflower Movement: How a Student-Led Occupation Transformed the Nation

On Wednesday, February 14, the Center for Taiwan Studies, the Center for East Asia Studies, and the Clements-Strauss Asia Policy Program will host an event on “The Sunflower Movement: How a Student-Led Occupation Transformed the Nation”. Join us at 5:00 PM in the Meyerson Conference Room (WCH 4.118).

The 2014 Sunflower Movement, a 24-day student-led occupation of Taiwan’s legislature and its surrounding area, was the largest social movement in Taiwan’s history. A protest against the near-passage of a trade deal with China, the movement transformed Taiwan’s political culture and redirected its geopolitical trajectory. Marking the upcoming ten-year anniversary of the movement, this personal eyewitness account will clarify its causes, offer a tour of the occupation sites and their social and spatial structure, and examine its lasting impacts.

*A reception will follow the event at 6:30 PM

Ian Rowen is Associate Professor in the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the author of One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell University Press, 2022), and the editor of Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror (Cambria Press, 2021). Previously an assistant professor of Geography and Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, he earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Asia Policy Program is a joint effort of the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law.