A Hundred Flowers Bloom

Around the time of martial law's lifting, long-suppressed social energy erupted like a volcano. Labor movements pushed back against the state-controlled Chinese Federation of Labor and founded autonomous unions in shipyards, railways, and electronics plants; farmers' movements organized island-wide road blockades against agricultural liberalization; environmental protection movements stopped the construction of petrochemical complexes and documented industrial pollution with amateur cameras; women's movements built the first rape crisis hotlines and campaigned for equal inheritance; and indigenous rights movements demanded the rewriting of textbooks and the return of ancestral lands — various social movements blossomed across the island within just a few years, fundamentally transforming Taiwan's social landscape.

The 520 Farmers' Movement of May 20, 1988 brought tens of thousands of farmers to Taipei to protest import liberalization under U.S. pressure, leading to a violent nighttime clash outside the Legislative Yuan and the largest single-day mass arrest since the Kaohsiung Incident. The Hakka "Return My Mother Tongue" movement of 1988, marching beneath banners of Sun Yat-sen remade in Hakka script, demanded an end to the Mandarin-only broadcasting policy and the restoration of Hakka in schools and media; the indigenous peoples' name rectification movement fought through three waves of demonstrations for the right to use their own names on ID cards and for the legal renaming of the official category from "mountain compatriots" to "indigenous peoples." Each of these campaigns demonstrated the pursuit of justice and rights by different social groups.

These movements not only challenged unjust systems left over from the authoritarian era — a state-run single union federation, Mandarin-only classrooms, the casual seizure of indigenous land for national parks and timber concessions, a household registration system that denied women their birth names — but redefined Taiwan's public agenda around citizenship, cultural pluralism, and accountability. Their intellectual scaffolding was built in the new independent magazines and NGOs of the late 1980s; their activists would populate the legislative staff, university faculties, and city governments of the democratic era.

This volume presents the vibrant panorama of social movements during Taiwan's democratization period, documenting how various social forces — farmers, workers, women, Hakka, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, student activists — fought for their rights and dignity amid the wave of democratic transformation, and how their overlapping campaigns wove the dense civil-society fabric that still distinguishes Taiwan's democracy in the twenty-first century.