Monday, July 21, 2014

Will They Ever Learn to Trust Taiwan’s Youth?

Unless youth are given the space and responsibilities they are entitled to, Taiwan’s political parties will die of old age, and soon after them, so will the country 

Judging from the growing number of unrelentingly cheerful young people who surround party officials at press conferences or who appear in political adverts nowadays, it would be tempting to conclude that the nation’s politicians, shaken from their longstanding slumber by the Sunflower Movement’s eruption earlier this year, have finally realized that youth have a role — an important role — to play in politics. Sadly, there is less to this phenomenon than meets the eye, and the dinosaurs are to blame. 

There is no doubt that the youth-led Sunflower Movement, which occupied the Legislative Yuan for 21 days in March and April, led to an acknowledgement by both the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that the parties had failed to propose a viable future for the nation’s young people. With policies that seemed entirely disconnected from the dreams and fears of the current generation of young people, President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) KMT succeeded in politicizing a sizeable segment of society that otherwise didn’t seem to have the least interest in public affairs. For its part, the DPP, which should have been the natural go-to party for the disenfranchised youth, appeared unwilling to engage and work with civil society to counter the authorities. 

My article, published today on Thinking Taiwan, continues here. (Photo by the author)

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