And Taiwan workers, in the process of forming alliances, have discovered that in the present social system that is highly regulated and specified, labor protests cannot have the slightest element of disregard for the law, or else the protest will lose “legitimacy” in the public eye, such that the protest will not garner the social support of public opinion —which is likely to lead to public irritation, and thence failure of the protest.
But the legal boundaries that constrain the possibilities of workers’ protests are usually just an extension of the explanation for the illegality of individual behavior;
they do not apprehend the urgency of the workers’ struggle for a decent livelihood and the workers’ lack of alternatives to street action17. A woman worker who is a veteran of protests related the following18:
“If we didn’t have to take to the streets to demand the wages that the boss owes us, who would want to lie for long hours on an asphalt road baked to 40 degrees C? Suffering the agony of dehydration and burns? Going home, you still have to bear recriminations from your children: ‘Teacher says you guys shouldn’t block traffic and make hassles for other people.’”
The Assembly and Parade Act of 198819 has 35 items, with detailed stipulations and conditions for application in advance, such as applicant’s name, date and time, location, things to be carried, preparation for march monitors, social quiet, public sanitation, and even strictures against evading identification by police. The applicant must obey all these numerous regulations for behavior, or suffer punishment.
However, concerning the government’s protecting the right to demonstrate and protest, and its subsequent duty to uphold the social order, there is only Item 5,
“Any assembly or parade held in compliance with the law shall not be encumbered with violence, threats, or other illegal means.”, and Item 24, “When an assembly or parade is in progress, the police may be present on the scene to maintain order. At the request of the responsible person of the assembly or parade, the competent authority shall have officers be present on the scene to regulate traffic and maintain order.”
disparity, and was attacked by Huang Shih-hsiu, a researcher at the NPF, a think tank of the Kuomintang Party. You would not have to waste ten minutes to understand the clash.
17 Hsueh Chih-Jen, “Civil disobedience in the view of criminal law”, Law Journal of Academia Sinica no. 17 (September 2015): 131-204.
18 Author’s interview materials, 2012.
19 The Assembly and Parade Act that is currently in effect was amended in 2002.
Therefore, when labor protests occur, the police generally just stand by when conflict breaks out between the two sides. And labor bears the brunt of public criticism, with a magnified impression of loss of social order, traffic disruption, the noise of shouted slogans, and litter on the streets.
The legitimacy of the protest movement is judged by the public in terms of whether the protest can be carried out as smoothly and as orderly as campus activity. “Bloodless revolution” in Taiwan has evolved into a stroll in the park or a sports match.
If any litter is left on the streets, the protest organizers are perceived as disrupters of society. If any blood is shed, the social movement will be immediately portrayed as a “riot” or “mob violence”, even if the blood is occasioned by police using physical force in dispersing the protest.
With the government and society scrutinizing every event of the labor movement so closely, the laborers on the low rungs of society face opprobrium when there is any news report of smoking, chewing betel nut20, speaking native Taiwanese dialect, or any other physical embodiment of their class that meets with negative social judgment. Social opinion will immediately turn against them, with no concern for what the movement is calling for, or the issue for which it is seeking social support.
A labor union cadre with long experience participating in organized protests in central and south Taiwan summed up his observation of the predicament of Taiwan’s labor movement as follows21:
“When I see a report in the news of protesting workers smoking, chewing betel nut, or speaking Taiwanese, I know then that this battle has been lost.”
Even though Taiwan is not a very large island, and the two changes of regime in the last century brought extensive transformation of culture, language, historical experience, and life habits, still there are marked differences between north and south Taiwan. The south is predominantly populated by native Taiwanese, while the north has relatively more mainlanders.
The south is occupied with agriculture and industry, the north with business, services, and the bureaucracy of the central government. The south mostly speaks native Taiwanese dialect, while the north mostly speaks the official Mandarin Chinese. The average level of education in the south is low, while the average level of education in the north is high. In the south wages and incomes are low; in the north they are higher. The cost of living is lower in the south, but higher in the north.
20 Betel nut is the fruit of the areca palm, and when chewed it has a stimulant effect. It is especially used by truck drivers and those who must work for long hours. Chewers salivate profusely, creating a mouthful of red juice that must eventually be spit out. Chewers often leave sidewalks in Taiwan splotched with red that looks almost like blood, and so chewing betel nut is generally considered a lower class cultural behavior of the working class.
21 Author’s 2012 interview materials.
These differences between south and north Taiwan individually look like they would not be of much consequence or very pertinent, but in the labor movement, in combination, they have a strong and immediate impact.
The workers of south Taiwan with their lower incomes are unable to afford the expense of repeated trips to Taipei to air their grievances. Even if they are able to go north and launch their protest, they face the national media that largely speaks and broadcasts in Mandarin Chinese. If the workers interviewed speak native Taiwanese, the reporters, intentionally or unintentionally will only utilize a snippet of what the workers have said in their broadcast, or the reporters will simply give their own explanation, usually over-simplifying or even distorting the workers’ appeal.
Compared with the capitalists’ spokesmen or the related government agencies’
officers speaking fluently in Mandarin and clearly explicating their positions or rebuttals, the workers are at a disadvantage.
Given the uneven playing ground of communications, the northern listeners often cannot understand what the protesters are seeking, and secondly with the gap in life experiences and habits the labor protests may even create a negative impression22 on the northerners, who may deride the external appearance and behavior of the protesting workers and complain about disruptions in their own life rhythm, without any real understanding of the issues per se.
Given such socialization of value judgments, it is problematic as to whether the labor movement can make its reasons for protest accurately understood, much less find related organizations for alliance.
Because the social discourse has such a huge impact on whether the movement issue can find resonance with its message, right from the beginning of a movement the leaders and participants are challenged in their capacity for strategic planning, to “design” the movement initiation and all the subsequent stages and targets.
Ho Ming-sho has explained that in the recent development of social movements in Taiwan, two entirely different movement strategies have emerged23.
One movement strategy is to deliberately defy the law, as in the Dapu movement to resist land evictions24. The other kind of movement strategy is to meticulously
22 Concerning how environmental, ethnic, and cultural factors have created historical and life style differences between north and south Taiwan, the reader can refer to a book by Yao Li-ming, Maybe We Don’t Have a Common Past, But We Can Certainly Have a Common Future, 2016, Yuan Shen Publisher.
23 Ho Ming-sho, “Civil movements and civil disobedience: Two strategies of Taiwan social movements, past and recent,” New Social Policy, No. 30 (2013): 19-22.
24 In 2010-2013 a long-lived protest broke out in Tapu Neighborhood, Chunan Township, Miaoli County; the residents opposed government seizure of their land by eminent domain and forcible removal from their houses. In this incident, the Miaoli County government acted on the fact that the agricultural land had legally been ordered confiscated, even while the farmers had not agreed to appropriation of their land. The last straw for the farmers was that the land was cleared by bulldozers when the rice crop was about to be harvested; their protest broke out. As a result of the extension of a road in the redesign of the development project, four households that had not agreed to the project were forcibly removed. After appeal, the Taichung Higher Administrative Court ruled against the Ministry of the Interior; i.e., the confiscation was not justified (Judgment No. 47, Appeal Geng Yi, 2012).
obey the legal boundaries, as in the “dressed-in-white” mass protest against the mistreatment death of military recruit Hung Chung-chiu25.
Why do these opposite strategies of social movements emerge? The social movement is not just an expression of the dissatisfaction of the participants. Even more, it is a hope that by means of expression of this discontent, admittedly also emotional, pressure can be brought to bear on the authorities to rectify the defects in the system that have been the source of the discontent.
Therefore, the discontent must necessarily be channeled into some kind of participation within the political institutions.
But the form of this “some kind of political participation” actually is limited by the regulation and standardization of social movements, such that it cannot in the normal process enter into the political system.
That the social movement cannot achieve its demands does not just mean that the movement cannot come to a conclusion; it is further a pivot for escalating discontent.
Especially given the intentional or unintentional absence of government obligations to protect labor, obligations that could have been stipulated in the legal system, the effect of this regulation and standardization can be deduced from the following points:
- The relevant legal injunctions, at the time of legislation, were only formulated from the perspective of governance by the rulers; the government and the protesters are separate and opposing entities in this perspective, not symbiotic parts of a whole society.
- The onus of disturbing the social order is on the protesters, and the government has no duty to resolve the issue.
Especially when workers come from the south to the north of Taiwan to protest against the central government in the capital of Taipei, the Taipei City Government26 and the populace of the north have a sense of territoriality, and unconsciously view the protestors as disrupters of the social order that have come from some faraway external place, even though they are citizens of the same country and subject to the same central government.
25 In 2013, after the death of Corporal Hung Chung-chiu in military training, a protest movement arose because the military ruled that the cause of death was indeterminate, and shifting recriminations of legal blame. A crowd of over 100,000 marchers wearing white shirts marched in the name of civil education, demanding exposure of the real cause of death and human rights for those in the military. Subsequently, the public opinion set off by this movement resulted in a change in the legal system, that in non-war times military personnel would be tried with the same judicial prosecutorial system as civilians.
26 There have been twenty-seven terms of mayors of Taipei, the capitol city, since 1945, including both mayors appointed by the central government and popularly-elected mayors; of these only five were not Kuomintang Party members. Especially in the sixteen terms since 1967, only three terms, non-consecutive ones, were held by mayors not in the KMT. Typically, if a non-KMT mayor were elected, he would be quickly replaced by an appointed one.
- Given that the onus of blame is on the protesters, the barbs of public opinion are sufficient to limit the impact of protest. So the government can naturally contain social protest at the lowest social cost, without facing resolution of the issue.
These are the reasons that Taiwan’s workers are to a certain degree excluded from political participation, even if they are determined to carry out protest under Taiwan’s regulated and specified social structure, especially though a process that is itself highly regulated and specified.
The workers can only impotently face the constraints of the highly regulated and specified environment created under the mutual influences of politics and society.
1.2. Has “institutionalization” in the process of Taiwan’s democratization