Speakers At The Legislative Yuan
The speakers who came and spoke at the Legislative Yuan encampment demonstrate the diversity of the movement
At this point, more individuals than can be accounted for spoke as public speakers at the encampment surrounding the Legislative Yuan or within the Legislative Yuan itself. In part, this is because so many soapbox platforms sprung up around the Legislative Yuan, some of which differed from each other due to the political slants of different soapboxes. On the other hand, there was also a main stage for larger, more central speeches.
Although the main stage of the occupation encampment may have been more reflective of the political mainstream of the movement, the breadth of the individuals who spoke at the stage is a testament to the diversity of the Sunflower Movement nonetheless. As with the many soapbox stages, these included youth activists, politicians, academics, regular working members of society, and others individuals from all walks of life.
Lin Fei-Fan meeting with Su Beng. Photo credit: China Times
Oftentimes, speakers were intergenerational, including the leaders of the Wild Lily Movement, the 1990 student movement which was a pivotal event in Taiwan’s democratization, such as NTU professor Fan Yun (范雲), the later founder of the Social Democratic Party (社會民主黨), who had participated from the first day of the occupation. Likewise, Su Beng (史明), the Taiwanese independence revolutionary born in 1918, who had previously worked with the Chinese Communist Party in China before splitting with them and attempted to assassinate Chiang Kai-Shek (蔣介石) when he came to Taiwan, was another speaker hailing from an even farther historical period.
Participants in China’s Tiananmen Square student movement now living in Taiwan as Wuerkaixi (吾爾開希) and Wang Dan (王丹) were among other speakers, and speakers from China and Hong Kong expressed support as a kindred movement to their own movements for democratization in their home countries, and individuals from other countries. Wang had previously been the teacher of Sunflower Movement leaders such as Chen Wei-Ting (陳為廷) and others.
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