The Black Island Youth Front
During the course of the Sunflower Movement, the “Black Island Youth Front” became a blanket term to refer to all participants in the Legislative Yuan occupation, as though they all belonged to the same organization. This was not true
During the course of the Sunflower Movement, the “Black Island Youth Front” (黑色島國青年陣線) became a blanket term to refer to all participants in the Legislative Yuan occupation, as though they all belonged to the same organization. While some participants in the Legislative Yuan occupation were indeed members of the Black Island Youth Front, not all members were, and the two individuals who became perceived of as the “student leaders” of the Legislative Yuan occupation, Lin Fei-Fan (林飛帆) and Chen Wei-Ting (陳為廷), were not actually members of the Black Island Youth Front, although Chen was in the past a frequent participant in their activities. In similar manner, despite the fact that not all members of the occupation were students, they were all labeled “students” in the media and the movement as a whole was labelled a “student movement” instead of a broader “social movement.” Nevertheless, the Black Island Youth was a core part of the Legislative Yuan occupation, with core members sitting on the central decision-making bodies of the occupation.
Members of the Black Island Youth Front demonstrating against the CSSTA and Ma Ying-Jeou on Double Ten Day in 2013. Participants in the demonstration included later leading participants of the Sunflower Movement such as Chen Wei-Ting, Wei Yang, Huang Kuo-Chang, and Neil Peng. Photo credit: Black Island Youth Front/Facebook
Rather, the Black Island Youth Front was led by Wei Yang (魏揚) and was implicitly founded a platform of opposition to free trade. As a result, the Black Island Youth Front had an extensive history of reading and studying the effects of free trade globally, as well as organizing demonstrations against the CSSTA. The Black Island Youth Front was instrumental in organizing protests against the CSSTA prior to the Sunflower Movement and was founded in August 2013 in response to the possibility of free trade agreements signed between Taiwan and China which could be deleterious to Taiwanese sovereignty and had 50 to 60 members, with 20 to 30 core members. [1] Demonstrations organized by the Black Island Youth took place in front of the Legislative Yuan on September 30, 2013 and on Ketagalan Boulevard on October 8 and 9, as well as Ketagalan Boulevard on October 10, Double Ten Day. The Black Island Youth also demonstrated against the visit to Taiwan of Chen Deming, the president of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, in Taichung on November 30th.
[1] Ye Baixiang 葉柏祥. Zhexie taiyang hua xuesheng jiao women de shi:24 Tang jietou shang de minzhu ke 這些太陽花學生教我們的事：24堂街頭上的民主課. Fei bian she wen chuang youxian gongsi 費邊社文創有限公司, Taipei (2014). Print. P. 147