[Citizen College] Inequality, Identity and Political Generation: Taiwan’s Case

On June 2, 2018, the 7th lecture of “Citizen College: Citizens Between Life and Knowledge” was held by Seongbuk Village Citizenship Education Center and the Korea University Peace and Democracy Institute(PDI). The 7th speaker was Professor Eunju Chi of PDI.

The topic of the lecture was “Inequality, Identity, and Political Generation: Taiwan’s Case”. In the lecture, Professor examined the student movement in Taiwan, the result of the election by generation, and the national identity of the Taiwanese, and based on that, searched answer for the question “Why did the young generation in Taiwan recently increase their political participation?” The Taiwanese sunflower movement was a student movement that the Nationalist Party has declared “Cross-Strait trade agreement” with China. In addition, the recent election results showed that the 2-30s have a higher preference for the Democratic Progressive Party than the Nationalist Party of China. When we tracked the 20s’ adolescents period through the cohort effect, we can see that Taiwan Nationalism was on the rise in the first year of the Democratic Party at that time. Those who have been influenced by this tend to become adults and have a strong Taiwan identity rather than multi-tiered identity. In conclusion, the younger generations in Taiwan have not made political choices for economic reasons, and they have been supporting the independence-oriented Ministries. Therefore, they are now dissatisfied with the trade with China, and can be seen as guarding against excessive dependence on China. (Summary: Moon-Hyung Lee)