683824

research-article2017
ICS0010.1177/1367877916683824International Journal of Cultural StudiesWang

International Journal of Cultural Studies

2017, Vol. 20(2) 177­–192
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1367877916683824
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877916683824
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Article
‘The future that belongs to us’:
Affective politics, neoliberalism
and the Sunflower Movement

Chih-ming Wang
Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Abstract
The Sunflower Movement that took place in Taiwan in spring 2014 has been an epochal event
for Taiwan, China, and East Asia. Many critics identified China as the most important factor
for triggering the movement, while others emphasized the internal contradictions of economy,
politics, and culture within Taiwan as reasons for its outburst. Although the Sunflower
Movement has been treated as Taiwanese resistance to political and economic integration
with China under the framework of free trade and the World Trade Organization, few have
considered the discourses of neoliberalism surrounding and instigating it as the conditions
of subjectivity in which Taiwanese youth apprehend their place and future. In the Sunflower
Movement, neoliberalism is prominently associated with worries about the future, where college
students on the verge of entering the job market feel ambivalent about their career prospects
and life choices. These young people feel a sharp sense of deprivation and a strong anxiety
about Chinese competition. How do we theorize such anxieties about the future in relation
to neoliberalism as a structure of feeling, and such anxious subjects, in relation to Taiwan’s
status? This article addresses these issues by conceptualizing the Sunflower Movement as an
affective-political outburst of discontents that sits uncomfortably with the future of neoliberal
globalization as the ontology of being.

Keywords
22K, future, ‘Island Sunrise,’ little assured happiness, neoliberalism, Sunflower Movement,
synchronization

Corresponding author:
Chih-ming Wang, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
Email: wchimin@hotmail.com
178 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(2)

On 18 March 2014, Taiwan’s ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), tried to approve the
Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA hereafter) – a free trade pact with China
that promises Taiwanese businesses in the service sector greater opportunities and better
policy incentives in China – in the Parliament without a debate. Students and citizen
groups concerned with how economic integration with China may affect Taiwan’s econ-
omy and political future seized the occasion to occupy the Parliament, asking the govern-
ment to immediately rescind the agreement and renegotiate with China, because they
worried that the agreement will only facilitate greater influxes of Chinese capital and of
migrant workers to Taiwan. They condemned the way that the KMT’s negotiation with
China was conducted without public supervision, and that by forcing it through in this
way, Taiwan’s democracy is jeopardized and the country put at risk of becoming subor-
dinate and dependent for survival on economic hand-outs from China. Despite the three
‘direct communications’ (in air travel, postal service, and commerce) across the Taiwan
Strait since the 1990s, which facilitated exchange and eased political tensions to break
down 50 years of Cold War division, the cross-Strait relations are actually at a nadir since
the 2000s, as Taiwanese resentment toward China appears to be on the rise.
Thanks to the tireless news broadcasting and the hyper-dynamic social media that
quickly attracted more students and concerned citizens to the cause and the site of pro-
test, the Parliament turned into a mecca of activism and a spectacle of political desire,
and the movement against the CSSTA was thus born in the name of Sunflower, echoing
the Wild Lilies and Wild Strawberries movements before it,1 as a sign of hope, defiance,
and courage. As expected, the government responded to the protest negatively. The
police attempted to evict the students by force, but the students had already used what-
ever was to hand to build blockades and assemble their own press center, turning the
occupied Parliament into a combined citadel and a live news station. Five days later, in
order to press the issue, the more radical students broke through the police who were
defending it and entered into the government’s top administration building, the
Administrative Yuan. This spontaneous action instantly escalated the tension: the police
resorted to using water cannon and batons against the protesters, and arrested several
student leaders. Undaunted, students responded by organizing a mass demonstration on
30 March, bringing about 700,000 people to the streets to press their demands. The head
of the Parliament, Wang Jin-pyng, known for his political calculation, visited the protest-
ers and promised that the Parliament would put the review of CSSTA on hold until the
Parliament first legislated the rules to govern cross-Strait negotiations. At 6 p.m. on 10
April, each with a sunflower in their hands, the protesters declared victory and left the
Parliament, bringing to an end 24 days of occupation.2
The Sunflower Movement has commanded global media attention and provoked ana-
lysts and scholars to ponder why it happened, how to understand its contexts and creative
expressions, and what impacts it might have on democratic practices, political theory,
and cross-Strait relations.3 While some scholars defended the Sunflower Movement
through the discourse of civil disobedience, legitimizing its liberatory politics and
nationalist concerns (Chen CM, 2014, 2015; Ho, 2015; Jones and Su, 2015; Ye, 2014),
others found the movement’s pro-independence, anti-China, and masculinist stances
troubling, and its uncritical attitude toward free trade worrying (Hong 2014; Hu 2014;
Wang and Hu 2014). Bowen Tseng (2014) observes that the movement contains four
Wang 179

different and contradictory elements: anti-China Taiwanese nationalism; leftist anti-free

trade sentiment; demands for democratic reforms; and generational justice. While these
elements are mutually interpenetrated and uneasily aligned within the protest against the
CSSTA, the last element, I submit, is especially noteworthy: not only because students
were the main force behind this movement but also because their participation in the
events was actually inspired by the feeling of deprivation at a time when unemployment
and real estate prices are on the rise, wage levels in decline, and upward mobility through
education and hard work diminished. Tseng (2014) explains that Sunflower students
belong to the ‘collapsing generation’ (bong shidai) that is confronted by economic crises,
political impasse, class polarization, fertility decline, and falling wages.4 ‘Their discon-
tents engendered calls for “generational justice” and the yearning for a “youthful subjec-
tivity”,’ Tseng argues, ‘this is why the Sunflower Movement could mobilize students to
join the protest so fast,’ because ‘whether or not they understand what the issue is, by
participation, they already obtained a subjective feeling that “our future is in our hands”’
(2014: 140–1). This observation is important because it captures well a ‘structure of feel-
ing’ that understands the Sunflower Movement less as an ideological struggle between
unification and independence, free market and protectionism, and right and left, and
more as an affective response to the uncertainties of the future released by neoliberalism.
It also shows how neoliberalism in Taiwan is being understood not only in terms of
political economy but also as a factor contributing to social inequality, precarity of life
and work, and class reproduction, increasingly entrenched and enlarged by the cross-
Straits trade (Lin 2016a, 2016b).
Taking its cue from Tseng’s observation, this article seeks to reconsider the dis-
course of the future in the Sunflower Movement. The ‘future’ is important not only
because Taiwan has a peculiar ‘national’ status as hinged on the wind of the future, but
also because the vision of the future is embedded in neoliberalism as a structure of
feeling, or rather as an existential imperative that compels one to ‘invest’ in oneself, to
compete relentlessly so as to arrive at a future of prosperity. Jason Read argues that
neoliberalism produces a subject – homo economicus – who embodies a new mode of
‘governmentality’ that operates not in the terms of law or rights, but in those of ‘inter-
est, investment and competition’ for the purpose of capitalist accumulation (2009: 29).
Neoliberalism is neither just a political economy, nor an array of capital-friendly poli-
cies executed by the state, but, as David Harvey argues, a ‘conceptual apparatus … that
appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the
possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit’; and its concepts of dignity and
individual freedom, so powerful and appealing, have become the ‘central values of
civilization’ (Harvey, 2005a: 5). Noting that ‘neoliberal governmentality results from
the infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics,’
Aihwa Ong also points out that individuals under neoliberalism are ‘induced to self-
manage according to market principles of disciplines, efficiency, and competitiveness’
(2006: 4). In this sense, neoliberalism is also an existential imperative that hails us into
being, to seek freedom and dignity, not as inalienable rights but rather as the quest of
life. Because neoliberal competition mobilizes constant optimization of one’s skills
and resources to avoid falling into the realm of devaluation and abandonment (Ong,
2006: 6), the future is uncertain, precarious, and even elusive. It is something one can
180 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(2)

look forward to but never hold on to with any degree of certainty, even though what the
future will look like has never been clearer.
This article attempts to address neoliberalism’s future by conceptualizing the
Sunflower Movement as an affective-political explosion of discontents – not only against
Taiwan’s political status quo, but also against the uncertain future that the status quo
holds for them. By ‘affective-political,’ I gesture toward an understanding of both the
affective dimension of politics as well as the political meaning of affect, as articulated by
the ‘affective turn’ in recent cultural studies scholarship that considers affect as ‘the
imbrication of the social and the somatic’ to capture ‘bodies politics’ – both embodied
and embedded – ‘in the production, bypassing, and surpassing of subjectivity’ (Protevi,
2009: xiv).5 Therefore, instead of concentrating on protest events (e.g. Sewell, 1996) or
providing an analysis of its organizational profile and tensions with existing institutions
(e.g. Tilly, 1978), as sociology of social movements often advocates, I focus instead on
three Chinese keywords – ‘Island Sunrise’ (daoyu tianguang), ‘22K,’ and ‘little assured
happiness’ (xiao que xin) – as affective keys which are not only well-circulated within
the context of the movement but also indicative of the propensities of its participants for
understanding the social, economic and political circumstances they are caught up in, as
well as their experiences of these circumstances. Together these keywords highlight an
affective cognition of the Sunflower Movement as problematically articulated with/
against neoliberalism. By rejecting black box democracy, unfair competition, and further
integration with China, the Sunflower Movement in effect refuted the future of neolib-
eral globalization as the ontology of being, yet for what futures to come it knew not.

Utopian demands: neoliberalism and the future

While criticisms of the CSSTA had been aired by a consortium of citizen groups before
students occupied the Parliament,6 it was the 318 Manifesto for the Action of Occupying
the Parliament and against the Black Box Service Trade Agreement issued by the stu-
dents on 18 March that inaugurated the Sunflower Movement as a student movement.
The manifesto begins with the following declaration:

We do not wish to see that in ten years, Taiwanese youths will still live the life of the 22K! We
believe that Taiwan is a place where youths can realize their dreams of starting their own
businesses, opening a coffee shop or a company, a paradise for ventures [chuanye] where
anyone can succeed in becoming an ‘owner’ [toujia] by one’s sheer hard work. (318 Manifesto,
2015 [2014])

This opening paragraph identifies Taiwanese youth today with two features: the starting
wage of NT$22,000 and the dream of becoming an owner. While the first feature indi-
cates the precarious employment condition that the youths are facing, the second feature
articulates a humble desire that is embedded in, yet somehow incompatible with the
neoliberalist logic that favors big businesses and thrives on mergers and buyouts. This
sensible, yet impossible, demand gives this manifesto a utopian character, expressed in
the language of dream and paradise, affirming the middle-class work ethic and seeking
an alternative capitalism beyond the orbit of neoliberalism. Significantly, it also echoes
Wang 181

the imagination of democracy in Taiwan as ‘letting people be the owner’ (renmin dan-
gjia), running the state for their own interests.
As what Kathi Weeks (2011) calls ‘utopian demands,’ this manifesto articulates both
a Blochian hope of the ‘not yet’ and a nostalgia for what is ‘already lost.’7 Indeed, in the
1980s when Taiwan was deemed one of the ‘Asian Tigers,’ small and middle-sized busi-
nesses were the engine driving economic development, but the 1997 financial crisis and
the subsequent structural adjustments – deregulation, industrial upgrade, relocation of
factories to China, etc. – dealt a fatal blow to Taiwan’s economy, keeping its wages stag-
nant for 20 years and diminishing the competitive edge of its businesses (Dou and Hsu,
2012). The manifesto goes on to argue:

Liberalization will only benefit big capital, allowing the conglomerates to expand across the
Taiwan Strait without limitation, and damaging the owners of small businesses in Taiwan. The
paradise for middle and small businesses that Taiwan once was will be merged by a cross-Strait
capital that has no sympathies for ordinary people. (318 Manifesto, 2015 [2014])

Here, the manifesto offers a view of negation to ‘promote critical perspectives on and
disinvestment in the status quo’ and a mode of affirmation as ‘provocations toward alter-
natives’ (Weeks, 2011: 204), despite attendant anxieties and fear. However, by upholding
the middle-sized and small business as the model of success for Taiwan’s economy, it
overlooks the fact that historically these businesses also tried to expand their operational
scale by moving abroad to jump on the bandwagon of neoliberal globalization. In fact, it
is often through an expansion to the mainland Chinese and Southeast Asian markets that
Taiwanese businesses are able to stay competitive and growing. The manifesto thus pre-
sents a conundrum in its demand because the utopia it demands is none other than the
same neoliberalist future of competition, except that the terms of competition are now
deemed ‘unfair.’ The manifesto emphasizes:

We [the youths] are not unwilling to take challenges or face competition; we are simply
unwilling to face unfair competition, to see our future lives controlled by the bloc of ruling
elites, to allow our jobs to be controlled by big businesses and cross-Strait capitalists. We want
to hold on to our own future, and demand an environment and opportunity where we the youths
can develop and compete fairly. (318 Manifesto, 2015 [2014])

Such an articulation is full of contradictions. While the students subscribe to the dis-
course against neoliberalism, worrying that it will be ushered in and imposed on Taiwan
by a series transnational agreements and agents, including the U.S.-led Transpacific
Partnership Pact, they are neither against capitalism nor denying the game of global
competition; they simply wish to compete on level ground and hold on to the humble
dream of becoming a middle/small business owner. But is there really such a thing as fair
competition in neoliberalism? Is a fairer capitalism what we expect of the future? If
‘accumulation by dispossession’ and ‘uneven geographical development’ are constitu-
tive conditions, not exceptions, of neoliberal globalization (Harvey, 2005a), what signifi-
cances are there in the dream of becoming a small business or coffee shop owner? What
is the affective politics of the dream in bringing the students to the street? Is this dream
able to bring about radical social change, or another push of neoliberalism to affirm the
182 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(2)

regime of private property? Moreover, how should we understand the logical contradic-
tions in the manifesto and Taiwan’s place in neoliberal globalization as both a lost and
yet-to-come utopia?
To understand this dream as representing a ‘politics of hope’ that Weeks considers ‘a
cognitive faculty and an emotion’ (2011: 194), I propose to investigate three key dis-
courses – ‘Island Sunrise’, 22K, and little assured happiness – that evolved with the
Sunflower Movement as entry points to unpack the affective subjectivity of the Sunflower
students and their imagination of the future. Whereas 22K and little assured happiness are
discourses that had been popular before students occupied the Parliament, ‘Island Sunrise’
was a song (and music video) created in and for the Sunflower Movement. Produced and
sung inside the Parliament to confer on the movement ‘some power of tenderness’ (Li,
2014), ‘Island Sunrise,’ which won the Golden Melody Award (Jinqujiang) in 2014 for
the category of the best song of the year, is immensely popular among the Sunflower
students and has arguably become the musical face of the Movement. Its lyrics and music
videos work as affective media of subjectivity formation, which, by reporting on the
movement, hails the viewers to empathize, identify and become one with it. Similarly,
22K and little assured happiness are frames of affective cognition that also chart the psy-
cho-political profiles of the Sunflower generation. An analysis of how these terms, when
considered together, honed the cognitive capacity and produced affect, could reveal the
Sunflower Movement as an ambivalent yet charged articulation with and against neolib-
eralism in the quest for a better future.

‘Island Sunrise’: becoming brave

Written by an independent rock band called the Fire Extinguisher (miehuoqi) and
recorded inside the Parliament, ‘Island Sunrise,’ released on the internet on 29 March,
the Day of Youth in Taiwan, is no less symbolic than the bouquet of sunflowers. In fact,
the song was created at the invitation of the student activists who are art majors. They
produced different versions of the music video and released them online to reach out to
supporters. The Fire Extinguisher not only performed the song on several occasions but
also released its copyright for free to supporters of the Movement. The band’s vocalist
Yang Dazheng also thought that writing this song is ‘the most meaningful thing he did
for the movement’ (SET News, 2014). In short, ‘Island Sunrise’ is as much a song of, as
one that is about the Sunflower Movement.
The lyrics are written and sung in Taiwanese, and imagine a young man who leaves
his mother and girlfriend to join the fight against a bully. The young man finds a group
of brave people guarding their dream, so he vows to become one of them, hoping that
soon the sun will rise and shine upon the island (Yang, 2014). The lyrics and tune are
simple, but the imagery of the sunrise is gripping and metaphorical in multiple registers:
darkness refers to black box democracy, and the bully is a codename for China, as stu-
dents find in the brave young man a reflection of themselves. The song also has an
English version, which repeats the same sunrise imagery, chanting that victory is des-
tined to come, as ‘darkness breaks apart.’8
Moreover, ‘Island Sunrise’ is disseminated through multiple music videos, including
the official versions in Chinese and English, as well as acoustic versions featuring guitar,
Wang 183

orchestra and remix, each with powerful images from the protest. These music videos
take the form of a documentary, not only to report on the movement but also to project
its self-imaginary – one that safeguards Taiwan’s democracy from being corrupted or
taken away. Since all versions of the video convey a similar message, my analysis below
will focus on the official Chinese version produced by the students. This self-imaginary
is finely captured in the dedication to the sun-like ‘Taiwanese citizens who stepped up in
times of darkness’ and ‘friends who provided video documentation’ for their ‘persistent
attention can help spread the truth to faraway places.’ Instead of focusing only on the
students, the video shows diverse subjects – from students, nurses, doctors and lawyers
to newscasters and aborigines, to the police – as representatives of the brave citizens.
Moreover, while the student leaders get a bit more spotlight, the heroes of the video are
in fact these diverse protesters, seen carrying out numerous activities, from taking part in
discussions, building blockades, sitting in, delivering goods, and watching the news, to
shouting slogans, crying, and singing. Though the actual process of the movement might
have been more distressing and disappointing to many, the video adopts a positive tenor,
implying that the island will soon meet the sunrise after these efforts. As a movement
video, it intends to instruct, affect, and draw empathetic understanding and support.
An interesting aspect of the video is its heavy emphasis on the screen, which takes the
form of camera, laptop, TV, cellphone, slogan posters and portraits of Taiwanese patriots.
The ‘screen’ is a reference to both the news camera, which monitor and often misrepre-
sent the movement, and the video activists’ attempt to record the ‘truth’ and transmit it
beyond the spatial confines of the Parliament. It implies both the communicative func-
tion of sending and receiving information, and engaging in ‘keyboard warfare’ whenever
necessary, as well as the pedagogical and affective function of informing viewers how to
feel, where to look, and what to expect. Though there is no authorship for these affects,
as conveyed by such posters as ‘Go Go Taiwan’ (Taiwan jiayou), as viewers, it is implied
we feel the same way and these affects are thus inscribed in the collective sentiment. The
posters of Taiwanese patriots and early advocates of Taiwan independence – Lai He and
Jiang Weishui, for example – especially function as billboard screens informing viewers
and participants on site of the movement’s historical perspective. They function as a mir-
ror, reflecting on and projecting the movement as the passage to Taiwan independence.
Similar to the phantasmagoria that John Erni (2014) describes, of urban screens as creat-
ing the structure of feeling to locate our desires, the omnipresence of screens, small and
big, in and as the video, serves as an affective site to invoke our identification with the
movement. Nonetheless, whereas Erni links urban screen culture to the subjectivity of
the flâneur, who meanders in the glass jungle of modernity, the subjectivity the viewer
of ‘Island Sunrise’ videos is expected to identify with is that of the ‘brave Taiwanese,’
who, undaunted by police brutality, dare to demand their own future. Importantly, this
collective subjectivity is forged in the collective act of singing – one that is at once rep-
resented in and representative of the video.
Central to the brave Taiwanese subjectivity, as represented in the video, is its claim of
the ‘future that should belong to Taiwan.’ For anyone familiar with the Taiwan independ-
ence idea, this is by no means a surprising articulation; what is noteworthy, however, is
the grave worry that the future may not be ‘ours’ and that it is ‘our last chance to scream
our hopes before we are no longer allowed to speak’ (Cheng, 2014). In other words, the
184 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(2)

reasons why people are on the street is to express the anxiety that the future that should
belong to us may, or perhaps no longer does, do so. Despite the positive tenor it conveys,
‘Island Sunrise’ ironically envisions the greater darkness to come, as China has grown to
be the decisive factor affecting Taiwan’s future and is pounding hard on Taiwan’s door
with its economic bribes and political fists. Such anxieties about the future, as Sianne
Ngai suggests, are:

invoked not only as an affective response to an anticipated or projected event, but also as
something ‘projected’ onto others in the sense of an outward propulsion or displacement – that
is, as a quality or feeling the subject refuses to recognize in himself and attempts to locate in
another person or thing. (2005: 210)

Following this logic, we may contend that by responding to the CSSTA with worry, the
Sunflower protesters in fact projected the problems we ought to face onto an external
object called China. By focusing on the ownership of the future to come, they displaced
the discussion of the contents of the future, and invested instead in the affective and
utopic imagination of ‘Island Sunrise.’

22K: becoming ‘losers’

The concern over the ownership of the future has much to do with the rise of China. But
the threat of China, as I suggest above, is really more of a pretext for the larger anxiety
over the future. But this by no means denies or diminishes the psychological reality in
the Taiwanese perception that China is a menace. The moniker ‘22K’ and the attendant
discourse of ‘losers’ bespeak a sad analysis of the economic future for Taiwanese youths
in the era of neoliberal globalization.
Referring to the monthly wage for college graduates in Taiwan, ‘22K’ first appeared in
the Special Statute for Reviving the Economy and Expanding Public Infrastructure in
January 2009, with which the KMT administration intended to assuage the impact of the
‘subprime mortgage crisis’ on Taiwan by enlarging government spending on public infra-
structure. It included a budget of NT$10.8 billion (out of a total budget of NT$500 billion)
to subsidize businesses in Taiwan to hire college graduates for internships. It was then
implemented in May by the Ministry of Education in the Plan to Subsidize College
Graduates to do Internships in Business, through which businesses will receive NT$22,000
per month from the government for hiring one intern for a year.9 So the subsidy policy that
was originally intended to help the businesses and increase employment, ironically,
became a means to freeze salaries for college graduates entering the job market (Wu,
2014). Although the internships did reduce unemployment, the negative impact is more
widespread; and 22K is regarded as a spell of misfortune shadowing Taiwanese youths
into the future. The future which is supposedly theirs is hence understood as wrested away
from their hands, and those receiving 22K are caricatured as ‘losers’ because they will not
have the means to build a future of prosperity. Wu Junsheng observes: a sign of increasing
poverty, 22K is also used to describe the ‘losers on the labor market,’ but it is often ‘not
intended as a mockery of others, but rather of oneself; this collective self-mockery moreo-
ver indicates an atmosphere of generational despair’ (2014: 54).
Wang 185

While it is unfair and untruthful to characterize the Sunflower students as ‘losers,’

given that many of them come from prestigious class and educational backgrounds
(Chen W, 2014), their fear of becoming ‘losers’ was not unreal. It suggests that neoliber-
alism is indeed fashioning ‘an army of unemployed and a detached group of socially ill
misfits living off the dregs of society’ (Standing, 2011: 8), who are reduced from the
status of citizens to become ‘denizens,’ living a life of chronic insecurity and restricted
rights (Standing, 2014: 1) that sociologist Guy Standing (2011), among others, has called
the ‘precariat.’ In particular, Standing notes that ‘Internships are potentially a vehicle for
channeling youths into the precariat,’ for ‘intern programs as a form of “active” labor
market policy [are] designed to conceal unemployment,’ and are in effect ‘costly, ineffi-
cient subsidy schemes’ (2011: 16). In addition: ‘The precariat experiences the four A’s
– anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation’ (Standing, 2011: 19), suggesting a complete
collapse of the social welfare network that used to support individuals through dire times.
As Anne Allison writes of Japan today, ‘the sense of an insecure life and the sense that it
could, and sometimes does, turn quickly to death’ is ‘part of the pain of the precariat:
having a life that no one grieves upon death and living a precariousness that no one cares
to share with you, in the here and now’ (2013: 15). Indeed, precarity is about not having
a future and being given up on in the here and now; it is also about seeing the future as
(worse than) now.
Like South Korea’s ‘88,000 won generation,’ 22K envisions the future as stagnant,
alienating, and precarious. It is not something one looks forward to but what must be
resisted if one can. As Yan Shannong et al. (2015) explain, the Sunflower generation
bear the ‘universal darkness’ of precarity, which began in the 1980s with neoliberal
economics: out of unemployment, fertility decline, aging and other problems, came the
future in a cloud, out of which the collapsing generation emerges. They believe that
China plays a special role in the advent of the neoliberal future because the expansion
of the cross-Strait economy only benefits conglomerates, those with skills, and politi-
cal-commercial elites, and that it damages small and middle sized businesses, farmers
and workers (2015: 18–19).
While it is too early to tell whether the Sunflower generation will form a class con-
sciousness to join the global fight against neoliberalism, their anxiety about entering a
precarious future – in both political and economic senses – with little prospect for
upward social mobility has forged them into a loose collectivity defined against China
as an undemocratic, authoritarian state, and an aggressive, ruthless capitalism. Such
anxiety has become the dominant structure of feeling shaping the Sunflower generation
into ‘a class-in-the-making’ (Standing, 2011: 7), as they are also interpellated into the
neoliberalist imperative of competing for excellence and ‘survival of the fittest.’ Their
dream of becoming a small business owner is a neoliberal oxymoron that deserves our
critical attention.

‘Little assured happiness’: becoming owners

On the surface, wishing to be a small business owner is hardly a progressive dream. It
will neither create a new world, nor liberate people from the shackles of work. Its invest-
ment in ‘possessive individualism’ is moreover conservative, and its scale of ambition
186 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(2)

modest. But this humble aspiration is associated with the discourse of ‘little assured hap-
piness,’ which regards such a pursuit as the realizable dream in a time of misfortune, a
dream that Chen Zhongyan reminds us, nostalgically harkens back to the glory of the
1980s when ‘a good number of laborers quitted their jobs and started their own busi-
nesses as “bosses” (tou jiao)’ in Taiwan (Chen Z, 2014: 48).
This phrase was first brought into Chinese in 2005 in reference to Murakami Haruki’s
depictions of savoring the ‘minute things in life’ – such as drinking cold beer after run-
ning a marathon, finding the album you wanted at a discount, or running into a cheerful
lady at the subway – in a collection of essays called Vortex Method to Find the Cat where
Murakami writes:

To find those little but assured happinesses in life, we need some mechanism of self-discipline.
Such as the excitement one feels when he wallows in icy cold beer after a vehement exercise he
struggled to finish, closes his eyes and mumbles: ‘Right! This is it!’ Such is the beauty of little
assured happiness. Without it, life is but a dry desert. (quoted in Chen Z, 2014: 40)

As the term became popular, the sentiment of wishing to seize and savor the ‘minute
things in life’ quickly spread in society, and is often reinforced in food and travel chan-
nels, and in the overflow of culinary and travel images popping up on Facebook,
YouTube, and guidebooks. ‘Little assured happiness’ becomes both a mode of expres-
sion – I am living the moment (despite my low wage and dismal future prospects) – and
a form of resistance – since I can’t change the society, I can at least enjoy myself with
these minute things in life. Hence, leftist critics tend to criticize ‘little assured happiness’
as a form of late capitalist consumerism and political nihilism, taking it as a reflection of
people’s indifference to the society and the future (Zhao, 2014).
Indeed, for pursuers of ‘little assured happiness,’ the future is not a concern, as they
are more concerned with how to break the mundaneness of the everyday by the replica-
tion or exercise of minute differences – sipping cappuccino from a Hello Kitty cup for
instance. Its obsession with everyday mundaneness implies the ‘minutization of dreams,’
which according to Chen Zhongyan, a Sunflower student writer, can be regarded as the
‘minute/micro resistance’ to traditional concepts of success and ‘a form of self-paralysis
that refuses to strive for success and push for resistances that may result in structural
change’ (2014: 32). In particular, this focus on minute dreams also registers a different
sense of temporality. As Zhou Yicheng (2013a), a former student activist, notes, different
from the ‘big time’ (da shidai) of war and revolution, we are living our ‘small days’ (xiao
rizi) in the ‘small time’ (xiao shidai) of capitalist consumption. Whereas in the ‘big time’
people strive for structural transformation, in ‘small times’ people are interested in pur-
suing ‘small revolutions’ – to reform and improve our life by promoting fair trade, inde-
pendent music, free access to software and information, and shooting documentaries to
reveal and address social issues. He contends that while the small revolution focuses on
the minute aspects of life, it is no less real, because it ‘begins with oneself, and though it
does not aim at taking over power, it seeks to bring changes to our lifestyle and values’
(2013a). He writes: ‘Small revolution may not reach the day of success, but it may allow
us to live our small days longer, to prevent the big time from coming sooner and make
the society more capable of facing the challenges of the big time’ (2013a).
Wang 187

For Zhou and believers in ‘little assured happiness,’ the future is uncertain, since we
don’t know when and in what form the ‘big time’ will come; what is real and valuable is
the everyday life one can at least claim some handle on. Rather than longing for an
uncertain future to come, deliberating its possibilities and plotting its contours, it is more
meaningful and rewarding to focus on improving the present, to plant some seeds for
changes in the future. It is perhaps safe to contend that for ‘little assured happiness,’ it is
not so much that the future does not matter as that the future is embedded in the present,
in the improvement of the now. It is not merely a resistance to the ‘big revolution,’ but
moreover an assertion of another view of the future as inchoate in the present, because
while the present ‘belongs to us,’ the future may not. Yet, Zhou also admits that ‘small
days will not last forever,’ and Taiwan, nestled between great powers, cannot escape
from the next big time to come, so ‘we should raise our heads from the charms of small
days’ (2013b).
In this sense, the ‘little assured happiness’ discourse is neither anti-future nor anti-
utopian. Instead it conceives of the future not in a teleology fixated on a certain deter-
ministic alternative, be it Communism or the Apocalypse. The future, to twist Walter
Benjamin’s famous treatise on history, ‘is the subject of a structure whose site is not
homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now’ (1968 [1955]:
261). Rather than seeking to introduce a new calendar through the great revolution,
‘little assured happiness’ encourages us to regard the heterogeneous now – however
individuated and fragmented – as the futuristic moment, because it is in these moments
that the future is actually in our own hands. It asks not for remembrance or lasting
monuments, but for rejoicing in the affective moments of déjà disparu, to celebrate,
hold tight, and lament the quick passing of pleasure as the transient assurance of pos-
session and self-identity.

Conclusion: the politics of the future

The Sunflower Movement’s ambivalent view toward the future can perhaps be summa-
rized as follows: The future will come, but I do not know in what form (or more likely in
a form I do not agree with); what I know is that if I cannot control the future, I must hold
on to the present. The utopian injunction to become brave, and to become owners not
losers, is the affective response to this formulation of the future as inevitable, precarious,
overwhelming, and which therefore must be resisted now by imagining a new collectiv-
ity to withstand the wheel of time. It is as if the future is certain, inalterable, and arriving,
and all we can do is to prevent it from coming for as long as we can. Such a future of/as
neoliberalism is imagined to be an external force coming to devour us, or, to use another
metaphor, to ‘assimilate’ us, making our time synchronous with neoliberalism’s time.
The discussion of neoliberalism tends to focus on geography. Harvey’s (2005b) thesis
of ‘uneven geographical development’ explains how capitalist growth depends on the
‘spatial fix’ to overcome capital’s internal contradictions and maximize accumulation.
However, time is also an important factor, especially with regard to high finance that capi-
talizes on cycles of boom and bust, and even takes time as a commodity form. But critics
of neoliberalism, if interested in time, tend to read neoliberalism’s time in the light of
apocalypse and anti-future, especially in the context of climate change, arguing that the
188 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(2)

scramble for resources and the hope of endless economic growth are not only incompati-
ble with each other and unsustainable but will also bring about empire and the end of poli-
tics (Klein, 2014; Loo, 2011; Robinson, 2004). Interpreting neoliberalism’s time in the
geographical context, anthropologist Hai Ren argues that the neoliberalization of the
Chinese state is contingent on the restoration of Hong Kong’s sovereignty in 1997 as the
means of remaking socialist China to become ‘synchronic with the contemporary capital-
ist world’ (2010: x). Translating the Chinese phrase yu shijie jiegui in the 1990s as ‘syn-
chronization,’ Ren conveys an understanding of Chinese neoliberalization as a nationalist
and global project that not only seeks to develop the economy but also to re-unify and
reintegrate ‘long lost territories,’ such as Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Moreover,
while neoliberal synchronization means for China the attempt to be equal with the West in
sharing the same temporality, it also sheds light on an important dimension of neoliberal
globalization as penetrating and breaking down the barriers of time, to induct – if not
abduct – others into the homogeneity of the now. In short, neoliberalism’s time is not just
anti-future and apocalyptic, but the collapse of the future into the present. The neoliberal-
ist telos is of course prosperity by turning to the common as well as the individual as the
site for capitalist development; in this very sense, the future of neoliberalism is singular,
certain, and inalterable, and only the present is up for grabs. The future informs, even
dictates, the present; it tells us what to do and shows us where we will be.
Worse yet, the homogeneous imagination of the future only produces greater anxiety
about the present because the future is no longer waiting to happen, but right here in our
faces. The only choice we are given is to accept its challenge by making the right moves
to compete and accumulate, or else fall under its ruthless wheels. The certainty of the
future hence becomes a means to discipline the present, turning the heterogeneous now
into homogeneous empty time leading to the neoliberal future. If the nation-state relies
on the homogeneous empty time, as Benjamin suggested, to write its history as a story of
progress and arrival, neoliberalism is remaking the progress-oriented future into a prison
house of subjectivity and dream by making uniform the heterogeneous now and exclud-
ing the alternatives it holds. Neoliberalism’s future is a form of biopolitics that dictates
our paths to the future and a necropolitics of imagination.
In this sense, the Sunflower Movement’s vision of the future can be read as a resist-
ance to neoliberalism’s future – regretfully but appropriately embodied by the Chinese
state and capital. At the same time, its lack of future imagination, except that of an anti-
communist, independent nation-state to come, reinforces the hold of neoliberalism in
folding the future into the present and in collapsing biopolitics in electoral democracy.
Despite the more critical but minor formations within it, it is perhaps not inaccurate to
characterize the Sunflower Movement as more anti-Chinese than anti-neoliberal. What
they are really worried about is not so much the Chinese state as the singularity and cer-
tainty of the neoliberal future that China embodies as a political and economic entity.
Neoliberalism works in the minds of the Sunflower generation as a powerful combina-
tion of neoliberal economy and Chinese political hegemony, against which an independ-
ent and democratic nation-state has become their last hope of escape, as they are thrown
into the maelstrom of neoliberal competition.
German sociologist Norbert Elias tells us that time is neither just natural nor social but
a form of relations. Time is what makes possible ‘the relating together of positions or
Wang 189

segments within two or more continuously moving sequences of events’ (1992: 10). Its
secret power lies in its synchronizing capacity that enables us to orient ourselves in the
flow of history and to measure our relationship with others. Neoliberalism’s future not
only synchronizes but also singularizes social relations across times and spaces. It
demands we let go of time by letting it be taken as a form of commodity and capital. The
Sunflower youths felt the need of and demanded a different future, but they had no lan-
guage for it other than the affective rhetoric of sunrise, darkness, courage, dream, anxi-
ety, and happiness that clings to the demand of ownership (‘the future that belongs to us’)
as the ultimate horizon of political imagination. Such is not the triumph of Taiwanese
nationalism, but of neoliberalism’s privatizing impulse as the sky of our imagination. To
quote Standing again, to resist becoming and, better yet, to abolish the precariat, we must
‘revive the future’ (2014: 386). It is toward this end that the Sunflower generation will
make its mark in history and the future.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. ‘Wild Lilies’ was Taiwan’s first student movement for democratization in the post-Martial
Law era. Taking place in the early 1990s at the wake of the June Fourth movement in China, it
resulted in parliamentary reform and ushered in a generation of student activists who became
politicians later. ‘Wild Strawberries’ occurred in 2008, in response to the second visit of the
Chinese official on Taiwan affairs to protest state violence against human rights. Although
this movement did not yield any productive results, it succeeded in giving the post-1990s
generation of students a sense of activism, leading up to the Sunflower Movement. Both
movements have direct influences on the Sunflower. For interconnections between these
movements, see He (2014) and Liu (2014).
2. For a documentation of the movement in English, see Owen (2015).
3. See discussions in the special issue of Reflexion (Chen and Wang, 2014) and the special forum
in Hong Kong Law Review (Jones, 2015).
4. The term bong shidai was coined by a group of left-leaning scholars in Taiwan for their book
of the same title to describe the collapse of a generation in the era of neoliberalism. They
translated it as the ‘BOMB Generation,’ to suggest not only the collapse of a generation but
also the outburst of its rage (see Lin et al., 2011). To avoid the confusion implied by the word
‘bomb,’ I translated the term as the ‘collapsing generation’ that better connects with the term
‘precariat.’
5. Though I do not have the space to fully engage with them here, the works of Ahmed (2004),
Hemmings (2005), and Protevi (2009) have shaped my understanding of the affective-politi-
cal as a critical approach to culture and politics.
6. See the Statement for the Action of ‘Defending Democracy for 120 Hours’ (17 March 2014)
which represents the voices of 54 citizen groups on the issue.
7. For exploring anti-work politics and post-work imaginaries, Weeks (2011) relies on Ernest
Bloch and Nietzsche for inspiration. In particular, Bloch’s formulations of utopia as the ‘not-
yet-become’ and ‘not-yet-conscious’ provide a roadmap for understanding the politics of hope
in utopian demands. Weeks writes: ‘The ontology of what Bloch calls the “Not-Yet-Become”
affirms reality as a process that not only extends backward but also stretches forward’; such a
190 International Journal of Cultural Studies 20(2)

view allows us to understand the present not merely in terms of ‘attachments to the past,’ but
also as ‘leading edges and open possibilities’ (2011: 189) that can be apprehended by what
Bloch calls the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’ as ‘a source of creativity and site of intellectual produc-
tivity’ (Weeks, 2011: 190).
8. The English version is performed by an independent female singer from Taiwan, Sherry
Cheng; the lyrics were co-written by nine student activists (see Cheng, 2014).
9. The second phase of this project reduced the monthly salary to NT$10,000, for a period of
only six months (Wu, 2014: 56).

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Author biography
Chih-ming Wang is associate research fellow at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He is the author
of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (2013) and
the guest-editor of the special issue on ‘Asian American studies in Asia’ in Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies (2012).