志异 Draft by Drama box July 2014 (english) | Page 52

it is unlikely that they can resolve the problem once
they take to the streets; it is at most, a performance.
‘Professors of sociology’ including myself, are not
part of the solution but the problem. The students do
not need the professors’ permission to skip classes in
order to protest on the streets because participants of
the movement should rightly take responsibility for
their own actions. If students are boycotting classes as a
form of protest, what professors ought to do is not just
conveniently support such action. Instead, they need
to pay their own price by going on strike, supposing
that this is already a ‘social movement’ as some of
them claim. If no one wants to pay the price for his
or her own political choice, then who should pay? For
a long time, intellectuals who made a mess during
their political stints have ‘returned to teaching’ after
stepping down! But then again, students must also
take historical responsibility for their own actions.
Did the participants of the student movement try to
engage in self-criticism for the racist or quasi-fascist
undertones in the movement’s rhetoric? If we allow the
discriminatory language of racism to go unchecked
while continuing to pat ourselves on the back for our
‘diversity’, ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘civil society’, are we
not being too hypocritical?
No one knows where this student movement will lead
Taiwan, but its genesis is relatively clearer. It is but a
periodic manifestation of the unresolved issues in the
historical legacies of Taiwanese society, which went
through Japanese colonialism, the Chinese civil war,
the White Terror period, separation from the Chinese
mainland and subsequent democratisation. If it is
everyone’s view that Taiwanese ‘democratisation’
has encountered a problem, it is correct. However,