Last Saturdays march in Taipei – which was to protest China’s recent anti-secession law – seems to have succeeded in it’s main goal of attracting a reasonable amount of international attention. Here are a few thoughts from someone who was there …

The Atmosphere

The Taiwanese sure know how to organise a friendly protest. I’ve never considered protests to be family affairs before, but they are in Taiwan; this was a day for babies, children, pets and grandparents. Despite the serious focus of the march, there was a carnival feel to the day; people were happy to be out on the streets, saying what they wanted to say. This seems to be the way the Taiwanese do things: whether it was this march, the Feb 28th protest or March 13th rally last year, the atmosphere has been unfailingly good-natured. Even in the post-election protests last year (which were, on the face of it, massively confrontational) people behaved in a generally decent manner.

The Organisation

A lot of things in Taiwan are chaotic; not the demonstrations though. Organising a protest where people are bussed in from all over the country (with thousands of busses) to march in 10 different groups all converging on 1 place at the same time (and then ensuring everyone gets home again) is not a trivial problem, but one which was carried out without any obvious difficulty. The police marshalled everyone effectively, the people obeyed all the instructions, and when it was all over, everything was cleaned up with a minimum of fuss.

Partisan politics

Partisan politics are a way of life out here. Even on an issue like this (where politicians on all sides have denounced the law), there has been an obvious, and fairly bitter, division of opinion. Although the protest march was officially not linked to any political party, it was clearly organised by pan-Green supporters, and so pan-Blue politicians avoided participating. As a result, there was the predictable political sniping after the event (whether over the total number of participants, or whether it was a waste of money).

Some banner notes

A couple of weeks ago, there was a request for native English speakers to help come up with some slogans for the rally. Always a sucker for a bad pun, I came up with a few suggestions … and was surprised to see a few of them appear in the rally. Beyond the inevitable puns on the Chinese leadership (“Wen will Taiwan be free?”, “Hu cares about Taiwan?”), there was also one which (with apologies to Richard) appealed to my puerile sense of humour:

However, I didn’t see my favourite: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein China”