‘The future that belongs to us’: Affective politics,neoliberalism and the Sunflower Movement

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.