The Flowers and the Sun

On the evening of March 18, 2014, an extraordinary thing happened in Taipei: Students stormed Taiwan’s national parliament building, the Legislative Yuan, in protest of the then-ruling Kuomintang forcing the passage of a trade pact with China.  It was the largest student protest Taiwan had ever seen, and the then-opposition Democratic Progressive Party swept the next election as a result, capturing both the Presidency as well as a Legislative majority.

Over the course of the occupation, which lasted several weeks, I documented the day-to-day life of the students and police inside and around the Legislature during the ensuing historic saga, from political fights at the highest level to threats of attacks by organized crime syndicates, as society watched and reassessed what it means to be Taiwanese.

For more information, see this interview Brian Hioe of Daybreak conducted with me.