Wild Lily Student Movement

30-Second Overview: In March 1990, Taiwan's university students staged a seven-day-and-six-night sit-in at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, demanding the dissolution of the National Assembly, the abolition of the Temporary Provisions, the convening of a National Affairs Conference, and the establishment of a timetable for political and economic reform. This student movement, known as the Wild Lily movement, did not overturn the government — but it forced the rulers of the time to directly answer a question that should have been answered long ago: after the lifting of martial law, when would Taiwan actually become democratic? One year later, the Temporary Provisions were abolished; then the "ten-thousand-year" National Assembly stood down, the legislature was fully re-elected, and direct presidential elections took shape. The Wild Lily was not the starting point of democratization, but it was one of its most crucial accelerators.

On March 16, 1990, the first students to sit down in the plaza of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall numbered only about a dozen.

They had no party machinery, no large budget, and no idea whether they would be carried away by police seven days later. What brought them to the plaza was not abstract at all: a group of National Assembly representatives who had held their seats since 1948 — more than forty years without re-election — were still managing to extend their own terms and raise their own salaries. Taiwan had already lifted martial law, and all kinds of social movements had begun appearing in the streets, but the core of state power still seemed frozen in another era.

For many young people, what was truly intolerable at that moment was not authoritarianism itself, but the fact that authoritarianism had clearly begun to loosen — and yet the old order still wanted to pretend it could stay unchanged forever.

Seven Days: Why It Was Enough to Change a System

The Wild Lily movement lasted from March 16 to March 22 — not long, but it fell at an extremely sensitive historical moment.

Taiwan lifted martial law in 1987, and the bans on political parties and the press were also gradually relaxed; but lifting martial law was not the same as completing democracy. At the time, the National Assembly and the Legislative Yuan still retained large numbers of central representative delegates elected on the mainland in 1948. These people had long since lost any electoral mandate but continued to represent a political reality that no longer existed, earning them the derisive label "ten-thousand-year legislature" from Taiwanese society.

1990 also happened to be a presidential election year. Lee Teng-hui needed to complete his presidential re-election through the National Assembly, and within the KMT a fierce factional struggle had broken out between the "mainstream" and "non-mainstream" factions. For the students in the plaza, this was not merely an internal party power struggle — it was a rare historical opening: the old system was loosening, and society finally had a chance to stuff reform demands directly into the heart of power.

Curator's Note
The fate of many student movements depends on whether they appear in "an era of calm" or "an era of cracks." The Wild Lily was effective not only because the students were courageous, but because Taiwan's political system in 1990 happened to no longer be as solid as it had been in the 1970s.

From a Dozen to Thousands

On March 16, National Taiwan University students Chou Ko-jen, Yang Hung-jen, Ho Tsung-hsien, and a few others launched a sit-in at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, protesting the "ten-thousand-year legislature" and National Assembly delegates enriching themselves. The first night was the most dangerous, since the site was within the Boai Special District and could be cleared at any moment.

But by the second day, the situation began to change. Media coverage, word spreading among students from campus to campus, mobilization by student movement groups, and a continuous inflow of supplies from supporters — the plaza rapidly expanded into a site of Taiwan-wide student solidarity. By March 18 and 19, participants had risen from hundreds to thousands, with students from NTU, Fu Jen, Tunghai, Taipei Medical, Chinese Culture, Taiwan Theological College, and other schools and departments converging there.

They did not turn the site into violent confrontation, but instead established something resembling a "provisional civic government": a command center, a discipline group, a publicity group, a logistics group, and cross-campus meetings to build consensus. The students emphasized four principles to the outside world: autonomy, isolation, peace, and order.

This was important. The power of the Wild Lily came not just from numbers, but from its demonstration to society that Taiwan's university students were not engaging in emotional rabble-rousing — they were displaying a capacity for public political action more orderly, and more legitimate, than the old system.

Four Demands: Why Each Cut to the Bone

The Wild Lily movement is best known for these four demands:

1. Dissolve the National Assembly
2. Abolish the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion
3. Convene a National Affairs Conference
4. Establish a timetable for political and economic reform

Looking back today, these four points named almost every knot blocking Taiwan's democratization.

First, dissolving the National Assembly targeted the absurdity of the "ten-thousand-year legislature." Second, abolishing the Temporary Provisions targeted the legal continuation of the emergency state of authoritarian rule. Third, calling for a National Affairs Conference was a demand that constitutional reform enter open public discussion rather than remain behind party-state closed doors. Fourth, demanding a timetable was a refusal to let the ruling party stall with vague promises like "we will reform."

This was also where the Wild Lily was most formidable: it did not merely shout "I want democracy" — it broke democracy down into several actionable, accountable, verifiable political projects.

Why "Wild Lily"?

The movement did not call itself "Wild Lily" from the beginning. On March 19, the students formally selected the "Taiwan wild lily" as their symbol and erected a large wild lily installation on the plaza.

The choice of the wild lily was not only because it grows in Taiwan's mountains and wilderness — it also carried symbolic qualities well suited to this movement: not showy, not obedient to cultivation systems, yet capable of growing up on its own in the wind.

This was very close to how the students of 1990 imagined themselves. They were not a youth wing attached to any political party, not a decoration for anyone's politics — they were a new generation that had grown organically from the society that emerged after the lifting of martial law. They had inherited the democratic energy accumulated through the Dangwai movement, the Formosa Incident, and the end of martial law, and were more willing than the previous generation to directly challenge the constitutional structure.

Lee Teng-hui's Choice: Dialogue, Not Suppression

The Wild Lily became a pivotal node in Taiwan's democratization not only because the students held firm, but because Lee Teng-hui made a historic choice: rather than suppressing the protest, he met with the students.

On March 21, Lee Teng-hui met with student representatives. This act seems unremarkable in retrospect, but at the time it was highly unusual. In the earlier authoritarian era, large-scale student protests were typically monitored, co-opted, or — in the worst cases — simply dispersed by force.

Lee Teng-hui did not agree to all the demands on the spot, but he promised to convene a National Affairs Conference and respond to the call for reform. The next day, the students announced the end of their sit-in.

The dialogue itself was already symbolic: the head of state acknowledged that the students were not a nuisance to be cleared away, but public actors who could enter directly into political negotiation.

Contested Perspective
Some argue that the Wild Lily succeeded primarily because Lee Teng-hui was already planning to reform, and the students merely caught a favorable wind. Another view holds that precisely because the students concentrated social pressure and constitutional demands in the streets, Lee Teng-hui gained greater political legitimacy to push subsequent reforms. Both views capture part of the truth: reform requires a leader's choice, but without social pressure, many "reform intentions" ultimately become blank checks in history.

After the Wild Lily: Did Reform Actually Happen?

Looking only at the moment the movement ended, the Wild Lily seemed not to have immediately toppled anything. The National Assembly did not dissolve the following day, and the old system did not collapse overnight.

But if you extend the timeframe, the effect is very clear.

In 1991, the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion were abolished; that same year, the National Assembly held full re-elections; in 1992, the Legislative Yuan was fully re-elected; in 1994, direct elections were opened for mayors and county magistrates; in 1996, Taiwan held its first direct presidential election.

These reforms were certainly not caused by the Wild Lily alone — they were the combined result of the Dangwai movement, social movements, institutional reform from within, the KMT's internal power reorganization, and international circumstances. But the Wild Lily compressed reforms that might have continued to drag on into a public agenda from which society could no longer flee.

In other words, the Wild Lily did not single-handedly create Taiwan's democratization, but it pushed democratization from "perhaps it will slowly arrive" into "you must answer now."

How It Differed from Later Student Movements

Taiwan subsequently had many other important student and civic movements — the Wild Strawberry movement of 2008 and the Sunflower movement of 2014, for instance. Compared with these, the Wild Lily had two very distinctive characteristics.

First, its demands were highly concentrated on constitutional structure. The Sunflower movement was concerned with the procedures of the cross-strait services trade agreement, the direction of China-oriented economic policy, and the failure of representative democracy; the Wild Lily was concerned with: what right did this country's highest representative body still have not to hold re-elections?

Second, it appeared at the doorway of an as-yet-uncompleted democratization. The Sunflower was a movement of the era of deepening democracy; the Wild Lily was a movement of an era in which democracy had not yet taken shape. The former sounded an alarm about an already democratized system; the latter was pushing a semi-authoritarian, semi-transitional system to formally cross the threshold.

This is why the Wild Lily holds such a distinctive place in Taiwan's history: it was neither the earliest resistance nor the most passionate street confrontation, but it happened to stand at that door and push at the most critical moment.

A Generation That Redefined "Politics"

What the Wild Lily left behind was not just the results of reform, but a new sense of what politics could be.

In earlier eras, politics was often understood as the domain of a few elites, opposition politicians, and professional political operators; students could care about current events, but they were not necessarily regarded as genuine political actors. The Wild Lily changed this. For the first time, Taiwan's society witnessed on a large scale that students were not citizens of the future — they were citizens of the present.

They could occupy a plaza, put forward concrete political demands, organize with discipline, negotiate with the president, and — without resort to violence — make the state yield.

This had a deep impact on Taiwan's political culture over the next twenty-plus years. From campus self-governance and civic participation to later social movements and youth political engagement, something of the Wild Lily's public imagination lives on in all of them.

The Most Counter-Intuitive Thing About This Movement

The most counter-intuitive thing about the Wild Lily is that it looked like a campus movement, but it was actually addressing the state's hardest question — constitutional legitimacy.

It did not storm the Presidential Office, did not spill blood, and had none of the dramatic scenes of revolution. What it did was actually quite restrained: sit-ins, meetings, hunger strikes, press releases, demands, requests for dialogue. But precisely because it stated its reform demands so concretely, the old system found it all the harder to play dumb.

Many movements that truly change history are not the most extreme, but the ones that make a system that has already lost its legitimacy unable to survive any longer through delay.

The Wild Lily was that kind of movement.

It let Taiwan's society see clearly in the spring of 1990: lifting martial law is not the endpoint, elections are not mere decoration — the real question is when this country is willing to truly return power to the people.

And that year, the answer began to appear.

References

• Wild Lily Student Movement (Wikipedia)
• President attends "Symposium on the 30th Anniversary of Direct Presidential Elections in Taiwan and Democratic Resilience" and discusses the Wild Lily movement (Office of the President)
• 7th–9th President Lee Teng-hui (Office of the President)
• Wild Lily Student Movement and Taiwan's Democratization Process (Democracy Moment Hall / National Cultural Memory resources)
• _The Quiet Revolution_ — related research and the context of Lee Teng-hui's democratic reforms
• _The Wild Lily Generation_

Related Topics

• Sunflower Student Movement: How another generation of students pushed institutional debate twenty-four years later
• Democratic System: How Taiwan's democratic rules today were built step by step
• Taiwan's Political Environment and Electoral System: The institutional transformation from the "ten-thousand-year legislature" to full re-election