01 / The Puzzle
Why did deepening integration culminate in mass resistance?
The election of Ma Ying-jeou in 2008 appeared to open a new era in Taiwan-China relations. Taipei and Beijing signed a series of agreements, economic exchange accelerated, and movement across the Strait expanded sharply. For several years, deeper integration appeared to be the direction of travel.
Then, in spring 2014, students and activists occupied Taiwan’s legislature to block the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement. The Sunflower Movement brought the rapprochement into crisis and marked a profound shift in Taiwan’s political trajectory.
02 / The Argument
Rapprochement was a social project
Social Forces in the Re-Making of Cross-Strait Relations argues that the answer cannot be found in elections, party competition or relations between Taipei and Beijing alone. Cross-Strait rapprochement was also a social project, constructed and contested within Taiwan itself.
The book reconstructs a struggle between social forces seeking to consolidate a renewed model of Taiwan’s developmentalism through closer integration with China and movements challenging the inequalities, forms of domination and visions of social life associated with that project.
Seen from this perspective, the Sunflower Movement was not a sudden eruption. It was the outcome of a much longer process of organisation, learning and conflict.
03 / What the Book Shows
Two forces remade the political terrain
Based on 45 interviews and extensive primary research, the book reconstructs two interwoven processes.
First, Taiwan’s large business conglomerates were central to the construction of rapprochement. Over decades, these groups helped build networks of think tanks, associations and civil-society organisations that sought to present cross-Strait economic integration as pragmatic, technical and economically necessary.
Second, Taiwan’s social movements developed through struggle. Confronting land dispossession, labour precarity, environmental conflict and democratic grievances, activists refined their organisations, accumulated political capacities and articulated competing visions of Taiwan’s future.
Neither process can be understood adequately in isolation. Their interaction explains both the advance of rapprochement and the forces that ultimately challenged it.
04 / Why It Matters
The struggle did not end in 2014
The consequences of this period continue to shape Taiwan. The Sunflower Movement helped close the political space for the earlier model of cross-Strait rapprochement and contributed to a lasting reorganisation of Taiwan’s political landscape.
Yet many of the social contradictions that animated the movements of the 2000s and early 2010s remain unresolved. Young people continue to face pressure from wages, housing and living costs, while Taiwan’s industrial model continues to generate conflicts over land, labour, energy and economic strategy.
Understanding how these struggles reshaped cross-Strait relations therefore also helps explain the Taiwan that emerged after 2014.
05 / Resistance as Method
Understanding politics through struggle
The book develops a critical political-economy approach drawing on Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg and Henri Lefebvre. It conceptualises cross-Strait rapprochement as a contested hegemonic project and asks how domination and resistance develop through one another.
Rather than beginning from institutions alone, the analysis takes episodes of hegemonic contestation over everyday life as its empirical point of departure. This makes it possible to trace how social forces are constituted through struggle, how they accumulate capacities, and how apparently stable political projects can become vulnerable from within.
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Social Forces in the Re-Making of Cross-Strait Relations speaks to readers interested in Taiwan, cross-Strait relations, social movements, critical political economy and Gramscian approaches to social change.