Generational Differences in Attitudes towards Cross-Straits Trade

1 The Sunflower Movement erupted in March and April this year because of the hasty passing of the Cross-Straits Service Trade Agreement by the Legislative Yuan.This movement has certainly made many people in Taiwan aware of the anxiety and distrust the younger generation has towards China. Regardless of the possibility of party politics and power strugglehaving played a role in triggering the protest, the Movement may have been a culminating event summarizing the gradually developing generational differences in attitudes towards the cross-straits political and economic relationship. As Wang Jenn-hwan(2014), a Taiwanese sociologist, commented recently in Taipei Times, unlike those above the age of 40, who have gone through the KMT's " greater China " education and have certain understanding about China, younger people in Taiwan grew up during the process of democratization and have no emotional attachment to China. The purpose of this paper is to explore important macro and micro factors that may have formed the social basis of these generational differences. The exploration pooled national statistics and large-scale social surveys across many years to investigate the trend of these differences. The paper also draws upon the information provided byseveral previous studies, in particular a surveythat specifically studied the participants of the Movement and another survey that targeted the attitudes of Taiwanese people towards various agreements signed between the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF, Taiwan) and Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS, China), to understand the differences at the individual level. The Sunflower Movement is widely identified with the younger generation, in particular, college students in Taiwan. It is, however, very important to learn more about the composition of the activists who actually participated in the event. First, the so-called " younger generation, " just like any generational cohort, may not be a homogenous group. There have been comments in newspapersto the effect that students who participated in the Movement were angry young men and women (fen qing, 憤青) and mostly were not students of natural sciences (e.g., Yuan, 2014).Secondly, the young activists also tend to be opinion leaders and are likely to engage in political activitiesin the future. Other than gathering information based on reports in mass media to learn about the composition of movement participants, it is fortunate that Prof. Wan-chi Chen with the assistance of her colleagues and students conducted a fairly systematic on-site structured interview survey of these activists on March 25 th and …