From the Wild Lilies to the Ballot: Liberty Square and Taiwan's First Direct Election

In March 1990 students sat down on the paving of this square, in front of the memorial hall built for Chiang Kai-shek, and refused to leave. They had four demands, and the sharpest of them was the dissolution of the National Assembly — a body elected on the mainland in 1947 whose members had never faced another election and were by then in their eighties, voting on the constitution of an island most of them had first seen as refugees. The students called themselves the Wild Lily movement after the Formosa lily, a flower that grows on its own without cultivation.

The numbers reached several thousand over six days. On 21 March, the newly confirmed president Lee Teng-hui met student representatives inside the Presidential Office and accepted the substance of what they were asking for. What followed came fast: a national affairs conference that summer, the abolition of the Temporary Provisions that had suspended the constitution since 1948, the forced retirement of the entire mainland-elected legislature at the end of 1991, and full elections for the Legislative Yuan in 1992.

The last piece was the presidency itself. On 23 March 1996 Taiwanese voters chose a head of state directly for the first time. Turnout was about 76 per cent; Lee took 54 per cent against three opponents. The campaign ran through live missile tests — the People's Liberation Army fired ballistic missiles into waters off Keelung and Kaohsiung that March, and the United States sent two carrier groups into the area. The intimidation is generally reckoned to have helped Lee's margin rather than hurt it.

The square kept changing after that. It was Great Loyalty Square until 2007, when the plaque on the arch was replaced with the characters for Liberty Square — a change made, unmade and remade as governments turned over, which is itself an accurate summary of how contested the memory of all this remains.

Come on a weekend and it is tai chi practitioners, skateboarders, wedding photographers and pigeons, with schoolchildren queueing for the changing of the guard behind them. It looks like nothing happened here. That is roughly the point: the achievement of 1990 and 1996 was to make politics boring enough that a plaza this size could go back to being a plaza.

Where: Liberty Square 自由廣場, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Zhongzheng District, Taipei. Open, free, always accessible; CKS Memorial Hall MRT exit 5. The Wild Lily sit-in occupied the paving between the arch and the hall steps.

Cover photo: Gate of Liberty Square and National Theater by Lord Koxinga, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.