World
Thousands of Taiwanese protesters have been turning out once again, demanding more decisive action against nuclear power from officials in Taipei in recent days. A crowd of 45,000 reportedly gathered in the capital city last week to halt a controversial practice of shipping nuclear waste overseas for a process called “nuclear reprocessing” – i.e., a method of recycling nuclear energy.
These protests are a sort of coda to those staged by the so-called “Sunflower movement” last year, which successfully forced the Taiwan parliament to shelve a hotly debated trade deal with China after pro-democratic students famously camped out in the parliamentary building for 23 days. Although mostly overshadowed by the Hong Kong protest movement, Taiwan has also been the site of tension in recent years amid the coercive specter of Chinese influence. The trade deal that inspired the occupation of parliament was largely reviled because it threatened to leave Taiwan too vulnerable to the mainland.
Like Hong Kong, Taiwan has a complicated, quasi-autonomous relationship with China. After a civil war in 1949, Taiwan fell into a semi-detached status that has never quite reached full independence. China maintains that such a move would be unacceptable. And as China’s global stature has grown, fewer and fewer countries continue to diplomatically recognize Taiwan - surely a source of anxiety for the tiny, but wealthy island.
But Taiwan’s democratic protests appear to have deeper roots than nationalist assertions. China is a prickly issue in large part because of the existential threat it poses to Taiwan’s democracy. After overthrowing a dictatorship in 1989, Taiwan has emerged as one of the world’s most democratic societies (this in stark contrast to its neighbor).
When analyzed in this broader context, Taiwan’s current anti-nuclear protests appear, at least in part, to boil down to the nation’s ambitions to survive and thrive as a Western-style democracy. Environmentally motivated protests seem defiant when juxtaposed with China’s widely criticized pollution crisis, and well-coordinated demonstrations are certainly a function of a formidable civil society.
So far, the anti-nuclear protest movement has been quite successful. Last year, Taipei legislators agreed to freeze progress on a fourth nuclear reactor in the country, in response to a protest movement that stemmed out of the Sunflower Movement. They also agreed to draw back on nuclear reprocessing efforts last week, after widespread demonstrations against it. The future is hardly guaranteed to be nuclear-free in Taiwan - the freeze on the fourth reactor is up for a re-vote next year - but the protest movements have shown themselves to be resilient.
The arguments against nuclear reliance are obvious in Taiwan - the island sits upon the so-called “ring of fire” that leaves it vulnerable to earthquakes like the one that shattered Fukushima in 2011. But experts worry about Taiwan’s lack of energy security, particularly in light of China’s looming presence. Nuclear power accounts for only 18% of Taiwan’s energy supplies, but it is practically the only domestic source. For a country fundamentally concerned with maintaining its self-reliance, a dependence on energy imports is one heck of an Achilles heel.
