Precariat Strike!: Neoliberalism and Future Anxieties

• In Event: The States of Precarity: The Consequences of Neoliberalization in East Asia

Abstract

The Sunflower Movement that took place in Taiwan during spring 2014 has been an epochal event with critical implications for Taiwan and the larger East Asian region. Many critics have identified China as the most important factor that instigated the Sunflower Movement, while others have noticed the contradictions of economy, politics, and culture within Taiwan as the reasons for its outburst. Though it is noted that the proposed service and trade pacts between Taiwan and China that inspired the movement is inevitable in the process of economic regional integration under the framework of "free trade" and WTO, few has begun to theorize the movement's discourses on neoliberalism as both the conditions of globalization and a discourse on the youth's relationship with the future. The latter is prominently articulated as an "anxiety" before and during the Sunflower Movement in which people, mostly college students on the verge of entering the job market, feel greatly uncertain about their career prospects in the future. Especially when it comes to such practical issues as finding a job, buying a house, getting married, and raising children, these young people feel either a sharp sense of deprivation (because the good old days enjoyed by their parents are now bygone) or a strong anxiety about competition with China (for which given Taiwan's economic and political condition, they feel greatly disadvantaged). How do we theorize such anxieties about the future, especially in relation to neoliberalism as a structure of feeling, and these anxious subjects in relation to Taiwan's economic and political status? This paper seeks to address these questions by conceptualizing the Sunflower Movement as a "precariat strike" that jettisons future anxieties and questions the future of globalization.

Author

• Chih-ming Wang, Academia Sinica