Introduction
Around the end of November to early December 2022, the protests against the Zero-COVID policy in China hit the headline of major Western media. Newspapers and reporters outside China were astonished at the outbreak of anger and protests in the highly censored and authoritarian regime. Some of the reports recalled the Tiananmen Square Incident on June 4th, 1989 and regarded the current protests as a second June Fourth Movement. However, if we carefully examine the groups of protesters, the methods of the protests, and the history of contemporary social movements in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, we would not be surprised by the current protests. Instead, we would find out that the spirit of the resistance has already been rooted in the society since 2014.
This exhibition features some of the major contemporary social movements in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from the Taiwan Sunflower Student Movement in 2014 to current protests against the Zero-COVID policy in China at the end of 2022. By displaying monographs, photos, videos, and born-digital sources about social movements of contemporary China, Hongkong, and Taiwan, the exhibition points out some significant characteristics of the 21st-century movements and tries to historicize the recent anti-Zero-COVID movement (or the White Paper Movement/A4 paper Movement) within a broader context of contemporary social movements in East Asia.
This exhibition will last from January to March 2023.
