Wild Lily student movement

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Banners recalling the Wild Lily student movement of 1990 were mounted on Memorial Hall in March 2007.

Taiwan's Wild Lily student movement (Traditional Chinese: 野百合學運) or March student movement was a six-day student demonstration in 1990 for democratic reform. The sit-in at Memorial Square in Taipei, initiated by only a few students from National Taiwan University, soon drew the participation of over 300,000 demonstrators. The Wild Lily demonstrators sought direct elections of Taiwan's president and vice president and new elections for all representatives.

The demonstration coincided with the upcoming election of Lee Teng-Hui to a six-year term as Taiwan's president--an election in which only 670 officials voted, only one party was recognized, and only one candidate ran. This presidential appointment process, characteristic of one-party rule under the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek, was by 1990 widely seen as antiquated.

Protesters wore white Formosan lilies and created giant replicas of the flower as a symbol of democracy. Their adoption of the flower as an icon of freedom evoked a long native tradition. Yang Yung-ming, a professor of political science at National Taiwan University, described it to Taiwan Review in 2003:

"For years, Taiwanese poets have employed this flower as a symbol of grace and resilience. The aboriginal poet Lin Yi-te, for example, often used it to symbolize the Taiwanese indigenous peoples' primitive purity of spirit, and used the flower's decline to dramatize the desolation and tragedy of their decline. It was Taiwanese literature's use of this wild lily as a metaphor of simplicity and fortitude that inspired its use by those in the student democracy movement."^{[cite this quote]}

On the first day of his new term, March 21, Lee Teng-Hui welcomed fifty students to the Presidential Building. He expressed his support of the students' goals and promised full democracy for Taiwan beginning with reforms to be initiated that summer.

The Wild Lily student movement is widely regarded as a turning point in Taiwan's transition to democracy. Six years later Lee became Taiwan's first popularly elected leader, taking 54% of the vote in an election where over 95% of eligible voters participated. Democracy supporters continue to gather at Memorial Square every March 21 to commemorate the event. Officials affiliated with the Taiwan Solidarity Union have advocated the movement of Taiwan's Youth Day to March 21 in recognition of the students' achievement.

President Chen Shui-Bian, on the eve of the fifteenth anniversary of student democracy protests in China's Tienanmen Square, noted that the Wild Lily student movement took place only one year after the ill-fated student demonstrations in Beijing. He noted the contrast in the way the governments responded. "The most memorable impression of the Tienanmen incident of June 4th is that of that small, thin person holding up a line of tanks, which was a heroic and disturbing impression," he said. "The March Study Movement, in pressing for the establishment of a national affairs conference, changing the way the Legislative Yuan and the National Assembly are elected and a consensus on realizing the direct election of the president, also set a timetable for [further] reform."