A unique phenomenon that occurred during the recalls is how many small and private business owners explicitly voiced their stance on the recalls. Such businesses were not few in number, with pro-recall business numbering around 3000 by some counts.
No other social movement in recent Taiwanese history has seen such a large scale involvement of privately-owned businesses. Given the civil society origins nature of the movement, pro-recall business were of unlimited variety, including bookstores, cafes, breakfast stores, animal clinics, printing service providers, religious organisations, and more.
Such an expression of civic society is quite high-risk, considering how many pro-recall businesses operated in districts that were blue-leaning. If a business chooses to express its political stance, there is no cover of anonymity.
This means that customers or even passersby whose recall stance is different can retaliate directly by either boycotting the store, flooding it with negative one-star reviews, or even engaging in physical altercation against store staff.
Additionally, the local government of many of the regions where such businesses operated were staffed by Kuomintang (KMT) politicians. Hence, the local government may also apply pressure by suddenly conducting a number of politically motivated government inspections, known as “water meter checks”. A well known case was that of Fonglin Charcoal-Grilled Corn (鳳林碳烤玉米) in Hualien, which, after expressing its pro-recall stance, was forced to close due to joint inspections by the National Taxation Bureau, the Health Bureau, and the Fire Department.
The fact that so many businesses expressed their pro-recall stance regardless of the risk clearly illustrates the heightened sense of crisis that many Taiwanese felt in response to the actions of the KMT-TPP coalition in the Legislative Yuan.
Such large scale pro-recall mobilisation of private businesses was absent during previous large-scale social movements, such as the Sunflower Movement. In both cases, the government was perceived as drifting too close to China. The recall signalled a crisis of greater measure: for the first time eliciting the participation of businesses to safeguard Taiwanese democracy.
Businesses have an ability to break through echo chambers that many recall groups and activist organisations lack. This is because, especially for businesses in blue-leaning districts, they have built-up a clientele that does not select for political ideology. Anything that a business puts on display for customers - be it on social media or physically in the store space - will inevitably be seen by people with varied and diverging political stances.
Conversely, recall groups and activist organisations only attract those with similar stances. Most recall groups had ‘air war’ teams, which specialised in creating persuasive content to engage swing voters. The degree to which most of this content, especially online, made it past the pro-recall bubble is questionable.
The pro-recall business movement in Taiwan mirrors earlier patterns seen elsewhere in East Asia — most notably in Hong Kong.
There are a few interesting similarities and differences between Taiwan and Hong Kong’s case. Respectively, not so long ago, when China was cracking down on Hong Kong’s freedom, a similar phenomenon of stores expressing their political stance occurred within the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. Businesses that supported the Hong Kong protests were labelled as yellow, while those that opposed them were blue.
As in Taiwan’s case, choosing where to dine and who to do business with was a form of protest, an expression of one’s ideology. There was even an app that enabled Hong Kongers to see which businesses supported the anti-China protests and which opposed them. Likewise, in Taiwan many recall groups shared online lists of recall-friendly and anti-recall stores.
However, there is a curious difference between both cases. Respectively, though the majority of Taiwanese (in recall districts) did not support the recall, in general there are more pro-recall stores than anti-recall stores. In Hong Kong’s case initially it was flipped - although most Hong Kongers supported the goals of the protest movement, there were more pro-China stores (1,600) than pro-Hong Kong stores (1,300) (however, according to most recent data, blue and yellow stores later came to score even). In both cases, pro-recall / pro-democracy stores reported improved business.
Also, in Hong Kong’s case many of the pro-China stores became victims of vandalisation - a feature that was absent in Taiwan. While in both countries it was a sense of national crisis that prompted businesses to express their stance, perhaps due to the wide-spread violence inflicted on protesters by the Hong Kong police force, the crisis was felt more keenly in Hong Kong - which may have led to some violent excesses. It could also be the case that some of the pro-China store vandalism was inflicted by pro-China agents acting undercover to discredit the pro-democracy movement.
In both cases, expressing one’s political stance could attract unwanted attention from authorities. How this has played out in Hong Kong may be a portent of what pro-recall stores will have to deal with if the government keeps drifting closer to China.
Some have expressed concern regarding the amount of polarisation the trend of businesses taking sides may cause. If each business is expected to take its stance on current social or political developments, then the space for neutrality may shrink rapidly. In Hong Kong’s case, after the pro-democracy protests ended, in the years ahead many stores still continued to take sides to the point where there are around 5,000 stores on each side today.