Wild Lily student movement

Taiwan's Wild Lily student movement (Chinese: 野百合學運; pinyin: Yě Bǎihé xué yùn) or March student movement was a six-day student demonstration in 1990 for democracy. The sit-in at Memorial Square in Taipei (since rededicated as Liberty Square in commemoration of the movement) was initiated by students from the National Taiwan University. Participation quickly grew to 22,000 demonstrators. The Wild Lily demonstrators sought direct elections of Taiwan's president and vice president and new popular elections for all representatives in the National Assembly.

The demonstration lasted from March 16 to March 22, 1990, coinciding with the inauguration of Lee Teng-Hui on March 21 to a six-year term as president. The election Lee won was one in which only the 671 members of the National Assembly voted, only one party was recognized, and one candidate ran. This process had been characteristic of one-party rule under the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek.

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 the National Taiwan University, described it to the 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."

...
Wikipedia