ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of the hegemonic project. The failure to achieve a normalisation of economic relations across the Taiwan Strait fostered the insight among Taiwan's capitalists that individual attempts of lobbying were insufficient to accomplish the liberalisation of cross-Strait economic interactions. What was necessary, from their perspective, was instead a more comprehensive project of ideological reforms that would portray the cross-Strait rapprochement to be in the interest of all Taiwanese, thereby neutralising the Taiwan independence movement and de-politicising economic relations with the People's Republic of China. The chapter examines how think tanks were reformed to integrate the interests of economic and political elites. These became the organisational centre of the hegemonic project and served as the platform for a variety of cross-Strait channels. These channels allowed to forge the political and economic demands into a coherent ideological narrative, which portrayed the rapprochement simply as the technocratic management of unavoidable dynamics produced by globalisation. The chapter then turns to the Wild Strawberry Movement, which emerged against the background of the intensification of cross-Strait exchanges. The chapter demonstrates that the Wild Strawberry Movement was both related to and limited by hegemonic activities, which had secured passive consent from farmers, discredited the political project of Taiwan independence and universalised economic benefits that were the result of the cross-Strait rapprochement. Due to these limitations, the movement was framed as a successor to Taiwan's democratisation movement of the 1980s, severely constraining its ability to intervene into the current political discourse.
