How a Netflix Show Sparked a #MeToo Wave in Taiwan

It was a scene that could have been plucked directly from an episode of Wave Makers, an eight-episode hit Netflix drama released in April that follows a group of campaign staffers during a heated present-day presidential election in Taiwan. On an island where political films and TV shows are rare, let alone pointed critiques of the upper echelons of power, the series is the first depiction of a contemporary grassroots campaign in Taiwan on TV. It also isn’t afraid to touch on sexual harassment and how it’s dealt with by people in power—a choice that has clearly struck a chord with viewers. Shortly after airing, the show triggered a wave of retaliation against political leaders, months before a decisive, real-life presidential election in Taiwan.

Generously described as Taiwan’s answer to The West Wing or House of Cards, Wave Makers lacks the witty banter of great political thrillers. But if you’re able to overlook predictable plot turns and a syrupy sweet script, the show offers a clear porthole into the unique culture of modern Taiwanese politics. At its core, it is a celebration of one of the main features of a healthy democracy: the ability of regular citizens to hold those in power accountable.

Campaign workers shout slogans at a campaign party in an episode of Wave Makers. Netflix

In Wave Makers, the roles are reversed from reality: The conservatives are the incumbents, and most of the series centers on campaign workers inside the opposing Justice Party, a stand-in for the DPP. The Justice Party’s presidential nominee, Lin Yue-chen—a progressive, no-nonsense woman with a salt-and-pepper pixie haircut—is an analog of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

The direct parallels between Lin’s fictional campaign and Tsai’s past bids for president reflect hot-button domestic issues on the island today. For instance, Southeast Asians have long been a marginalized immigrant community in Taiwan, and even though half of them are naturalized citizens, politicians often overlook that potentially influential voting bloc. In one scene, Lin films a food tour video with Parrot Quack Quack—a half-Taiwanese, half-Indonesian influencer—to show solidarity for Southeast Asians in Taiwan and mobilize their support for votes. In 2019, Tsai filmed a similar video with Chien-Chien, a half-Taiwanese, half-Thai food influencer.

The series also briefly touches on capital punishment, long a deeply contested issue in Taiwan. In the 38 years that the island was under martial law, the KMT used the death penalty as a tool of oppression. While still legal today, it is highly controversial, and most politicians steer away from discussing it in public. At a student event where Lin speaks about her experience as a woman in politics, she is accosted by attendees who ask her to take a firm stance on the death penalty. Although, as we learn in another scene, Lin is personally against it, she gives an eloquent—albeit vague—answer to skirt controversy. “She doesn’t dare to express her stance,” a student grumbles after the event. Over the years, the opposition has accused Tsai of equivocating about her thoughts on capital punishment; in 2022, a high school student asked her a similar question at a school Q&A event.

Wave Makers also nods to more unusual aspects of Taiwanese politics, from supporters at rallies shouting “frozen garlic” in Mandarin—a homophone for the word “victory” in the Taiwanese Hokkien language—to candidates barreling through small towns on the back of a truck and blasting slogans on megaphones with firecrackers illuminating the way. In one episode, Chang Ya-ching, a doe-eyed junior Justice Party employee, dresses up as a turtle as part of an anti-plastic campaign skit during a press conference. While this may seem absurd, cutesy animals have been used in Taiwanese political messages for nearly a decade; cat ears were superimposed on Tsai in her past campaigns.

Yet the show misses an opportunity to tease out more complex themes. Topics such as homophobia, pollution, immigration, and the misuse of taxpayer funds add intrigue but are rarely explored in depth and feel like buzzy backdrops instead of devices that generate meaningful debate. Most of the screen time is instead devoted to the characters’ personal lives—no doubt a tactic to appeal to the average viewer.

But a riskier script could have worked. After all, the show’s treatment of sexual abuse—the one sensitive issue Wave Makers does not shy away from—ended up making actual waves. In an early episode, Chang is grabbed at the waist by a brutish coworker at the office. When she drums up the courage to lodge a formal complaint, a male colleague immediately encourages her to drop the case. A couple episodes later, Lin catches wind of the incident. Furious, Lin fires the perpetrator, tells off her colleagues, and sends Chang flowers with a handwritten letter: “I know that the things that make you uncomfortable are also happening in every corner of Taiwan. I fired the person who hurt you, but I know that what I’m doing is far from enough. Please wait for the day when this society catches up with you. I will move forward for this goal.”

Voters attend a rally for the fictional Justice Party in an episode of Wave Makers.Netflix

Chang’s fight against sexual violence is a reoccurring theme throughout the show. She spends the entire series trying to retrieve her nude photographs from the philandering Chao Chang-tse, her former lover and the incumbent conservative party’s vice-presidential nominee. Terrified that Chao will leak the photographs as an act of revenge, she pleads for him to hand them to her, and he refuses—but she doesn’t let up.

A month after the show’s debut, Chang’s steely resolve rippled into the real world. Former DPP staffers started speaking out about superiors silencing and shaming them after they reported their abusers. In a Facebook post with a screengrab of Chang holding back tears, a former staffer claimed she was groped by a filmmaker during a work project for the DPP last year. When she reported the incident to a senior party official, she said she was stonewalled and asked why she hadn’t screamed. Another former employee alleged on Facebook that a colleague had forcibly kissed and touched her inappropriately multiple times in 2020. After she filed a complaint, she said that her boss, the former head of the DPP’s Department of Youth Development, bullied her into resigning.

It’s a reckoning that is being called Taiwan’s #MeToo movement, and over the summer, more than 150 people have come forward with allegations. The surge of accusations and resignations has swept beyond politics and reached all corners of Taiwanese civil society. As a result, many figures have stepped down, including several high-ranking DPP officials, and the DPP tanked in polls. “The Democratic Progressive Party is the largest political party and has a responsibility to lead, but we have let society down,” DPP Deputy Secretary-General Yang Yi-shan said in a June press conference—a statement that eerily mirrored Lin’s letter in the show. “We should have held ourselves to the highest standards but have fallen short. We are very sorry.”

The show even ended up triggering a major shift within the corridors of power. On Aug. 1, three months after the show’s debut, lawmakers in Taiwan amended a bundle of sexual harassment laws to make it easier for victims to come forward. The statute of limitations for victims has been extended, and employers are now subject to hefty fines if they fail to report sexual harassment complaints to local authorities. Lawmakers also increased the penalty for convicted perpetrators to three years in prison and now require workplaces to have channels in place through which victims can report harassment. It is testament to how a fictional series can have a lasting impact on actual events. The new laws have been called a “legislative milestone.”

Read More

On the Front Lines of the China-Taiwan Food Fight

A Brooklyn start-up hits back against Beijing’s pressure campaign.

Dispatch

|

Hunter Lu

Taiwan’s Government Has a Messaging Crisis on China

Electoral shock showed that voters have other worries than Beijing’s threat.

Argument

|

Hilton Yip

China’s Newest Action TV Show Is a Propaganda Hit

Private partnerships are upping the Communist Party’s entertainment game.

Argument

|

Alex Colville

Election aides huddle over a laptop in an episode of Wave Makers.Netflix

“If there’s no cross-strait relations, then it’s not realistic,” one of the show’s screenwriters, Chien Li-ying, admitted to the Los Angeles Times. “But it’s also difficult because you don’t want it to become something where this side or that side doesn’t watch. And once you bring it up, whatever else you talk about, no one will care.”

Taiwanese viewers had mixed reactions on the choice to ignore the China issue. Some found it jarring and unrealistic. Others welcomed the suspension of reality. As Taiwan gears up for another presidential election, young people are yearning for an alternate world where Taiwanese politicians, without the looming shadow of Beijing, can focus on what many Taiwanese see as more pressing issues—at least in day-to-day life—such as stagnant wages and exorbitant housing prices. Early polls show that many voters between the ages of 20 and 40 support the Taiwan’s People Party (TPP)—a relatively new third party with a notoriously opaque and inconsistent China stance. While the vast majority of Taiwanese people want to preserve the status quo—neither unifying with China nor declaring independence—how to deal with China remains a point of contention. Youth support for the TPP reflects their discontent with both the DPP and KMT, who they feel have rigid, black-and-white approaches to the China issue.

At least domestically, the showrunners’ choice to avoid China paid off. The series opened to widespread acclaim and topped the Netflix charts in Taiwan for two weeks after its debut.

None of this is to say the show didn’t have an effect across the strait. Some Chinese viewers have been enthralled by the sight of a functional Mandarin-speaking democracy. “Watching Wave Makers really makes me feel like I’m living in a cage,” a Chinese netizen wrote on Weibo after watching the series, in a post that has since been scrubbed by Beijing’s censors.

Accountability is a privilege of democracy. And for the people of Taiwan, whose right to self-rule has been teetering on the edge of uncertainty for decades, it is a privilege worth celebrating.

Another Chinese commenter marveled: “It’s like a fairy tale story.”