Tuesday 30 July 2013

Where Are The Interviews With Student Protesters?

Every time I hit the two English-language newspapers, whether late at night when I get back from walking the dogs in the park, or late in the morning when I finally rise from the crypt in search of caffeine, I am disappointed; there are no interviews with the student protesters. Not in the Taipei Times, where that ridiculous idiot still prances about pretending to be a managing editor, and not in the China Post either wherein the sparse commentary has been written with a limp-wrist.

The only English-language sources on these protests I know of are the blogs of J.M. Cole and Ketty Chen, and although Chen's write-ups and excellent photographic work renders a better sense of the details than Cole's, neither of them have yet reported interviews with any of the students - and this is what I really want. Of course, I should really be trying to do as many of these interviews as possible myself - I really ought to get up to Taipei to have my turn at taking photographs once other necessities down here in Tainan are out of the way. Unlike the ostensible journalists at the newspapers however, such responsibilities are not my chief occupation, and my time is taken up by numerous other things I cannot afford to neglect.

Three draft questions - to be asked to protesters individually, and with allowance for as much elaboration as they would like...
How would you describe yourself ideologically? 
Do you believe the Land Expropriation Act ought to be revised and amended - as per the demands of the Taiwan Rural Front - or do you believe it should be repealed and abolished entirely? 
Do you think of electoral politics as useful for the changes you would like to see, or not?

2 comments:

  1. Those are going to be a mouthful in Chinese. It'll be amazing if anyone manages to ask all three without repetition.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm going to run them past a friend or two before I go, but I'd ideally like to get one of my Taiwanese friends to come up to Taipei with me to help. As usual, it's a problem of timing: weekdays off vs weekends off and so on.

    ReplyDelete

Comment moderation is now in place, as of April 2012. Rules:

1) Be aware that your right to say what you want is circumscribed by my right of ownership here.

2) Make your comments relevant to the post to which they are attached.

3) Be careful what you presume: always be prepared to evince your point with logic and/or facts.

4) Do not transgress Blogger's rules regarding content, i.e. do not express hatred for other people on account of their ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation or nationality.

5) Remember that only the best are prepared to concede, and only the worst are prepared to smear.