Saturday 27 December 2014

On Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷)

Regarding the recent news about Sunflower protest leader Chen Wei-ting (groping random women on public transport) I'll say this: I am neither shocked or surprised by what he has admitted to, but I do wonder whether there are more serious wrongs in his past which he hasn't yet admitted to.

Here is something I wrote in email (bad Chinese) to somebody back in March just after the Sunflower protests at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei...

政治和權力的危險不是危及生命,而靈魂的危險。它是毒藥,和我們應該非常小心誰相信因為總是有那麼多的謊言和這麼多的錯誤 (任何人可以犯錯誤,所以沒有人是 100%的無辜在這裡)。

It almost looks prescient now, but it's really just a bland, polite statement of the commonly held expectation that politics will tend to corrupt everybody who gets involved with it.

For the record I don't think Chen's groping of random women on buses warrants anything more than the slap across the face he apparently received and the subsequent public exposure. The government policies he was protesting against are far worse in consequential terms. 

He should have stuck to protesting and working outside the electoral system.

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