Tiananmen leader is a shadow of former self

[dArKeR]

By Cao Chang-ching ???

Friday, Apr 09, 2004,Page 8

A number of students have been taking part in a hunger strike as part of demonstrations organized by the pan-blues at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. The Chinese-language media in the US have since printed sensationalist stories of how Wu'er Kaixi (????) and Shen Tong (??), both prominent members of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in China which ended with the Tiananmen massacre, participated in the hunger strike. The pair said that when they visited the scene, they felt something akin to the atmosphere that day in Tiananmen Square. According to Wu'er, the media and the law in Taiwan were being controlled by the government, and he wanted to give his support to the people.

I cannot help but pity Wu'er. The Tiananmen massacre happened 15 years ago, and he is now almost 40 years old. It seems that with the passage of time he has lost the ability to differentiate between dictatorship and democracy. He seems to think Taipei is Beijing, and muddles the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) with the Chinese Communist Party. His values are utterly confused. After more than a decade living in the free world, Wu'er doesn't seem to have learned anything.

The students who gathered in Tiananmen on that day in June were protesting against a dictatorial government that had deprived more than a billion Chinese of the freedom of choice. Taiwan, on the other hand, has already had three elections in which its president was directly elected, in addition to countless democratic local and legislative elections. How is it possible to equate democratic Taiwan, in which the government is elected by the people, with China?

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/04/09/2003135971