After protests erupted in Taiwan because of visiting Chen Yunlin (a Communist Party negotiator from China), I thought I'd pick up a few Taiwanese papers to see photos that didn't make it into the English-language press. Here's one from page A6 of Friday's Apple Daily News:
(A better version is probably available on their website, but the site's in Chinese and I can't navigate it.)
Anyways, Chen Yunlin is the guy in middle, in the back seat. Here's a digital close-up:
Jeez, 7,000 Taiwanese policemen guarding him, and Chen STILL looks like he's gonna wet himself. Not too many anti-CCP protests back where he comes from, I guess. Or maybe he bought into all that Xinhua and China Post propaganda that Taiwanese compatriots are just DYING to reunify with the motherland.
Musta been a rude awakening.
Guy on the left doesn't seem to be enjoying himself much, either. But that glowering driver looks pretty scary, though. Bet HE could teach Ma Ying-jeou's stormtroopers a thing or two about breaking the fingers of people carrying Tibetan flags.
Speaking of which, Taiwan Matters! had a pic of the woman whose finger was dislocated by police acting under orders from China's puppet president in Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou. Note to foreigners: you may be better off trying to unfurl a Tibetan flag in downtown Lhasa than you are now in downtown Taipei.
(Image from Billy Pan's Blog via Taiwan Matters!)
If this is how Ma Ying-jeou safeguards the democratic freedoms of Taiwanese, I'd sure hate to see what it'll like when he puts the sledgehammer to them!
Postscript: For purposes of completeness, here's a close-up of the caption for the Apple Daily News picture:
UPDATE: Added attribution of third image to Billy Pan's Blog.
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Sorry if it wasn’t clear on my blog, but the picture of the finger is not my own image. It was attached at the bottom of the mail containing the press release. Looking at the following URL from the press release, I’m assuming it’s a Billy Pan photo:
http://www.wretch.cc/blog/billypan101/14367606
Here’s that page again, run through a Google translation:
http://tinyurl.com/59wduq
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Thanks Tim — I’ll update the post right now. It’s only fair to give credit where it’s due.
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It’s interesting — if I understand the English translation correctly, it seems as though there was some kind of incident where Taiwanese police forbade Taiwanese passersby from buying items at a 7-11 near the Grand Hotel. They did this because they said the Chinese “guests” might want to buy from there, and the cops didn’t want the 7-11 to run out of stock.
Doesn’t sound like the police were terribly polite about the whole thing, either.
At least, that’s what I get from it. These translation programs (while better than nothing) can be pretty iffy sometimes.
About the translation, “iffy” is right.
It looks like the original actually says that people were complaining that they couldn’t even shop at 7-Eleven simply because a “small Chinese official” was in the vicinity. The police had told them, “Anybody who’s not buying something, get out.”
BTW, here’s a Tiny-fied link to the Apple Daily story that contains the Chen Yunlin photo, but the online image is rather low-resolution:
http://tinyurl.com/6rqfbu
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Wow. Good thing we’re all equals, huh?