Strawberry Fils Forever

The Wild Strawberries student movement, still ongoing, has three demands -- an apology from President Ma, resignations of the police and security chiefs, and amending of the Assembly and Parade Law. The first two are highly unlikely to occur, but the third was a possibility. A few days ago the KMT had a caucus which they billed as an "open forum" at which some "NGOs" appeared...

Although they agreed that the pre-approval system has its defects and should be replaced with a pre-notice system, many KMT lawmakers were still worried the change could bring social chaos.

“The pre-approval system could be changed to the pre-notice system, but there should still be some kind of application and check process,” KMT Legislator Wu Ching-chih (吳清池) told the public hearing. “For the sake of social stability, adequate restrictions should still be implemented, otherwise [demonstrations] may lead to anarchic situations. It’s very dangerous.”

The chairwoman of the Taipei International Cultural Exchange Association for Professional Women, Ling Yu-ying (凌瑜英), expressed strong opposition to amending the Assembly and Parade Law.

With "social opinions" like this, you can imagine the results, reported by the Wild Strawberries in their press release of Nov 18:

The Executive Yuan has raised the issue of revisions to the Assembly and Parade Law recently. However, the new version adopts a “compulsory notification system” whose content preserves restrictions including “assembling without notification is illegal”, “establishing forbidden areas”, “police have the right to alter the time, place, and form of the parade”, “the police can command dissolution of the parade without explicit standards”, and “the criminal and administrative sanctions relating to assembly”. Namely, the revision contains no practical improvements, only the change of name from “permission” to “notification”.

I am reminded of the period right after martial law was lifted, when the KMT passed a new national security law that was martial law in all but name. Hopefully the DPP and concerned KMT lawmakers can move to make meaningful revisions to the law.

Meanwhile the Strawberries, numbers dwindling, are planning to build a "strawberry tower." I stopped by the NCKU protests on Monday and was told that parents are putting lots of pressure on the students in the university not to participate. "Concerned parents" are also bombarding the counseling center with demands that the counselors do something about the "mentally ill "students demonstrating. I do know a few students whose parents encouraged them to get out and do something. Public support has been overwhelming, with many stopping by to leave donations of food and equipment. The students have become a cause of "chaos" and like any cause of distortion in the social order, the pressure gradient to conform becomes steeper as time passes. One of the many bizarre bits of fallout from the definition of order in Chinese society is that peaceful student demonstrators are a cause of "social disorder", but mad drivers and construction vehicles blocking streets are of no concern...

[Taiwan]