Students Beaten by Thugs as Cops Stand by, Ma calls for "tolerance"

As President Ma visited a temple in Tainan the other day, a group of five students protested the plan to bring Chinese students over and recognize their credentials as students. They were attacked by thugs dressed in temple gear apparently in full view of the police, who did nothing. The police then detained the students and questioned them. Several Taiwan bloggers were all over this story:

Claudia Jean writes:

"Apparently, the police arrested those students but none of those who attacked the students. It is amazing that those attackers could escape with the level of police and national security protection around Ma Ying-jeou. Those students were taken into a precinct and interrogated. The police wouldn’t let them go and Tainan City Councillors found out that the Head of National Security was expecting ‘information’ and Investigation Bureau also sent an officer to the precinct.

The police told Tainan City Councillor, Wang Ding-yu, that they were simply taking a record for those students in case they wanted to press charges against their attackers even though the students already said they didn’t want to press charges. The interesting thing is Wang discovered that the questions the police posed to the students were:

How many of you are there?
Do you belong to any organisation?
What’s the name of your organisation?
Where did you hold the meeting, preparing for this protest?
How did you organise and prepare for this protest?
Where did you meet up before setting off to the temple?
What tools or instruments did you prepare?
Was there anyone who teaches or advices on your activity?
How do you keep in contact with each other?

Seriously, do the above questions look like they were helping the students keep a record in the event of bringing charges against their attackers?"

My man Maddog collected videos of the incident and previous incidents that appear to clearly show the police ignoring the violence.

Finally, that Ma called for "tolerance" on the part of the police for dissent, which he said originated in a the fact that Taiwan is a multi-ethnic society, as if protesters dissented because they were of a different ethnicity, not because they disagreed with a policy. Ma did not mention the fact that the police appeared to simply let the beatings take place, right in front of his security cordon.

I was hoping there would be more English-language coverage of this story, but the media did not pick it up. Nevertheless, as maddog documents, it seems to be yet another in an increasing and disturbing trend of police not being punished for (in)action in the context of democratic protest, as well as the deployment of gangsters against protesters.
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Daily Links

• Job listings at the 104 Job Bank reach a six-month high
• Chinese Consumer Connection Show #50 & 51 now online
• Julian Baum in FEER reviews a great new book on diplomacy in US-Taiwan relations
• Yesterday India was the subject of China's peaceful rise, today it is China's peaceful rise, the Spratlys, and the Philippines. Fortunately China's rise is all peaceful and such, otherwise we'd have to worry about the fact that it has territorial claims on almost its neighbors.

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