Seemingly Unconnected Facts about a certain Chen Wei-ting

The Taipei Times had a great moment in its piece on a student charged with violating the Social Order Maintenance Act for reporting about a kidnapping attempt:

Chen, the administrator of the Facebook page “I live in Hsinchu City” (我住新竹市), posted a message on March 28 warning that a man had allegedly tried to kidnap a child in Hsinchu County, but the child’s family spotted him and he ran off.

“The next day, I got a phone call from the neighborhood’s management committee, asking me where I got the information. I said a Facebook user passed the information to the ‘I live in Hsinchu City’ page, and not long after, I got a phone call from the police about the same thing,” Chen told the Taipei Times.

Chen said he immediately contacted the user who forwarded the message to the Facebook page.

“We spent a week trying to find the original source of the message, without success. We were questioned by police on Tuesday and the next thing we know is that we are charged with violating the Social Order Maintenance Act,” he said.

In fact, the article reports, fliers have been posted to the area. There is an interesting coincidence: Chen Wei-ting, the TT observed in its article, is one of the conveners of the anti-media monopoly student protests, the anti-WantWant protests, and was the person who criticized Minister of Education Chiang Wei-ling last year (this longish post, even longer post describing the incident).

Nah. Couldn't possibly be retaliation.

Cultural note: The police defended themselves by saying they had received a complaint and thus, had to take action. The police do not enforce the law, as my friend Jeff Martin pointed out to me years ago, they administrate it -- fundamentally, they often don't take action unless someone complains.
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