TAIWAN HOLDS AN ELECTION; WANG DAN IS IN THE NEWS

MA YING-JEOU

RE-ELECTED

PRESIDENT OF TAIWAN

WANG DAN AT HARVARD

A.M., 2001, Ph.D, 2008

STUDENT LEADER IN BEIJING IN 1989

("TIANANMEN," "JUNE 4")

SEVEN YEARS IN CHINESE JAILS

NOW TEACHING AT

NATIONAL TSING HUA UNIVERSITY

HSINCHU, TAIWAN

As a sidebar on the Taiwan elections held today, the Washington Post ran a piece by Andrew Higgins featuring a lecture by Wang Dan on "why China, too, needs elections." What made this deemed newsworthy was apparently the presence in the audience of students from the mainland, some of whom "rushed to pose for a souvenir photograph with the man reviled by Beijing as a 'counter-revolutionary' agitator."

In the end, Beijing's preferred candidate in the Taiwanese presidential race, the incumbent Ma Ying-jeou, won handily enough, though with a smaller margin than last time. The details and some of the context can be found here.

The L.A. Times article quotes a People's Daily editorial which says, seemingly without any sense of irony, "Ma Ying-jeou's victory was the choice made by Taiwan's people."

THE COSTS OF THE REVOLUTION IN CHINA

OUT OF

THE MOUTHS

OF ...

THE HAMMER & SICKLE

DOMINATES

THE SETTING OF

THE 17th & MOST RECENT

CONGRESS OF

THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY

(October 2007)

"Unrest is still imprinted deeply into Chinese society. Revolution catalyzed a new China, but society also paid heavy costs for the revolution."

This is the message not of some opposition group -- no whiff of jasmine, here, directly -- but of the March 7, 2011, editorial of the Global Times, owned by the flagship publication of the Chinese Communist regime, the People's Daily (as reported by the Washington Post).