My Take | Tide turns for Taiwan’s Sunflower students
Protest leaders who once led the movement against closer economic ties with the mainland are themselves now working there; there’s a lesson there for Hong Kong’s own hotheads who took part in Occupy Central
If Chang Yu-hua is right, several leaders of the so-called Sunflower student movement in Taiwan have now graduated from university and found work on the mainland.
One of the island’s most influential pundits, Chang said on a TV programme that the former student leaders should apologise for their past actions.
His report has been widely circulated on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and solicited a sarcastic opinion piece from the state-run Global Times, saying even the spoiled children of Taiwan have had to hide their identities to find jobs on the mainland.
Actually, I think those young people are being perfectly sensible. You can’t live on ideology alone. Unlike many young diehard ideologues in Taiwan and Hong Kong, once they realised their errors, they changed course. That should be encouraged, not criticised.
Chang claims at least four former student leaders are working on the mainland. One works for a computer game developer in Shenzhen, earning the equivalent of HK$12,390 a month. Chang is sometimes referred to as “the king of scoops” who was among the first journalists to expose the corrupt practices of jailed president Chen Shui-bian.