What's Ma Ying-jeou Up To?

Former Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou working in a bookshop for a day

Does former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou have a new gig?

In a recent video the 68-year-old is seen working as a shopkeeper in a bookstore in Taipei. As he's wearing a baseball cap and a black mask, most people don't recognize him at all. When customers approach him at the cashier, he suggests that they buy his memoir that was released in December.



Many say no -- in one case a woman said she hardly reads books anymore. But when he pulls down his mask, people do a double take and are excited to see him. He offers to sign the books for them too.

However he's not quite cut out to be a cashier. One customer asked to use JKo Pay, the local version of Apple Pay, and Ma seems to have no clue what it is or how to process the payment.

He tried to persuade customers to buy his memoir

The video has been seen over 150,000 times since Ma's office posted it on YouTube on Friday. His office explained the video is meant to show another side of the Harvard Law School graduate.

"We want to let the public know that the ex-president is actually an easy-going person, the man next door type," an official from the office said.

But when asked about whether this was an attempt to garner popularity again in the hopes of running for president in 2020, the office was coy.

"This kind of question has been around for some time, you'll have to ask the former president because we have no idea at all," the official said.

He made enough to buy ink and brushes to write couplets

It seems his popularity has risen in the past year or so, in contrast to when he was president, especially in the last few years of his second term which ended in 2016.

When Ma was first elected in 2008, his popularity approval rating was at 68 percent. But his government's mishandling of the economy and issues like the typhoon that killed almost 700 people in 2009, as well as the Sunflower movement -- where hundreds of students stormed the legislature in 2014 -- made him highly unpopular.

And in case you're wondering -- in the end Ma managed to sell 30 copies of his book, enough to buy Chinese calligraphy brushes and ink to write Lunar New Year couplets for his supporters.

Detained for 128 Days in China's "Guantanamo"

Writer Kou Yanding who was detained somewhere in China for 128 days

A mainland writer was "disappeared" for 128 days as punishment for visiting Taiwan during the sunflower student movement and Hong Kong at the start of the Umbrella Movement in 2014.

Kou Yanding, 51, has no idea where she was detained on the mainland but only that she was picked up and blindfolded by security officials while on her way from Beijing to Mount Wutai in Shanxi province in October 2014.

She was held for over four months without access to family and legal counsel, and has now published her ordeal in a book called How is an Enemy Made?  -- Chinese Who Don't Have the Right to Remain Silent.

She went to observe the sunflower movement in Taiwan...

The book was launched in Hong Kong last week and she is one of the few people who has publicly spoken out about her time in custody and how civic movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan have touched a nerve in Beijing.

While Kou's family had no idea of here whereabouts, she asked repeatedly to see a lawyer and relatives but was denied on state security grounds.

"Doesn't the United States have Guantanamo?" she quoted one of the officers as saying. "Well this is the Guantanamo of China."

The officer told her she was being held for subversion.

When she was in Taiwan, she saw the student movement in March 2014, and six months later went back again to see exiled 1989 student movement leader Wang Dan.

Then she went to the Occupy Central site and met with Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Chan Kin-man, one of the campaign's organizers.

... and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014

Two weeks later when she was in the mainland, Kou was blindfolded and bundled into a detention centre. "Occupy Central is Hong Kong independence! The sunflower movement is Taiwanese independence! The overseas democratic movement is subversion... You are in the middle of everything," she recalled an officer shouting at her.

During her time in detention, Kou was not allowed to speak to anyone except her interrogators and she could not look around, turn her head, close her eyes, drink water or go to the bathroom without permission.

The furniture and walls of the windowless room she was held in were covered in plastic foam, presumably to prevent her from harming herself. She had no idea how big the building was that she was in, except overhearing the guards talk of a fourth floor.

While she was concerned about her safety, Kou was also worried about the Occupy protest. "I was afraid to say anything wrong that would prompt them to make up their mind for a bloody clean-up," she said.

The authorities eventually decided not to prosecute Kou, but stopped her from coming to Hong Kong last year because she was still on parole.

She is one of many activists on the mainland to be detained without charges in the last two years, but one of the few to speak about it. Kou wondered if the authorities would retaliate, but decided to write the book anyway.

Kou is a brave woman -- some people would have been to scared to speak out at all, let alone write a book about her terrifying experience. She has let the world know a bit more about China's use of intimidation but also its insecurity, with very little tolerance for what it believes is subversion.

China's Propaganda Smear Campaign

Joshua Wong is not advocating independence nor is he affiliated with the US

Beijing is really on a mission to destroy young activist Joshua Wong Chi-fung, with the latest smear campaign an example of when one goes overboard with the insults so it looks outrageous.

The Supreme People's Procuratorate -- China's highest prosecution agency -- has released a video claiming Wong is a pro-independence advocate who is backed by the United States and wants to turn China into another Syria.

Huh?

If anything his party Demosisto isn't even advocating independence -- perhaps the Supreme People's Procuratorate has mixed him up with the Hong Kong National Party or Hong Kong Indigenous.

In any event, the video, posted on the Supreme People's Procuratorate's official weibo account, starts off with images of refugees from the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Central Asia starving, dying or being treated cruelly. Then this contrasts with images of a "harmonious" China, mostly militaristic ones.

"The shadow of internal and external troubles has not dispersed from the Chinese sky," the text says. "Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan independence, as well as dissident leaders, lawyers who could fight until death and other agents of the Western forces are damaging China's internal stability and harmony by hook or by crook. Behind all these incidents, we can often catch a glimpse of the dark shadow of the Stars and Stripes."

Activist Zhai Yanmin was convicted of subverting state power

Wong's picture is shown twice in the video, one when he was on a hunger strike before the 2014 Occupy movement, and in a newspaper clipping from pro-Beijing Wen Wei Po, highlighting his "American background".

In this case, perhaps the Supreme People's Procuratorate has confused him up with his colleague Nathan Law Kwun-ching, who is the one with the American passport, not Wong, who has never studied in the US. And why bring up this two-year-old conspiracy again that has been proven false?

Not surprisingly Wong is frustrated by the video.

"... I've been smeared for a long time in the past," he said. "But it's very rare to see information released by communist officials on the mainland."

Wong posted his response on Facebook as well as news of pro-rights activist Zhai Yanmin convicted of subverting state power in Tianjin and given a suspended jail sentence.

Young people in the Sunflower Movement in Taipei

"[The sentence] is enough to prove the mainland's discredited legal system, and [the video]... is another example that there is no separation between the party and the country," Wong wrote.

He said he did not advocate for Hong Kong independence during the 2014 hunger strike, and that he viewed the "false statements" from the "state apparatus" as jokes.

The video also lumped in members of Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, who occupied the island's legislature in 2014 to protest a trade agreement with mainland China, saying they backed independence for Taiwan, and that they were also backed by the US.

In response, Lin Fei-fan, one of the leaders of the movement, said any revolution in Taiwan would not be Beijing's business because Taiwan was not a part of China.

Touche!