“I actually only did not think that human rights ought to segregate according to political position. The Nationalists, the Communists, the Democratic Progressive Party, any fucking party … if human dignity is not your core value and if you permit human rights to be determined by those in power, then you are just someone that I despise. You do not intimidate me.” – Lung Yingtai, Taipei City Minister of Culture/Freezing Point Essayist
This was a quote poached from EastSouthWestNorth’s recent post Li Datong: “It’s Lung Ying-tai again, f**k!”. This woman is my new personal hero. I had read her “The Taiwan That You May Not Know About” essay (again, in translation via ESWN) last year, but until reading this most recent entry I didn’t fully understand its importance.
This latest essay, written by Li Datong, the former editor of the now defunct Freezing Point, puts Lung’s contributions (though for only a limited time) to China’s mainland media in a historic perspective. The door of free flowing information opened for a moment there last year … it was quickly slammed shut, but it gave a lot of people a peek behind it. And now that some people have seen what’s there, it’s going to be harder to keep it closed.
Lung Yingtai, you’re one cool chick in my books.
