by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Kevin Harber/Flickr/CC

FIVE WERE INJURED and one was killed in a shooting at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church on Sunday afternoon. The victims were all Taiwanese American, as was the shooter, David Wenwei Chou, age 68, who was a resident of Las Vegas and a former academic. The shooting took place at a lunch reception for a pastor who had returned to Taiwan to start a congregation there. The Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church convened at the Geneva Presbyterian Church. 

One man, physician John Cheng, age 52, was killed after charging Chou. These were primarily elderly individuals, with Cheng being one of the youngest individuals present. The congregants were unable to flee because the church’s doors had been superglued by Chou before he began firing. The other members of the congregants that were injured were four men and one woman, who were between 62 and 92. 

Video of the sheriff’s briefing on the shooting. Film credit: KTVU

After being hit by a pastor with a chair, Chou was eventually disarmed and tied up with electrical cords, as Chou’s gun jammed after shooting Cheng. Police stated that they found other weaponry and explosives after Chou was taken into custody, with police believing that Chou intended to use the weapons and explosives as part of further acts of violence. 

Chou is eligible for life without parole or the death penalty and has been charged with one count of murder and four counts of attempted murder. Additional charges may be added for hate crimes, pending an investigation. 

Initial reports stated that Chou’s actions were motivated due to hatred of Taiwanese and that Chou was a Chinese immigrant to the US. This confusion may have started from the press conference held by law enforcement, in which Chou was referred to as a Chinese immigrant with US citizenship, and as “upset with political tensions between Taiwan and China”. Subsequent reports stated that Chou was waishengren, but conceptual confusion in English-language media about the meaning of waishengren led to Chou still being referred to as a Chinese immigrant to Taiwan. 

The pan-Blue United Daily News (UDN) was the first domestic Taiwanese news outlet to report on Chou being second-generation waishengren. UDN owns the World Journal, one of the dominant Chinese-language media newspapers among ethnic Chinese communities in the US, and so can be expected to have a number of local sources in California among Taiwanese American communities. The pan-Green Liberty Times later also reported such. US-based TVBS reporter Ni Chia-hui confirmed via a Facebook post that Chou had been found to have been born in Taiwan in 1953. 

Facebook post by US-based TVBS reporter Ni Chia-hui

Responding to reports that Chou was Chinese from US officials, then, the director-general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Los Angeles later confirmed that Chou had been born in Taiwan. TECO stated that Cheng, too, was born in Taiwan, but emigrated to the US at the age of one. 

In the course of speculation about his identity, images emerged of Chou attending meetings of a pro-unification group in the US, the Las Vegas National Association for China’s Peaceful Unification. This included images of Chou holding up a banner supportive of KMT presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu. The organization may have links to the Chinese state. 

Many in Taiwan were quick to point to the parallels between Chiu’s action and the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), or supporters of Han Kuo-yu such as the “800 Heroes”. Such groups have been increasingly willing to use political violence against pro-independence activists in recent years, as observed in incidents when the “800 Heroes” attacked journalists, or when the CUPP attacked pro-independence student demonstrators on the campus of the National Taiwan University in September 2017. Other incidents of violence committed by members of the pro-unification camp include attacks on Hong Kong pro-democracy activists visiting or residing in Taiwan. 

Notably, the CUPP was founded by former gangster “White Wolf” Chang An-lo, who conducted political assassinations for the KMT during the authoritarian period. This included the October 1984 murder of Taiwanese American journalist Henry Liu, which took place in Daly City, California. The fact that Liu was an American citizen and killed on US soil led the FBI to become involved in the investigation, with Chang later being jailed in the US. Since returning to Taiwan, Chang has since reinvented himself as a pro-China politician. 

Early writing on the incident from AP. Photo credit: Screenshot

US media initially framed the incident as a result of China versus Taiwan tensions in line with early reporting that Chou was Chinese, likely due to a failure to understand the complexities of Taiwan’s political situation, or due to the fact that some Taiwanese in the US who are old enough have documentation that lists their place of birth as “China”. Early reporting in Taiwan followed suit, due to weak fact-checking practices in Taiwanese media, and uncritical mimicry of English-language reporting. One notes that the Apple Daily Taiwan’s first reports this morning followed suit with flawed US journalism in its early reporting, also reporting that Chou was a Chinese immigrant, and not actually seeming to know his Chinese name, instead referring to Chou by the transliteration of “David.” 

After it was clarified that Chou was second-generation waishengren, this has not prevented some conspiracy theories from circulating. claiming that Chou was acting on behalf of China’s United Front. In particular, Chou targeting the Presbyterian Church was seen as significant, given the strong historical ties between the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the pan-Green camp. In line with its historically pro-independence leanings, many congregations of the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church conduct services in Taiwanese Hokkien. 

Tweet by President Tsai Ing-wen on the incident

But while Chou may have been involved in organizations with links to the United Front, it is unlikely that the killing was any more than a spontaneous act on his part. It proves hard to imagine that China’s United Front would think that the cause of unification could be advanced by gunning down a defenseless church delegation. In fact, Chou’s actions actually seem more characteristic of American gun culture, and America’s culture of mass shootings. 

But what is unusual about the incident is to what extent a hate crime committed by second-generation waishengren against members of a presumably benshengren congregation would be unheard of in Taiwan today. Such an incident seems more characteristic of the past, in which sub-ethnic tensions in Taiwan were stronger. In today’s Taiwan, lines between benshengren and waishengren are blurring, with third-generation waishengren mostly identifying with Taiwan rather than China, and intermarriages between waishengren and benshengren having been culturally accepted for decades. 

Pan-Blue and pan-Green communities often coexist in the US, but do not interact. It proves rare for such communities to directly come into conflict; even when the presidential candidates of both the pan-Blue and pan-Green camps in Taiwan usually visit the US before elections to conduct meetings with US government officials and to raise funds from the Taiwanese American community, one rarely sees counter-protests between each political camp, for example. 

At the same time, diasporic communities sometimes preserve the politics of decades past, from when they left their home country. This may have been the case with Chou. 

Moreover, with the KMT increasingly on the defensive since 2014, diasporic pan-Blue communities in the US that have long been outside of Taiwan have sometimes embraced misinformation and disinformation about the current situation in Taiwan, as circulated through messenger apps such as LINE or WeChat. This includes lurid claims about the Tsai administration rigging elections or covering up deaths due to COVID-19. 

Tweet by the KMT Twitter account on the incident

The spread of such misinformation and disinformation among overseas communities may have contributed to Chou’s drastic actions. To this extent, splits between elderly members of the pan-Blue camp that believe misinformation and disinformation and even family members such as their children are increasingly visible. In the lead-up to 2020 elections, there were a number of reports of children that had been evicted from their homes because of their parent’s ardent support of Han Kuo-yu, as to be contrasted to their children’s pan-Green political views. 

President Tsai Ing-wen has weighed in on the matter, expressing condolences to the victims of the incident. The KMT’s English Twitter account stated similarly, though party chair Eric Chu has yet to comment on the matter directly. Nor has Han Kuo-yu responded to the incident. 

Still, one expects the incident to perhaps be spun in a number of directions. For example, the framing of the incident as an act of political violence committed by Chinese against Taiwanese could potentially be used by Republicans hawkish on China issues to call for escalatory actions by the US. Yet as is generally the pattern with such Republican hawks, such actions are to quickly hit back at China more than they are to benefit Taiwan, and they sometimes stand to put Taiwan in the crossfire, if China targets Taiwan as a proxy for the US with retaliatory action. Likewise, one notes that such Republicans have often embraced Sinophobic rhetoric–at a time of unprecedented violence against Asian Americans in the US and this bellicose rhetoric has been a contributing factor, one hardly expects racists to draw distinctions between Taiwanese and Chinese. 
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