{"id":6741,"date":"2022-06-01T08:00:40","date_gmt":"2022-06-01T12:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=6741"},"modified":"2022-11-12T11:18:03","modified_gmt":"2022-11-12T16:18:03","slug":"the-shooter-in-laguna-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/06\/the-shooter-in-laguna-woods\/","title":{"rendered":"The shooter in Laguna Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"

O<\/span>n May 15, a Chinese ethnonationalist targeted<\/a> the Irvine Presbyterian Taiwanese Church in Laguna Woods, California. He was heavily armed, with firearms, magazines of ammunition, and Molotov cocktails. He came prepared and secured the church’s doors with chains and superglue. Before killing one Taiwanese person and injuring five others\u2014four critically\u2014the shooter left a note in his car arguing that Taiwan was part of China. His hatred for a Taiwanese identity separate from the Chinese nation drove him to murder.<\/p>\n

Most media sites have been singularly focused on the question of the shooter\u2019s ethnicity. He was born in Taiwan, holds a Taiwanese passport, and served in compulsory military service in Taiwan, but U.S. cops fumbled<\/a> in their initial press conference by referring to him as a Chinese immigrant. But the fact that the shooter was from Taiwan alone explains little without understanding the historical context of Taiwan. By grappling with the history of Taiwan as a site of multiple layers of occupation and settler-colonialism, we can begin to understand the shooter for what he was\u2014a violent perpetrator of Chinese ethnonationalism.<\/p>\n

On Taiwan<\/h4>\n

Taiwan is a multi-ethnic nation with citizens from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds: Indigenous, Hoklo and other Han Chinese, Japanese, Western. Many of these are rooted in colonial experiences as non-Taiwanese migrants settled on the island and successive powerholders occupied Taiwan all the way through modernity. The imperial occupations of the twentieth century fundamentally shaped the fabric of Taiwanese identities today\u2014particularly since the nationalist Kuomintang party\u2019s occupation of Taiwan when the island became the so-called \u201cRepublic of China\u201d in 1945.<\/p>\n

Capitalizing on the modern invention<\/a> of Chinese nationhood, the Kuomintang (KMT) built a political machine on the Chinese mainland in the early twentieth century to throw off Japanese colonialism and emerge as a free and independent nation. They were joined by the Communists at first, supported by the Soviet Union, as a \u201cunited front\u201d that included all ideological tendencies from revolutionary socialism to communism to proto-fascism. The KMT quickly did away with that by purging Communists in the thousands in immense bloodshed in 1927<\/a>, which sent Communists into hiding and eventually led to Mao Zedong\u2019s rise to power over the Communist Party.<\/p>\n

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Taiwanese protest Kuomintang repression in Taipei on February 28, 1947. The KMT responded with a massacre of 18,000 to 28,000, foreshadowing the White Terror period of martial law from 1949 to 1992. No source information<\/a> available.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Maggie Clinton lays out in her book Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925-1937<\/a><\/em>, the Kuomintang\u2019s foundation was fascistic from its modern origins in the 1930s. The KMT built an ideology of the Chinese nation that was characterized by the nation itself (rather than, for example, the proletariat) being understood as the revolutionary unit. The KMT violently stamped out ideas that weren\u2019t obedient to the Chinese nation. The Kuomintang sought to bring all people and cultural productions into a top-down Confucian patriarchal structure of state control and \u201cunquestioning loyalty of social inferiors to superiors.\u201d They implemented that mission not only through propaganda and the arms of dictatorship, but through paramilitary violence and assassinations by its footsoldiers: the Blue Shirts and CC Clique. The Blue Shirts murdered magazine editors who published letters condemning Nazism and violently targeted critics to support their ethnonationalist ethos of the Chinese nation.<\/p>\n

When Mao\u2019s army defeated the Kuomintang in 1949 and created the People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC), the Chinese ethnonationalist party-state escaped to Taiwan and occupied the island while aiming to \u201crecapture the mainland.\u201d They were bankrolled<\/a> by the United States. The Kuomintang rapidly transformed into yet another Cold War-era U.S.-backed dictatorship presiding over a grotesque military-industrial complex on occupied land. The Japanese were gone but had left behind a national bourgeoisie that spoke Japanese. They promptly lost social power as the Kuomintang consolidated its rule through martial law<\/a> and an anti-communist White Terror that persecuted<\/a> Taiwanese leftists and anti-colonial sympathizers for generations.<\/p>\n

Chinese people who emigrated to Taiwan during this period formed a very different political group than much of the rest of Taiwanese people. They were labeled<\/a> waishengren<\/em>, as opposed to Taiwanese people who lived on the island before KMT occupation who became benshengren<\/em>. As Mau-kuei Chang of Academica Sinica explained<\/a>, \u201cdespite the diversity of social and economic backgrounds, the waishengren<\/em> [showed] a strong and almost uniform tendency in opposing Taiwanese nationalism or Taiwan independence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, national consciousness increasingly developed<\/a> as part of the wider democratic, anti-colonial movement against the Kuomintang, even though Taiwanese nationhood\u2019s roots ran even deeper into the Taiwanese soil that still remembered Japanese imperialism. The fault lines between waishengren<\/em> and benshengren <\/em>were starkly laid bare in two, almost-polar opposite, understandings of the Taiwanese future.<\/p>\n

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Pro-democracy demonstration in March 1990 by the Wild Lily student movement. Photo by Bubbha<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The end of the Kuomintang\u2019s one-party rule unleashed a flood of new ideas, from new literatures to new identities rooted in the celebrations of Taiwan as a multicultural democracy free from the enforced uniformism of Chinese ethnonationalism. Younger Taiwanese generations, in particular, have increasingly come to identify<\/a> just as Taiwanese\u2014even if they generally prefer the peaceful status quo to independence; and even as the looming mainland constantly threatens to complete the Kuomintang\u2019s dream of uniting the \u201cChinese nation\u201d by recolonizing Taiwan through annexation. The fault lines between waishengren<\/em> and benshengren<\/em> have similarly blurred as newer generations of Taiwanese people increasingly understand themselves as members of a pluralistic nation.<\/p>\n

The greatest triumph for the Taiwanese anti-colonial movement was the establishment of vibrant and pluralist democracy on the island beginning in the early 1990s and celebrated with the first democratic election in 1996. Democracy not only meant an end to U.S.-backed dictatorship and colonial occupation of the Kuomintang but also a way forward to reconciliation of Taiwan\u2019s many groups. Finally, the Left could organize without the anticommunist hysteria and blood-soaked colonial violence that hounded it for generations.<\/p>\n

The Chinese ethnonationalist ideology<\/h4>\n

The attack on Taiwanese people was motivated by the rise of Chinese ethnonationalism and its particular expression in a U.S. context. . While this exclusionary ideology has existed since the beginning of Chinese nationhood\u2014dating from the dynastic centralism that characterized imperial rule over what is now China and that treated all marginal peoples as barbarians \u2014it is far from the only kind of national consciousness. The Chinese nation has been articulated by thinkers throughout modern Chinese history in dramatically different ways. Many conceive of the Chinese nation as diverse, multinational, multiethnic. Communist understandings of the Chinese nation were particularly divergent, as were the early<\/a> comprehensions of China when \u201cChina\u201d first entered the Chinese language.<\/p>\n

Now, the ways that the People\u2019s Republic of China politicizes the Chinese nation for state projects resembles that of their old arch-enemy, the Kuomintang. Like the Kuomintang, the PRC invests<\/a> in and commits to Confucian structures that reinforce patriarchal hierarchies and conservative authoritarian rule. Mao Zedong was responsible for raising the status of Lu Xun (1881-1936) as the most important revolutionary thinker in Chinese history, but the state that Mao spawned now engages in all the practices Lu Xun most hated. In fact, Lu Xun himself wrote<\/a> that the right-wing Confucian ideology, which characterizes the old U.S.-backed KMT and modern PRC, was a scheme for controlling the state that was \u201cmade in the interests of those who ruled the masses\u2014that is, those who wielded power; it gave no thought to the interests of the masses themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n