A deadly shooting in southern California has sent shock waves throughout Taiwan.
On Sunday, 40 members of the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church had gathered in Laguna Woods for a luncheon in honor of Pastor Billy Chang (張承宗), when David Wenwei Chou (周文偉), 68, allegedly entered the church and opened fire, killing one churchgoer and injuring five others.
As the church has long backed Taiwan’s independence from China, law enforcement officials suspect Chou targeted it out of anger over its stance.
Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said that Chou had notes in his car that said he “was upset about political tensions between China and Taiwan,” and harbored “hatred of the Taiwanese people.”
Internet users have accused Chou of involvement in the Las Vegas branch of the National Association for China’s Peaceful Unification (NACPU), while a media report said he attended the group’s founding in 2019 and was an outspoken supporter of former Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜).
President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) office issued a statement on Tuesday saying she condemned “any form of violence,” while the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) expressed a similar stance in a Facebook post.
Asked about Chou’s actions, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said: “We hope the US government will take effective measures to resolve the worsening gun violence issue at home.”
The incident has highlighted China’s grand unification propaganda, social divisions between pro-China and pro-Taiwan supporters, and the hazards of “red infiltration” and organizations backed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Over the past few years, as China has ratcheted up its aggression toward Taiwan, tensions between pro-China and pro-Taiwan supporters have mounted. Tensions might have peaked when the KMT’s Beijing-friendly Han ran for president in 2020.
As Han lost by a wide margin and his recall in Kaohsiung sent the KMT into a tailspin of consecutive election losses, frustration might have morphed into hatred among unification supporters such as Chou, who might have seen violent “revolution” as the only path toward change.
On a deeper level, Chou’s alleged hate crime was born out of Chinese nationalism. China hates and envies Western countries, making it want to defeat the West. It considers Taiwan’s “modern” values — freedom, democracy and human rights — as symbols of the West. It views Taiwan as an entryway for “Western imperialism” and opposition to China.
This is twisted logic more akin to fascism during World War II. To facilitate unification and bring about the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese race,” it is necessary to annihilate the “dissidents,” and “liberate” Taiwan through force and violence.
While the victims of the church shooting are Taiwanese, they are also 100 percent American. Previously, Americans might have thought that Chinese propaganda only affected freedom of speech — for example, companies should not criticize the Chinese government if they want access to the Chinese market. Americans now realize that Chinese ideology can erode their democracy and threaten their lives.
Taiwan and the US should use this opportunity to step up the investigation of CCP-backed unification organizations, hate speech and red infiltration. As a conduit for Chinese propaganda and even espionage, front organizations such as the NACPU have been set up around the world to advance the CCP’s political agenda and malignant influence.
If the government does not implement harsher punishments for espionage and continues to turn a blind eye toward unification organizations and hate speech, some other shooter could emerge and instigate another tragic incident.
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
Reports about Elon Musk planning his own semiconductor fab have sparked anxiety, with some warning that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) could lose key customers to vertical integration. A closer reading suggests a more measured conclusion: Musk is advancing a strategic vision of in-house chip manufacturing, but remains far from replacing the existing foundry ecosystem. For TSMC, the short-term impact is limited; the medium-term challenge lies in supply diversification and pricing pressure, only in the long term could it evolve into a structural threat. The clearest signal is Musk’s announcement that Tesla and SpaceX plan to develop a fab project dubbed “Terafab”
Most schoolchildren learn that the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000km. They do not learn that the global economy depends on just 160 of those kilometers. Blocking two narrow waterways — the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait — could send the economy back in time, if not to the Stone Age that US President Donald Trump has been threatening to bomb Iran back to, then at least to the mid-20th century, before the Rolling Stones first hit the airwaves. Over the past month and a half, Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz, which is about 39km wide at
The ongoing Middle East crisis has reinforced an uncomfortable truth for Taiwan: In an increasingly interconnected and volatile world, distant wars rarely remain distant. What began as a regional confrontation between the US, Israel and Iran has evolved into a strategic shock wave reverberating far beyond the Persian Gulf. For Taiwan, the consequences are immediate, material and deeply unsettling. From Taipei’s perspective, the conflict has exposed two vulnerabilities — Taiwan’s dependence on imported energy and the risks created when Washington’s military attention is diverted. Together, they offer a preview of the pressures Taiwan might increasingly face in an era of overlapping geopolitical
RSS