There was a mass shooting at the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, Calif., on Saturday. One man was killed — John Cheng, a doctor who tackled the shooter and stopped the massacre — and five retirees were injured. The FBI then announced that it was investigating the incident as a “hate crime,” while local police said that the shooter was motivated by “a hate for Taiwanese people.”
You can guess what happened in the media, next. Outlets galore whipped up the frenzy of this being a hate-motivated incident, under the aegis of “anti-Asian racism.” Headlines in multiple outlets ran the phrase “anti-Taiwanese hate,” as if some new trend of bigoted events against Taiwanese people had existed — of which this one isolated incident was actually a part. Subheads in respectable publications such as NPR and PBS called the shooter a “Chinese immigrant” — a not-so-subtle attempt to suggest that Chinese geopolitics had something to do with it, where its heated rhetoric about Taiwan has raised fears of an invasion of the island. In the context of Asian American and Pacific Islander month, the incident was initially painted as another facet of “anti-Asian hate” supposedly prevalent across the United States.
Later disclosures — under-reported by these outlets — proved these assumptions faulty and provide some insight into how news outlets skew events to fit narratives. The shooting suspect, David Chou, 68 and a U.S. citizen, was actually born in Taiwan. Yes, not mainland China, but the island of Taiwan itself. The Taiwanese government even confirmed it. He wasn’t a “Chinese immigrant” but a “Taiwanese immigrant.” It’s a significant and quite conspicuous distinction that the media chose to ignore, especially given that the church itself was Taiwanese. Though Taiwan is formally named the Republic of China and has a Han-ethnic majority like the mainland, the notion that someone from Taiwan is generally Chinese is not really accurate, especially in this context.
Motives remain murky. Orange County sheriff Don Barnes has said the suspect was motivated by “tensions” between China and Taiwan and called the shooting “a politically motivated hate incident.” Though Chou had, per police, expressed a dislike for his native land, there’s no conclusive proof (yet) that he was motivated by geopolitics. Evidence may yet emerge, but the media should remember that, as with the Buffalo shooting, the motivations behind despicable acts of violence don’t always fit perfectly into preexisting political and racial narratives.