Written by Isabelle Cockel.
Jessica Davies is the guest editor of the Taiwan Insight: International Journal of Taiwan Studies Special Issue for March 2024
Image credit: Tsai Tsung-lung.
It is known that cyber trolling can target anyone or any group, be they individuals or a group. These targets may be ordinary citizens, celebrities, public figures, or groups who are minoritised because of their ethnicity, sexuality, faith, occupation, disability, age, accent, geographical location, appearance, or lifestyle. In fast-rolling cyberspace, where attention span may be as short as just a few seconds, netizens often marry extreme emotions with verbal violence in order to outperform others in the ‘attention economy’ of cyberspace. When they compete with each other under anonymised account names, such ‘marriage’ is particularly enhanced, and it encourages netizens to deviate from everyday norms or etiquette. For netizens on PTT, an anonymised platform popular in Taiwan and the largest Chinese-language BBS platform, they either claim that anonymity allows them to be ‘true’ to themselves, as research has argued, or they can enact an identity that is not their own unless they are online, as analysed by a woman user interviewed by me in December 2021. In either sense, performance in this ‘affective community’ seems to hold the key to understanding the explosive, sentimental, abusive or profane content created by no one but these individual users. Does this mean that, because they may not be spoken by a real person in everyday life, the overt discriminatory comments thrown at Nguyen Quoc Phi, an undocumented Vietnamese worker who lost his life to a police constable’s gunshots, can be dismissed?
This fatal tragedy took place on the morning of 31 August 2017 on the riverbank of Fengshan Creek in Hsinchu. On that fatal morning, at 09:54, Nguyen was reported to the police for vandalising a van and a scooter. At 10:05, a police constable and a supporting Civil Defence Corps (CDC) (min fang) member arrived at the scene. Entirely naked (for reasons unknown), Nguyen was questioned by the police constable and fought against both of them. Undeterred by their baton and peppery spray, Nguyen caused a nosebleed to the CDC member. At 10:14, the police constable called for paramedics to treat the CDC member’s injury. At 10:17, the police constable turned on his body camera. After Nguyen entered the police’s vehicle parked at the scene, at 10:20, he was fired at by the police constable nine times in a short range in twelve seconds. Wounded and confused, he remained alive. At 10:23, a paramedics team arrived with two police officers; at 10:24, they called for reinforcement to treat Nguyen’s injuries. At 10:28, two more police officers arrived. At 10:29, without attending to Nguyen’s injuries, the paramedics left with the CDC member, leaving Nguyen untreated. At 10:30, a fifth and final police officer arrived; at 10:32, Nguyen was handcuffed around his wrists and shackled around his ankles. At 10:37, the second paramedic team arrived, and after addressing Nguyen’s wounds, they left and took him to a hospital. On the way, his heart stopped, and he was given CPR. The hospital failed to resuscitate Nguyen, who was pronounced dead at 11:32. Posthumous examinations found that Nguyen had taken methamphetamines and alcohol.
Before this footage was edited into ‘Miles to Go Before I Sleep’, a documentary examining how Nguyen and migrant workers were recruited by their brokers and treated by their employers, the negligence of the police officers and paramedics was not in the domain of public knowledge. What was known to the public immediately after his death was the media coverage that mentioned his vandalism and violence, his entry into the police vehicle, and his substance abuse. It is in this critical information void where PTT users created 1,052 posts between 5 September and 17 November 2017. 1,052 is an insignificant number compared to that of those posts rapidly multiplying during election campaigns or social movements when there were as many as 100,000 users simultaneously posting and vying for short-spanned public attention.
However, what is imperative is that some of these posts racialised, criminalised and dehumanised Nguyen individually and Vietnamese men collectively, whilst they were also provoked in equally emotional languages by pro-rights posts, which prompted netizens to the self-positioning of Taiwan in a fixed ethnic hierarchy below the white and above the people of colour. This debate can be grasped by a few examples:
‘Dealing with these people has to be like white policemen killing Negros.’
‘Not only Nguyen but all the undocumented workers were ‘scrambling after Taiwanese jobs, killing and robbing Taiwanese people, and raping their female bosses.’
‘[Anyone who] attacks the police [in the U.S.] will be shot to a pulp. Alas, in this ghost island, the policeman is to be prosecuted.’
‘No one felt sorry for the death of rubbish.’
‘[He] deserved to die.’
‘Animals don’t have human rights.
‘Would the police dare to shoot a Taiwanese nine times?’
‘[I] support the use of firearms, but if the police do not dare to shoot Taiwanese or white people, they are not acting with due diligence.’
Unarmed Taiwanese people might also, like Nguyen, be confronted with ‘police officers who fired at the abdomen nine times because they thought their lives were at risk.’
‘What kind of exploitation made Nguyen fight with his life?’
Accentuated by these posts, PTT netizens vehemently attacked each other on their perceptions of the image, legitimacy, justification, proportionality, and regulation of the police’s use of lethal firearms. This is a much-needed debate, given the number of high-profile cases of incidents where the physical conflict between the police and citizens ended in the loss of lives of either party, regardless of whether or not a firearm was involved. And, as anyone familiar with how netizens ‘perform’ in this freewheeling space, these vital debates, which were split between being pro-rights (but not necessarily pro-migrants) or pro-police (pro-violence), were expressed in languages equally provocative to each other. Against the background of netizens’ performativity and attention-seeking, these debates have made PTT a highly volatile socio-political space. However, viewed holistically, the necessity of this debate was obscured by the overtly hostile posts that racialised, criminalised and dehumanised Nguyen and Vietnamese workers.
Alas, issues about labour migration do not usually dominate election campaigns in Taiwan. A common explanation is that migrant workers do not have the right to vote. Hence, their rights are in nobody’s interest, and the violation of their rights is nobody’s concern. When the labour migration issue caused a stir, like the news reported by Bloomberg on 10 November 2023 about the signing of an employment mobility agreement in December 2023 between Taiwan and India for recruiting Indian workers, the controversy was the reported number of potential recruitments. Although the Ministry of Labour quickly and repeatedly dismissed it as ‘fake news,’ what cannot be overlooked was an overwhelming campaign online and offline against the employment of Indian men, who were explicitly condemned as sexual predators. Thus, before setting foot in Taiwan, Indian men had been subject to discrimination constituted by the biases of gender, class, and ethnicity. On 16 February 2024, the once-dismissed ‘fake news’ returned to the limelight. This time, it was a press release issued by the Workforce Development Agency (WDA) of the Ministry of Labour. In the press release, the WDA noted the positive assessment of their work performance given by other recruiting states. On Taiwan Yahoo, three days after the news was published, sandwiched within 637 cynical, satirical, and ballistic comments was the image of Indian men presented as sexual predators. Not naming the name ‘Indians’ but replacing it with ‘Ah-san,’ a derogatory term widely used in pre-1949 Shanghai, netizens repeatedly warned: ‘Taiwanese women, watch out!’ Plagued by high-profile cases of rape and gang rape in recent years, Indian men have become another easy target of cyber trolling.
Taiwan’s industrialisation, starting in the 1960s, hinged on the cost-effectiveness of low labour costs. Today, opening the domestic labour market to migrant workers, Taiwan has become a migration state that utilises the migrant labour recruitment system to retain low labour costs. This recruitment system, by design, creates circumstances conducive to debt bondage, which leads to coercion, abuse and forced labour, which, on the whole, can be considered a case of human trafficking. However, what is concerning is that out of these 1,052 posts mentioned earlier, there was only one which commented on the plights suffered by migrant workers:
‘I had contact with some [civic] organisations, [I know that] foreign workers are paid half a year, they are not allowed to go out, they don’t speak the same language, they are homesick, they are exploited, and there was a care worker who was raped by three generations of her employer’s family.’
If these debates had drowned the voices about migrant workers’ rights, it is hoped that ‘Miles to Go Before I Sleep’ can be a wake-up call for the government, as well as the citizens, to take remedial action towards this recruitment system. Ethnic trolling is a critical reminder of how this system can breed discrimination, a ‘face-losing’ challenge, as mentioned by some PTT netizens in the aftermath of Nguyen’s death. If the people of Taiwan wish to bask in the glory of creating a ‘beacon of democracy’ in East Asia, then it is time now to tackle this challenge.
Isabelle Cockel is a Senior Lecturer in East Asian and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth. She is currently the Secretary-General of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (2018-2025).
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘International Journal of Taiwan Studies‘.
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