The Eng-Lite Program Lecture Series: Talk No 7
Time：2024.04.17（Wed.）14:00-16:20
Topic：‘They Will Shoot You to A Pulp!’ The Racialisation of Migrant Workers in the Emotive Cyberspace of PTT
Speaker：Isabelle Cockel ,Senior Lecturer, University of Portsmouth
Host：Hsin-Chin Evelyn Hsieh, Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University
Venue: NTUGITL R324, Guo Qing Bldg.
By Conrad C. Carl
On April 17, we were delighted to welcome Dr Isabelle Cockel to our institute. Dr Cockel is Senior Lecturer in East Asian and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth. Her research interests are labour and marriage migration in East Asia. She focuses on how the state instrumentalises immigration for political and economic gains. She publishes about sovereignty, citizenship, gender, activism, and irregular farm work in the informal labour market. She utilises academic blogs to raise public awareness of inequality and injustice embedded in labour migration. Taking gender as an approach, her other research interests are the Cold War in East Asia. Using women broadcasters as a case study, she argues that the propaganda broadcasting on the radio constructs an ideological soundscape across the Taiwan Strait. She is currently the Secretary-General of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (2018-2025). She is an Associate Editor of Asia Pacific Viewpoint and a member on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies. Dr Cockel was so kind to present not merely one but two of her recent research projects.
The context of the first topic was the death of an undocumented Vietnamese worker on August 31, 2017. Nguyen Quoc Phi was a 27-year-old man from Nghe An Province in Vietnam. In Taiwan, he became a so-called “Runaway,” after leaving the factory he was officially employed by. Being an undocumented worker, he then worked as a foreman at construction sites. Before diving deeper into his case, Dr Cockel emphasized, we need to take a look at the guest worker system in Taiwan (which resembles that of Hong Kong, Singapore or Malaysia). Guest workers in Taiwan are divided into two categories by the Employment Service Act: indentured workers and social welfare workers. Regulated by the Employment Service Act, they are bound by a contract to a certain employer. But in order to be contracted by an employer, they pay brokers an extremely high amount of recruitment fee, conventionally known as ‘mai gong fei’. Recruitment fees can be as high as US $6,000, as found amongst Vietnamese workers. Fees will be deducted from their salaries and they are forced into pledging their services as security for the repayment which leads to debt bondage, a situation akin to modern-day slavery. A different but related aspect is that of mobility, Dr Cockel underscored. The Employment Service Act does not allow guest workers to change their employers and require them to reside at their residential address registered with the government. ‘Missing’ from this address for more than three days makes them violate the Act and they become ‘runaways’, ‘tao pao wai lao, a derogatory term previously used to describe absconders as criminals. In reality, runaways are undocumented and irregular workers in an ‘informal economy.’ To grasp the extent to which this is happening, in Taiwan, as of 2017, there were 663,234 workers from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines in Taiwan and out of the 199,546 Vietnamese, 1,269 are missing. One of those was Nguyen Quoc Phi.
PTT is the largest Chinese-language bulletin board system based in the Chinese speaking world. Its users are rendered anonymous by their IDs and nicknames chosen by themselves. PTT is comprised of chatrooms of various subjects, including Gossiping, Sex, Joke, Hate, and Baseball, amongst others. TPC_Police and PublicServan are another two chatrooms where, as the name indicate, users may be employees in the police force and civil servants, although their identity is difficult to ascertain. Despite the anonymity of the users, PTT is no unlawful space. There is both civil and criminal legal liability at play here. In addition to these, administrators are elected to make sure the code of conduct is followed. For Dr Cockel, it is important to grasp what kind of space PTT is. It is open, interactive, emotive, fast-moving and freewheeling.
Considering this context, Dr Cockel’s research was to find answers to two research questions. First of all: How was Nguyen’s death collectively reimagined by PTT users? And, secondly: What does this re-imagination reveal to us about their perceptions of migrant workers and the judicial system?
Social media can encourage deviation and anonymity plays a crucial role here. For example, as previous research has shown, users with real names use less swear words. In addition to that, the interactions on social media also create an outlet for emotions and facilitate room for users to perform their identity. Violence is happening, too. The verbal violence prevalent on those platforms, particularly on Sex, is often misogynistic and gender-based.
Dr Cockel analyzed user’s interaction that were archived on PTT, totaling 2,893 posts (as of November 2020). The start was marked by the event in 2017. The three months following the incident, 1,052 posts were found that discussed news reports that were related to Nguyen’s death and were posted by users who invited other users’ comments. The police constable who fired at Nguyen was sentenced in 2019 and in reaction to that several threads were posted. In May and June of 2020, posts focused on the aftermaths of the Black Lives Matter movement.
On August 31 in 2017, Nguyen died after being shot nine times by a police constable. This fatal encounter began when the police constable was called to the scene for a reported theft and vandalism. In the news coverage, Nguyen was framed as an alleged thief, an aggressive offender and a runaway. And now, he was a dead man. This incident resulted in a public inquiry undertaken by the Control Yuan, investigating the police and paramedic for their misconduct.
Dr Cockel’s findings are eye-opening. In the imagination of PTT users, the shooting of Nguyen was, in fact, racialized. They commented that it happened by the same logic as the shooting of people of colors by white policemen in the US. Nguyen’s death, in their imagination, cannot be understood without this dimension in mind. Equally alarmingly, those fighting for human rights were also mocked by users in the emotive space of PTT (they were ridiculed as the ‘woke youth’ or ‘leftist idiots’). In this racialized discourse, violence is accepted and permitted. Their worldview is built on a power relation that is understood along a racial lane. The racial hierarchy took on the form of White/Taiwanese/Black & Southeast Asian migrants. Calling for their rights was met with contempt on PTT.
The second dimension is that of criminalization. Vietnamese were perceived by users to be troublemakers and the police should arrest runaways. For PTT users, once a criminal you cannot appeal to human rights anymore. For Vietnamese runaways, reappearing denominations imposed on them by users included: gangsters, drug addicts, crazy criminals, etc. Nevertheless, in equally emotional languages, there were users who challenged the pro-police and thus pro-violence discourses. They, in turn, also faced pro-police users’ attack.
Thirdly, the dehumanization of ‘runaways’ is another prominent theme in the discursive space of PTT. Users made use of vulgar and extreme language to belittle human life. Out of 1052 posts, there was only one user commented on migrant workers’ employment and predicaments, indicating that there was no interest amongst the users to engage with the guest worker system, regardless of their views on the circumstances leading to Nguyen’s death.
And lastly, distrust and disillusion was the last theme emerging from these posts. There was a low level of trust held by the police towards politicians, their commanding officers and their institution. In their eyes, politicians and their commanding officers were self-serving and calculative.
Dr Cockel’s research concluded that social media thrives through anonymity, deviation. and by performing a different identity, a different self that is facilitated by the said anonymity. Furthermore, spaces like PTT accommodate freewheeling utterances (unrestrained and unregulated) which subsequently becomes an emotional outlet for racialization, criminalization, dehumanization and distrust. Toughness is ubiquitous on these platforms; masculinity is performed towards migrant workers and progressive voices. On the other hand, PTT is also a volatile space that accommodates different views. Every standpoint, either pro-police or pro-right in the case of Nguyen’s death, is challenged by explosive languages. As highlighted above, racial hierarchies that heavily influence the tone and content of the posts can be discerned. That being said, we can witness calls for inter-subjectivity and empathy. The bottom line and dire conclusion is, though, what Dr Cockel calls a ‘democratic deficiency.’ Taiwan is a migration state, politically close but economically open. Taiwan, unfortunately, is not interested in reforming the guest worker system that gives rise to so many of the issues mentioned in Dr Cockel’s presentation. And this inaction is a huge liability to the democratic system in general.
For more information about migrants in Taiwan and their personal biographies, please see here: