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INTRODUCTION
On 1 September 1918, in Victoria, British Columbia, a local Chinese barber named Wong Chun assassinated Tang Hualong, a Chinese government minister traveling through Canada en route to China. Wong ambushed the Minister and his entourage and fatally shot Tang at close range, committing suicide at the scene after a failed attempt to shoot the Minister's secretary.(1) The assassin was a member of the Chinese Nationalist League (CNL), the North American wing of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement and a vehement critic of Chinese Premier Duan Quiri. Tang, Speaker of the Chinese House of Representatives and Minister of Education and the Interior, was returning from an official visit to the United States intended to secure war loans for Peking, and as such, Wong's political affiliation became the main focus of the coroner's inquest.(2) Investigators deemed the act to have been politically motivated, and evaluation of the assassin's motive shortly evolved into an indictment of the CNL as a whole. Exercising powers available under the War Measures Act, the federal government banned the CNL, along with twelve other political organizations, under Order in Council PC 2384 in September 1918.(3)
Local media coverage of the assassination was quick to stress the peculiarly "oriental" nature of the crime. Headlines in the Victoria Daily Colonist declared, "Local Chinatown in a Ferment: Assassination of Tang Hua Lung Creates Great Excitement and Predictions Made of Further Trouble." The reporter noted that "an Oriental impassiveness characteristic of the Chinese" could not "hide the undercurrent of excitement" in Chinatown after the murder, and that despite their effort to "solve the real inwardness of the shooting," the police were unable to permeate "a seemingly impenetrable veil of mystery and silence" surrounding the event. The same reporter commented that Wong committed the murder "with a fatalism peculiar to the Oriental," and in the aftermath, Chinatown was "seething" and "rife" with speculation of retribution and further violence (Victoria Daily Colonist, 4 September 1918).
The perception of the Chinese as mysterious, devious, and violent so clearly evident in the media coverage of the assassination also informed the Canadian government's investigation of the CNL's culpability for the crime. This paper will discuss the investigation into the assassination and the subsequent ban of the CNL in the broader context...