suit in a United States district court against the Republic of China and the six named conspirators, alleging that his murder had been arranged by Taiwanese officials acting in an official capacity. Although the suit survived an early motion to dismiss as an act of state grounds, Judge Eugene F. Lynch dropped Taiwan from the suit in 1987 based on Wang's military tribunal, which had concluded that Wang was not acting on behalf of the government of Taiwan, nor could his superiors have predicted his actions. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Lynch's decision, ruling (Liu v. Republic of China) that the ROC government was liable under the doctrine of respondeat superior; a petition for certiorari from the ROC government to the U.S. Supreme Court was subsequently rejected. The suit was finally settled out of court. Fallout The assassination became a major political scandal in Taiwan, and American officials were critical of the Kuomintang for allegedly orchestrating an assassination on United States soil. In a December 1985 speech, Chiang Hsiao-wu's father Chiang Ching-kuo declared ″If someone asks me whether anyone in my family would run for the next presidential term, my reply is, ′It can't be and it won't be. Prior to the Henry Liu murder, Chiang Hsiao-wu was the only one of Chiang Ching-kuo's sons mentioned as a potential successor to his father; the younger Chiang later served on the trade mission to Singapore, a move seen as soft exile. In popular culture The assassination was the subject of the book Fires of the Dragon by David E. Kaplan. A fictionalized version of the assassination was portrayed in the 2009 film Formosa Betrayed. See also List of journalists killed in the United States Bai Wanxiang, who masterminded Liu’s assassination Chen Wen-chen, another noted dissident who died under mysterious circumstances, potentially also a late example of White Terror suppression Lin Yi-hsiung, whose twin daughters and mother died after his arrest in another incident cited as an example of White Terror Kashmir Princess, another case of the Taiwanese government likely being involved in an overseas assassination References Notes Bibliography Taiwan Communiqué External links 1932 births 1984 deaths 1984 murders in the United States Taiwanese emigrants to the United States American male journalists American writers of Taiwanese descent Assassinated American journalists Taiwanese people murdered abroad People murdered by Chinese-American organized crime People murdered in California Writers from Taizhou, Jiangsu American people