Blood brothers, p.29
Blood Brothers, page 29
But with or without a city of their own, thousands of Chinese immigrants have flooded into Cambodia, legally and illegally. The total Chinese population of Cambodia is estimated at 350 000, of whom 200 000 live in Phnom Penh. Old communities have been joined by doctors, dentists and businessmen from Shanghai, architects from Taiwan and investors from Malaysia and Singapore. Since 1990, a major resurgence of Chinese culture has also occurred, and the largest and most prestigious Chinese school, Duanhua, has more than 10 000 pupils. This makes it the largest Chinese school in any country where Chinese is not one of the official languages.30
This ‘third wave’ of Chinese migration as such is not necessarily connected with criminal networks other than gangs involved in the smuggling of illegal aliens. But the fact that the Chinese Association in Cambodia is headed by a character like Theng Bunma has opened the door for all sorts of unsavoury characters, and many criminals have indeed come in with the tide. Chinese-owned night clubs in Phnom Penh have become meeting places for Chinese gangsters carving up the local entertainment and drugs scene in the capital, and their web of contacts—their own ‘bamboo network’, as the term goes—seems more akin to the worldwide network of the Triads than mainstream chambers of commerce.31
That was why Guo Dongpo, director of Beijing’s Office of Overseas Chinese Affairs, met Theng in Phnom Penh in October 2000 and asked him to help control Dry Duck and other unruly gangsters who had flocked to the Cambodian capital, including Macau’s Wan ‘Broken Tooth’ Kuok-koi during his heyday in the late 1990s. And, as Theng’s case also shows, the new wave has created entirely new loyalties and upset traditional power structures within the overseas Chinese communities and associations in Southeast Asia, including the underworld networks. A new kind of criminal order—or disorder—is taking root.
That the Iowa Wesleyan College decided to award Theng with an honorary doctorate was not an accident. The man who arranged it was Ted Sioeng, an Indonesian-Chinese businessman and tobacco tycoon who was a key figure in the ‘Donorgate’ saga in the United States in the 1990s. Sioeng is alleged to have acted on behalf of China in funnelling money to the Democratic National Committee, activities which later were subject to separate congressional and Justice Department investigations. In 1995 and 1996, Sioeng appeared at several glitzy Democratic Party fundraising events in the United States, usually accompanied by delegations of unidentified Chinese ‘businesspeople’. On one occasion, he sat next to President Bill Clinton, and on another with then Vice President Al Gore. Sioeng and his family were reported to have donated $250 000 to Clinton’s and Gore’s re-election campaign.32
Sioeng also sat on the board of trustees of the Iowa Wesleyan College from 1994 to 1997. The college, which for its part apparently hoped to get donations from its newly minted doctors, appears to have been used by Sioeng to further his own business. Theng is big in tobacco in Cambodia, and several officials from China’s Yunnan province, where Sioeng won the right to distribute the exclusive Hongtashan cigarettes in 1993, were awarded Iowa Wesleyan degrees during his tenure as a trustee. Sioeng also arranged honorary doctorates from the little-known ‘American M&N University’, a ‘religious school’ registered in the state of Louisiana, but with no campus, teachers or students. The ‘university’ was, in fact, headed by a Chinese-American called Nancy Chien, whose company in Monterey Park near Los Angeles runs the M&N Driving School. Among those awarded degrees from this unusual academic institution was the irrepressible Chen Kai-kit, alias Chio Ho-cheung, the Triad-connected Macau legislator who was also implicated in the ‘Donorgate’ affair. Chen, who sometimes uses the English name ‘Tommy’, proudly had new business cards printed identifying him as ‘Doctor Tommy Chio’.33
Sioeng is evidently a much more important person than the mobsters from Macau, and the US Senate investigative committee concluded that he ‘worked or perhaps still work[s] on behalf of the Chinese government’.34 He carries a passport from the Central American country of Belize, where his flagship company, the S.S. Group, is based, even though his wife and children are American citizens. Sioeng had long been buying influence in the United States in ways other than supporting Clinton’s and Gore’s re-election campaign. In 1995 he paid $3 million for the International Daily News, then a politically moderate Chinese-language newspaper in Los Angeles. As soon as he had taken over the paper, its editorial policy switched to a strong pro-Beijing stance. A few years later, it opened a bureau in Hong Kong which was headed by Yeung Hong Man, a former editor of the territory’s Beijing run Wen Wei Po newspaper. The International Daily News, which also distributes a North American edition of Wen Wei Po as a free ‘bonus’ for its readers, is headed by Jessica Elnitiarta, Sioeng’s eldest daughter. It was in her name that one of the main donations to the Democratic National Committee was made. At a Senate committee hearing in October 1997, Republican Senator Robert Bennett described Sioeng as being among a dozen witnesses who had ‘fled the country rather than be available for either this committee or the Justice Department’.35
But Sioeng has remained a regular visitor to China, the site of his main tobacco business—and to Cambodia, where he became a partner in Theng’s cigarette factory. In November 1997, Sioeng and Theng together attended an international conference of ethnic Chinese in the city of Chaozhou in China’s southern Guangdong province. The get together was presided over by Li Ruihuan, a member of the standing committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China. In his opening address, Li appealed to the congregated overseas Chinese to ‘act as a bridge between China and the world’.36 In fact, Sioeng had done much more than that: as the Donorgate scandal showed, he had even helped build a bridge right into President Clinton’s Oval Office in Washington.
The inroads made by Beijing into the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and the world over the past couple of decades stand in sharp contrast to how those communities were formed hundreds of years ago—and how they developed until Deng Xiaoping launched his new economic policies in the late 1970s, and the third wave of migrants landed on the shores of Nanyang. The first compact and permanent Chinese settlements in the region—as opposed to bands of deserters from the navy, artisans and assorted drifters and adventurers—were established in the fourteenth century at Palembang in Sumatra and at Tumasik, or Old Singapore. From these humble beginnings grew the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia which today consist of millions of people. They came as labourers, coolies and refugees, but soon ran their own schools and temples, and very quickly took over much of the commercial life of the region. Today many are bankers and tycoons, whose economic power and influence stretch far beyond Southeast Asia.
The fall of the Ming Dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century and, equally importantly, the establishment of European outposts in the region prompted many Chinese to look for a new future in Southeast Asia. In 1786, British Captain Francis Light acquired the island of Penang from the Malay sultan of Kedah, to which later was added a strip of the mainland, Province Wellesley. After the foundation of this new colony, Chinese immigration increased dramatically. Penang, however, proved to be only a limited success as a settlement and trading post, and it was not until after the foundation of Singapore in 1819 that the Chinese became really well established in Malaya.37 Gradually, the Malay sultanates on the peninsula also became British protectorates. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of Chinese—and a smaller number of Indians—were brought in by the British, as it was hard to persuade the native Malays to work in the plantations, the tin mines and the ports. They preferred to stay in their kampungs, or villages, with their paddy fields and their mosques, and they paid their respects to the Malay sultans rather than the colonial authorities.
Nearly all the Chinese who migrated to Penang and Singapore, and to the rest of Malaya, came from the south, but were of different language groups: Hokkien (Fujianese), Cantonese, Hakka and so on. They did not form a unified social unit as they had done at home in China, where they had lived side by side in defined districts and regions. Friction was common between the different groups of immigrants, and although the European colonial power protected all of them against the oppression or exactions of native princes and rulers, fear and trade jealousy sometimes brought them into conflict with the British. Nor were the immigrants exclusively composed of enterprising merchants, industrious artisans and hard-working labourers. Some of the worst characters for whom China itself had no room also came with the southward flow of migrants. There were frequent robberies, even in broad daylight, and for the first years of Singapore’s history most of these went unpunished as the British had brought with them only a handful of police, mostly Indians from Bengal and Madras.38
To protect themselves in this new, alien and sometimes hostile environment, the different groups banded together in secret societies, though it was not until 1831 that there was any reference to the existence of such groupings in official colonial records in Singapore. Twenty years later, in 1854, a series of incidents took place which culminated in a riot in which 400 Chinese were killed. But, for nearly a century after Captain Light had landed in Penang, the British administration was completely unaware not only of the nature of the secret societies, but also of the organisation of the Chinese community in general. In 1857 there were 70 000 Chinese in Singapore, but not a single European who understood any Chinese dialect. It was not until a Dutchman, Gustav Schlegel, published his epoch-making work, Thian Ti Hui (The Hung League or Heaven-Earth League), in 1866 that the colonial authorities came to know anything definite about the secret societies.39 A ‘Chinese Protectorate’ under the direction of W. Pickering, a member of the Civil Service who had actually learnt to speak Chinese, was established in Singapore to deal with the Chinese immigrants—and it was discovered that all their societies and community organisations were in one way or another offshoots of the Tiandihui.
Somewhat arbitrarily, however, the British decided to divide these organisations into ‘benevolent’ kongsi, or district and clan associations, and the malevolent hui, which were believed to be more prone to violence and crime.40 Kongsi, which over the years have become the Chinese equivalent of ‘company limited’ in English, sprung up in the many tin-mining towns that were developed during Britain’s time in Malaya. They were often groups that had reached agreement on how to divide capital and labour responsibilities, each member having a share. They could also be people of the same surname, or language group. The hui took after the kongsi, and one of the most influential secret societies in Singapore, the Ghee Hin (or Ngee Hin or Ngee Heng, which is yixing in Pinyin; ‘the rise of righteousness’), officially called itself Ngee Heng Kongsi.41 Hui, which means ‘society’ or ‘brotherhood’, sounded far more Masonic to the British, who introduced a new law in 1889 that recognised the kongsi but banned the hui as ‘unregistered societies’.
That piece of legislation created an artificial division between the two types of organisation by forcing the hui underground. What the British did not grasp was the yin–yang interaction—the dialectical relationship of interlocking opposites—that has always existed between open and secret societies among the Chinese. Yin (female) and yang (male) symbolise contrasting qualities corresponding to male and female characteristics, such as hard–soft, forceful–submissive, dry–wet, military–civil, and open–secret. The balance was unequal, yang always being the predominant element, but it had to respect the nature of yin.42
In western terms, kongsi and hui were two sides of the same coin, and the relationship between them was perhaps even stronger among the overseas Chinese than at home in China. The alien environment, with its many other ethnic groups—and foreign colonialists at the apex of the power structure—required a more flexible communal organisation among the immigrants. At the same time, sworn brotherhoods were the only available basis for social organisation for the male immigrants to Southeast Asia, and in the beginning nearly all of them were male.43 ‘Mutual-aid fraternities’ would actually have been a more appropriate term than ‘secret societies’.
Both kongsi and hui groups used symbols such as flags and seals, and the trappings were strikingly similar: Guandi, the god of merchants, was worshipped in both kongsi and hui temples and lodges, and both groups had initiation ceremonies that involved drinking the blood drawn from either a chicken or from the forefingers of the initiates. But hui initiation ceremonies tended to be more elaborate, and were always held in secret. As the hui drew their recruits from the lower strata of society, stricter discipline was needed.44 But, at the same time, the unruly secret societies had a habit of clashing with each other.
In this relationship, the more secretive hui were obviously yin, a role that the British legal system formalised by outlawing them. Mary Somers Heidhues of the Universities of Göttingen and Hamburg argues that ‘colonial policy finally forced (or better, facilitated) a differentiation of these brotherhoods, leaving the fields of extortion, petty rackets, and other criminal activities to the hui in the twentieth century’.45 As the Chinese communities in Malaya grew—by 1911 they accounted for 35 per cent of a total population of 5.5 million, compared with 49.2 per cent Malays and 14 per cent Indians—so did both the kongsi and the hui. But the influx of more people from different parts of China also led to more factionalism and infighting. Riots and open street warfare between different Triad, or secret society, factions were common in both Singapore and Penang. Different societies repeatedly petitioned the British Governor of the Straits Settlements—Penang, Singapore and Malacca—to help one or the other against its rival, but he declined to take sides in the conflicts.46 Instead, he charged the colonial police with containing the violence. The police, for their part, almost admitted that they were powerless. According to one internal British report commenting on the secret societies in Malaya:
Their worst feature is the protection they afford their members, whatever crimes these may have committed. The brethren will risk their lives for each other without hesitation and if one were to betray another vengeance would be very sure. Outsiders who assist the authorities are in little less danger than traitors from within: if they aid in the arrest of a brother they are almost sure to meet vengeance from the society, and the mere ill will of the fraternities can mean ruin. Thus those who disapprove of their aims or methods are usually too cowed to dare to report them to the police.47
As far as the British were concerned, what had begun as mutual-aid organisations to assist new immigrants had developed into fierce criminal gangs. According to another report:
Chinese secret societies’ activities in Malaya . . . have included the organisation of opposition to the government; the stirring up of anti-foreign feeling; the formation of self-protection units against robber gangs; the ‘protection’ and extortion of money from hawkers, shopkeepers, hotel-keepers, prostitutes, labourers, opium and gambling dens; kidnapping for ransom; and the operation of rings and rackets.48
The Chinese nationalists, however, saw it rather differently, which was why Dr Sun Yat-sen turned to the overseas Chinese for help in the struggle against the Qing Emperors in Beijing. He knew that wherever the Chinese went, they took their secret societies with them—and they were going to form the basis for his revolution. Since most Chinese in Malaya came from the south, many were also Ming loyalists, and opposed to the Manchu Qing. Local branches of his first political organisation, the Tongmenghui, or ‘United League’, were formed in Singapore, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Seremban, Malacca and Kuala Pilah. Dr Sun became a frequent visitor to Malaya, and his many articles for revolutionary papers even prompted the British to issue a stern warning; it was important for Britain to maintain good relations with the court in Beijing so as not to jeopardise the security of Hong Kong. But the overseas Chinese listened to Dr Sun, and provided him with financial backing for his struggle. Between 1909 and 1911—just before the fall of the Qing—a Triad society in Malaya even carried out a number of gang robberies, the proceeds of which were sent to China to aid the revolutionary cause.49 When the Guomindang was formed in 1912, its Singapore branch followed the Triad tradition by calling itself a ‘Lodge’.50
The political division in China was also reflected in the communities in Southeast Asia: communist cells began to operate in Malaya in 1924, and after Chiang Kai-shek’s and Big-Eared Du’s massacre of communists and labour union organisers in Shanghai in 1927, a separate Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) was formed. Its members were almost exclusively ethnic Chinese—and they were drawn from the same lower end of society as the Triads and the Guomindang: Chinese coolies, servants and labourers, mainly of Hainanese origin. The clannish, secretive Hainanese remained separate from other immigrant Chinese, comprising a closely knit group with a long and proud antiestablishment tradition.51 The CPM led the struggle against the Japanese during World War II, only to go underground again in the 1940s to fight the British. Malaya’s—and, after 1963, Malaysia’s— civil war was bitter and bloody, despite the name the colonial power gave it with typical English understatement: ‘the Emergency’.
Intermingling between the CPM and the Triads did exist, but it was more on an individual basis. By and large, they were rivals, because they appealed to the same social outcasts of society who made up the foot soldiers of both. But the CPM thought that perhaps the Triads could be reformed and turned into leftist revolutionaries. A letter written by the secretary of the Selangor State Committee of the CPM, Chan Lo, expressed that sentiment:
Triad personnel are elements of a decadent society, ostensibly patriotic, but in reality self-seeking. When once tempted by offers of money they will commit all sorts of crime. Care should be taken to avoid arousing their suspicion. They should be given political teaching, and their societies should be recognised under different names, such as the ‘Righteous Killer Squad’, the ‘Blood and Iron Volunteer Corps’, and the ‘Anti-British Protection Corps’.52
