Blood brothers, p.48
Blood Brothers, page 48
The United Bamboo gang traces its origin to 1956, when its predecessor, the Bamboo Woods League, was formed in the Taipei suburb of Yung-ho. Named after the neighbourhood’s Bamboo Forest Road, it consisted of seventeen teenagers, mostly sons of senior officers in Chiang Kai-shek’s military who had escaped to Taiwan after the communist victory in the mainland. The youngest at the time was the thirteen-year-old Chen Chi-li, the son of a local magistrate.94 Disenchanted by the humiliation of their fathers, the youngsters formed the gang to fight off other local gangs on Bamboo Forest Road. As long as Chiang Kai-shek was alive, they had little to fear. Dry Duck Chen even socialised with the sons of Chiang Ching-kuo, when he and his ‘brothers’ were not protecting gambling dens and hostess clubs, or otherwise involved in loan-sharking and debt collection. By murdering Henry Liu, they managed to curry favour with the powers that be in Taiwan at the time. In its heyday in the early 1980s, the United Bamboo gang had up to 40 000 members in Taiwan and overseas cells operated in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, as well as throughout Asia.95
But those days were over, and attempts by Taiwan’s Triads in the 1990s to imitate the yakuza by entering the construction business did not fare well. Although they managed to siphon off millions of dollars from public works projects, the authorities struck back. In August 1996, the police launched operation Chih Ping, or ‘Clean Sweep’, and staged a pre-dawn raid on the home of Tsai Kuan-lun, the leader of another notorious Taiwanese Triad, the Four Seas gang. News footage of his arrest was shown on national television, which also filmed Tsai and some of his bodyguards being whisked by helicopter to Taiwan’s Green Island gaol, which previously had been reserved for political prisoners. In the ensuing weeks, the police raided massage parlours and brothels and scores of other criminals were arrested.96 The Triad problem has not gone away in Taiwan, but times have changed and the public do not accept the old ways any longer. Hardly surprisingly—but somewhat ironically—both the United Bamboo and the Four Seas seem to have more business in Shanghai these days than in Taipei.97
However, Taiwan’s break with its criminal past also resulted in some unforeseen consequences. Suddenly, heroin became available in the streets of Taipei, and the number of addicts was soon in the tens of thousands, and increasing steadily. The drug invasion of Taiwan coincided not only with the democratisation of the island, but also with the massive surge in heroin production in the Burmese sector of the Golden Triangle since the late 1980s. New gangs and networks emerged from the mutiny in the Communist Party of Burma in 1989 which, unlike many of the older groups, did not have historical and emotional ties to Taiwan. The remnants of the Guomindang in the Golden Triangle, and even the organisation of the Shan-Chinese warlord Zhang Chifu (alias Khun Sa), always refrained from selling heroin if the destination was Taiwan. The new dealers—the United Wa State Army, the UWSA and other groups of fighters from the former Burmese communist rebel army—have no such qualms. To them, Taiwan is only a lucrative market for their produce.98
A Taiwanese government document issued in 1993 stated:
Drugs were not a serious problem in the ROC (Republic of China) until five years ago. Now drug abuse has reached major proportions . . . Recent drug busts have pointed to Thailand and the Chinese mainland as the major sources. ROC police estimate that 3,000 kilogrammes of heroin . . . finds its way across the mainland into Taiwan each year, but only one-tenth of this amount is seized by the police.’99
Another government publication stated that the amount of heroin seized in Taiwan did not exceed 10 kilograms annually prior to 1990. In that year, the amount jumped to 22 kilograms, increasing to 76 kilograms in 1991 and 320 kilograms in 1992. The year 1993 saw a record volume of drug seizures: 1110 kilograms of heroin, morphine and marijuana, of which 96 per cent was heroin, and 3357 kilograms of finished and half-finished methamphetamines.100 The flood has not stopped: in June 1999, 21 kilograms of heroin with a street value of $30.5 million, manufactured in the hills of northeastern Burma and smuggled from Thailand, were seized at Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek airport.
China’s relations with the drug-running UWSA seems to go way beyond a mutually beneficial business arrangement. In 2000, Chinese technicians were seen upgrading several roads inside and close to UWSA-controlled areas in eastern Burma. Chinese doctors, teachers and even military personnel have been spotted in the Wa Hills, and the 20 000-strong UWSA is equipped with Chinese-made weapons, including HN-5N surface-to-air missiles.101 A prominent leader of the UWSA, Ta Thang, has Chinese intelligence and military advisers.102 Ironically, as China is battling its worst domestic heroin epidemic in decades, with millions of mostly young people turning to drugs to escape from the bitter realities of life in today’s society, the country’s military and intelligence apparatus is actively cooperating with the biggest armed drug-trafficking organisation in the world. Even among the blood brothers at the grassroot level, the impact of the drug epidemic, and related diseases such as HIV and AIDS, could be felt in a rather curious way. Fear of catching AIDS has forced new recruits to slit their own finger tips simultaneously and suck only their own blood rather than following the age-old initiation rite of drinking the mingled blood of new recruits from a communal tumbler.103
The relocation of many gangs to China, the emergence of new ones and the new hold that Beijing seems to have over the Triads—even overseas—are all outcomes of traditional weaknesses in Chinese society. Taiwan has managed to put its state-sponsored criminal past behind it and to create a modern society ruled by law, but it will take a long time for China to achieve the same degree of development—if ever—because China has ambitions to become a world superpower, and the ‘spiritual homeland’ for the world’s new ‘global majority’. Without the criminal underworld on its side, it would be almost impossible for Beijing to extend its writ beyond its frontiers, and that is what makes the new nexus between the Triads and China’s present leaders so dangerous for the rest of the world. China is, even more than North Korea, a state that feels that it has to engage in criminal activities such as drug running and the printing of counterfeit dollars to survive. And China needs the underworld to help it steal industrial secrets from more developed countries and to influence the politics of what is becoming its main rival, the United States.
The Donorgate saga in 1996 revealed for the first time that Beijing has used gangland figures to funnel money to a presidential candidate in the United States. The affair would most probably have attracted more attention than it did had a certain young lady called Monica Lewinsky not stolen the show. Suddenly, media focus shifted to President Clinton’s sordid private life instead of what was the tip of an iceberg of espionage and organised crime. Charlie Trie, Ng Lap Seng, Chen Kai-kit and their like were soon forgotten. But during the trial of Taiwan-born Chinese-American fundraiser for the Democrats Johnny Chung, some vital information was unearthed. He had been involved not only with the aerospace executive Liu Chao-ying, the daughter of General Liu Huaqing, a high-ranking Chinese military commander and a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party, but also with General Ji Shengde, a former head of China’s military intelligence. Chung admitted that Ji gave him $300 000 in the summer of 1996 for Clinton’s re-election campaign.104 Ji was also widely reputed to have been the contact man between the PLA and the gangsters in Macau. The wily general was later linked to Lai Changxing, the key figure in China’s biggest-ever corruption scandal which broke in late 2000. Lai, an influential local businessman in Fujian, had used his connections with senior party cadres and army generals to build up a smuggling empire, based in Xiamen port, that handled everything from crude oil to vegetable oil, rubber, cars, tobacco and electrical appliances. Lai managed to get on his payroll at least one of Xiamen’s deputy Communist Party chiefs, Liu Feng, the head of the city’s police external liaison department, Wang Kexiang, and a top official in the Fujian Provincial Border Defence Force, Zhang Yongding. The manager of the Fujian branch of the Bank of China and the chief of the Xiamen branch of Industry and Commerce Bank Corp. had also been bought off.105 Lai was reported to have evaded $6 billion in taxes—before he, like so many other Chinese criminals, managed to escape to Canada.106 Back home in Fujian, more than 300 people were arrested and tried. Fourteen death sentences (three of them suspended), twelve life sentences and 58 fixed-term prison sentences were handed down. Among those sentenced was General Ji, who was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment for his part in the corruption scandal, but some western intelligence operatives in East Asia felt that he was perhaps punished more for blowing an important attempt to penetrate the White House.107
At the very least, the Chinese authorities managed to shut him up— which was not possible with Lai, who was in Canada. Lai told the Canadian media that China has a network of businessmen in Canada and the United States who acted as its spies to steal industrial and military secrets. The network, he said, was run by the intelligence unit of the PLA and Beijing’s Public Security Bureau.108 Many felt that he was trying to show that he could be useful to the Canadian government to get political asylum in the country. But his revelations were strikingly similar to the findings of a top-secret study prepared for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service as early as 1997. Known as ‘Sidewinder’, the report detailed an alleged pact between Chinese intelligence agencies, businessmen and criminal gangs operating in Canada. The report was subsequently rewritten and given a new code name, ‘Project Echo’. The press accused the Canadian government of trying to water down the damning report so as not to upset relations between Canada and China.109 The original report specifically mentioned CITIC, or the China International Trust Investment Company, as a major player in both politics and business in North America. CITIC, which is the largest Chinese company operating internationally, had on its first board of directors Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, and Henry Fok, the de facto head of Macau’s gambling operations. CITIC and the Lippo Bank of Indonesia, in which Li Ka-shing is a major shareholder, were also implicated in the Donorgate affair.
Among the other major Chinese companies mentioned in the ‘Sidewinder’ report was the arms manufacturer Northern Industrial Corporation, or Norinco, and Poly Technologies, both of which are owned by CITIC. The Poly Group was until recently headed by one of Deng Xiaoping’s sons-in-law, He Ping, and is widely seen as part of the PLA’s entrepreneurial drive. Large quantities of arms manufactured by Norinco have been confiscated on Indian reserves in Canada, especially those of the Mohawks.110 In May 1996, US authorities made what was described as the largest seizure of automatic weapons in the country’s history: 2000 Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles and other military weapons. United States-based representatives of the Poly Group were subsequently arrested. The final destination of all those arms was never determined, but native Indian ‘Warriors’ and, ironically, some of the extreme right-wing American militias were strongly suspected by US authorities. What is clear, however, is that Chinese guns destined for the North American market are almost always transported by the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), which has been implicated in many smuggling operations other than gun running.111 The PLA has come a long way since its teenaged peasant soldiers marched into Shanghai in their sneakers and straw sandals in May 1949.
Smaller firms were also highlighted in ‘Sidewinder’, such as film production companies which were ‘regularly in contact with prominent members of the Sun Yee On Triad’. It also accused China’s military intelligence of trying to influence Canadian elections in the same way as it had done in the United States.112 And the choice of Canada to penetrate North America was not an accident. It is huge and sparsely populated. In the least populated part of the country, the Northwest Territories, there are only 160–170 police officers to maintain law and order in an area larger than Western Europe. And it has an 8000-kilometre, porous border with the United States, over which flow not only illegal immigrants but also drugs and guns. Canada is rapidly becoming the United States’ unguarded back door, a key entry point for women and child sex-slaves from Eastern Europe as well as one of the world’s centres for Chinese organised crime and espionage.113
The ‘Sidewinder’ report became extremely controversial and was criticised by many as being ‘biased against China’. But its basic findings received more credence when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the FBI) in May 2001 arrested three Chinese-born scientists at the telecommunications giant Lucent Technologies and a smaller related enterprise in New Jersey. Accused of a ‘complicated scheme of corporate espionage’, the three men were brought in handcuffs before a federal magistrate in Newark and detained without bail. They had stolen voice and data software from Lucent to set up a joint venture with a Beijing company that would become the Chinese equivalent of the US data-networking powerhouse Cisco Systems. The venture received $1.2 million in financing from Datang Telecom Technology, a Chinese-government controlled maker of communications equipment based in Beijing.114 Rick Fisher, a China expert with the Jamestown Foundation, who served on the Republican Policy Committee of the House of Representatives during a 1998 investigation of US technology transfers to China, described the arrests as ‘a signal that the United States needs to ‘‘redouble’’ its efforts to find those persons working in this country for the benefit of the Chinese government’.115 But was it just a joke that the China-financed New Jersey joint venture formed by the threesome was called ComTriad Technologies? Even if not part of a traditional Triad, the firm clearly saw itself as a high-tech version of China’s age-old secret societies.
A string of revelations of Chinese industrial espionage in the United States, and also the Donorgate saga, have had a severe impact on America’s racial relations, and threaten to undermine the high level of acceptability that the Chinese-Americans have managed to achieve following decades of discrimination. Frank Ching, a Hong Kong-born Chinese-American, wrote in 1999:
Virtually every Chinese is tarred—visitors, students, diplomats and business representatives. All are suspected of spying. Similarly, it is suggested that there are no legitimate Chinese companies—every one is considered to be a front for the Chinese military or some intelligence agency. It assumes that every member of every Chinese delegation is on an intelligence mission, as is every Chinese student.116
The anti-Asian hysteria has echoes of World War II, when every Japanese living in the United States was considered a spy, and nearly all of them were rounded up and interned in camps throughout the war. It is too often forgotten that it is the Asians themselves—the ordinary law-abiding Chinese in New York’s Chinatown, the Vietnamese shopkeeper in Cabramatta, the street vendor or minibus driver in Hong Kong, the student or scientist who comes under pressure to spy for Beijing—who suffer the most from ethnically based organised crime, extortion, threats and clandestine operations within their respective communities. They are trapped in an evil social order, for which few have any recourse.
This is unlikely to change while China does not change—and it is important to remember that, although China wants to learn from the West, there is also a deep feeling of animosity towards western powers. China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the last century, and western drug trafficking to China at the time, have not been forgotten. Nor can the Chinese see why the West should take any moral high ground when it comes to issues such as drugs. Just in time for Hong Kong’s return to China on 1 July 1997, the Chinese movie industry even released a mega production called The Opium War, which depicted Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu, who had been sent down to the south to stamp out the British opium trade, as a foresighted national hero defending the honour of the Chinese against the ‘western imperialists’.
The many other ways in which the Chinese have been humiliated throughout history—the colonial treaty ports, the slave trade from Macau to Peru and Cuba, immigration exclusion acts directed against Chinese in North America and Australia—have left behind a complex mix of anger, an inferiority complex and a sense that China, with its thousands of years of history, is superior to the rest of the world. China’s march to a place in the world community of which it could be proud began when Mao Zedong on 1 October 1949 proclaimed: ‘Never again will the people of China be enslaved!’.
But China is today going through perhaps the most difficult period so far in its long history. It is trying to modernise without the necessary institutions in place—and the outcome is a heavy reliance on its traditional social formations, the secret societies. However, not all of them are willing to cooperate with the leaders in Beijing. The opening up of the Pandora’s box of reform in the early 1980s has released a host of unforeseen social forces and political developments. An internal police report, published as early as 1985, stated:
During the past few years, there has been a continuous annual increase in the cases of reactionary sect and society activity throughout the country . . . In every region and province of China with the exception of Tibet, acts of disruption by the reactionary sects and societies have occurred—most prominently in the provinces of Henan, Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Yunnan. The vast majority of these activities have taken place in the countryside, and particularly in remote mountainous areas along the borders between different counties or provinces.117
This has happened before in China’s history—and it is how Chinese dynasties have fallen in the past. The 1985 report mentions a host of small secret societies and syncretic sects, ranging from small underground Christian churches and sects such as the Yi Guan Dao (‘Way of Unity’), a semi-religious group that is strong in Taiwan, to Hong Kong Triads which have become active in Fujian. In more recent years, the strongest spiritual challenge to the moral authority of the ruling Communist Party has come from Falun Gong, a meditation society which once had millions of members all over China. To the West, it was a somewhat eccentric but basically innocent and peaceful club for housewives and others who were seeking inner strength in the teachings of its spiritual leader, Li Hongzhi from Manchuria. In 1992, when Li first began to preach Falun Gong in China, he was also well received and supported by the Chinese government. But gradually, as the group grew, the authorities panicked. Falun Gong’s leadership claims that the organisation has more than 70 million followers, including party members, government officials, scholars and members of the army and police.118
