The alliance of the Triads
with the Chinese government:
The article above also contains the information that I mentioned about the deal struck with the major Triad groups.
When I started writing about this in 1992, no one believed me and along with discrediting me, all my reports on his topic were destroyed.
On 8 April 1993, just as the people of the then still British Hong Kong were starting to get used to the idea of a return to the “motherland,” Tao Siju, chief of China’s Public Security Bureau, gave an informal press conference to a group of television reporters from the colony. After making it clear that the “counterrevolutionaries” who had demonstrated for democracy in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 would not have their long prison terms reduced, he began talking about the Triads: “As for organisations like the Triads in Hong Kong, as long as these people are patriotic, as long as they are concerned with Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability, we should unite with them.”[i] Tao also invited them to come to China to set up businesses there.
The statement sent shockwaves through Hong Kong’s police force and there was an uproar in the media. Since 1845, Triad membership had been a crime in the territory, and the rule of law was considered one of the pillars that made it an international city. Claiming to be “patriotic” was no excuse for breaking the law. But the people of Hong Kong should not have been surprised. Deng Xiaoping, the father of China’s economic reforms, had over the years hinted at the existence of connections between China’s security services and some Triads in Hong Kong. In a speech in the Great Hall of the People in October 1984, Deng pointed out that not all Triads were bad. Some of them were “good” and “patriotic.”[ii]
While Deng was making those cryptic remarks in Beijing, secret meetings were held between certain Triad leaders and Wong Man-fong, the deputy director of Xinhua, the New China News Agency, China’s unofficial “embassy” in Hong Kong. Wong told them that the Chinese authorities ‘did not regard them the same as the Hong Kong police did’. He urged them not to “destabilise Hong Kong” and to refrain from robbing China-owned enterprises. But they could continue their money-making activities.[iii]
In the years leading up to the 1997 handover, and especially when the British on Hong Kong’s behalf argued for more democratic rights to be included in its mini-constitution, or when the Hong Kong people themselves demonstrated their support for the pro-democracy movement in China, certain “patriotic” Triads were there as Beijing’s eyes and ears. They infiltrated trade unions, and even the media. Hong Kong — and increasingly even China — experienced a paradoxical throwback to Shanghai of the 1930s, when the former rulers of the country, the Guomindang, had enlisted gangsters to control political movements and run rackets to enrich themselves and government officials alike.
A few days before security chief Tao made his stunning public statement to the reporters from Hong Kong, a new, glitzy nightclub called Top Ten had opened in Beijing. One of the co-owners was Charles Heung of the Sun Yee On — and another was Tao himself.[iv] Sun Yee On was the first Hong Kong-based Triad to take advantage of China’s new economic policies, and it knew how to win friends who mattered. An entirely new breed of entrepreneurs is emerging on the fringes of the country, and the business-like, pinstriped suit wearing managers of the Sun Yee On have shown where the future lies.
That this symbiotic relationship between China’s military establishment and gangland figures went beyond such mutually beneficial business deals — and even further than low-level espionage on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong — became clear
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