THE CRIMINAL SOCIETY THAT DOMINATES THE CHINESE IN CANADA
1962-*2021
This symbol designates Triad, an international crime ring that police believe operates here. But, even without Triad, the laws that rule behind Canada's bamboo curtain are made by a criminal oligarchy with an immigration policy of its own
THE CRIMINAL SOCIETY THAT DOMINATES THE CHINESE IN CANADA
This symbol designates Triad, an international crime ring that police believe operates here. But, even without Triad, the laws that rule behind Canada's bamboo curtain are made by a criminal oligarchy with an immigration policy of its own
ALAN PHILLIPS
ON A JUNE DAY in Ottawa nearly two years ago twenty prominent Chinese-Canadians met with Prime Minister Diefenbaker to protest the investigation of an international ring alleged to be smuggling Chinese into Canada. They seemed to be a minority group fighting racial discrimination in the name of the Chinese Community and Benevolent Associations, whose branches reach into Chinese cafés and laundries across the country. The investigation, they said, should be taken away from the RCMP and its “brutal” aides from the Hong Kong police force, and “restored" to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.
This request, which would have blocked all hope of smashing the ring, was turned down. As a result a thousand Chinese, who were living in fear of discovery, have confessed to illegal entry and are now prospective citizens. The ring, however. remains intact. The prospect for breaking it is bleak. For. as this is written, the Chinese are openly proclaiming that they will have the
investigation stopped—presumably through their many friends in Parliament — and there are at least another 10.000 impostors to uncover.
This would not be especially notable in a society composed of pressure groups, except that of the twenty Chinese who met Diefenbaker that June day — leaders of an association representing all our Chinese — three have since been convicted as agents of the ring, two are awaiting trial, and another six are known
THE CRIMINAL SOCIETY THAT DOMINATES THE CHINESE IN CANADA ...continued from page 11
They have their own civil service, foreign office, spies, taxes and, most important, their own law to be agents. The implication is inescapable. Canada’s Chinese are controlled by a group which, by our standards, is criminal.
This fact becomes less incredible when viewed against its background. Chinatown is not a synthetic Oriental bazaar. It is not merely a tourist trap baited with Canton’s exotic food. It’s a genuine fragment of pre-Communist China, a China that will never be again. Behind the bamboo screen or our Chinese ghettos, behind the bland closed faces and the incomprehensible language, the clannish culture of ancient China persists.
The ghetto preserves it. Many Chinese born in Canada speak only a few words of English. Even those westernized Chinese who live in Caucasian neighborhoods are tied to the ghetto by business and social contacts. Most live and die in its confines. Few vote. They are the most unassimilated ethnic group in the country. Their interpreters are cliat-fans, "they who deal with the barbarians.” Their children learn that Mandarin is the world’s greatest language, with the greatest number of characters and the greatest number of people speaking it. Home, even to those born here, is some district in southeast China. They never speak or write of themselves as Chinese-Canadians (except in their public relations handouts). They are the huachiao, sojourning or 'Overseas Chinese'. They pay lip service to our government but it is their own they obey, their local Chinese government, the Chinese Benevolent Association.
This association is OSTENSIBLY a mutual-aid society (known in Ontario as the Chinese Corn Unity Centre). And it does indeed, in the best Chinese tradition, give handouts to the destitute, conduct a few night school classes, and occasionally put a pauper in a grave. Its prime function, however, is to represent the sojourners in their dealings with each other and the foreign (Canadian) government. Its basic unit is the family or “name” association, of which the Wongs are probably the largest. These clans enlist almost everyone with the same surname, even though there is no family relationship. Almost every Chinese is also enrolled in a district association, according to where his family lived in China. And he may belong to one of many clubs, social or service, a few of which are fronts for the secret societies or tongs, successors of the bygone white-slaving, opium-running tongs whose killers were called hatchet men because their first weapons were meat cleavers.
Each Chinese pays dues to each association. He pays special assessments and gives to special collections. He also pays to the CBA which links them all together. He pays, or he suffers boycott or ostracism.
Most Chinese have no vote in the CBA. Within each association a clique of elders, men of prestige or wealth, appoint a delegate to represent them. Each delegate nominates three other people. Only these nominees vote. Those they elect, together with the appointees, form an executive committee resembling a parliament. It in turn selects a standing committee, similar to a cabinet. Under this comes a governing body, the civil service. Each department— finance, welfare, external affairs, the secretariat, investigation—has a chief, a deputy and several secretaries. There is also a supervisory committee akin to our Senate, and out-of-town representatives in smaller cities.
The law of the CBA takes precedence over Canada’s courts. This was clearly shown by a dispute in I960. A Chinese in Saskatchewan, wishing to bring his grandson to Canada, had paid another Saskatchewan Chinese $1,100 for a fraudulent birth certificate. The arrangement failed. The paper-buyer wanted his money back. The paper-seller refused. The paper-buyer appealed to his family association in Saskatchewan. The paper seller enlisted support from his clan in Vancouver. The former referred it to the CBA in Vancouver because, as they noted in a letter, "it would be affecting the Overseas Chinese in buying papers if the matter were brought before a court.” The Vancouver CBA instructed their Saskatchewan branch to arbitrate, and the paper seller was ordered to pay back half the money, and did.
The power of CBA spokesmen is well known to police. “Say you’re looking for a Chinaman,” says one. “He’s given an address. You go in. It’s a gambling house. There’s a bunch of Chinamen standing around. You ask for Harry Foo. They just stare at you. He could be .standing right there. So you go to the boy who can put his finger on everyone in Chinatown. He says, ’Come in tomorrow.’ And just like that, there’s your man.”
In Winnipeg last August two RCMP constables, D. R. Barker and Wong Tuen Sang, the latter one of twelve Chinese on loan from the Hong Kong police, went into the New Canton Chop Suey House to question a scar-faced cook. His evasiveness convinced Barker that this was the man they were looking for, an illegal immigrant named Yuen Mun.
While Barker phoned for instructions the scar-faced man told Constable Wong that his immigration papers were in his room. Wong followed him upstairs and through a kitchen. From a drawer Yuen snatched a meat cleaver. “I am going to kill you!” he cried, and struck at the constable’s face.
Wong flung up his hand, deflecting the cleaver. It glanced off his skull (seven stitches were needed to close the wound) and knocked him down, bleeding freely. Yuen escaped through a back door.
The police searched Chinese gambling houses, clubrooms, clansmen's homes. Yuen had vanished. Police contacted the most influential Yuen in Manitoba, who told them that Yuen Mun would give himself up soon, rather than bring bad publicity to his people.
A few hours later, in Winnipeg, the scar-faced man surrendered. CBA leaders in Manitoba had obviously known where he was. They had helped him concoct his cover story (later dropped as unconvincing): that Constable Wong had tried to shake him down for $200 and in the ensuing argument both men had grabbed for the clever. On the witness stand Yuen said he'd been unaware of what he was doing, that he’d been terrified. He received only one year in jail.
AS A PROPAGANDA AGENCY the CBA has few equals. Again and again, in advertisements and briefs to parliament, they have stressed that "We are proud of our respect for the law. Canadians of Chinese origin have the lowest crime rate of any national group."
In fact, of our thirty-one ethnic groups the Chinese, per capita, are fourth highest in criminal convictions. Even excluding those for gambling and drugs, both abnormally high, the official figures show a crime rite half again as high as a similar racial group, the Japanese.
The present investigation is also revealing widespread scheming to outwit our social security regulations. A Chinese will go back to China, and another Chinese, in his name, will draw his old age pension or family allowances. Tax returns are loaded with nonexistent relatives in China, so that few Chinese pay much income tax. Income tax investigators are now reported to be checking on Chinese who were paying little or no tax on incomes of up to $35,000 a year. The Chinese were a conquered nation for several thousand years, which probably gives them a somewhat different viewpoint on the law.
CBA PROPAGANDA, allied with CBA control, is defeating the government’s efforts to break the Chinese smuggling ring. The strategy was outlined by forty-eight elders at an emergency meeting in Toronto on May 26, 1960, two days after the RCMP raids. They decided to ask their Toronto MP. House Speaker Roland Michener, to set up a protest meeting in late June with the prime minister. Lawyer Yeh Chui-to was instructed to draft a petition.
Next day the Toronto association chairman. William C. Wong, issued a statement. Conditions in Canada’s immigration offices in Hong Kong, he said, were "rotten." Even legal Chinese immigrants had to pay tea money (bribes) to get into Canada. Said another CBA spokesman: “Officials use foolish and unfair questions in interviews to block the way of immigrants. All of this done in an attempt for monetary gain." ___
Similar information was fed to the government’s critics in parliament. Arnold Peters (CCF, Timiskaming) described the illegal entry racket as “$33.000.000 worth of graft" and called for "a real shakedown in the immigration department.” In fact, the Chinese were smearing the men they could not buy. (The head of the Hong Kong immigration office, on one occasion, interrogated a Chinese who admitted he wasn't the man he claimed to be. Informed of this. Ottawa ordered him let in anyway. Whereupon the Hong Kong official, fed up. wrote back: "Which name would you like him admitted under?”
Having dealt with Immigration, the CBA turned its propaganda on the police.'The RCMP raids “on honest Chinese before they were proven guilty were outrageous," said the Shing Wall Daily News in Toronto. “Planning raids in secrecy" is "the practice of a police state.” Wilbur Wong of the Montreal CBA showed the press a statement drawn up by Montreal lawyer William Aaron. In it Patrick Mark, an illegal immigrant from Hong Kong, charged that he had been held by force at RCMP headquarters, denied counsel, refused food, verbally abused, threatened with deportation and asked by a Hong Kong special constable if he remembered “how we beat our prisoners in Hong Kong."
Inquiry revealed that Patrick Mark had gone willingly to headquarters, had refused counsel only to have it forced upon him by Wong, had eaten lunch, had tea, and that the abuse was invented by Wong, after which William Aaron, admitting that he had been duped, resigned as CBA counsel —but by that time the RCMP had suffered some loss of esteem.
All across the country Chinese claimed they were persecuted, abused, humiliated and insulted by reports of 11,000 illegal immigrants. It was “grossly a lie,” said the CBA, "fictitious . . . mad.” In daily newspaper ads signed by chairman William Wong, the Toronto association proclaimed “no official knowledge or intimation whatsoever of illegal activities.” The government's "unfair, unwarranted and malicious allegations,” Wong said, had cast “a cloud of suspicion” over the entire Chinese community.
Tin; FACTS OF THE RACKET are somewhat different. The Chinese first settled in Canada in 1858, drawn by gold in British Columbia. CPR agents brought them in by the boatload in the eighties to build the railroad through the Rockies on time, thousands of scrawny coolies. In the subsequent depression they took jobs as cooks and laundrymen, women’s work that would not be resented, they soon were in business for themselves, with jobs for clansmen. Then, in 1923, when the Chinese Immigration Act blocked legal entry, due to the heist of Canadian jade and gold, they plotted what would become the biggest fraud of the postwar era.
Every Chinese family was told to register every birth at once, then lend the child to three or four other families to do the same thing, explaining to each doctor that a midwife had delivered it. A Canadian Chinese would visit his wife in China for the period of up to two years that is allowed, then come back and report a son born and another child on the way. Six months later he would duly notify the federal government that this second child had been born. It would, of course, be male, and (another wonder of the world) immune to China’s frequent epidemics.
What the father had really produced was a “slot”—a fictitious or "paper” identity, a birth certificate. By the time the Immigration Act was repealed in 1947. the birth certificates on file enabled Chinatown’s vested interests to draw on China’s pool of cheap labor. Slots commanded a high cash value: 1000's a year: for the birth certificate of a sixteen-year-old, $1,600. Slots became legal tender; one wealthy Vancouver Chinese was accepting false certificates as security on loans. Chinese-Canadian citizens could now bring in husbands and wives, unmarried sons and daughters under eighteen (later twenty-one), fathers over sixty-five, and mothers under sixty. Brokers in human beings sprang up on the teeming streets of Hong Kong. Their agents recruited Chinese on the mainland. They smuggled them in junks with lockers concealing up to 200. Confederates in countries untouched by war — Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, Latin America, the U.S. and Canada — took orders from Chinese employers and Chinese desiring to bring out their relatives.
The Canadian agent, an association official as a rule, combed clan records for a slot that met specifications. He bought its owner’s papers and airmailed the family history to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong broker matched the specifications to a recruit. sent him to coaching school to bone up on his "family,” and airmailed his description back to Canada. The Canadian agent then filled out an application form for a visa, and when, in Hong Kong, a young man presented himself to immigration, his description and the application tallied, complete to blood type.
In the period from 1950 to 1959, 23,000 Chinese entered Canada. “At least eighty percent of these were impostors,” an immigration official says. British officials in Hong Hong say it is ninety percent. One Chinese in the twenties swore to bring his entire home town out and sixty percent of that village is now in Alberta.
The variations on the racket make it an intricate Chinese puzzle. But one factor is constant: each illegal entry involves a paper-buyer and seller, their families and near relatives, any of whom, if not informed, could give the game away. Obviously, every Chinese knew of the racket.
MOST INCOMING CHINESE come from the poorer classes of one small district in Kwangtung Province noted for sharp trading, Toi-shan, “the little land of remittance men.” They come because, said the CBA brief to the prime minister, of "their urgent and compelling desire for family reunion” which makes their guilt “technical rather than criminal . . . morally excusable.”
No one knows how many Chinese were brought here because of family affection, for the Chinese count eighth or ninth cousins as family. But there are many cases where wives were abandoned, and the slots used to bring in concubines. At first, for each girl that entered, eight boys were brought in ("boys earn, girls don’t,” says a cynical investigator). Of these most were sixteen to twenty-one. an age able to work hard but not obliged to attend school, which perhaps might teach them their rights as Canadian citizens.
One small-town café owner brought in a cook in 1956 on a temporary permit, which was renewed. It expired again in 1959 and the cook disappeared. Investigation showed that he (and his father) had paid $2,000 to his employer for bringing him in (plus $1,500 to an agent), after which he had worked for three and a half years at $100 a month. Because this wage wouldn’t keep his family in Hong Kong, his father said, he had run away.
A restaurant worker on the prairies complained to his immigration office that he was “slave labor” for the owner who brought him over. “I must work for him without wages,” this worker wrote last January, “until he say, I am satisfy from your reward you may go,’ . . . Thereafter, more than ten years passing already, I never hear him say that to me . . . He told me his friends are all top men in town, they should conduct any lawsuit on his side ... I know myself I have no money, no proof, no friend to conduct a lawsuit . . . He told everybody I am his son because he wants to cover his evil mind." Another Toronto restaurateur held the papers of five laborers, who worked on his farm and lived in a pigpen.
Most revealing is an agreement between a herb specialist named Quon Gay Fonn and a company in Toronto owned by Kent Lee, then association treasurer and an agent of the ring. By this extraordinary covenant Quon "agrees that he will faithfully, honestly and diligently serve the employer ... 13 hours each day (for) Qne Hundred ($100) dollars . . . each and every month . . . for a period of five years." And in case he is caught "the company shall have the full and sole right, duty and responsibility to negotiate with the Canadian Immigration."
BY JUNE 1960 the Immigration branch was faced with the fact that over half of all our Chinese were obviously impostors. They totaled at least 75,000 rather than the figure of 54.000 compiled by the CBA for despairing census takers. They were here, a fact of life; to avoid bitterness and dispel fear it was best simply to legalize their position, and the government, on June 9th announced an amnesty. If impostors would come forward and tell how they came in, no one except the ringleaders would be prosecuted.
The Immigration branch set up fifty teams of officers to handle the rush of volunteers. No more than half a dozen Chinese came forward.
In Toronto. William Wong, the same association chairman whose ads were disclaiming any “intimation whatsoever" of the racket, told Mounted Policemen that he knew of many impostors and promised his personal support as well as his organization’s in having these persons give statements. That same night. May 27, Wong called Robert Chow, a Chinese reporter an the Globe and Mail, and ordered him to cease writing on immigration. Chow had written that twenty young Chinese had admitted illegal entry to him but were too terrified to talk to police. When police asked Chow’s help Chow said he could ask the young men to come forward. If they suffered as a result, he himself would suffer “professionally and mentally.”
A CBA leader in Regina had also promised co-operation. Asked to translate a letter from Hong Kong he had told a Mounted Policeman that the writer was asking after his family's welfare. The RCMP, playing safe, had double-checked. The letter was from an agent making arrangements to bring out a fraud.
On the week end of June 19-20, while CBA delegates were en route to Ottawa to assure the prime minister of their dedication “to the correcting of wrongs and the maintenance of order . . . amongst the most loyal, the most law-abiding and the least burdensome of Canada’s citizens." two loudspeakers in Montreal's Chinatown, one in a well-known restaurant, the other an agent (and CBA leader) in Wilbur Bruce Wong’s office, were denouncing the "military police" (the RCMP). and branding the Hong Kong policemen as "traitors" and "running dogs.” The Hong Kong police force, the loudspeakers blared, was behind the investigation, and to stop it booklets of $2 tickets were pressed upon Chinese.
The twenty CBA delegates, arriving back in their home cities, held mass rallies. In Toronto's Casino Theatre 1.500 people were told that the prime minister said they did not have to talk to the RCMP. If the military police came to the door with a search warrant, a spokesman said, holding up the blue form, "let them in but say nothing . . . inform your association.” Anyone with "irregular immigration papers.” he said, should burn them. The rally raked in about $1.900 to help fight the government's amnesty program.
In Winnipeg the CBA leaders announced a "policy of silence." Government pamphlets placed in every Chinese restaurant and shop, promising immunity to those who confessed, were ripped up unread. Said "The Chinese Times" in Vancouver: “The government's guarantee in the Parliament not to prosecute or deport the illegal immigrants was actually untrue and groundless."
Chinese lied about lack of knowledge of English with investigators. In Toronto a Mounted Policeman went back to one Chinese "at least seventy-five times,” he says, "before he confessed he was here illegally. All they tell you is what they think you know already.” Many in Toronto simply handed police the card of Thomas Deacon, QC. lawyer for George Chan, one of the biggest immigration brokers in Canada.
Leaks in security hampered investigators. When the chief of immigration's inspection services, J. K. Abbott, flew out to Hong Kong in 1959, the Globe & Mail's Far Eastern correspondent. William Stevenson, reported that "Chinese ringleaders here were tipped off almost immediately . . . indicating that racketeers have inside information cabled to them from Ottawa.” One Canadian agent, with contacts in his provincial attorney general’s office, as well as the federal cabinet, had stripped his files of incriminating evidence prior to the RCMP raids.
Last October a seizure of papers in Vancouver’s Chinatown indicated that a Chinese in Cobourg, Ontario, had brought in two frauds as his wife and son. Interviewed, he insisted, "These are my true wife and son.”
"Where are they then?”
"They away.”
When police returned two days later the "wife" and "son" were living with him —sent from B.C.. police believe, by the agent whom he had telephoned. All across Canada, following the raids, there was a shifting of Chinese as CBA agents brought paper families together for the first time.
THE AMNESTY PROGRAM’S FAILURE is a bitter disappointment. The government felt that the Chinese would, in Mr. Fulton’s phrase, "want to get these racketeers oil on their backs." Many may, but many others, though victimized by shakedowns and payoffs by the bondage and coercion of the regime, are a hundred times better off than they were in Hong Kong’s refugee villages. They may well look on the agent as a benefactor; he helps them avoid income tax and gets them milk money (baby bonuses), unemployment insurance and old age pensions.
If the government did not take the Chinese background into account, even the beggars in Hong Kong today pay protection to racketeers. Kickbacks and graft are not considered dishonest unless unreasonable. Charlie Chow, a hotelkeeper in Kirkland Lake, who became a multi-millionaire by grubstaking Harry Oakes, says he knows his accountant grew wealthy cheating him, “but somebody else would cheat me even more.”
Nor did the government reckon on what the Chinese term "face.” Joseph Hope, a Vancouver agent, one of the first committed for trial, took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills the night before the trial opened. But today no agent feels that he will lose face in Canada’s courts. In Winnipeg, Lui Pak Tong was fined $1,000. Chinese at the trial took up a collection and paid his fine. It was not that Lui was popular; he had come out on top.
In Montreal, agent Wilbur Wong pleaded guilty (as most agents do to keep the case from becoming news) and paid a fine of $3.000 — "the price of two papers,” a Chinese says contemptuously. As Mr. Justice Taschereau of Quebec’s court of appeal says, “These sentences cannot exercise a preventative effect against this crime.” He had called for two years imprisonment for Wong but was overruled. “They’re laughing at us in Montreal,” says one of the Hong Kong policemen. “They’re planning a big celebration for when the investigation is called off.”
So confident is the CBA of winning that The Chinese Voice, last December, ran this story in Chinese:
THE R.C.M.P. SEARCH IN THE IMMIGRATION CASES ENDED VERY SOON
(Ottawa News) Minister of Justice,
Mr. Fulton announced today that investigation in Chinese immigration cases is almost finished . . . Mr. Fulton also said that many people think it is the responsibility of the Minister of Justice to investigate the illegal Chinese immigration cases; they do not know that this is the duty of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Headquarters . . . The Minister of Justice has no connection with these investigations.
The statements attributed here to the minister of justice are clearly absurd. No cabinet minister, certainly not Mr. Fulton, would deny responsibility for the agency he administers. The Chinese rely on the CBA to interpret the news and the agents often interpret it to build face.
AS OF JANUARY I, only ninety Chinese have voluntarily confessed. Another 1,072 confessed after being tracked down, a tedious job, for each immigrant has a real and a false name; grocery stores sometimes bear both, one on each window. And each can be spelled in various ways. for example, T'ung maybe Hoong, Tung or Toong.
All these people, who could have been jailed, have been granted amnesty, and still the Chinese community will not cooperate. "If it becomes known that I helped you,” a Chinese clergyman told an investigator, "I’ll have nobody in church on Sunday,” and he asked the official to leave by the back door. "I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” said a university professor, "but I've got a family in Canada. I have relatives in the Far Fast. I just can't help you.”
One witness reversed his story after a Toronto agent and his lawyer traveled to Cornwall to talk to him. Agent George Chan motored from Kingston to North Bay warning witnesses that they’d get in "lots of trouble” if they talked. Two Ottawa Chinese who talked to police were immediately fired from their jobs. For a Chinese this is a calamity. Outside the ghetto he cannot survive.
Only one CBA leader swung behind the Canadian government. Within a month he was blacklisted in the Chinese community, his business ruined, his life threatened from the Triads, a notorious secret society begun by patriotic monks when mid-seventeenth Century Mongols conquered China. Their emperors were tax collectors. They supplied little law and order. Secret societies flourished as Chinese turned to them for protection. Businessmen showed one set of books to the tax collector, and another, more realistic, to their society. Such practices, disquietingly similar to some in our present-day Chinatowns, prompt speculation that Triads may dominate all of the CBA chapters.
Triad is an English term (from its symbol for Heaven, Earth and Man enclosed in a triangle) for the Hung Men Hui. League of the Tongs, the most feared of China’s four great secret societies. Six times its members, bound by blood oaths, rose against the Manchus. They were the force behind the republican coup of Sun Yat-sen. the power behind Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. When ousted by the communists many Chiang men fled to Hong Kong, swelling Triad membership there to some 20,000 active members.
Triads today have degenerated into a Crime Incorporated, raking in about S40,000.000 a year from extortion. Each gang, [or Tong] has its territory. Every Hong Kong pimp and prostitute, burglar and pickpocket pays them to operate. They shake down longshoremen, street hawkers. shoeshine boys, rickshaw coolies, dancehall girls, even housewives, school children and millionaires. Those who do not pay are mutilated or found in the bay. In police headquarters in Hong Kong a colored chart shows each Triad branch as a one inch square; it’s a seven-foot chart.
One of the biggest brokers running immigrants from Hong Kong, multimillionaire C. S. Wong, was a Triad leader. The coaching schools were Triad establishments. "Triads controlled the racket in Hong Kong,” says a Hong Kong police official. "You can be sure they wouldn’t have anyone running it here whom they didn’t approve.”
There is evidence to support this viewpoint. Three days after one Hong Kong broker was arrested, his Canadian agent flew out to take charge in the Triad-controlled area. Two Canadians, Wong laiyap and Chen Ping-hsuin, were among those convicted in Hong Kong as agents. At least one Canadian was operating under the same firm name in both Hong Kong and Canada, and his nephew, who worked in a Hong Kong broker’s office, is now on the staff of the CBA in Toronto.
It was The Triad Society in Canada, in the guise of Chinese Freemasons, the Chee Kung Tong, who raised much of the money for Sun Yat-sen’s first abortive revolution. The Chee Kung Tong, now all over Canada and the U.S., is known in Hong Kong as the overseas branch of The Triad Society. Hand-brushcd characters on a document seized in Ottawa have been identified as Triad catchwords, symbols and codenames. And RCMP investigators have recently uncovered two books explaining the secret Triad ritual, reprinted by a Chee Kung Tong official in Toronto.
"Many sources of information” convince the Hong Kong police that Triads “exist in Canada and the U. S.” In San Francisco, Chicago and New York crime is spilling across the boundaries of Chinatown: burglaries, holdups, drug-running.
A CBA~ ladder in San Francisco, Chung Wing Fong, was deported, and the past president of the Hip Sing Tong in New York, George Yee, was jailed, for conspiring to smuggle drugs worth $100,000,000 into the U. S. in 1959. Three tongs one within San Francisco, some of whose leaders are also CBA officials, are deeply involved in blackmail and extortion, according to the U. S. district attorney’s office in that city. Whether or not the tongs are Triad affiliates. Assistant U. S. District Attorney James B. Schnake, who handled the U. S. Chinese investigation, declares that they are not “fraternal societies. They are Mafia-like organizations, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
In Montreal the long-time president of the Chee Kung Tong, "Uncle Jack” Wong, is also boss of the biggest Chinese gambling joint in the city, the Victoria Sporting Club. Last year three young Chinese walked into his club and smashed it up. Police think their leader, Joe Lee. known as an “intimidator,” was trying to take over. Lee was kicked to death seven weeks later and his murder is still unsolved, like three other Chinese killings in recent years.
THERE IS ANOTHER ASPECT of the Triads, equally disturbing. In 1952 the British government in Malaya discovered that the Ang Bin Hoey. a Triad society, was smuggling in Chinese by hundreds of thousands. The society at the same time had been informing police on Chinese Communist jungle guerrillas. They may have been playing both sides, but a little later an intelligence report said that the Communists had asked The Triad Society to join with it in liberating Southeast Asia from "western barbarians." Since then there have been reports that the hua-chiao in Malaya are passing supplies and intelligence to the Communists.
The Triad Society has for years been strongly pro-nationalist. But the huu-cliiao everywhere have been first and foremost Chinese. One of the biggest government departments in Peking- [now called Beijing] is the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. Its chairman declares, “Nothing can break the ties which bind the Overseas Chinese to the Motherland!" The Chinese, says Chang-tu Hu in a joint university (U. S.) study, “are pleased to find themselves members of a nation which, for the first time in over a century, can demand and expect international recognition of its power and importance in world affairs.”
A former Dutch intelligence officer in China says flatly that the Communists have infiltrated the Triads. There is evidence to support this. The Communist-instigated riots in Singapore in 1955 involved Triad street fighters and it was the Overseas Chinese who rebuilt Indonesia’s Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party is a military organization. Its slogan in 1958 was “Everyone a Soldier." Children in China go into state nurseries at birth. And immigrants to Canada from the mainland today, Hong Kong officials say, are thoroughly indoctrinated.
If was the U. S. realization that the Hong Kong immigration ring was being used to build a Red Spy Network that moved them to launch the investigation that bared its magnitude. The Hong Kong Seaman's Union, both Triad and Communist affiliated. is known to be involved in running “immigrants.” The U. S. is still concerned with Canadian and Latin American Chinese who cross the border freely on forged papers. Peking for years has had more agents than Moscow in Latin America, helping patriots plan revolution while the U. S. supports the regimes that protect U. S. financial interests. China is fast supplanting Russia as the mecca of the Left in most of the uncommitted countries. [like Canada]
In this light the background of Yuen Mun is intriguing. Yuen is the scar-faced cook and illegal immigrant in Winnipeg who tried to kill a policeman to escape. He had crossed from the States into Canada under cover of darkness, he said; where, he didn’t know. He had entered the States as a tourist from Brazil, he said, but where he had entered he didn’t know, or where he had lived in Brazil, or where he had stayed in the U. S.
WHAT PEKING SEEMS to want most today from Overseas Chinese is money — the foreign exchange they so badly need. According to one Allied intelligence report, the Overseas Chinese in 1954 were remitting $200,000,000 a year to their relatives in China. In a new version of "the squeeze” Peking tried to jack this up. All citizens were ordered to list their overseas relatives with the government, then to dun them for money unless they wished to be shot. Coincidentally with this pressure, ten Chinese-Canadians committed suicide.
In 1955, as news of the shakedown leaked out, remittances dwindled to $30,000,000. Switching from stick to carrot, China set up the Overseas Investment Corporation to give the Overseas Chinese “a unique chance to invest their money at a profit and serve the Motherland at the same time.” Between 1956 and 1958 Canadian Chinese, in bank drafts alone, sent more than $20,000,000 to China. The world total, at last report, was back up to something like $100,000,000.
AGAINST THE MAGNETIC PULL of birth and blood this nation can only oppose the assimilating force of western culture. Several hundred Chinese are training for professions. Some live in split-level homes in our suburbs. Over a hundred in Ottawa have jobs in the civil service. Office jobs are opening to Chinese girls. Last year one Vancouver lassie, in the plaid (it’s said) of the clan McWong, won the national Scottish dance championships. But overall these are few, though no doubt the better-schooled younger Chinese would like to scale Chinatown's walls and merge in a free Canadian society.
The CBA leaders who profit by segregation bar the way. They oppose our social system, which presupposes a sense of responsibility. They subvert our legal system, which presupposes that people don’t lie under oath. They bribe our politicians with the promise of Chinese votes, and MPs bring pressure to bear on civil servants. And once a civil servant gives in to pressure to break the immigration laws, another MP can say (and does). “You made an exception for my colleague. Now you can do as much for me.”
The CBA claims it is forced into fraud by our harsh immigration laws, by our high-handed heartless immigration officials. On the contrary. Our officials have always given the immigrant the benefit of the doubt rather than bar a bona fide relative.
The more perceptive officials (as well as Chinese MP Douglas Jung) urge a quota system. Instead of letting the CBA decide whom to bring in. we could select Chinese who can assimilate, who would contribute. We could draw from Hong Kong's pool of European-educated students and businessmen with money to invest.
We could, but since the CBA is a potent pressure group, we probably won’t. The CBA will continue its underground war against the government. Its next widespread racket will be the marriage of convenience. A Canadian-Chinese woman visits China and marries a widower with three "sons.” Then a son goes out and marries a widow with three more grown “children.” And these will be the kind of people the CBA can control. ★
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