By DAN LEVIN
OCTOBER 4, 2014
On Saturday, as news spread that some of the men arrested after an attack on a pro-democracy protest camp were said to have ties to Hong Kong’s criminal underworld, a traffic sign pointing to the local government’s headquarters in the Admiralty district was modified with a piece of paper that added: “and triad offices.”
That morning, a Hong Kong police spokesman had announced that eight men connected to the organized crime gangs known as triads were among 19 arrested in connection with the assaults Friday on protesters in the district of Mong Kok, according to local media.
Protesters have since accused Hong Kong law enforcement of cooperating with shadowy criminals at the behest of Beijing. “Dislike for real democracy won’t be defeated by police-mob collusion and paid thugs,” read anewly hung banner in Admiralty, site of the largest protest camp. Lai Tung-kwok, Hong Kong’s secretary for security, strongly denied the allegations at a news conference Saturday, calling them “completely fabricated and unjustified.”
In mainland China, state-controlled news media have painted the pro-democracy protesters as law-breaking radicals. The accusation of lawlessness has also been made by pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong, including Wong Kwan-yu, a member of the Alliance for Peace and Democracy party, who last month compared organizers of pro-democracy student strikes to “triad gangs.”
But with men with triad connections now accused of attacking student protesters, a spotlight has been thrown on the historic role played in Chinese politics by these criminal enterprises, notorious for illegal activities including murder, extortion, illegal gambling and drug trafficking.
According to Sharon Kwok and T. Wing Lo, experts on the city’s criminal underworld at City University of Hong Kong, the triads were originally a patriotic organization founded in the 17th century to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. They eventually contributed to the 1911 revolution, which saw the last emperor replaced by the Republic of China.
Patriotism soon fell by the wayside, however. During World War II, triad groups collaborated with the occupying Japanese Army, acting as informers and enforcers, according to Ko-lin Chin, author of “Chinese Subculture and Criminality: Non-Traditional Crime Groups in America.” In return, the Japanese destroyed criminal records and allowed the triads to run gambling and opium dens.
After the Communist takeover in 1949, many gangs fled to Hong Kong. A police commissioner once alleged that one in every six of the three million people then living in the British colony was a triad member.
Last year, more than 1,800 people were arrested in anti-triad raids in Hong Kong, Macau and the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Triad organizations such as Wo Shing Wo, the Harmonious United Nations, 14K and Sun Yee On remain powerful players in the global underworld. The South China Morning Post reported that Sun Yee On and 14K teamed up with the brutal Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel to ship small arms and ingredients for methamphetamine production in exchange for cocaine bound for Asia.
There have been indications in the past that the Chinese government has found the triads useful. In 1993, just four years before Britain returned Hong Kong to Beijing’s control, China’s then-minister of public security, Tao Siju, said at a news conference that China was willing to work with triads if they were “patriotic and concerned with the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong,” The Post reported at the time. The paper also reported that members of Sun Yee On had visited Beijing and were believed to have met with Mr. Tao.
Suspicions that triads were working with pro-Beijing interests resurfaced in February of this year, when a vocal critic of the Communist Party, Kevin Lau, who had recently been ousted as chief editor of the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao, was brutally attacked with a cleaver by a man who fled on a motorcycle. The media described the crime as “a triad-style attack.”
Jessica Yu contributed research.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/sinosphere/2014/10/04/triad-links-to-attack-on-protesters-raise-some-old-questions/
