The Chinese Mafia

The Chinese Mafia
Author: Peng Wang
Publisher: Clarendon Studies in Criminolo
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780198758402

Utilising individual interviews and focus group discussions, primarily from two Chinese cities, The Chinese Mafia: Organized Crime, Corruption, and Extra-Legal Protection contributes to the understanding of organized crime and corruption in the Chinese context, filing a significant gap in criminological literature, by investigating how extra-legal protectors-corrupt public officials and street gangsters-emerge, evolve and operate in a rapidly changing society. China's economic reforms have been accompanied by a surge of social problems, such as ineffective legal institutions, booming black markets and rampant corruption. This has resulted in the rise of extra-legal means of protection and enforcement: such is the demand for protection that cannot be fulfilled by state-sponsored institutions. This book develops a new socio-economic theory of mafia emergence, incorporating Granovetter's argument on social embeddedness into Gambetta's economic theory of the mafia, to suggest that the rise of the Chinese mafia is primarily due to the negative influence of guanxi (a Chinese version of personal connections) on the effectiveness of the formal legal system. This interplay has two major consequences. First, the weakened ability of the formal legal system sees street gangsters (the 'Black Mafia') providing protection and quasi law enforcement. Second, it allows for escalating abuse of power by public officials; as a result, corrupt officials (the 'Red Mafia') sell public appointments, exchange illegal benefits with businesses and protect local gangs. Together, these outcomes have seen street gangs shift their operations away from traditional areas (e.g. gambling, prostitution and drug distribution), whilst corrupt public officials have moved to offer illegal services to the criminal underworld, including the safeguarding organized crime groups and protection of illegal entrepreneurs. A study of crime and deviance located within a fast growing economy, The Chinese Mafia offers a unique understanding of these activities within contemporary Chinese society and a new perspective for understanding the interaction between corruption and organized crime. It will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, sociology, and political science, with particular interest for those researching China and Chinese politics and governance.

The Chinese Mafia

The Chinese Mafia
Author: Fenton Bresler
Publisher: Scarborough House
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1984-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780812880892

Triangle of Death

Triangle of Death
Author: Frank Robertson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2023-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000991741

Triangle of Death (1977) examines the growth of the international heroin trade, and its control by the Chinese secret societies known as Triads. It looks at the Triads active in Hong Kong, the Golden Triangle and Amsterdam, and shows how these groups have spread across the Western world.

The Chinese Mafia

The Chinese Mafia
Author: Peng Wang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2017
Genre: SOCIAL SCIENCE
ISBN: 9780191076046

Explores the rise of extra-legal protection organizations in contemporary China, contributing to the understanding of organized crime and corruption in the Chinese context. It examines two types of extra-legal protectors: Black Mafia (street gangsters) and Red Mafia (corrupt public officers), and their impact on Chinese society.

Tong Wars

Tong Wars
Author: Scott D. Seligman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 039956229X

A mesmerizing true story of money, murder, gambling, prostitution, and opium in a "wild ramble around Chinatown in its darkest days." (The New Yorker) Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not house-to-house searches or throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets and meat cleavers to pistols, automatic weapons, and even bombs. Welcome to New York City’s Chinatown in 1925. The Chinese in turn-of-the-last-century New York were mostly immigrant peasants and shopkeepers who worked as laundrymen, cigar makers, and domestics. They gravitated to lower Manhattan and lived as Chinese an existence as possible, their few diversions—gambling, opium, and prostitution—available but, sadly, illegal. It didn’t take long before one resourceful merchant saw a golden opportunity to feather his nest by positioning himself squarely between the vice dens and the police charged with shutting them down. Tong Wars is historical true crime set against the perfect landscape: Tammany-era New York City. Representatives of rival tongs (secret societies) corner the various markets of sin using admirably creative strategies. The city government was already corrupt from top to bottom, so once one tong began taxing the gambling dens and paying off the authorities, a rival, jealously eyeing its lucrative franchise, co-opted a local reformist group to help eliminate it. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next thirty years. Scott D. Seligman’s account roars through three decades of turmoil, with characters ranging from gangsters and drug lords to reformers and do-gooders to judges, prosecutors, cops, and pols of every stripe and color. A true story set in Prohibition-era Manhattan a generation after Gangs of New York, but fought on the very same turf.

The Triads

The Triads
Author: Martin Booth
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1990
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Warlords of Crime

Warlords of Crime
Author: Gerald L. Posner
Publisher: Penguin Group
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1990
Genre: History
ISBN:

With the illegal drug crisis reaching epidemic proportions, here is an illuminating and disturbing account of a relentless new criminal organization which has muscled aside the Mafia and dominates the multibillion dollar world heroin trade.

The Chinese Triads

The Chinese Triads
Author: Charles River Editors
Publisher:
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre:
ISBN:

From running guns to white-collar crimes in cyberspace and illegal seafood, the Triads, the mafia of China, are potent figures in the world of organized crime. Going by enigmatic names like the 14K Triad and the United Bamboo Gang, these criminal groups are enormous, with some organizations boosting memberships ranging in the tens of thousands. A powerful factor in China and throughout Asia, Triads are entrenched in society and the masters of multiple enterprises ranging from extortion, narcotics, prostitution and white collar crime. Despite their origins in mainland China, the Triads are most powerful in Hong Kong and Taiwan; as an international organization, the Triads have expanded into North America and other Western countries. The various Triad organizations are different but share many similarities, including a hierarchical structure, exclusive membership, common commercial money-making activities, the use of violence as a tool and the codification of rituals for the group. Although the various Triad groups share a common Chinese ethnic origin, these groups are fiercely territorial and do not collaborate together too often. The modern Triads trace their lineage to a group called the Hung Mun (Heaven and Earth Association). Originating in the Qing Dynasty as a secret society focused on Han solidarity and the restoration of the Ming Dynasty, these groups sought to overthrow the foreign Manchu Qing rulers. The Hung Mun positioned themselves as self-help organizations to disfranchised Chinese workers, providing them money loans and welfare when they were ignored by the government. From these secretive anti-Qing groups to their current existence as powerful organized crime groups, the Triads have continued to evolve and grow. Taking full advantage of technological changes, the Triads have become major players in cybercrime and the illegal seafood trade, forcing law enforcement to evolve in order to combat them. The Chinese Triads: The History and Legacy of China's Most Famous Organized Crime Syndicates explores the organizations' origins and their inner workings.