By Ji Pei for the Saker Blog
To put the World in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the Family in order; to put the Family in order, we must first cultivate our personal lives by setting our hearts right. Confucius
The extent of the criminal and corrupt past of Hong Kong and Taiwan is little known in the West.
People know that Hong Kong has been a British colony and the center of the opium trade with China from the the nineteenth century on, but this often remains an abstract knowledge for most readers, who often ignore to which extent this “trade” was tied to blackmailing, corruption, money laundering, war, colonial exploitation and other criminal activities. Part of the huge growth of British banking and of the financial power of the City of London in the 19th century resulted notably from the profits from the opium sold in China. This trade grew from around 5000 crates of opium sold in 1820, to 96,000 crates sold in 1873. This took place against the fierce resistance of the Chinese imperial government, which for this reason had to suffer the three so called Opium Wars waged by Great Britain against China. Expressed in tons, the British opium exports reached very nearly ten thousand tons during the year 1873. An incredible quantity for a substance sold in grams!
Colonial exploitation and crime expanded to new heights after 1949 in Hong Kong and, for that matter, also in Taiwan. Why?
Western people interested by Chinese history usually know that the Kuomintang (KMT) came to power in China as a result of Chiang Kai-shek’s 1926 “Northern Expedition” against the northern warlords. With 6000 Whampoa cadets and 85,000 troops, Chiang took Wuhan in September, 1926, and Shanghai and Nanking in March 1927. Many also know, if only by having read the famous French Author André Malraux’s moving text on this event, that Chiang Kai-shek organized the liquidation of the communists in Shanghai in April, 1927, and that he used the help of the Shanghai criminal syndicates, the so called triads to this aim. What is much less known is the incredible high level of influence played by the triads and by crime in the history of the Kuomintang government of China until its defeat at the hands of Mao Tse-tung’s and Chu Teh’s communists in 1949. This ignorance is due to the fact that the USA, which supported the Kuomintang-based anti-communist government in China during the war with Japan and later in Taiwan after the liberation of China, did everything to let Chiang and the KMT appear clean and solid. They thus laid a coating of governmental respectability on everything that concerned Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT.
In the twenties of the twentieth century, Shanghai’s underworld was dominated by three triads: Pockmarked Huang’s (Huang Chih-jung’s) Red Gang, which would soon be the most militant anti-communist force in China after Big-eared Tu (Tu Yueh-sheng) took the gang’s operational direction, Tu’s own Green Gang, and the Blue Gang. These three triads associated under Big-eared Tu’s pressure to exercise a monopoly of opium handling in order to raise the price. Tu was soon pulling all strings in Shanghai, not only in the underworld, but also in the city’s administration (the gangsters could even read the mail and gather information on banking operations) and in the police. He also had the best connections to the Kung banking family and to the Soong finance dynasty, thus combining the resources of the Kung banking empire, the leverage of the Soong family and the mammoth clout of the green gang. With Chiang Kai-shek, Tu would soon add political power to this extraordinary pyramid of forceful means.
Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang and the triads
And here comes violent-tempered Chiang Kai-shek, born around one year before Big-eared Tu left his mother’s womb in 1888. In 1906, young Chiang left for Japan to receive a military training. On arriving, he discovered that he did not own the official recommendation necessary for that. Soon, he came in contact with the Chinese expatriate community, many of which were followers of Sun Yat-sen’s republican movement. One of them, Ch’en Ch’i-mei, one of Sun’s most ardent recruiters and member of Pockmarked Huang’s Shanghai Red Gang, befriended him. Back in China where he attended the lessons of a military academy, Chiang finally obtained a permission to follow a three-year course at the famous Shimbu Gakko military academy. There in Japan, Ch’en put Chiang up for membership of Sun’s political movement and he was accepted. During one of his visits to China with Ch’en, Chiang Kai-shek was also enrolled into the Green Gang. Involving himself in the gang’s activities, he took part in extortion, armed robberies and a jail break. “His police record in the British-administered International Settlements grew over the years to include murder, extortion, numerous armed robberies, and assorted other crimes.” (Seagrave, page 156).
In 1911, now graduated from Shimbu Gakko, Chiang joined Ch’en for the revolution in October with a unit of Sun Yat-sen’s Republican army composed entirely of Green Gang personnel. After the success of the revolution, Ch’en was appointed military governor of Shanghai and Chiang was made commander of a regiment. He spent the years of WW I mostly in Shanghai (and in Japan when Yuan Shih-kai’s secret police was after him and after Ch’en), usually active in Green Gang extortions and also assisting Ch’en Ch’i-mei who was now chairman of the Kuomintantg’s Central Committee. After Ch’en’s murder by the secret police in May, 1916, Chiang found himself at the heart of a hefty realignment of power in the Kuomintang. He became senior political assistant to Sun Yat-sen and, in 1917, his military adviser in Guangzhou, at the same time always closely working with Big-eared Tu on insider dealings in Shanghai’s stock market. His Shanghai patrons (Tu, the Soongs and wealthy industrialists, bankers like Kungs and merchants) wanted him to ingratiate himself with Sun to increase their common influence upon the Kuomintang. He fulfilled the task with success and was himself made chairman of the Kuomintang’s military academy in Whampoa and chief of staff of the Kuomintang army. Following Sun Yat-sen’s death (1925), Sun’s favored successor, left of center politician Liao Chung-k’ai, was gunned by five Green Gang killers. The murder was attributed to right wing influence: this eliminated the conservative candidates to Sun’s seat, while other leftist candidates couldn’t secure enough support because the workers’ strikes called by the Communist Party scared too many. Thus in the end, it was the “middle of the road” candidate Chiang Kai-shek, Big-eared Tu’s secret candidate of choice, who was elected president of the Kuomintang, the ‘Nationalist Party’. Chiang organized immediately the election of Curio Chang (Chang Ching-chang, another Green Gang friend of Tu with wide connections) to the chairmanship of the KMT’s Central Committee. “With them in charge, the Kuomintang was finally thoroughly criminalized.” (Booth, page 143). Two years later, Chiang and the Green Gang would carry against the communists the heavy blow mentioned at the beginning of this article (the Shanghai 1927 communists’ massacre), thus opening the long civil war between KMT and CPC that would end 1949 with Chiang Kaishek’s defeat at the hands of Mao Tse-tung and Chou Teh and with the establishing of the People’s Republic of China. Chiang fled to Taiwan with his defeated army.
New Regime on Mainland China: the triads flee to Hong Kong and Taiwan
Whatever position one has on communism, one must admit that Mao’s new regime proscribed the triads with a vigor never seen before. The triads were considered a real threat: the Kuomintang had used them as they had used the Kuomintang, virtually running (and ruining) the country together. So the communists feared and abhorred triad criminality: triads had plundered China for decades and in their eyes, this had to stop. Within three years of the communists’ victory, opium got completely removed from Chinese society, the nation “clean” again after more than one century and the triads bereft of their most lucrative business. Addicts were treated sympathetically, farmers ordered to grow food crops instead of poppies. Opium-den owners were publicly humiliated and sent for political reeducation in labor camps. Dealers and traffickers were shot in public after brief trials. The triads got outlawed all over the country.
It is easy to imagine where the triad bosses and members that did not get caught by the communists would go: to Taiwan and to Hong Kong.
As a colony, Hong Kong had attracted Chinese triads almost from the beginning. The more affluent the colony became, the more worthwhile crime also grew. So by 1848, Hong Kong was already considered the nerve center for triad activity all over South China. Hundred years later, by 1949, it looked as if Hong Kong would become the biggest criminal city on earth: prostitution, protection, gambling rackets, narcotics trade, nothing was missing. It is in this situation that refugee members of the big Chinese triads (especially the Shanghainese ones) arrived to Hong Kong and Taiwan in great numbers. Big-eared Tu and his Green Gang chose Hong Kong, not Taiwan, as their mainstay. A new scourge came with them, Heroin: the first Hong Kong heroin laboratories were financed by Big-eared Tu and went into production in 1950. “With an orchestrated, vicious ruthlessness, they also started their own extortion rackets and staged armed robberies on Chinese jewelers’ and gold shops. Well organized and financed, they were soon challenging the local societies (…), coordinating vice with the efficiency of corporate managers. They opened dance halls full of ‘taxi dancers’ who, charging clients by the dance, in turn paid the Green Gang operators for the right to work in their establishments. They ran brothels and massage-parlors, and administered opium and gambling dens. Not content with this, they bribed immigration officials, then preyed upon wealthy criminal exiles, offering protection to avoid deportation or to avoid being sent back to China. Wealthy non-criminals were forced to invest in Green Gang-controlled legitimate business.” (Booth, page 264). However, not everything developed smoothly in Hong Kong for the Green Gang. They had to ward off the competition of the local triads, and the arrest of a high member of the gang, Li Choi-fat in 1952, was a serious setback.
For Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, on the contrary, the refugee triads from the mainland were welcome. Here again one may say: ‘With them in charge, the island’s new government was now fully criminalized’. Chiang’s government itself consisted almost exclusively of triads, which could so continue their life of crime. They associated themselves into a new government sponsored society, the United Bamboo Society, which helped other triads to gain foothold in Hong Kong. They also formed an effective branch of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret service. Chiang had originally even hoped to be able to establish some political power in Hong Kong to run the colony as another KMT center of power against communist China.
After riots in Hong Kong’s refugee settlements in 1956, during which triads had supported the rioters, the British colonial government increased its fight against the secret societies. The triads had to adopt a low profile and to reconsolidate their position. At the same time, they re-oriented their criminal business to take advantage of the worldwide growing level of wellbeing. “Within four years of the riots, they were in a position to internationalize the narcotics trade. A new triad era was dawning.” (Booth, page 275).
The worldwide narcotic trade
Soon, the triads developed their infrastructure, increased their grip on Hong Kong, and organized during the Vietnam War an essentially Asian-wide, and later a worldwide Heroin trafficking. To gather the huge quantities of morphine base they needed, they set up a purchase agreement with Kuomintang general Li Wen-huan who lived in the Thai jungles in the so called ‘Golden Triangle’ ready to strike at communist China, and who paid his troops by selling Heroin. They also had agreements with Burmese insurgents, with General Rattikone, head of the Laotian army, with the Vietnamese heroin ring of air Vice-marshal Ky etc., thus controlling unlimited sources of morphine base. The CIA, Air America, Continental Air Service and Laos Development Air Service flew the narcotics for them to Thailand and to Hong Kong. In this way, the Hong Kong triads could soon control the entire heroin smuggling, processing and trade from the source to distribution. Hong Kong was the place which accommodated the Heroin labs, where the worldwide income was gathered, laundered and invested in casinos, in general and in commodity trading companies, in commercial property, cinemas, restaurants and bars. Triad bosses like the Ma brothers founded the Oriental Press Group, the main publication of which was the Oriental Daily News, one of Hong Kong’s most popular daily papers. They took part in high profile philanthropic activities, were accepted on the select Hong Kong racecourse and even in the exclusive Royal Jockey Club and lived in luxurious mansions.
After the end of the Vietnam war in 1973, the Hong Kong triads organized connections to the American Mafia (some say they even met Mafia boss Meyer Lansky), to the French Corsican crime syndicates, the French Marseilles gangsters and others. Soon, heroin addiction rose sharply in most Western countries and the triads’ income rose correspondingly. Meanwhile, the fight of the British authorities against the Hong Kong triads was most of the time rather a joke. Even the Ma brothers, if arrested, were released on appeal, or went to Taiwan if necessary. Many high level traffickers were acquitted. Why would police officers or judges risk their lives, seeing the attitude of their bosses: according to a Sunday Times report, the triad’s Oriental Press Group had donated considerable sums to the Conservative Party funds. Even Christopher Patten, sung of as the so incredibly democratic minded last governor of Hong Kong, “attended functions at the Oriental Press Group headquarters and gave his blessing to the founding of a new English-language daily newspaper, the Eastern Express. John Major, as party leader as well as prime minister, entertained [triad boss] Ma to tea at Downing Street.” (Booth, page 295). No change from the 19th century: Great Britain’s elites (if not the poor British youth addicted to Heroin!), Hong Kong’s elites ‒ and their banks! ‒ have always thrived on opium. And the USA always followed the example.
Chinese corruption and Chinese Fight against corruption
Everybody knows that in the early eighties, Deng Xiaoping told the Chinese to “Get rich” in order to launch the process of building up efficiently a market economy to strive out of underdevelopment. The Chinese people obeyed and the economy started to thrive and to boast incredible GDP growth rates never seen before. Obviously, in this process, quite a few Chinese would transgress the laws of morals, and corruption grew again in China at a rate never seen since 1949. Hong Kong triads reestablished business with the new Chinese criminal scene. Even the People’s Liberation Army, the communist party and the administration were caught in this corrupting frenzy. But because the Chinese communist party is – with more than eighty million members – the biggest people’s party worldwide, the law abiding majority of this party let their party leaders understand that they had to do something against corruption, or else… Since China had and has energetic leaders like Jiang Zemin, Zhu Rongji or now Xi Jinping, who organized a war against corruption never seen of in our parts of the world, things started to change: in the meantime, even high level officials or ministers found guilty of corruption have been condemned to heavy sentences (even death penalty) in China, whereas similar persons in the West get a few months on probation for the same level of corruption, if at all.
However, the corruption fighting leaders of the Communist Party had a problem: if criminal or corrupt members of the Chinese society and of the party could flee to Hong Kong before being arrested, they couldn’t be brought to trial in their homeland because the ex-colony had no extradition law. That was a real problem for China’s politics and for China’s justice.
In the final months of British rule under Governor Patten, Hong Kong had passed laws barring the extradition to mainland China due to claimed concerns about the quality and objectivity of the mainland’s justice. This in spite of the huge progress made in China in the field of justice, especially since the law of 2004 strongly reinforcing the position of the defending counsels in court, and in spite of the fact that colonial justice itself had always been a caricature of justice, since in Hong Kong Chinese people could never be tried by Chinese judges, but only by British ones.
Beijing formulated very early its wish to see this Patten “non-extradition” bill changed for a law allowing extradition, but displayed much patience in order to avoid doing violence to the autonomy and anti-communist feelings of part of the Hong Kong population. But the constant misuse of Hong Kong’s protection by persons menaced by the Xi Jinping government’s legal, useful and successful fight against corruption and graft led to an increase of Beijing’s pressure for a change in this field. Beijing let it know that more than 300 wanted fugitives were hiding in Hong Kong. Finally, the Hong Kong government decided in February, 2019 to amend the law and to allow for extradition on a case-by-case basis with countries not already covered by mutual agreements—and this would include mainland China and Macao, doing away with the geographical restrictions on the PRC in the existing rules.
Street war against extradition law
Opposition to this change manifested itself very soon. Aside of the old anti-communist prejudice of a part of Hong Kong’s population, this change obviously affected huge interests: the financial interests of the Hong Kong triads which earned millions with the corrupt part of mainland China’s industry, banking and import-export business, the financial interests of the Taiwan triads doing similar businesses, the financial interests of the money laundering and money manipulating British and overseas Chinese banks, the financial interests of Hong Kong’s big import-export houses, the financial and political interests of Taiwan’s Kuomintang party, the huge political and geopolitical interests of the imperialist NATO countries, especially Great Britain and the USA and their secret services and NGOs, which have been practicing the containment of China since 1949 and which dream of a weak China which could be recolonized, and finally the financial and political interests of the infamous One Percent billionaires dreaming of globalization and world power and who saw there an opportunity to sabotage China’s Belt and Road Initiative. With such interests ready to finance and support opposition against the new extradition bill, and within the framework of the anti-China business war waged by the Trump government against the Chinese government, it is clear that huge rioting activities and widespread protests were soon mobilized on a very large scale against China in the streets of Hong Kong and Kowloon during the whole of 2019 and part of 2020.
The incredibly brutal and nasty protests against the extradition law in Hong Kong thus lasted more than one year. The West has probably never before invested so much money and political influencing in a single China containment political struggle, fortunately to no avail: bar associations, chambers of commerce, law societies, so called human rights groups, journalist’s associations, dozens of colonial era officials including of course Chris Patten himself, the whole of the Western mainstream media and dozens of government representatives in the line of Great Britain, the EU, the USA, Canada, etc. have criticized the People’s Republic’s policy. A nastier intervention into the internal affairs of a country is difficult to find. The world can rest thankful to the Peoples Republic of China for having shown much patience: the units of the People’s Liberation Army established in Hong Kong never intervened except to clean up the debris of destroyed shop fronts. Having brought seven hundred million citizens out of poverty within twenty-five years, China is now a strong, proud dragon that obviously no longer needs to brawl with misled students and louts. One only feels sorry for the tens of thousands of these naïve students and other young people who believed the lies of their agitators and thought to fight for liberty and democracy, whereas they were fighting for the financial and political interests of criminals, of money launders, globalists and of corrupt politicians.
In the end, an extradition law had to be. And it is now effective in Hong Kong.
Literature:
One could fill many pages with titles of books on the Chinese triads, on the history of Kuomintang China, on the history of Hong Kong, etc. The two books mentioned in this article bring the most important facts together in attractive, easy readable texts:
SEAGRAVE, Sterling, 1985: The Soong dynasty, Corgi Books, London
BOOTH, Martin,, 1999: The dragon syndicates. Bantam Books, London
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_hong_kong_extradition_bill
Dr. Ji Pei was lecturer for Chinese history at a European University.
Great article. I had no idea about any of this. I know a very senior British, ex-Hong Kong police official. He told me USA generals flew tons of drugs on military aircraft out of Hong Kong. I guess it all landed in Arkansas with Bill Clinton.
brilliant much needed article. it connected so many dots. i’ve studied mao’s journey but most of the texts failed to include this. thank you. the only quibble i had was that mao only killed dealers, mao also killed addicts…he reasoned they were already dead. & in some ways he was right.
Well, my understanding is that opium addiction at that time was so widespread that to kill the addicts would likely mean killing 50%+ of the entire population in China. I do not think such a thing happened.
One point of fact correction: Meyer Lansky was in the Syndicate, not the Mafia. The Mafia is exclusively a Sicilian-origin criminal affiliation.
I know the term Mafia is now more a generic term, but it should be maintained with a capital M as pertaining solely to the Sicilian basis of it.
The Jews built their crime organization, the Syndicate.
All other uses of the term mafia should not be capitalized.
Russian mafia, Corsican mafia, et al.
This article is a very good presentation of historic context that everyone should know.
‘Kosher Nostra’, ‘Undzer Shtik’ (Yiddish for ‘Cosa Nostra’), ‘Jewish Mob’, ‘Murder Inc’ , are names of Jewish-American organized crime. No doubt that it has close relations with the ‘Russian Mafiya’ (as Kosher as its American counterpart that they created in the first place at the end of 19th century-early 20th – by immigrants from ‘Russia’). Its global reach is illustrated by its relations with the Triads.
Excellent article and yes, I knew a bit about this whole sad saga including the disastrous results of the Comintern’s Popular Front strategy resulting in the brutal 1930’s Shanghai massacre of the Chinese cadre–students, workers thrown into boilers of locomotives etc.
There is no need to make similar mistakes in the 2020’s–i.e. foolish trust of class enemies. I don’t agree that the combined forces of today were necessarily merely plotting against the Belt and Road initiative which has its own set of internal problems and which you might want to write about perhaps?
Warning: I am no fan of the CCP at all–it is a ridged, self defeating bureaucracy. Let’s hope some independent thought is encouraged even if it is physically isolated in some cloistered think-tank tucked in the countryside. Every society needs its rebels, its monks….its critics for its long term health. Calling them class enemies is just stupid especially since those in power know who the enemy really is.
The upper class/educated young of Hong Kong knew that they could not “win” without support of the West and in the end they did lose because basically they had nothing to offer concretely and in addition the gangs have moved on to a different dance in a different way with some of the elites of China. And these “combined forces:” have their own inner contradictions which can be exploited although in the end they will coalesce like in 1930 Shanghai to make a deadly combined strike—at the right time and when it is most profitable.
One does not have to be a fan of the CCP. Fact is however that the CCP has more than 80 million members and is no longer a Leninist elite party, a so called “avant-garde of the proletariat”. It is genuinely a peoples’ party. This is the reason why a decent part of the value creation by the Chinese capitalists goes to the people in the shape of good infrastructure, good public services and rising salaries. In this respect, the Chinese system is a social market economy (what the Germans called “soziale Marktwirtschaft”, which did run excellently until 1968): The social market economy would run excellently because at that time, the socialist party (SPD) was practically as strong as the capitalism-oriented Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and came to power each time the CDU allowed the industry to reduce the part of the value creation redistributed, and allowed the firms to increase their profits. Later the SPD sold her economic soul to the Chicago boys and thus betrayed its constituency, shaping alliances called “great coalitions” with the pro capitalist CDU. With this, it gained permanent participation to power, but lost two third of its constituency and the half of its party members. I don’t think that the CCP will make a similar mistake, in any case not in the next few decades. By the way: if you doubt that China is a social market economy borne by her growing middle class (“What!?! China is a communist country!”), you should know that the name “Communist Party”, Chinese Gongchandang (共产党) means “party of the joint producers” or “party of (those who) create value together”. So in Asia, the name “Communist party” hat not the frightening connotation is has here. The Chinese name of this party is equally adapted to a country of people’s communes, what China has no longer been for decades, or to a country of a jointly producing middle class enterprises and people, what China now is. Don’t forget that to day, the Chinese state sector produces less than 25% of the industrial production.
Right. A communist party somewhat like the Russian one circa 1990 ( lip service to the Revolution) but different in that it represents itself in a new bureaucratic form of nomenklatura and oligarchy. It has lured the Western financial/tech sector over to its shores and thus to fund the growth of its middle class, hardly known for its dedication to wealth sharing with workers and peasants ( yes, there is still a large rural, poor population).
What I am watching for is: Which one will betray ( the Western techies/financiers vs. Chinese oligarchs) the other first? It is a different game than German politics–this, which is being played in Asia.
As for being scared of the word Communist? Please. If I find a real one, I honor him/her even though I am no longer able to utilize the wordview in a creative way as I am stuck here in the belly of the technofascist beast where the union movement tells its workers ( oil) to vote Biden or to insist on teaching gender politics in schools via Zoom.
I knew a fair amount Hong Kong but there is a huge amount of information in this article which I did not know.
It really sheds light on the situation there.
I was in China last January and on my flight from Hong Kong to the mainland I talked to a couple of Hong Kong residents.
One thing that they told me was not mentioned in the excellent article above.
The majority of the discontent felt by the average young person in Hong Kong is caused by income inequality. Hong Kong’s land is limited. Hong Kong is an international jet set destination and the cost of housing is prohibitive. The young cannot afford housing. These genuinely disgruntled youngsters are being egged on by oligarchs, western NGO’s and others. The purpose of the oligarchs is to prevent the merger of Hong Kong with the mainland so that the oligarchs can keep their little fiefdoms. The purpose of the western NGO’s is to engage in hybrid war with China. These “others” are manipulating the youth for their own purposes. Many of the youth could care less about so-called pro democracy movement – they just want an affordable place to live and a decent future.
@Mike,
Agreed, and now watch China break the Hong Kong oligarchy. Personally I can’t stand HK, can’t wait to get north of the border if I have to land there.
Tung Chee-hwa (HK’s first post-British Chief Executive) was charged with fixing the housing situation by Beijing. The problems were well apparent even in the late ’90s, and have ballooned since. He proved unable to overcome the real-estate and construction vested interests, and indeed a large portion of HK’s population who worried about their own housing losing value. He failed in this critical, but apparently unsolvable task and his successors did no better.
The fact is that approx 75% of HK’s territory is green space, with big islands like Lantau Is. & Lamma Is. largely empty. To be sure, the green space adds much to HK’s liveability, yet opening some of this space to desperately needed residential development has been fought tooth and nail. The net result is that HK’s 7M residents are crammed into just a few sq kms resulting in it being one of the world’s most expensive cities, where apartments of 25sqm (300 sq ft) are considered “large”, and cost a bomb.
This is an easily solved, unsolvable problem of HK’s own making.
I worked in UK twenty years ago.
What I noticed is that the southern part of the Island was undeveloped. Has this changed?
A big island with everything centered on the water between the mainland.
“An incredible quantity for a substance sold in grams!”
In Oslo Norway 0.2gram of heroin costs 200 NOK or 1000 NOKpr gram, the amount of money the US/cia earn from the heroin trade is unimaginable.
(right now 1000 kr= 121.64 $)
So the US was built both on slave labour and on opium?
Skull and Bones, the notorious ‘fraternity’ aka nasty secret society at Yale, which had all three Bushes, Prescott, George Sr and Dubya Bush, was founded by a US drug runner.
While the US didn’t do as much opium trade as the UK, it wasn’t insignificant. And let’s recall that many US patent medicines were either opium or cocaine (Coca Cola)
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/3/30/opium-at-harvard/
Shocking. I have read that even FDR came from a family that made its fortune by trafficking Opium into China.
No problem. As everybody see today, American is a friend of Vietnam and all Vietnamese admire and love Americans today.
The same will happen with all Chinese people. A new generation of young people dont know anything of the past, they have only feelings for the future. They will love England and America again.
The past is over.
Now we have a reset after which America can earn big money on what happens in China and even more when this get richer and richer.
” Hong Kong was the place which accommodated the Heroin labs, where the worldwide income was gathered, laundered and invested. Triad bosses like the Ma brothers were accepted on the select Hong Kong racecourse and even in the exclusive Royal Jockey Club. John Major, as [Conservative] party leader as well as prime minister, entertained [triad boss] Ma to tea at Downing Street.”
I always wondered why Conservative anti-immigration Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, made a U-turn for Hong Kong “refugees”. Long standing puzzle solved.
Apparently in the 1950s to 1970s in the City of London, the advice for failed gentlemen was….
F.I.L.T.H.. =
´´Failed in London -Try HongKong´´..
and H.S.B.C. also founded in 1865 in HK (HongKong Shanghai Banking Corporation) and Europes largest bank.
´´Heroin Shipments to a British Colony´´
finally Chiang Kai-shek, or his Christian!!! wife was also known;;
´´Cash my Check´´
I was teaching English during a summer holiday in Taiwan 1980. My wonderful Taiwanese students and friends could NOT tolerate the KMT or that twit Chiang Kai-shek.
Furthermore, Simplified Chinese characters (from the mainland/DaLu!!.) were not approved of/forbidden and often stamped over with ´FEI´ meaning Evil/bad!! My dedicated and lovely Chinese teacher was KMT, from the mainland. She freaked out when she saw my ´´Having Fun with Chinese Characters´´published in Singapore which used both Simplified & Traditional Characters ..I had to discreetly keep it in a paper bag.
However, off the south coast the notorious prison island *Green Island* was kept full with rebellious Taiwanese. Plus earlier KMT massacres swept under the carpet and were taboo topics..
Ironical or perhaps understandable that many older Taiwanese were genuinely nostalgic for the former Japanese administration.
Too bad that monstrous monument to ´´Cash my Check´´is still in place in Taipei!!!
‘To put the World in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the Family in order; to put the Family in order, we must first cultivate our personal lives by setting our hearts right.’ … Confucius
Here in the center of the ‘Golden Triangle’ hearts are strong and the family is strong. Everyone seems related to everyone and the Buddist temples are highly decorated.
J believe the quotation is not from Confucius ((Kŏng Fūzǐ/ Kŏng Qiū)) who lived some five hundred years before Christ, but rather from the classic “Lǐ Jì” (Memoranda on Rituals) compiled -250 to +150, and more specifically from its chapter “Lĭ Yǜn” (Proper Stages of applying the reflectin over rituals to govern the land– starting with the how the superior gentleman or official should connect his inner being with social and political realities).
In 1977, I stayed at one of the top hotels on Hong Kong Island. At that time, there were few young Western men like me in the hotel or indeed in Hong Kong. The only Westerners seemed to be business people.
Once, in the lobby of the hotel, I was approached by an unusually pretty Chinese girl. She smiled at me and suggested that we go to my room. It was obviously a freebie. I politely declined. Later, when trying to work out why I was offered such largess, I realised that she thought that I was an officer in the Royal Hong Kong police.
It was well-known that British policemen who were sent to Hong Kong returned wealthy. :-)
Japan played a major role in Chinese political life. By1931, Japan was an important industrial power, as well as a member of the League of Nations. Like other capitalist countries of that time, she suffered from social, political, and economic dislocation. Population growth and the world economic depression magnified Japan’s social and political problems. To ameliorate these problems and provide needed natural resources and living space for its growing population Japan invaded Manchuria. Japan seized this opportunity by exploiting the world economic crisis, Western fear of communism, and political unrest in China. The final aim of Japan, however, was total political and economic control of Asia through the creation of the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere”. This Japanese expansionist policy came into direct conflict with national interests of China, the League of Nations covenant, the Soviet Union and the historic Open-Door Policy which protected American interests in the Orient.
By signing The Treaty of Shimonoeski in 1895, China ceded to Japan “Taiwan, the Pescadores, and Liaotung peninsula; the opening of seven Chinese ports to Japanese trade; the payment of 200 million taels, with permission to occupy Weihaiwei harbor”. More importantly, the big prize of this treaty was Japanese control of Korea, a base for future expansion on the mainland of Asia. In the next thirty years and three wars later, Japan was poised to take all of Asia.
Japan established herself as a major power in Asia with war victories over China in 1894, Russia in 1904-05 and Germany in world War One. In 1902, Japan was allied with Britain this assured her of British assistance against potential rivals such as Russia and France and neutrality in the Pacific by the Royal Navy when Japan became the aggressor. Furthermore, as a partner in the defeat of the Triple Alliance in World War One, this “afforded the Japanese Empire a golden opportunity to consolidate and expand its economic penetration and political domination of East Asia”.2
War in Europe combined with the political struggle for power between Warlord Yuan Shih-kai and the Kuomintang movement led by Sun Yat Sen, gave Japan a free hand to expand her sphere of influence on the Asian Mainland. “Japan took advantage of her geographical proximity and the absence of other predators, to push her own domination” to expand her control in the Pacific by taking former German possession of Tsingtao, Shantung, Marianas, Marshall and Caroline Islands.3 The Chinese government of Yuan Shih-kai was forced to accept more humiliation by accepting, economic concessions, the Twenty-One Demands, which made China a virtual colony of Japan.
With over three hundred thousand Chinese laborers working on the Western Front, China was a partner in the WWI victory over the Triple Alliance. However, in the end Chinese national interests, particularly, her sovereignty and relations with Japan were not addresses by the Treaty of Versailles. Even in Japan, in some quarters, public opinion was critical of the unreasonable demands against Chinese sovereignty. Britain and America, however, saw the Twenty-One Demands as a challenge to their economic interests but since they were involved in a war in Europe, they were unable to dissuade Japan from her incursions into China.
With the death of Yuan Shih-kai, Sun Yat-sen returned to China. As the leader of the Kuomintang, he champion democracy, people’s livelihood, and “China for the Chinese”. Sun Yat-sen wanted to improve the living standard of his people establishing a parliamentary system of government under Chinese control. The Great Powers saw the Kuomintang as a threat to their economic and political control. America and Britain, in their own interest, exploited the divisions within Kuomintang ranks to maintain the status quo. Russia, however, saw Chiang Kai-shek leadership of the Kuomintang as a possible ally of Japan and “was deeply apprehensive of a war on two fronts. Threatened by the West, they wanted to be sure that Chiang Kai-shek would not join with the Japanese in a thrust into Siberia”4 therefore the Comintern agents encouraged the Chinese Communist Party to establish an independent “Soviet Chinese Republic” . “The idea was that this would prevent Chiang Kai-shek from entering into an alliance with Japan against U.S.S.R.” 5
Japan’s post war industrial boom was followed by an economic downturn. Growing emphasis on manufacturing had neglected agriculture, resulting in food shortages, rice riots and formation of tenants and industrial unions. Facing a “prospect of a drastic reduction in the standard of living and the social tension” Japan experienced “political instability that often accompany economic stagnation and decline”.6 The ruling elite in Japan exploited the world economic crisis, not only to maintain political control at home, but also to bring resource rich Northern China under their influence. The origin of this militarist attitude of the ruling elite, which dominated governments of the 1920’s, and the present need for raw materials can be traced to the establishment of the Meiji regime in 1867. “In less than sixty years since the Meiji reform of the 1860’s Japan had modernized, become a power on the Western model, and joined with the West in exploiting and warring upon China”7
The government of Meiji Japan was determined to close the gap to the Western powers economically and militarily. In order to do this they brought into line with government policy the press, education and the legal system. Saburo Ienaga states that “The Meiji political system gagged and blindfolded the populace” to the aims and goals of the militarists.8 This blindness was part of Japanese society until the end of world War Two. Furthermore, by banning left wing parties and freedom of expression and using the schools to indoctrinate children, Japanese society was indoctrinated not to question. Specifically, education was designed to serve national policy and the curriculum emphasized war and honor. This was particularly true in relationship to the emperor where “the Imperial Rescript on Education was issued in a bid to inculcate submissiveness to the political authority presided over by the emperor”9 The laws controlling fundamental freedoms, manipulated through education, made the invasion of Manchuria acceptable to the Japanese people.
To restore economic growth, militarists used the British example of empire to justify and promote economic stability through use of force in Manchuria. They felt by following the British example of emigration to the colonies, and export of manufactured goods they would achieve economic growth and stability. This militaristic policy was in direct conflict with the civilian government. The civilian government expected to bring social harmony at home with the reduction in armament and by signing treaties such as the Washington Conference of 1922 and the London Conference of 1930. Diplomacy through arms control conferences seemed to keep the Great Powers on side but it angered the militarists at home who saw this as a sign of weakness. Tokyo earthquake of 1923 combined with the passage of tariffs in America produced hardships for an already unpopular civil administration. The “Rice Laws” which limited Japanese emigration to America and the example of British imperialism was used by the militarists to justify the Manchurian invasion.
The Hamaguchi government of the 1920’s promoted a policy of social justice; however, the militarists wanted an end to the constitutional government because it interfered with their future for Japanese expansion. The civilian government angered the militarists and the nationalists further when it signed several naval agreements with Great Britain and America and at the same time, renounced war as an instrument of national policy. This schism between the civilian government and the armed forces brought the militarists to power. The militarists saw the answer to Japan’s economic crisis in the domination and control of Asia.
This crisis of the quasi-Japanese parliamentary democracy was further acerbated in 1929 after the stock market crashed which was followed by a world economic depression. “By 1930, Japan’s raw silk prices had fallen to one-fourth of the previous year’s level and silk exports to the United States fell by over 40 percent, causing the ruination of many peasants who depended on this important cash crop for their livelihood”.10 Furthermore, Japan returned to the gold standard causing “a dramatic overvaluation of the yen and therefore increased the prices of Japanese exports at the very moment that the decline in purchasing power and the rise of protectionism abroad was closing foreign markets.”11 The military elements did not accept what they saw as indecisiveness of the parliament; they pressed for more funding for the army and greater autonomy of action in order to solve the national economic crisis. In particular, they wanted a free hand for the military command of the Kwantung army in Manchuria. The militarists saw Manchuria as a source of cotton and other raw materials, a marketplace for Japanese manufactured goods and a base for the protection of her Asian interests. Freda Utley, in “Japan’s Feet of Clay” “identifies Japan’s desire to secure natural resources as the most important economic cause of expansionism (though she thought military factors more important), and detailed how Japan’s trade structure was conditioned and restrained by her need to secure raw materials from outside the Japanese Empite.”12 In 1927, Baron Tanaka informed the emperor in a letter that Japanese investment in Manchuria “amount to no less than 440 million yen. It is veritably the largest single investment and the strongest organization of our country.”13
The Japanese militarists used an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway as a pretext to seize all of Manchuria. In September 1931, the Japanese overran Manchuria, and set up the Republic of Manchukuo. They placed the ex-Emperor of China, Pu Yi, as its puppet ruler and recognized Manchukuo as an independent state. China appealed to the League under section 11, 15 and 10 of the covenants. Their appeal came at a time when Briand was a sick man and Britain was in an economic crisis. “The political and economic crisis affecting Britain, the prevailing horror of war, the remoteness of the theater of operations, Manchuria – all sufficiently accounted for Simon’s unwillingness to act.” in the name of collective security.14
Added to the impotence of the League, USSR, and the United States, who had vital interests in the Far East, were not members of the League and, therefore, not committed to a policy of sanctions against the aggressor. United States and the Soviet Union had their own agenda in the Far East. Egerton emphatically states, “the isolation of both of these Super Powers from the European diplomatic concert presented the most serious “structural” problem in world politics of the inter-war era.”15 Japan insisted that Manchuria was a local quarrel. Lack of agreement on a common policy by the Great Powers, Japan refused to negotiate in good faith. Japan continued to stall over Chinese objections while at the same time establishing full control over the province.
Though, Chinese did boycott Japanese goods, however, China was unable to militarily stop Japan from occupying her territory. Involved in a political struggle with the communists, Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek refused to commit military forces against the Japanese. With Chiang under Communist pressure at home, America sided with Chiang Kai-shek because America was concerned that a communist takeover of China was more of a threat to all of Asia than Japanese control of Manchuria. American diplomats feared that fall of China to communism would end the historic Open Door Policy which America had supported since 1922. American State Department, particularly her envoy to the League, Mr. Stimson, was never clear in its cooperation with the League aims because clear mechanism for this cooperation did not exist.
The League, on the other hand, condemned this aggression and appointed the Lytton Commission to investigate. The commission’s report according to American representative Stimson provided the world with “an authoritative record of events and an impartial verdict on their real nature”. 16 The Commission condemned Japan as an aggressor and the League refused to recognize the new state of Manchukuo. The League and Britain did not follow the condemnation with military action; as a result, Japan saw the diplomatic confusion as a sign to consolidate her hold on Manchuria,
The international crisis in Manchuria clearly demanded that the League should apply sanctions if the spirit of the covenant was to be observed since “The initial mistake was the failure to recognize that the Mukden incident was an act of aggression of the part of Japan”17 Nothing was done, and Japan’s action set a precedent for future aggression. This lesson was not lost on Germany and Italy who saw the League inaction as a signal that force can win, and that collective security would not be used. The Manchurian affair undermined any credibility that the League had developed in its short existence. Chinese delegate to the League of Nations, Dr. Koo, stated that, “The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship, upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interests or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery” was the only way to resolve international conflicts.18 The League failed to honor this principle and its successor, the United Nation, is following in its footsteps in the Balkans and the Middle East.
I would like to read the source. Would you kindly provide? Thank you, pvuk
I wrote this a few yeas ago still very valid
Seagrave, Sterling. “Dragon Lady” (Toronto: Random House 1992) p. 186
2 Keylor, William R.. “The Twentieth Century World” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) p.220.
3 Suyin, Han. “Eldest Son” (London: Random House UK Ltd., 1994) p. 28.
4 Suyin, Han. “Eldest Son” (London: Random House UK Ltd., 1994) p. 105.
5 Suyin, Han. “Eldest Son” (London: Random House UK Ltd., 1994) p. 109.
6 Keylor, William R.. “The Twentieth Century World” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) p.220.
7 Suyin, Han. “Eldest Son” (London: Random House UK Ltd., 1994) p. 32.
8 Ienaga, Saburo. “The Pacific War” (New York: Pantheon Books 1978) p.15.
9 Ienaga, Saburo. “The Pacific War” p. 21.
10 Keylor, William R.. “The Twentieth Century World” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) p.227
11 Keylor, William R.. “The Twentieth Century World” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) p.227
12 Sugihara, Kaoru. “The Economic Motivation behind Japanese Aggression in the Late 1930’s: Perspectives of Freda Utley and Nawa Toichi” Journal of Contemporary History, (London: Sage Publishers, 1997) p. 267.
13 Brooman, Josh. “China Since 1900” (New York: Longman Inc., 1988) p.16.
14 Nortedge, F.S. “Manchuria: The Covenant Defied”. The League of Nations: Its Life and Times. Chapter 7. (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1986) p. 16.
15 Egerton, G. W. “International Relations of the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century.” Lesson 8 (Vancouver: History 432 (6), University of British Columbia, 1995) p. 43.
16 Walters, F. P. “A History of The League of Nations”. (Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1965) p. 491.
17 Smith, Sara R. ”The Manchurian Crisis 1931-1932”. (New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1970) p. 260
18 Wheeler Reginald W. “China and the World War” http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/comment/chinawwi/ChinaC8.htm [accessed November 18, 2002]
Brooman, Josh. “China Since 1900.” New York: Longman, 1988.
Egerton, G. W. “International Relations of the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century.” Vancouver: History 432 (6), University of British Columbia, 1995.
Keylor, William R. “The Twentieth Century World.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Lane, Peter, Christopher Lane. “GCSE World History 1870 to the Present Day” Gosport: Ashford Colour Press, 1996.
Northedge, F.S. “Manchuria: The Covenant Defied” Custom Course Materials: Vancouver: UBC Bookstore, 2002.
Rayner, Ed, Ron Stapley. “GCSE World History” Longman’s Study Guide, London: Longman Singapore Publishers, 1997.
Seagrave, Sterrling. “Dragon Lady”. Toronto: Scribbler’s Ltd., 1992.
Sugihara, Kaoru. “The Economic Motivation behind Japanese Aggression in the Late 1930’s: Perspectives of Freda Utley and Nawa Toichi” Journal of Contemporary History, London: Sage Publishers, 1997.
Suyin, Han. “Eldest Son”. London: Random House, 1994.
Thomas, Roy. Japan: “Growth of an Industrial Power”. Toronto: McGraw Hill Company of Canada Limited. 1971.
Walters, F. P. “A History of The League of Nations”. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1965.
Wheeler, Reginald W. “China and the World War” CHAPTER VIII, THE FUTURE OF CHINA AS AFFECTED BY THE AIMS OF THE ALLIES [available at: {http//www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/comment/Chinawwi/ChinaC8.htm 18 November 18, 2002.}
I found this book immensely interesting. I read it when it came out in 1971. It explains the complexity of politics in prewar Japan. How two military factions disputed strategy. Whether to “Go North” or “Go South”. The “Go South” faction won and hence their invasions of SE Asia.
“Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy” – by David Bergamini
https://amzn.com/0688019056
There are a massive number of references in this book. The writer was born in Tokyo. He was interned by the Japanese during the War in the Philippines. The Wikipedia goes out of its way to denigrate him – a good recommendation IMHO. The book was massively unpopular in Japan as it portrayed their emperor Hirohito in a different light from the official version. I suspect the Chinese would prefer this version of history.
….the units of the People’s Liberation Army established in Hong Kong never intervened except to clean up the debris of destroyed shop fronts.
And why not catch the mafia and condemn them to a public shooting with the prime time that the whole nation is watching. I would be glad for a such thing to see on alternative media in Serbia f.e. However they are in good relations with a Vucic mafia regime. Are they also part of the game, where f.e. the Reds support the Guerrilla in South America that Monroe is trying to keep?
So who is exctly making profit out of selling drugs to Chinese and Americans? Maybe Brits who are controling both sides? What about drug abuse in India and Pakistan, or Russia and Europe. Do we find any connection to London again?
Malthus’s Essay on Population and its relevance to China has been a focus of debate and discussion for the past two centuries. Its relevance to modern political economists and demographers go far beyond the question of food sustenance which was the primary population control variable for Malthus. Contemporary demographers and political economists are concerned with how population push and human activity cause environmental change resulting in adverse human and natural consequences. They see these consequences as human or global rather than national. The Malthus’s trap threatens developing nations like India and China since in their drive to industrialize population growth and environmental consequences remain unsolved. In a short run, science and global sharing may solve the food problem that concerned Malthus. The ‘invisible hand’ in the multiparty and democratic India and the Communist party monopoly on power in China has not solved the environmental consequences caused by population pressure. India and China must seek answers in education with more direct government action and incentives, as well as in international law and multinational agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol so that Malthus’s theory does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thomas Malthus like other political economists of his day supported the theory of laissez-fair. This theory, the cornerstone of Capitalism, suggested that the economy must be regulated by natural laws of supply and demand. This law or the ‘invisible hand’ as Adam Smith called it, served the common good of humanity if governments did not interfere in the economy. Malthus, a political economist, applied this law to population. In his now famous Essay on Population Malthus concluded that population increased geometrically while the food supply increased arithmetically leading to food shortage and starvation. He argued that states should not interfere in this process by distributing food or provide charity since this was nature’s way of controlling overpopulation.
Prior to 1949 China was a perfect example of Malthus’s theory at work. For example, according to Spence, in the seventeenth century, in the T’an-ch’eng region “famine, locusts, and war, cycles of drought and flood” as well as cultural factors such as “female infanticide, lower level of food supply to girls, the presence always of several women in the home of wealthier men” controlled population growth (p. 117-118). Malthus would argue that this was nature’s way of population control. In fact, before WWII, nature, war, and cultural values remained the primary control on population growth in China.
After 1949, the Communist government of China was faced with daunting economic problems caused by forty years of civil warfare, centuries of colonialism, a growing illiterate population steeped in centuries of dogma, as well as ignorance of and prejudice against contraceptives. However, according to historian Paul Kennedy the immediate problem for the new regime was how to feed “one fifth of the earth’s population with only 7 percent of its farmland, much of it of poor quality” (p. 167)
Using the Soviet example, the Chinese Communist Party attempted to increase food production by land reforms and collectivization. They established food storage facilities as contingencies in case of natural disasters. During times of shortages, they introduced rationing. For the most part the population writes Frolic, “had food in their bellies and didn’t worry about natural disasters” (p. 25). However, the communists recognized that more drastic measures had to be taken to deal with the ever-present food crisis. To deal with the food problem they saw birth control as the answer.
Initial measures by the communists to promote birth control were ineffective. Cultural bias favoring large families remained one of the obstacles. To eliminate this obstacle as well as to catch up with the West industrially they used intense propaganda, particularly during the Great Leap Forward, to indoctrinate, communize and create a highly productive cooperative society. In the short story “A Foot of Mud and a Pile of Shit” Frolic observed that in the early 1960s low farm output “during the creation of people’s communes” caused the birth rate to fall but quickly rebounded since “for every setback there were ten thousand gains: more food, better life, education” thus again new measures had to be introduced to reduce the rate of population growth (p. 25).
In 1971 the policy called wan xi shao or ‘later and fewer’ called for Chinese couples to limit the number of children to two per family. To achieve this goal, the government provided incentives for those who married late, had fewer children, and had them several years apart. In 1979, fearing a population explosion, as the 1960s generation matured and married the communists introduced the One-Child Policy. Wide variety of incentives ‘rewards’ were given to those who complied and ‘penalties’ assessed for those who did not. In the first two years after implementation this policy resulted in a lower birth rate. However, the government was unable to enforce this policy because of centuries of cultural conditioning where large families with many male children provided security in old age.
Nevertheless, the One Child Policy had some success, but it was not without problems. Chinese traditional fixation to have male children led, in some rural areas, to infanticide of female babies. Furthermore, in the long run, one child families created hardships for the one child since now the one child was expected to look after four aging parents. Kennedy in his Preparing for the Twenty-first Century writes that if China achieves zero population growth by the turn of the century “China’s population in 2035 will contain “twice as many persons in their sixties as in their twenties, an age composition that even the most enthusiastic supporter of the virtues of the elderly could scarcely favour” (p. 168). This is unlikely, even with the One Child Policy, since the Chinese population is increasing by twenty million annually. Affluence due to economic restructuring is partly responsible for this population growth.
Economic restructuring and privatization, both on the farm and in the city, has led Chinese families to desire more children to share the work. China will need to continue to exert pressure and provide incentives to maintain its present population levels otherwise Malthus’s theory of food supply will be the controlling factor as it was, to some extent, in England during the Industrial Revolution. In Malthus’s England lack of political will led to starvation and infanticide. Population pressure in Africa, South America, and Asia, in the long run, will not be solved by direct biological manipulation. Legal recognition, in law, for public need to clean air, water, and adequate food supply must be addressed while private rights that are socially detrimental must be reversed. Multinational political will and cooperation, combined with international law, is the only hope against the Malthusian consequences, not only in China but globally.
Because of paternalism and Confucian tenants, women in China prior to 1949 represented a class of people with very few rights. At this time, majority of the people in China lived in rural communities where illiteracy, superstition and tribalism were dominant forces in the day-to-day life of the people. In this society where men had all the power women were enslaved by their gender and centuries of family conditioning. Spence quotes a great Chinese reformer Kang Youwei who wrote that “Men have callously, and unscrupulously repressed women restrained them deceived them, shut them up, imprisoned them and bound them”. Because of culture, overpopulation and hunger many girls were killed at birth, some were sold into slavery while others became prostitutes. In a feudal society that they lived they were conditioned to be obedient to their fathers, husbands and later to their sons.
In pre-Revolutionary China women were a commodity and one of the aims of the revolution was to rid China of 2000 years of feudalism as well as imperialism and bureaucratic-capitalism –the “three big mountains” which were oppressing the Chinese people. 1 After implementing land reforms in 1950, Mao tackled the social system to end feudal treatment of Chinese women. New marriage laws were introduced in 1950 to protect the legal rights of women and children. These laws eliminated arranged marriages, female infanticide, child betrothal, polygamy and attempted to establish equality between the sexes. This was the first step, at least in law if not in practice, when women in China were designated as persons.
The Communist vision of a classless society did not materialize since much of China was a rural society and patriarchy was a centuries old tradition to which farm families clung despite the new laws. This new law was welcomed by many women; however, since most women were illiterate the communist party had to implement educational programs to wash out centuries of Confucian dogma. Through adult education and public schools’ women were informed of their new rights. Many rural men attempted to circumvent the laws and the government established consequences for violators.
Emancipation of women increased their participation in education, positions of authority and the world of work. Emancipation solved some problems for women but created others. First, the invisible and traditional role of women, common worldwide, remained since Chinese women, writes Eastman in Family Fields and Ancestors, had three jobs because their husbands expected them to be mothers, homemakers, and workers. Second problem, particular to Chinese women was a consequence of the One Child Policy. Men, particularly in rural communities saw the birth of daughters in terms of fines and loss of face; consequently, for not producing male heir women were beaten, scorned and ridiculed. In some situations, women who gave birth to girls were divorced and infanticide of girls re-emerged. Child gender was the responsibility of the woman. Chen X from Xiaojia village stated to Patricia Ebrey that “most rural women are afraid to have a girl at the first birth”. These problems for Chinese women became even more visible with the continuation of the One Child Policy and the new economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping.
Deng’s policy of ‘Perestroika’ or economic restructuring meant competitiveness in the world market, downsizing the workforce, and farming for profit brought back old stereotypes which had negative consequences for women. To reduce the workforce in industry, observed Patricia Ebrey, women were asked to take longer leaves, they were first ones to be laid off and last ones to be hired. New firms hired men, paid women less, and promoted them less frequently. A school teacher from British Columbia writes in his e-mail November 15, 2003 that in large centres like Beijing and Shanghai where he works many women are in positions of authority, however, he adds that the same is not true in the countryside. Human Rights Watch has documented evidence that in the countryside women and children are sold by criminal gangs to exploit their labor. The Vancouver Province Sunday, November 16th quotes Xinhua News Agency of the arrest of a “46-member gang in Yunnan province” who “kidnapped and sold more than 150 women and 27 children in six provinces across China”.
Deng’s economic reforms have also led to abuse of both male and female children. Girls in particular are expendable and rural fathers pull them out of school to work on the farm. Children are employed at a lower wage rates, they work in unsafe environments, and they drop out of school early. In a letter to the editor Li Jing, a professional woman with a university diploma, questions why women’s contribution is not recognized by society and why women are excluded from competing for work with others who have the same qualifications. These and other violations were institutionalized due to old Confucian values. For example, writes Spence, Deng Xiaoping economic planning split many families as was the case of Fu Yuehua whose husband was living Hebei province and she was living in Beijing. The head of her work unit made sexual advances and raped her causing her to have a mental breakdown. The court dismissed the charges against the unit chief resulting in Fu leading a street demonstration for which she was arrested and sentenced to a year in jail and the judge called her ‘“morally degenerate.”” From those early days of Deng’s reforms, the government has implemented legal standards but the society has not fully grown into them.
Laws of the People’s Republic of China on the protection of the Rights and interests of Women of 3 April 1992 are clear on the rules in respect to protection of women. Enforcing these rules in such a large and diverse population is difficult, as a result, Women’s Federation provide counselling for abused women and emerging radio hotlines provide advice on harassment and social services help abused women with family problems. More importantly, the government has implemented training programs for police and the judiciary to deal with family violence as a crime. School curriculum has been amended to educate young people on gender roles while the university societies provide legal advice for women. These programs, mostly present in the large urban centres, have not reached into the countryside. In some circles Deng’s policy has brought back the feudal mentality about women but at the same time Chinese society like our own is using education, law and training to eliminate gender bias.
China in 1949 turned centuries of social values on their head. Women’s roles, at least in law, changed from subservience to equal partnership. In a tribal society where men were dominant this new reality did not fit the Confucian moral values. Mao used a ‘bullet to the back of the head’ for drug dealers to make people comply. Even with Mao’s Draconian rules some peasants remained loyal to the old ways. After the death of Mao, Deng introduced economic reforms or ‘perestroika’. In some circles these reforms brought back the ‘one big mountain’ the feudal attitude towards women, including discrimination in the workplace, stereotype, and harassment as well as trafficking in women. To extinguish reemergence of the past abuses China is using Western methods such as education, police reforms, reforms of the judiciary, new laws on equal treatment, and public awareness programs to combat gender bias. In the West some of these programs have become a hindrance to social discourse while in China this is an unending struggle to suppress the return to Confucian moral values where women are treated as property.
Fascinating article. Thank you. Asian history is a gold mine of useful information that relates directly to how the West is run as well – things that are never spoken about, like the alleged drug-running by the CIA and its long-running connection to Chinese triads.
We have old photos of my wife’s grandfather taken with Chiang Kia-chek in China. My wife is a third generation Canadian citizen BTW. The grandfather moved to Canada in about 1914 – the same time England stopped exporting opium into China. The grandfather had a rather elaborate concrete house in the lovely Guangdong province of China, rich farm land, retail spaces in the village, and 4 wives in total. He magnanimously built a bridge over the river leading into the village at one point – it held his name. Safe to say, he was doing quite well for himself there.
It was never clear why he bothered to come to Canada where he lived a down-scale existence – one wife and a modest dry-cleaning business that employed himself and 3 sons. Given the Japanese invasion during WWII and the communist revolution soon thereafter, he became dissociated from his entire prior life there, property included.
Most of the people in my wife’s large extended family seem quite incurious about what the grandfather was up to back in China and the circumstances of his move to Canada. I’m sure they assume it was something shady given the odd circumstances but no one knows the facts. I am the only one in the family who thinks he was deeply involved in the drug trade with Chiang Kia-chek and the triads.
You might find the book by Scott D. Seligman “The First Chinese American” interesting. . The book is about the life of Wong Chin Foo which details the life of Chinese people in America.The made for TV movie “The Warrior” represents some reality of the life of Chinese in America particularly how the Irish treated them as they were both on the low economic rung competing for jobs. The book and the movie are fascinating, one fiction, with lots of truth to it, and the other a Biography.
A few years ago I read two books about Chinese immigrants in British Columbia who lived in Nelson BC. Nelson is a mining town, a jewel. on Kootenay Lake. Nelson is an early settlement in this beautiful province. In a book “The Silver Grill” one of the children of the Wah family a professor of English from Alberta tells the story about his heritage Chinese father and Swedish mother. This was one of the earliest interracial marriages. The mother was disowned by her family but survived the racial intolerance of the day to raise a very successful family.
The other book name escapes me is a story of a Chinese gardener who went door to door selling vegetables to English families. He was never allowed inside the home of the whites. The Chinese were portrayed as ants and oddities, unmarried and lusting for white women. They did not marry because immigration laws and the head tax did not permit them to bring their families to Canada. Many married native women or prostitutes that were smuggled from China into Canada and US during the railway construction . Many had two families one in China and one in US or Canada.
“Having brought seven hundred million citizens out of poverty…,” while that is as may be, you and the Chinese who’ve supplanted The Mandate of Heaven with the doctrine of that Europeanised-Jew, Marx, seem not to know that there are worse things than poverty. Such as ordering a society to satisfy more than the appetites of the stomach. Such a society The Middle Kingdom had for millennia, until the modernist Chinese started to believe their European colonisers: that the best that China could do was to imitate the West. Now that need not have been so bad, except that, instead of Plato, they took their lead from the worst that the West had to offer. This does not say much for the much vaunted Chinese self-reliance and independence, you must admit, that the Chinese, following Mao, took for a paradigm, not Mencius, but that new opiate of a Marxist utopia; a society henceforth dedicated to taking care of the body only. And at what cost, and with what villainy! Now, this “nothing-moreist,” progressist ideology characterises the Modern West in despite of its own millenium-and-a-half Christian civilisation (which it, in its turn, also replaced with the same materialist betrayal; one which now manifests itself as “The Chinese ‘miracle’ of the 21st century). And it is this ideology of Social Darwinism ‘on heroin’ that is responsible for the post-civilisational chaos and barbarism of these closing days of the modern world. Yet, you new masters of China would have us do what exactly? Applaud you as you give the very last of your ch’i to implementing “The White Man’s Way”? Or is this diatribe of yours another Chinese cookie? One which conceals — unlike its more famous cousin — a promise of something more than just anodyne…?
Colophon: If there still is someone left in China skilled in reading the I-Ching, then it would be interesting to ‘see’ how the fortunes of the growing entanglement of Russia with atheistic China will play itself out.
I agree with the majority of the information in this interesting article. Most of it is not new to me. There is some relevant information that it missing, mostly about the present, and I would guess that the omission is due to ideology.
You see, the Communist Party is also completely willing to use triads and gangsters to attain its goals, both on a local level and in the Taiwan situation.
Let me explain. As the author correctly points out, corruption is a major problem in China, and corruption in the CCP is serious and dangerous to the party. Unlike the corruption in the west, where in my view the highest levels of government and politicians are corrupt to the core, the corruption in the CCP is rampant in the lower levels of government, starting at the lowest level (Neighborhood/Township) and moving up through the next two levels (County/District, City) and even up to the Provincial Level. The Chinese culture, with its strong focus on power levels, hierarchies, and total acquiescence and obedience to superiors, makes this corruption move up through the levels. For example, a land developer wants to build some buildings, and he gets approval from the Township and County Officials. Money changes hands. If the corruption occurs at the Township level, money is passed up to the County/District level officials, and more is passed up to the City level officials. This is how the system works. Now let’s say that in their zeal to enrich themselves, the local officials fail to realize that the local farmers are unwilling to give up their land and an entire village protests and arms itself. At this point, the corrupt CCP officials will NOT use local law enforcement to deal with the problem, as it attracts attention. Instead, a group of stick-wielding hard men (organized crime) will descend on the village. This kind of altercation has become very common, and anyone who really looks into the number of local level protests in China will notice that the number has grown to quite high levels.
I must say that I admire President Xi and his lack of tolerance for corruption at the lower levels.
Now, let’s talk about Taiwan, my home. In particular, let’s examine the case of Chang An-lo (張安樂), also knows as the White Wolf. Chang, a former leader of the Bamboo Union triad, fled Taiwan to China (Shenzhen) after being put on a wanted list in Taiwan for organized crime activities. In 2004, Chang started the Chinese Unity Promotion Party, and later started a Taiwan branch of the party. He returned to Taiwan in 2005, during Ma Ying-Jeou’s KMT administration, was arrested and later released on bail. Ma was soundly criticized for the political nature of this release. It is ridiculous to think that Chang An-lo’s entrance into politics and his efforts to influence Taiwan politics doesn’t have the stamp of approval from the CCP and Beijing.
Food for thought.
So those fleeing Hong Kong to the UK and especially to Taiwan are manly members of the Triads which fled originally from Shanghai when Mao took over? Seems like it. Also, they may have been the back-up to the Hong Kong rioters.
There was a book in the 80s called ‘Underground Empire’. It stated, and I witnessed, that the Flying Tigers organization in Taiwan were flying heroin into SFO, San Francisco, in the crew’s duffle bags which had diplomatic immunity. The stuff came from Khun Sa if you know who that was. The stuff then went to the Fairmont Hotel to be broken down and distributed to local dealers. I knew a couple of people, both dead now, who benefitted from this arrangement as did the estimated 50,000 users who lived in the city at that time.
My own mother wound up in an import furniture business with Heinrich ‘Heiny’ Aderholt, part of Air America with Captain Tony. She started having creepy people over for dinner like Oliver North and Richard Secord and Singlaub, the whole pantheon of deluded bastards. I left home at 16 and never went back. My father, a SOG Vietnam vet, bailed too.
The last paragraph of the article contains an error. The Hong Kong government withdrew the extradition bill in September 2019.
Reference
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3025641/hong-kong-leader-carrie-lam-announce-formal-withdrawal