Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia
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Book Reviews Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia Bertil Lintner Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2003, 470pp. ISBN: 1-4039-6154-9. Asian Business & Management (2005) 4, 205–207. doi:10.1057/palgrave.abm.9200099
Some years back, in Hong Kong, I was guest at the Salvation Army headquarters in Kowloon. The British Army had wished to conduct some community welfare activity in a village effectively controlled by a Triad group. It would probably have been hazardous to enter this community without the say-so of the Triad Big Brother, and so this was the first port of call. In the result the Triad group actually welcomed the Army. Although the purist might regard this as an example of the Army compromising itself by dealing with organized evil, a more liberal view, shared by this reviewer, is that this was a sensible accommodation. The Monica Lewinsky sex scandal involving the Clinton presidency overshadowed the much more significant 1996 Donorgate scandal, in which it emerged that Beijing had used gangland figures to funnel money into the Clinton campaign in what was the tip of an iceberg of espionage and organized crime. It transpired that China had a network of businessmen in Canada and the USA who acted as spies to steal industrial and military secrets. It was alleged that this network was run by the intelligence unit of the PLA and Beijing’s Public Security Bureau and bore out the findings of the 1997 ‘Sidewinder’ report of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. CITIC, the China International Trust Investment Company, the largest Chinese company operating internationally, was implicated, as were naturally top Chinese officials. The fallout in Fujian, regarded as China’s Sicily, was 300 arrests and trials, 14 death sentences (three suspended), 12 life sentences and 58 fixed term prison sentences. The best-connected conviction was General Ji Shengde, sentenced to 12 years for his part in the corruption scandal. General Ji was linked to other scandals and was a former head of China’s military intelligence, as well as being reputed to be the link person between the PLA and the ubiquitous gangsters in Macau. With such activity having penetrated the highest reaches of China and the USA, one can imagine the scale of the infiltration. Indeed such activity, it is argued, is an integral and essential aspect of the Chinese economy, with the Triads being the lubrication which oils the State and privatized machine.
Book Reviews
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This book represents a most thorough-going picture and analysis of encyclopaedic proportions. Although this may be regarded as top-rate journalism, it would certainly qualify for the accolade of scholarship and research. It is incredibly difficult to uncover areas of mass criminality and an academic researcher would probably have had to follow a similar trail to the author, who mixes his personal first-hand experience with secondary sources and interviews. A total of 52 pages of references and notes evidence the thoroughness with which this has been done.
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