A conservative friend once said that Communism was evil and that China needed a proper legal system. Since China already has a legal system, what did he mean? I’ve known this individual for decades, and I’m sure he meant that China should have a legal system like the one in America or the U.K. After all, he claims scripture guides his life and the Christian Bible has been around for centuries proving it comes from God. There is no other choice.
The problem with that logic is Confucius walked the earth long before Christ, and the New Testament didn’t exist for centuries after Christ was gone. What Confucius taught has been around longer.
What about China’s legal system? The highest agency in China is the Supreme People’s Procuratorate. This agency is responsible for both prosecution and investigation in the People’s Republic of China. Similar institutions influence the office of the Procurator in the Socialist legal system. Its direct predecessor in China is the Supreme Court of the Republic of China, which in turn is descended from the Procuratorial Office of the late Qing Dynasty.
China's Supreme Court
The Chinese legal system may have been broken during Mao’s Cultural Revolution but not any longer. It also appears that China’s legal system is an organic institution capable of change as seen in this piece from the Dui Hua Human Rights Journal.
This series of posts about the legal system in China started with Officer in Action http://wp.me/pN4pY-ho
“There is nothing wrong with thanking your father and mother, but you should thank your country first,” Yu Zaiqing, China’s State Sports deputy director said. “You have to put the country ahead of your parents.” Source: Vancouver Sun
Yu Zaiqing
What Yu probably meant was “community” instead of “country”. The rest of the piece in the Vancouver Sun goes on with more examples of wrong thinking (by Western standards) from Chinese officials. I disagree with the opinions of the journalist, who wrote the piece, Aileen McCabe, Canwest News Asia Correspondent. Her ignorance of Chinese culture shines.
The reason I disagree is because of Confucius (551-470 B.C.E.), who is considered the founder of China’s ethical and moral system based on the family and his Five Great Relationships. These values have been learned from the family and the community for more than two millennia.
1. between ruler and subject
2. father and son
3. husband and wife
4. elder and younger brother
5. friend and friend
Did you notice the first of Confucius’s relationships? There’s a reason it is number one. Is China supposed to throw out its two thousand years of behavior and thought because a foreigner does not approve?
The first post in this series about Chinese law was Officer in Action http://wp.me/pN4pY-ho
Language is a powerful tool. When abused by the media or “any” political agenda, the audience is misled and forms incorrect opinions. The Western media often judges actions in China based on Western law from a Judeo-Christian foundation.
Chinese law uses the Chinese Constitution as its basis—not the American Constitution.
China’s Legal System weighs the Law from different values
When the legal system in China arrests and finds political activists guilty, consider Article 28 from China’s Constitution. “The State maintains public order and suppresses treasonable and other counter-revolutionary activities; it penalizes acts that endanger public security and disrupt the socialist economy and other criminal activities, and punishes and reforms criminals”.
If you are not a Chinese citizen and you do not agree, don’t go to China. Understand that Chinese criminal law uses a mixture of Legalism, Confucius, Marxist, and a Leninist, Maoist philosophy as its guide in addition to being modeled on German Law.
Since 1979, China has educated its people about the law in the universities and other education institutions like the primary, middle and high schools. China has also publicized information about their legal system through the China Law Journal and many provincial and municipal journals, magazines, and newspapers. Public lectures are often organized in factories, mines, and rural communes in order to increase the people’s understanding of China’s Constitution and laws. Chinese citizens probably understand their country’s law better than most Americans do.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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While in Beijing one year, a friend of my wife’s shared gossip about a neighbor. The neighbor was a single man in his forties. His former girl friend was in her early twenties, who called the police from his apartment.
Chinese Police in Action with a Murder Suspect
“He raped me. Arrest and punish him,” she said to the officer. All the neighbors crowded in the hall outside the open door. The officer heard both sides. There was no rape. It turned out that the woman had discovered he had another girlfriend.
“He asked me to strip,” she said. “He is corrupt.”
The officer studied her and then the man—the woman was taller and twenty pounds heavier. “You have legs. You could leave. But you stripped. Is that correct?” There was the sound of laugher from the hallway audience.
She nodded.
“No laws have been broken. He is a single man and can date anyone he likes. You could have said no. If you feel that you have been abused, there’s a woman’s organization that will help you. Do you want the phone number?”
“I already went to them. They won’t punish him either.”
The officer shook his head. “You will never come to this apartment again,” the officer said, as he wrote his verdict in a notebook.
China’s police do not have to read a suspected criminal his or her Miranda rights. In China, The police have more power. We often hear about China’s human rights violations. Read China’s response in China chides U.S. on rights record.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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For two thousand years, secret societies have been part of Chinese culture.
Most of these secret societies were harmless but a few were highly organized criminal organizations. Under emperors and Communists, in war and peace, Chinese crime lords have acted as shadow governments with their own laws and severe forms of punishment.
In recent decades, Chinese gangs have moved into major American cities competing with Russian gangs, Italians, Sicilians, Ukrainians, Japanese, Latinos, etc. Today, these gangs deal in more than gambling and drugs. They deal in human trafficking too.
Was she the Godfather of Chinese organized crime or a Robin Hood?
Over the last few decades, the business of smuggling people into the US by Chinese organized crime has boomed.
Many poor Chinese want to start a new life in the United States, which is known as Gold Mountain.
However, the risks are big and costly. Each person may have to pay as much as 40 thousand dollars to the smugglers often ending in a form of slavery in America until the debt is paid.
Kingman Wong of the FBI says these smugglers are like the flu because they are always mutating their methods and alliances to find new ways to smuggle illegal aliens in to the US. There are hundreds of independent groups operating like this around the globe.
However, the beginnings of all this illegal activity may be traced to one group from the past — the Triads. The first such group was known as the “Heaven and Earth Association” and may have started in 1761 AD.
A myth says that China’s Triads started with a group of Buddhist monks that were martial arts experts who went to the assistance of a Qing Emperor to defeat an enemy.
Later, after defeating this enemy, the emperor decided to get rid of these monks since he saw them as a future threat.
After the assassination of hundreds of monks, a handful survived and started the secret societies known as the “Heaven and Earth Association”.
However, the myth of the Buddhist monks is only a legend. The truth is that the Triads (organized crime in China) didn’t start from such a noble cause.
FBI Unit Chief Kingman Wong says that Chinese organized crime members identify themselves with these ancient heroes in order to glamorize their criminal activities.
According to scholars, the true story of the Triads starts during the 1700s in Fujian province along China’s southeast coast facing Taiwan.
Dian Murray, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, says that Fujian province was China’s Wild West. For protection, young men banded together in mutual aid societies. Soon, these societies turned to crime.
The “Heaven and Earth Association” took for its emblem an equilateral triangle, which explains why these gangs are called the Triads in the West.
There was no central figure or mob boss that controlled the Triad gangs, which were similar to America’s street gangs of today.
Then in 1787, the Qing Emperor discovered the existence of these gangs and declared war.
However, to survive, the Triads in Fujian province spread to every corner of the Qing Empire, to Southeast Asia and America’s China towns where they sold drugs and dealt in prostitution and gambling.
In time, one gang, known as the Green Gang, controlled the opium trade and Shanghai in the early 1900s. The Green Gang was involved in every criminal activity.
At the center of the Green Gang’s metamorphosis was one man. His name was Du Yue-sheng. Du grew up an orphan and illiterate near Shanghai.
When Du was fourteen, he arrived in Shanghai and spent the money he earned on opium and women. In 1910, Du was sworn into the Green Gang.
Du lived and worked out of the French Concession in Shanghai where the police were the criminals.
In 1924, Du had an opportunity to become the leader of the Green Gang when the current leader, Wong, had the son of a powerful warlord beaten. The warlord then had Wong arrested and tossed in prison.
Du paid the warlord to free Wong, who then owed Du a debt of gratitude. From that day on, Du controlled the Green Gang.
Du Yue-sheng, godfather of the underworld—45 minute documentary
In 1927, General Chiang Kai-shek made a deal with the Triad Du controlled to destroy the Communists in Shanghai who were organizing labor unions.
Frederick Wakeman, a historian at the University of California-Berkeley says that Du was threatened with the possibility of a Communist victory.
Thousands of Green Gang members went after the Communists to shoot and behead as many as possible. Within hours, at least five thousand Communists had been executed.
As a reward, Chiang Kai-shek made Du a general in the Nationalist Army. Du’s public image became one of respectability while he maintained an iron control over Shanghai and the Green Gang.
For Chiang Kai-shek, the alliance with Du and the Green Gang became a useful way to raise money from Shanghai’s wealthy families.
Du was also in charge of the agency to stop the opium trade in Shanghai and he controlled the drugs seized by the Nationalists, which he would sell making a huge profit.
In 1937, Japan invaded China. On August 14, the Japanese launched a fierce assault on Shanghai. Chinese refugees fled to the foreign concessions hoping to be safe.
Du Yue-sheng had his Green Gang fight alongside Nationalist troops against the Japanese.
Three months later, Shanghai fell and Du fled to Hong Kong, and the Triads would never be the same.
A month after the end of World War II, in 1945, Du returned to Shanghai.
Any respect and fear he’d earned before the war had been lost. The Shanghainese saw him as a coward for running away from the Japanese and booed him when he was seen on the streets.
When the Communists won in 1949, broken and unhealthy, Du fled to Hong Kong and died there in 1951 at 66. The Communist Revolution ended the Green Gang in Shanghai.
Asian Crime Gangs in the US:43:47 min.
The Chinese Communists didn’t destroy China’s criminal underworld. With hundreds of gangs operating in other countries, the leadership of the gangs left mainland China.
In time, New York’s Chinatown would become the center of the Chinese Triads in the US.
In 1977, on Mott St. in the heart of New York’s Chinatown, a war raged between the Chinese gangs. One Chinatown gang boss, Nicky Louie, became the most feared gangster in New York’s Chinatown.
Nicky arrived in New York’s Chinatown in the 1960s along with tens of thousands of other Chinese soon after Congress changed the Chinese Exclusion Act allowing more Chinese into the US.
Work was hard to come by, so young Chinese men organized street gangs modeled after the same gangs from China that the Communists had destroyed.
Nicky, ruthless and smart, quickly became the leader of a Triad gang called the Ghost Shadows.
Under Nicky’s leadership, the Ghost Shadows became more powerful and ruthless. However, Nicky wanted to control all of Chinatown. Success then made Nicky a target and he was shot many times but survived.
During one assassination attempt from one of his gangsters, Nicky Louie was shot in the head but managed to run to the police station to save himself.
He agreed to work with the police and the federal prosecutors.
However, to gain the government’s protection, he had to admit to his own crimes and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
This led to the end of the era of New York’s Chinatown Triads.
Today in the U.S., the Chinese Triads consist of an elusive array of constantly changing alliances among many small gangs scattered across the country.
The only bond between the gangs is the desire for making money. These Triads are involved in everything from human trafficking and gambling, to heroin smuggling.
For the first time, the Chinese American Triads are moving beyond the Chinese community and are willing to work with anyone as long as they make money.
FBI Unit Chief Kingman Wong says this makes the Triads in the U.S. a more significant threat to the safety of American citizens.
It’s not easy to define Chinese organized crime today. The Triads are difficult to penetrate.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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