Partners in Crime

I was inter­view­ing Hong Kong tycoon Albert Yeung in his office on a recent after­noon when he sud­den­ly changed the sub­ject to ask whether I knew that his fore­bears had come from Chiu Chow, a region in south Chi­na famous for breed­ing tough guys. A Chiu Chow is the Chi­nese equiv­a­lent of a Sicil­ian. I took the bait, and told Yeung that some peo­ple had advised me to stay away from him because he was reput­ed to be a dan­ger­ous man. He did not even try to con­ceal his delight. “Do I look dan­ger­ous to you?” he asked, with a mis­chie­vous laugh.
     Yeung is the chair­man of Emper­or Group, a huge Hong Kong con­sor­tium involved in real estate, finan­cial ser­vices, watch­es and jew­el­ry, pub­lish­ing and oth­er busi­ness­es. He does not look dan­ger­ous. He is 52, a small man, live­ly, with a boy­ish face. If he looks any­thing, it’s rich. He wears hand-tai­lored suits and shirts and A. Testoni shoes that cost as much as $2,000 a pair. He owns a fleet of Rolls-Royces and Mer­cedes, all with expen­sive license plates. (Hong Kong busi­ness­men are big on lucky num­bers, and cov­et­ed plates are auc­tioned to the high­est bid­der.) In March 1994, Yeung paid $1.7 mil­lion for a plate bear­ing the sin­gle dig­it “9,” which was con­sid­ered espe­cial­ly lucky because the Can­tonese word for nine sounds like the word for dog, and it was the Year of the Dog.
     But Yeung’s rep­u­ta­tion, at least to some, is indeed that of a dan­ger­ous man. Emper­or is Hong Kong’s lead­ing play­er in the for­eign exchange mar­ket, and one of Yeung’s top cur­ren­cy traders was a man named Michael Lam. In Novem­ber 1994, Lam went to work for a com­peti­tor of Yeung’s. On Decem­ber 9, Lam returned to his old office at Emper­or to ask for unpaid salary and bonus­es, and was told to meet Yeung that evening at the Man­darin Ori­en­tal Hotel. Lam and oth­er eye­wit­ness­es lat­er informed the police that the meet­ing turned ugly. “You are a bloody guy,” Yeung was report­ed to have told Lam, seething. “You will lose your left leg.” Yeung alleged­ly escort­ed Lam out of the hotel with his arm around Lam’s shoulder—a sig­nal of peace to a group of men sur­round­ing the hotel. “Oth­er­wise,” Yeung is said to have warned Lam, “my guys out­side will put you in real trou­ble.”
     The men sur­round­ing the hotel were believed to be tri­ads, so-named for their mem­ber­ship in Chi­nese secret tri­ad soci­eties. Tri­ads are the world’s largest crim­i­nal fra­ter­ni­ty, and Hong Kong, with four major tri­ad soci­eties and numer­ous small­er ones, is home to more eth­nic Chi­nese gang­sters than any­where else on earth. One soci­ety, the Sun Yee On, has by itself at least 30,000 mem­bers, and pos­si­bly 60,000. The low esti­mate is larg­er than the Hong Kong Police Force, and the high esti­mate is equal to near­ly one out of every fifty males in Hong Kong. (Women can’t be tri­ads, but boys as young as 10 are recruit­ed by all the major soci­eties.) Apart from run­ning the rack­ets in Hong Kong—illegal gam­bling and pros­ti­tu­tion, for instance—triads are active in legit­i­mate enter­pris­es, such as the prop­er­ty mar­ket and pub­lic trans­porta­tion. Mean­while, their pow­er­ful influ­ence is felt world­wide in coun­ter­feit­ing, arms deal­ing, alien smug­gling and mon­ey laun­der­ing. Hong Kong is a key tran­sit point for the South­east Asian hero­in and metham­phet­a­mine that pour into the Unit­ed States, and tri­ads play a key role in the drugs’ trans­ship­ment. Tri­ad soci­eties are more loose­ly struc­tured than Mafia fam­i­lies; the ben­e­fit of mem­ber­ship is sol­i­dar­i­ty, the ease of find­ing crim­i­nal part­ners and the threat that one’s tri­ad broth­ers can be called upon to per­form acts of vio­lence. And tri­ad vio­lence tends to be grue­some because of a tra­di­tion of using a meat cleaver, or “chop­per”; the chop­ping off of one or anoth­er limb is a trade­mark tri­ad method of reg­is­ter­ing dis­ap­proval.
     Michael Lam there­fore may have had good rea­son to fear for his leg. As it turned out, he suf­fered no seri­ous bod­i­ly harm, but he told the police that his ordeal con­tin­ued after he left the hotel. He said he was escort­ed back to his old office, where he was held cap­tive overnight and forced to kneel and serve tea. To fur­ther humil­i­ate him, he claimed, Yeung threat­ened to order the most junior employ­ee on the premis­es to slap Lam twice in the face.
     The fol­low­ing day, Decem­ber 11, Lam’s new boss tipped off the police, and five eye­wit­ness­es from the hotel and the office, includ­ing Lam, were prompt­ly sum­moned to give state­ments. The police were already famil­iar with Albert Yeung. Accord­ing to press reports, in 1980, Yeung, then a mem­ber of the Roy­al Hong Kong Jock­ey Club, tried to per­suade the vic­tim of an assault by a jock­ey not to tes­ti­fy and spent six months in jail for attempt­ing to per­vert the course of jus­tice. In 1986, he was con­vict­ed of ille­gal book­mak­ing and giv­en a sus­pend­ed sen­tence of six months. In March 1994, for­mer Brook­lyn Con­gress­man Stephen J. Solarz was forced to with­draw his bid to become U.S. ambas­sador to India because he’d had busi­ness deal­ings with Yeung. Solarz protest­ed that he had believed Yeung to be “total­ly respectable,” until the Amer­i­can con­sul in Hong Kong told him that Yeung was a tri­ad. Solarz says he con­firmed this accu­sa­tion to his sat­is­fac­tion and imme­di­ate­ly sev­ered all ties to Yeung. Yeung denies that he is a tri­ad, or that he is involved in crim­i­nal activ­i­ties, and he attrib­ut­es the charge to “jeal­ousy” over his suc­cess in busi­ness.
     Three days after Lam went to the police, Yeung was relax­ing at a karaoke chib with one of Emperor’s busi­ness part­ners, the film star Jack­ie Chan, when he was arrest­ed by offi­cers from the Orga­nized Crime and Tri­ad Bureau and charged with crim­i­nal intim­i­da­tion and false impris­on­ment. He went on tri­al the fol­low­ing May. Lam was the first eye­wit­ness to be called, and he proved use­less to the pros­e­cu­tion. He said his heart was beat­ing fast, and added, “I am very fright­ened. I do not want to give evi­dence.” The next eye­wit­ness, a friend of Lam’s who had pro­vid­ed a detailed state­ment to the police just five months ear­li­er, claimed he could no longer remem­ber the incident—his mem­o­ry, he said, had been impaired by an anes­thet­ic he’d been giv­en to treat a foot­ball injury. After the oth­er three eye­wit­ness­es also com­plained of mem­o­ry loss, the judge dis­missed the charges, declar­ing, “I can­not be sure jus­tice has been done.” The press was sar­cas­tic. “To have five cas­es of amne­sia in two days is ter­ri­ble,” edi­to­ri­al­ized the South Chi­na Morn­ing Post, Hong Kong’s largest Eng­lish-lan­guage dai­ly.
     Per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant aspect of the entire affair nev­er made it into the press. Ear­li­er this year, I met pri­vate­ly with one of the offi­cers who arrest­ed Yeung, and he explained why the police wait­ed three full days to take action. “That’s how long it took for me to get per­mis­sion to arrest Albert,” he told me, in tones of dis­gust. “In spite of the bla­tant nature of the offense, the boss want­ed to get legal advice first. And when Albert was led away, a police inspec­tor actu­al­ly uncuffed him. This is the police force we’re fac­ing now”—that is, in the days lead­ing up to Hong Kong’s return to Chi­nese sov­er­eign­ty. Why was Yeung, who had done jail time in the past, accord­ed such spe­cial treat­ment? This reput­ed orga­nized-crime fig­ure has become rather tight with the men who run the People’s Repub­lic of Chi­na and who will, after July 1, gain sov­er­eign­ty over Hong Kong. Indeed, Yeung’s arrest was incon­ve­nient­ly timed—it caused Bei­jing to hasti­ly can­cel a sched­uled meet­ing between Yeung and Pres­i­dent Jiang Zemin.
     Bei­jing seems to have for­giv­en Yeung for that small embar­rass­ment. When I vis­it­ed Yeung, he hand­ed me Emperor’s glossy brochure, which was filled with pho­tographs of him­self pos­ing with senior offi­cials of the cen­tral Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, some of whom are his busi­ness part­ners. Yeung has been cul­ti­vat­ing his rela­tion­ships with top Chi­nese gov­ern­ment and par­ty offi­cials for years. He recalled to me the pro­pi­tious time when he began his courtship, short­ly after the Tianan­men Square mas­sacre of June 4, 1989: “Chi­na is in very bad shape. Nobody want­ed to be their friend. But we go there, one of the big tycoon from Hong Kong, and start to make friends with the top peo­ple, and invest mon­ey there. And they appre­ci­ate this.” One of those appre­cia­tive friends is Xiao Yang, China’s min­is­ter of jus­tice. In Novem­ber 1992, Yeung host­ed a ban­quet in the Great Hall of the Peo­ple in Bei­jing to cel­e­brate the launch of the first pri­vate bank in the his­to­ry of the People’s Repub­lic, which Emper­or and a sub­sidiary of the Min­istry of Jus­tice own togeth­er. The fol­low­ing June, the min­istry became the sec­ond-largest stock­hold­er, after Yeung him­self, in Emper­or Inter­na­tion­al Group, the pub­licly trad­ed part of Emper­or Group; it pur­chased 84 mil­lion shares, rep­re­sent­ing 4.74 per­cent of the company’s enlarged cap­i­tal. Yeung told me that when the min­istry asked to buy the stock, he broke the news to Hong Kong’s Secu­ri­ties and Futures Com­mis­sion, which had barred him from over­see­ing his own finan­cial ser­vices divi­sion because of his crim­i­nal record. “They didn’t believe it,” he said, laugh­ing. Yeung car­ries his busi­ness rela­tion­ships with the high­est offi­cials in the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment as a shield against his doubters. With neat­ly cir­cu­lar log­ic, he argues that his influ­en­tial friend­ships prove that he is a fit fig­ure with whom to be friends. “If I’m a crim­i­nal, if I’m a tri­ad,” he asks, tri­umphant­ly, “how can they trust me?”

EASILY, it turns out. Of all of the treach­er­ous aspects of Hong Kong’s reuni­fi­ca­tion with Chi­na, the most treacherous—and the least noticed—is that it will seal what amounts to a coop­er­a­tion pact between the tri­ad soci­eties and the Com­mu­nist Par­ty. This dread­ful alliance, of the world’s largest crim­i­nal under­ground and the world’s last great total­i­tar­i­an pow­er, has received sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle atten­tion in this coun­try, even though the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment has iden­ti­fied tri­ad rack­e­teer­ing as a sig­nif­i­cant glob­al threat. Even more omi­nous­ly, this alliance is not acci­den­tal. It was part of Deng Xiaoping’s reuni­fi­ca­tion plan for Hong Kong from the very begin­ning, and dates from the ear­ly 1980s, when Chi­na and Britain were nego­ti­at­ing the return of Hong Kong to the main­land in 1997.
     We know this because this past May, Wong Man-fong, the for­mer deputy sec­re­tary-gen­er­al of Xin­hua, China’s news agency in Hong Kong (which reput­ed­ly acts as a de fac­to embassy), admit­ted it dur­ing a forum at Hong Kong’s Bap­tist Uni­ver­si­ty. Wong said that in the ear­ly 1980s, at Beijing’s behest, he “befriend­ed” Hong Kong’s tri­ad boss­es and made them an offer they could not refuse: Chi­na would turn a blind eye to their ille­gal activ­i­ties if they would promise to keep peace after the han­dover. “I told them that, if they did not dis­rupt Hong Kong’s sta­bil­i­ty, we would not stop them from mak­ing mon­ey,” Wong said. No one knows why Wong made this astound­ing dis­clo­sure about China’s secret deal­ings with crime boss­es, but there is even more to the sto­ry than he acknowl­edged. In the past few years, Hong Kong tri­ads, embold­ened by their friend­ship with the Com­mu­nist Par­ty, have expand­ed their ille­gal activ­i­ties into Chi­na. Today, the four major tri­ad soci­eties of Hong Kong—the Sun Yee On, the 14K, the Wo Shing Wo and the Wo Hop To—have out­posts in Bei­jing, Shang­hai, Shen­zhen and oth­er main­land cities, and are expand­ing in size and pow­er at an impres­sive rate.
     The West’s appar­ent blind­ness to the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of a work­ing alliance between a great pow­er and a great crim­i­nal net­work is strik­ing for its per­sis­tence. Deng had been open­ly hint­ing at an under­world accord for years. In Sep­tem­ber 1983 and June 1984, while Chi­na was still nego­ti­at­ing with Britain to regain Hong Kong, and again in ear­ly Octo­ber 1984, only days after a han­dover agree­ment had been reached, he made remarks about tri­ads at the Great Hall of the Peo­ple that were sur­pris­ing­ly and point­ed­ly pos­i­tive. On each occa­sion, he promised that Chi­na would allow Hong Kong to gov­ern itself as long as its admin­is­tra­tors were Chi­nese “patri­ots” who cher­ished the main­land; and each time, he spon­ta­neous­ly brought up the sub­ject of the tri­ad soci­eties, whose pow­er in Hong Kong, he point­ed out, was “very great.” Of course, he said, not all tri­ads were bad. Many of them were good. Many of them, he said, were patri­ot­ic.
     At the time, a lot of peo­ple dis­missed this as an old man’s mys­te­ri­ous mum­bling. Patri­ot­ic gang­sters? It was true that tri­ads had orig­i­nat­ed as a nation­al­ist move­ment, but that was long ago. The first tri­ads, accord­ing to leg­end, were sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry monks intent on over­throw­ing the Manchus, who had con­quered Chi­na in 1644 and estab­lished the Qing Dynasty. (To this day, tri­ads lean heav­i­ly toward Bud­dhist mys­ti­cism.) By the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, the Manchus were still in pow­er, and the tri­ad move­ment had large­ly degen­er­at­ed into a crim­i­nal under­ground, based pri­mar­i­ly in Hong Kong and Shang­hai. The Qing Dynasty was top­pled at long last in 1911, when Dr. Sun Yat-sen—himself a triad—and his fol­low­ers estab­lished the Repub­lic of Chi­na. In 1927, anoth­er tri­ad-turned-polit­i­cal-leader, Chi­ang Kai-shek, recruit­ed mem­bers of his Shang­hai tri­ad soci­ety, the mur­der­ous Green Gang, to put down China’s emerg­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty; in April of that year, the Green Gang slaugh­tered Com­mu­nists by the hun­dreds. When the Com­mu­nists final­ly seized pow­er in 1949, hordes of Shang­hai tri­ads fled for their lives to Hong Kong, estab­lish­ing that ter­ri­to­ry once and for all as the world head­quar­ters of Chi­nese orga­nized crime. After that, the tri­ad soci­eties of Hong Kong, with few excep­tions, pro­fessed alle­giance to the Repub­lic of Tai­wan and regard­ed the Com­mu­nist Par­ty as a bit­ter ide­o­log­i­cal ene­my. So, in spite of Deng’s cryp­tic com­ments, Hong Kong savants pre­dict­ed for years that, by the time Chi­na took over Hong Kong, the tri­ads would have fled a Com­mu­nist crack­down by emi­grat­ing to the four cor­ners of the world.
     The experts over­looked Deng’s prag­ma­tism. One of his best-known say­ings was “It doesn’t mat­ter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catch­es mice.” He appar­ent­ly rea­soned that the tri­ads were too sig­nif­i­cant a pow­er in Hong Kong to be ignored, and that their tra­di­tion­al ties to Tai­wan made them unpre­dictable, but that, for­tu­nate­ly, they could be bought. So he bought them: the Sun Yee On, the largest Hong Kong tri­ad soci­ety, no longer requires ini­ti­ates to pledge alle­giance to Tai­wan; now it is to the People’s Repub­lic of Chi­na that they swear.
     Deng was also a great believ­er in crony cap­i­tal­ism. (Anoth­er of his famous say­ings, “To get rich is glo­ri­ous,” sounds a lot less like Com­mu­nist ide­ol­o­gy than it does the tri­ad cre­do.) Since the ear­ly 1980s, a num­ber of gov­ern­ment depart­ments have been allowed to invest in pri­vate enter­prise, with busi­ness part­ners of their choos­ing, even from out­side Chi­na. Among the depart­ments that have done so are the Min­istry of Jus­tice; the Pub­lic Secu­ri­ty Bureau, China’s nation­al police force; and the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, China’s mil­i­tary. The PLA in par­tic­u­lar has pur­sued Deng’s get-rich phi­los­o­phy with a vengeance—its multi­bil­lion-dol­lar port­fo­lio includes hotels, cel­lu­lar-phone net­works, air­lines and pro-bas­ket­ball teams. It has been wide­ly report­ed (see “The Betray­al of Hong Kong” by Stan Sess­er, TNR, March 10) that Hong Kong’s mer­chant class has invest­ed heav­i­ly with main­land offi­cials and cadres as a means of estab­lish­ing good guanxi—the Man­darin word for “polit­i­cal con­nec­tions.” It is less well known that Hong Kong’s gang­ster class has done the same.

AMONG the most pop­u­lar ven­tures shared by Chi­nese offi­cials and Hong Kong tri­ads are the busi­ness­es that tri­ads know best—nightclubs, karaoke bars and broth­els. In Shang­hai, where the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army owns a string of night­clubs with the Sun Yee On tri­ad soci­ety, and where the Pub­lic Secu­ri­ty Bureau oper­ates sev­er­al high-class hous­es of pros­ti­tu­tion (includ­ing one called the Pro­tect­ed Secret Club), the par­al­lels to the roar­ing ‘20s are unmis­tak­able. In those days, the mil­i­tary and the police joined with the Green Gang in the very same endeav­ors.
Shen­zhen, the south Chi­na city just across the bor­der from Hong Kong, is the largest out­post for tri­ads oper­at­ing in the main­land. Called “the city that Deng built,” Shen­zhen became the late chairman’s first lab­o­ra­to­ry of exper­i­men­tal cap­i­tal­ism in 1979. Since then, it has been utter­ly trans­formed, from a qui­et vil­lage of rice pad­dies to a noisy, boom­ing metrop­o­lis of 3.5 mil­lion peo­ple, replete with sky­scrap­ers, shop­ping malls, dis­cos, high-tech man­u­fac­tur­ing, a stock exchange and even a Dis­ney­land-style theme park. It has also expe­ri­enced a dizzy­ing rise in vio­lent crime and drug abuse, and has some of the pushi­est hook­ers in the world. Here, too, the tri­ad pimps are oper­at­ing with the gov­ern­ment. In a recent issue of Apple Dai­ly, Hong Kong’s lead­ing Chi­nese-lan­guage news­pa­per, a reput­ed mem­ber of the 14K tri­ad soci­ety boast­ed that he and his tri­ad broth­ers had estab­lished “ter­rif­ic guanxi” with Com­mu­nist offi­cials, and cit­ed a thriv­ing part­ner­ship in cross-bor­der pros­ti­tu­tion.
     Vice rack­ets are not the only such part­ner­ships. Chi­nese offi­cials and Hong Kong tri­ads are believed to have joined hands in smug­gling con­tra­band in and out of China—from ille­gal aliens, stolen cars and boot­leg cig­a­rettes to more mun­dane items like air con­di­tion­ers. One author­i­ty on tri­ads says the “great fear” of the Hong Kong police is arms smug­gling by tri­ads in alliance with the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army. “You can’t arrest a PLA offi­cer; you can’t even stop and search their wag­ons at the bor­der,” he says. It is pos­si­ble that the worst scenario—heroin traf­fick­ers in league with main­land officials—will not occur, because the Com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment will draw the line some­where. But no one real­ly knows.
     Nor is there any rea­son to think that the tri­ads’ role in the main­land will be lim­it­ed to mon­ey­mak­ing ven­tures. In the after­math of the Tianan­men mas­sacre, a stag­ger­ing num­ber of Hong Kong citizens—as many as 1 mil­lion, or about one-sixth of the total population—marched in the streets. The protests dra­mat­i­cal­ly altered China’s view of Hong Kong, which until then had been seen as apo­lit­i­cal and con­cerned only with busi­ness. It was then, some believe, that Chi­na began look­ing seri­ous­ly at tri­ads not mere­ly as investors, but as a means for main­tain­ing social order. Some peo­ple are wor­ried that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment may try to use the tri­ad soci­eties of Hong Kong in the way that Chi­ang Kai-shek used the Green Gang—as secret police.
     It is not a friv­o­lous con­cern. Robert Youill, a for­mer detec­tive inspec­tor with the Hong Kong Police Force, and now a pri­vate eye for the Pinker­ton agency in Hong Kong, told me that a few years ago he arrest­ed a tri­ad on a black­mail charge, and that “the guy spilled his guts, and admit­ted he was a spy for Xin­hua, the Chi­na news agency.” Lai Ting-yiu, the deputy edi­tor-in-chief of Next mag­a­zine, Hong Kong’s largest newsweek­ly, fore­sees tri­ads being used by the main­land to rig dis­trict elec­tions in Hong Kong, and to kid­nap peo­ple the Com­mu­nist Par­ty wish­es to pun­ish. The lat­ter may already have occurred: in 1993, James Peng, a nat­u­ral­ized Aus­tralian born in Chi­na, was abduct­ed from a hotel room in Macao and brought to Shen­zhen to stand tri­al for fraud—though his real crime, it appeared, was that he had offend­ed a for­mer busi­ness part­ner, Deng Xiaoping’s niece. He got eigh­teen years in jail. His kid­nap­pers were believed to be mem­bers of the 14K tri­ad society.

FOR THE UNITED STATES and oth­er parts of the world, China’s accord with orga­nized crime is cause for con­sid­er­able alarm—triads are great exporters of mis­ery. For Hong Kong, the con­se­quences may be more imme­di­ate: the rule of law can­not long sur­vive such an arrange­ment. Deng had vowed that Hong Kong’s legal sys­tem and judi­cia­ry would remain essen­tial­ly inde­pen­dent of Chi­na for fifty years after the han­dover, and his promise of “one coun­try, two sys­tems” was cod­i­fied in the Basic Law, the con­sti­tu­tion draft­ed by Chi­na and Britain to serve Hong Kong until the year 2047. Yet China’s recog­ni­tion of “good” and “patri­ot­ic” tri­ads is itself an assault on the legal sys­tem of Hong Kong, where mere mem­ber­ship in a tri­ad soci­ety has been ille­gal since 1845.
     The dis­clo­sure this past May about Beijing’s secret par­lay with tri­ad boss­es pro­voked anger and dis­be­lief in Hong Kong. The ter­ri­to­ry sup­pos­ed­ly had grown com­pla­cent about its tri­ad soci­eties, because street crime in Hong Kong is rel­a­tive­ly low, and because tri­ads are said most­ly to kill and maim one anoth­er. But the com­pla­cen­cy is a myth, and so is the notion that the inno­cent are spared from tri­ad vio­lence. In Jan­u­ary, young Sun Yee On mem­bers got into a ter­ri­to­r­i­al dis­pute with young mem­bers of the Wo Shing Wo and fire­bombed a karaoke club in the Kowloon dis­trict of Hong Kong. Sev­en­teen peo­ple died. In May of last year, two days before the launch of a gos­sipy new Hong Kong mag­a­zine called Sur­prise Week­ly, two well-dressed men walked into the office of the pub­lish­er, Leung Tin-wai, escort­ed him to the con­fer­ence room, closed the door and sev­ered his left fore­arm with a chop­per. The debut issue of Sur­prise Week­ly was pub­lished on sched­ule, but a tri­ad-relat­ed arti­cle was omit­ted. The pub­lic was out­raged.
     Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong’s incom­ing chief executive—handpicked by China—has made no pub­lic com­ment about the tri­ad soci­eties, and he declined to be inter­viewed for this arti­cle. But Tung seems far more inter­est­ed in crack­ing down on “sub­ver­sives” like Mar­tin Lee, the elo­quent bar­ris­ter who heads Hong Kong’s pro-human rights and pro-civ­il lib­er­ties Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, and who is an out­spo­ken advo­cate for the rule of law, than on orga­nized crime. Tung has already warned Lee that his pub­lic pro­nounce­ments crit­i­cal of Chi­na will be “care­ful­ly read and interpreted”—a chill­ing admo­ni­tion, in light of Arti­cle 23 of the Basic Law, which will make sedi­tion against the main­land a crime in Hong Kong.
     Tung’s new­ly appoint­ed attor­ney gen­er­al, Elsie Leung, mean­while, seems unlike­ly to prove much of a tri­ad-fight­er. Leung has no back­ground in crim­i­nal law; she is a fam­i­ly lawyer who got her law degree by cor­re­spon­dence course. Her qual­i­fi­ca­tion for attor­ney gen­er­al, it seems, is her love of Chi­na. She is a found­ing mem­ber of a pro-Chi­na polit­i­cal par­ty and a mem­ber of the Nation­al People’s Con­gress, China’s rub­ber-stamp par­lia­ment, which meets reg­u­lar­ly in Bei­jing. Leung claims to see no con­flict of inter­est in serv­ing both as Hong Kong’s top law offi­cial and China’s appa­ratchik. Five days after being appoint­ed attor­ney gen­er­al, she warned that, after the han­dover, it may be ille­gal in Hong Kong to chant “Down with Li Peng”—China’s prime min­is­ter, who played a cen­tral role in the Tianan­men mas­sacre. It appears that Hong Kong will soon be a safer place for “patri­ot­ic” gang­sters than “unpa­tri­ot­ic” barristers.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, morale is rather low these days at the Orga­nized Crime and Tri­ad Bureau (OCTB) of the Hong Kong Police Force. Many of the bureau’s vet­er­ans to whom I spoke ear­li­er this year had recent­ly quit that branch of the force, or had left the force alto­geth­er. “The crim­i­nals are gain­ing an upper hand over the police, and doing it quite quick­ly,” one for­mer OCTB offi­cer told me. Those who remain in the anti-tri­ad bureau may soon find that a lot of senior tri­ad office-bear­ers are sim­ply untouch­able. Ken­neth Yates, a Toron­to police detec­tive, has han­dled a num­ber of South­east Asian hero­in cas­es with the help of the Hong Kong Police Force, which he describes as “the most pro­fes­sion­al and effi­cient police agency I’ve ever dealt with.” But come the han­dover, he says, “You can see what’s going to hap­pen, and it’s very sad. If they arrest some­body, and some bureau­crat from Chi­na says, ‘You drop the charges on that guy,’ they’ll have to do it. We know it and they know it.”
     To make mat­ters worse, the British offi­cers who used to hold many of the senior posts on the police force have depart­ed in droves. In antic­i­pa­tion of the han­dover, all branch­es of Hong Kong gov­ern­ment have been severe­ly localized”—that is, Britons in posi­tions of author­i­ty large­ly have been replaced with Hong Kong Chi­nese. The British might have stood a bet­ter chance of buck­ing pres­sure from the main­land and going after the tri­ad bosses—it helps in such sit­u­a­tions to have a for­eign pass­port.
     It was a for­mer Lon­don cop named Bri­an “Bash” Mer­ritt, who, as a chief super­in­ten­dent in the Hong Kong police in the 1980s, led the most ambi­tious charge to date against a tri­ad soci­ety. In Feb­ru­ary 1986, Antho­ny Chung, a for­mer Hong Kong police­man who had become a “Red Pole”—or enforcer-for the Sun Yee On, turned him­self in and asked for pro­tec­tion. He had run into trou­ble over a gam­bling debt with anoth­er Red Pole, and believed he was going to be chopped to death. Chung agreed to work as an under­cov­er infor­mant. The case was ulti­mate­ly turned over to Mer­ritt, who saw an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty to attack the Sun Yee On at the very top. Chung claimed to have dealt direct­ly with the “Drag­on Head,” or boss of the soci­ety, whom he iden­ti­fied as Heung Wah-yim.
     The sto­ry of the Heung fam­i­ly is an illu­mi­nat­ing one for any­one try­ing to under­stand the nature of the tri­ad soci­eties, and of the soci­eties’ chang­ing rela­tion­ship with the law in Hong Kong. When Antho­ny Chung offered his ser­vices to the police, he was giv­en a warm recep­tion; the police were well acquaint­ed with the Heung fam­i­ly. Heung Chin, the deceased fam­i­ly patri­arch, had found­ed the Sun Yee On (or New Right­eous and Peace­ful Soci­ety) in 1919. A native of Chiu Chow, Heung built up the Sun Yee On over the course of a half-century—he con­tin­ued to call the shots from Tai­wan after being deport­ed there in the ear­ly 1950s—leaving behind an estab­lished crim­i­nal enter­prise that was alleged to have been tak­en over by a new Drag­on Head, Heung Wah-yim, his eldest son. Heung Wah-yim osten­si­bly worked as a law clerk for Samuel Soo and Co., a solicitor’s firm, although evi­dence pre­sent­ed in court sug­gest­ed that the job was mere­ly a front. On April Fool’s Day, 1987—the day was deliberate—Merritt sent a squadron of his offi­cers to arrest eleven sus­pect­ed mem­bers of the Sun Yee On, includ­ing Heung Wah-yim. The police searched Heung’s law office and, in a fil­ing cab­i­net, found a list of about 900 num­bered names that appeared to be a mem­ber­ship ros­ter of Sun Yee On office-bear­ers. It was a gid­dy moment for the police; Michael Horner, one of the arrest­ing offi­cers, told me he had a card­board box placed over Heung’s head as he was led away.
     The fol­low­ing Octo­ber, Heung Wah-yim was brought to tri­al, along with one of his sons, a son-in-law and three oth­er alleged offi­cers of the Sun Yee On. The five oth­er sus­pects had plead­ed guilty. It was billed as the biggest orga­nized-crime tri­al in Hong Kong’s his­to­ry. The pros­e­cu­tor, a burly Aus­tralian named Kevin Egan, told the court, “In a nut­shell, the Crown case against Heung Wah-yim is that…he inher­it­ed his father’s title as the leader of the Sun Yee On.” Egan believed his case, which was built pri­mar­i­ly around the tes­ti­mo­ny of accom­plice wit­ness­es, was a strong one. The first of those wit­ness­es was Antho­ny Chung, who described his 1981 induc­tion cer­e­mo­ny, at which an offi­cial, wear­ing a Taoist monk’s robe and clutch­ing a wood­en sword, lined Chung and eleven oth­er recruits against an altar, and had them drink “red flower wine”—a mix­ture of Chi­nese wine, drops of their own blood and the blood of a fresh­ly behead­ed chick­en. Two years lat­er, he said, he was tak­en to meet Heung Wah-yim, who was intro­duced as the Drag­on Head, and whose approval was required for Chung to be pro­mot­ed from ordi­nary mem­ber to Red Pole. “I under­stood that he was the high­est-rank­ing offi­cer in the Sun Yee On,” Chung told the court. A sec­ond Sun Yee On Red Pole told a near­ly iden­ti­cal sto­ry.
     Heung vol­un­tar­i­ly took the stand in his own defense, and Kevin Egan cross-exam­ined him for a day and a half. “He was hos­tile,” Egan recalls. “The impres­sion I got was, he was out­raged that any­one would dare pros­e­cute him.” Heung tes­ti­fied that he was actu­al­ly the pres­i­dent of a local chap­ter of the Lions Club, and that the list found in his office was a list of prospec­tive donors to Chi­nese fes­ti­vals.
     On Jan­u­ary 20, 1988, after one day of delib­er­a­tion, the all-male jury con­vict­ed Heung Wah-yim, his son and son-in-law and two oth­ers of tri­ad-relat­ed offens­es; the sixth defen­dant was acquit­ted. The judge sen­tenced Heung to sev­en and a half years in prison. The police were jubi­lant. Using the seized name list, which the jury had effec­tive­ly found to be a direc­to­ry of senior Sun Yee On offi­cials, the force turned up the pres­sure on the soci­ety. “We were lock­ing up peo­ple day and night,” recalls Robert Youill, the for­mer police offi­cer.
     Heung spent the bet­ter part of two years in jail before his appeal made its way to Sir Ti-liang Yang, the chief jus­tice of Hong Kong. Sir Ti-liang, who had been knight­ed by the Queen short­ly before Heung was sen­tenced, was so tough that the Hong Kong bar dubbed his court “the Court of No Appeal.” The hang­ing judge hand­ed down his deci­sion on Decem­ber 13, 1989, and it was a sur­prise. He ruled that the name list had been wrong­ly admit­ted because the expert wit­ness­es put on by Egan, includ­ing a staff sergeant with thir­ty years’ expe­ri­ence in tri­ad crime, were unqual­i­fied to authen­ti­cate it. He also ruled that the two Red Poles could not cor­rob­o­rate one anoth­er because they were fel­low accom­plices to the crimes being charged—a legal argu­ment he had reject­ed in the past. Two British expa­tri­ate judges serv­ing under Sir Ti-liang assent­ed, for the most part. The jury ver­dict was quashed, and Heung walked out of prison, declar­ing, “Jus­tice is fair.”
     Kevin Egan still boils at the mem­o­ry of Sir Ti-liang’s deci­sion. “I thought to myself, this is a home­town ver­dict,” he says. “Here’s a noto­ri­ous­ly right-wing judge, sud­den­ly stand­ing on his fuck­ing head to let the biggest bunch of damned crim­i­nals off.” Egan soon resigned as a Crown pros­e­cu­tor, and became a defense attor­ney, with a sub­spe­cial­ty in rep­re­sent­ing accused mem­bers of the Sun Yee On. “I now act for them,” he told me on a recent after­noon at his law office. “I have been called a Mob lawyer.” It was a humid day—like most days in Hong Kong—and Egan was wear­ing a lum­ber­jack shirt open at the col­lar, dis­play­ing a hir­sute, bar­rel chest and a gold chain and cru­ci­fix. He also wore a gold Rolex and a gold pinkie ring. Bar­ris­ters, who argue cas­es in court, work in con­cert with solic­i­tors, who pre­pare briefs, and one of the solic­i­tors with whom Egan works reg­u­lar­ly is Heung Wah-yim’s son, Heung Chin-wai. “He’s the son of the Drag­on Head,” Egan says.

HEUNG WAH-YIM, now in his mid-60s, has been less active of late. Today, the most pow­er­ful of the Heungs is the tenth of the Sun Yee On founder’s thir­teen chil­dren. He is Charles Heung, a man in his late 40s, with slicked-back hair and a sen­si­tive face. While in his 20s, he act­ed in Tai­wanese kung-fu movies; in 1984, he and his broth­er Jim­my Heung found­ed a movie pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny in Hong Kong called Win’s Group. (Jim­my has since split with Charles to pur­sue non-cin­e­mat­ic inter­ests.) Hong Kong is the Hol­ly­wood of Asia, the world’s sec­ond-largest exporter of films after the Unit­ed States, and Win’s is Hong Kong’s No. 1 hit-movie fac­to­ry. Vir­tu­al­ly every major star in Hong Kong, apart from Jack­ie Chan, has made a film for the Heungs. Charles says he and Jim­my named their com­pa­ny Win’s because “every film is a bat­tle.” He has occa­sion­al­ly act­ed in his movies; in the 1992 gang­ster film Arrest the Rest­less, for instance, he played an incor­rupt­ible cop.
     Charles was one of sev­er­al Heung broth­ers iden­ti­fied in 1992 by the Unit­ed States Sen­ate Per­ma­nent Sub­com­mit­tee on Inves­ti­ga­tions as top office-bear­ers in the Sun Yee On. Two years lat­er, a for­mer Red Pole for the Sun Yee On, tes­ti­fy­ing in a Chi­na­town rack­e­teer­ing case in a Brook­lyn fed­er­al court, iden­ti­fied Charles as one of “the top guys, the biggest,” in the soci­ety. A year after that, the Com­mis­sion for Cana­da sent Heung a let­ter reject­ing his appli­ca­tion for a visa, cit­ing evi­dence “plac­ing you square­ly on the rul­ing coun­cil” of the Sun Yee On.
     Heung agrees that his fam­i­ly has what he calls “a Mafia back­ground,” but says that he per­son­al­ly has lit­tle knowl­edge of such things, and has had to labor hard to over­come the stig­ma. “I do more work than oth­er pro­duc­er because I know the neg­a­tive side, hav­ing to live under this fam­i­ly name,” he says. He also admits that some peo­ple may fear him, but says his busi­ness phi­los­o­phy is to get top actors and actress­es and direc­tors to make movies for him because they like him. “I tell you one thing, per­haps you under­stand a lit­tle bit,” he says. “Maybe the actor shoot one film because they afraid of you. Okay. But one or two or three more, you have to give what they want.”
     If movie peo­ple find it agree­able to work for Heung, that is for­tu­nate, since there are few alter­na­tives. The film indus­try in Hong Kong has basi­cal­ly shrunk to Win’s and Gold­en Har­vest, the stu­dio of Jack­ie Chan. Even a cou­ple of years ago, when there were many more pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies, there were few alter­na­tives to Heung for an entire­ly dif­fer­ent rea­son. A good many of those oth­er com­pa­nies were run by tri­ads of a par­tic­u­lar­ly nasty bent, men who resort­ed to coer­cive means—including kid­nap­ping and rape—to per­suade actors and actress­es to make movies for them, and Heung pro­vid­ed a safe refuge. Jet Li, the biggest mar­tial-arts star in Hong Kong, began mak­ing movies exclu­sive­ly for Heung after his man­ag­er was shot dead, in April 1992.
     Though the police had no proof, a pro­duc­er named Chan Chi-ming was a sus­pect in some of the acts of vio­lence per­pe­trat­ed against movie peo­ple in the ear­ly 1990s. “It was such an absurd sit­u­a­tion,” says movie direc­tor Gor­don Chan. “Every­body hates the Heungs, but then Chan Chi-ming and the oth­er tri­ads get in the busi­ness, and sud­den­ly every­body is yelling for help from the Heungs.” In June 1992, Chan Chi-ming went to Shen­zhen, the bor­der town in south Chi­na, for a busi­ness deal, and was prompt­ly arrest­ed. He was ini­tial­ly arrest­ed for arms smug­gling, which car­ried the death penal­ty. Ulti­mate­ly, he was charged with unlaw­ful sex­u­al inter­course with one of Shenzhen’s many hook­ers. (Even though the Pub­lic Secu­ri­ty Bureau owns broth­els, extra­mar­i­tal sex is still offi­cial­ly a crime.) He was impris­oned for a year, and then released, look­ing, in the words of one busi­ness asso­ciate, “very pale and thin.” It is wide­ly believed that Charles Heung orches­trat­ed Chan Chi-ming’s arrest; when I asked Heung if this was true, he laughed and said his influ­ence was not so great.

IT IS, though, very great, and it will be far greater still after July 1. For Charles Heung is co-own­er of the Top Ten, a ritzy night­club in Bei­jing, and anoth­er co-own­er of the Top Ten is Tao Siju, head of the Pub­lic Secu­ri­ty Bureau—China’s chief of police. The Top Ten is a mul­ti-sto­ry com­plex that includes a restau­rant, a dis­cotheque and a dozen pri­vate karaoke lounges. On April 8, 1993, only days after the Top Ten opened its doors, Tao Siju gave an infor­mal press con­fer­ence to tele­vi­sion reporters from Hong Kong; and, after con­vey­ing the unhap­py news that the “coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies” who protest­ed at Tianan­men Square in 1989 would not have their long jail terms reduced, he turned his atten­tion to the sub­ject of tri­ads. “As for orga­ni­za­tions like the tri­ads in Hong Kong, as long as these peo­ple are patri­ot­ic, as long as they are con­cerned with Hong Kong’s pros­per­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, we should unite with them,” he said.
     Charles Heung’s guanxi is not lim­it­ed to the Pub­lic Secu­ri­ty Bureau. In August 1993, he and Jim­my Heung opened a mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar, 200,000-square-foot movie stu­dio in Shen­zhen. Their local part­ner was a main­land com­pa­ny called the Shen­zhen Don­g­long Group, of unknown own­er­ship, though a pos­si­ble clue was pro­vid­ed at the gala open­ing par­ty by the pres­ence of an illus­tri­ous guest: Ye Xuan­ping, a pow­er­ful Com­mu­nist Par­ty cadre and for­mer gov­er­nor of Guang­dong province. In 1992, Ye’s eldest son, Ye Xin­long, moved to Hong Kong; a year lat­er, he and Charles Heung both became direc­tors of a Hong Kong invest­ment com­pa­ny.
     Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the Hong Kong police appear sim­ply to have giv­en up on try­ing to enforce the law against the Heung fam­i­ly. When I attempt­ed to pose ques­tions about the Heungs to a senior offi­cer in the Orga­nized Crime and Tri­ad Bureau, he stiff­ened and looked embar­rassed. After I closed my note­book, he explained that if he spoke to me about the Heungs, “I will be com­mit­ting sui­cide. I do not mean that the Heungs will kill me. I mean that my career will be fin­ished.”
     On a recent after­noon, Charles Heung invit­ed me up to his strik­ing new cor­po­rate head­quar­ters in Kowloon. The eye-pop­ping decor—purple indus­tri­al chic—was sug­gest­ed, he said, by his wife Tiffany, an ex-mod­el from Tai­wan. Heung asked a busi­ness asso­ciate, a man named Cecil Yow, to sit in. Yow is a bald for­mer adver­tis­ing man who speaks Eng­lish with a slight­ly plum­my British accent. As Heung gazed thought­ful­ly at the ceil­ing with his arms fold­ed, Yow spoke of Heung’s “vision­ary” deci­sion to make big, bold strides into Chi­na while oth­ers were still tak­ing cau­tious lit­tle steps. “Mr. Heung said, ‘I must invest in Chi­na; this is going to be my future,’” Yow told me.
     I asked whether Heung had dif­fi­cul­ty mak­ing friends in Chi­na, con­sid­er­ing his father’s crim­i­nal his­to­ry and close asso­ci­a­tions with Tai­wan. Yow lost his cheer­ful demeanor for the moment. He looked over at Heung, who seemed utter­ly unper­turbed, then cleared his throat, and said, “That’s noth­ing. That’s anoth­er gen­er­a­tion. There’s no impact, no grudge. Because Mr. Heung has done so much over the last few years to help the devel­op­ment of the movie indus­try in Chi­na. He’s done co-pro­duc­tions with local stu­dios that can’t even pay wages. He comes in and gen­er­ates rev­enue for them. I mean, how patri­ot­ic can you get?”

THE ARRANGEMENTS between the tri­ads and Bei­jing are not aber­rant fea­tures of today’s Hong Kong, but emblem­at­ic ones. Hong Kong, broad­ly speak­ing, is fast becom­ing a gang­ster soci­ety, an infi­nite­ly cyn­i­cal place where near­ly everyone’s polit­i­cal alle­giance seems to be for sale. Con­sid­er Tung Chee-hwa, the mul­ti­mil­lion­aire ship­ping mag­nate who is step­ping in as Hong Kong’s new chief exec­u­tive. He also bore loy­al­ty to Tai­wan until 1985, when Bei­jing lit­er­al­ly bought him away, as it had just done with the tri­ads. Tung’s late father, C.Y. Tung, who found­ed the fam­i­ly ship­ping empire, fled Shang­hai with his then 12-year-old son in 1949 when the Com­mu­nists took pow­er, and estab­lished close ties to Tai­wan; it is believed that his fleet of ships was used to trans­port some of the art trea­sures that Chi­ang Kai-shek loot­ed from Beijing’s Palace Muse­um. By the time C.Y. died in 1982, his overex­tend­ed ship­ping empire was on the brink of bank­rupt­cy, and, three years lat­er, Tung Chee-hwa appealed to the Tai­wanese gov­ern­ment for a des­per­ate­ly need­ed loan. Had Taipei agreed, Tung would sure­ly not be chief-exec­u­tive-des­ig­nate of Hong Kong today; but it said no, and Bei­jing came across with the mon­ey instead—$120 mil­lion, the third-largest gov­ern­ment bailout of a cor­po­ra­tion in his­to­ry, after Chrysler and Lock­heed.
     Tung is far from the only polit­i­cal turn­coat among Hong Kong’s new pow­er elite. Sir Ti-liang Yang, the judge who over­turned the Heung con­vic­tion in 1989, is anoth­er exam­ple. Last year, he renounced his knight­hood and ran as one of three can­di­dates for Hong Kong’s chief exec­u­tive. Every­one knew the win­ner would be Tung—the race was fixed by Chi­na, which select­ed the 400 “vot­ers” from Hong Kong’s populace—but the for­mer Sir Ti-liang was reward­ed for help­ing main­tain appear­ances, and now has a seat on Tung’s cab­i­net. Once a cham­pi­on of Hong Kong’s lib­er­al Bill of Rights, he has since lent his voice to its inevitable repeal.
     I men­tioned this turn­coat phenomenon—which has been dubbed “instant-noo­dle patriotism”—to Christo­pher Pat­ten, the depart­ing British gov­er­nor of Hong Kong. He smirked. “These are flip-flops of hero­ic pro­por­tions,” Pat­ten said. “I just don’t know how peo­ple can do it—to move as it were from Buck­ing­ham Palace gar­den par­ties to the Great Hall of the Peo­ple with no inter­ven­ing stop­ping-off point.”
     The few who can­not be bought—Democratic Par­ty leader Mar­tin Lee, for instance—must seem quite an odd­i­ty to Bei­jing. “Once I was invit­ed to a pic­nic lunch,” Lee recalls, “and anoth­er guest was the vice direc­tor of Xin­hua. And I heard him say, ‘Quite frankly, Mar­tin Lee is a per­son we can do noth­ing about, because he is finan­cial­ly inde­pen­dent and is not greedy for mon­ey.’ That’s how they put it. I don’t have to sell my soul for more.” Lee also makes lit­tle sense to one of his for­mer clients, Albert Yeung of Emper­or Group, whom Lee defend­ed unsuc­cess­ful­ly in 1980, when Yeung was sen­tenced to jail for wit­ness tam­per­ing. “Mar­tin Lee is my friend, but I’m very sor­ry he make state­ments against Chi­na,” Yeung says. “It’s bad to the Hong Kong peo­ple, and not true. Hong Kong will become much bet­ter after change hand. This I can guarantee.”

YEUNG can much bet­ter under­stand a woman who used to work for him, and who per­haps best exem­pli­fies the gang­ster cul­ture of Hong Kong pol­i­tics. Her name is Rita Fan. This past Jan­u­ary Fan was cho­sen by Bei­jing to head the Pro­vi­sion­al Leg­is­la­ture, the unde­mo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed body that is about to replace the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil, Hong Kong’s rough equiv­a­lent of our Con­gress, on which Mar­tin Lee serves. Lee was most recent­ly re-elect­ed to the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil in 1995 by a pop­u­lar-vote land­slide, but he will have served less than half his four-year term by July 1, when Fan and com­pa­ny move in and push him out.
     Fan is 52, a woman with a fixed smile and a drab, cadre-style wardrobe who has spent the last fif­teen years in politics—although, she says, she real­ly has no stom­ach for the pro­fes­sion, because politi­cians can be so “dis­cour­te­ous.” If Tung Chee-hwa is the king of instant-noo­dle patri­ots, Fan is assured­ly the queen—an only-in-Hong-Kong sto­ry of self-rein­ven­tion. Like Tung, she was born in Shang­hai, and fled with her father, Tse Ta-tung, in 1949, to escape the Com­mu­nists; her fam­i­ly set­tled in Hong Kong, with mon­ey. Fan says her father was a suc­cess­ful busi­ness­man, the agent for a num­ber of Euro­pean paper mills. She stud­ied sci­ence and worked as a stu­dent advis­er before being asked by the British gov­ern­ment in 1983 to sit on the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil, which was then all-appoint­ed. She remained a leg­is­la­tor for nine years and, for the last three, also served on the cab­i­net of Lord David Wil­son, then the gov­er­nor of Hong Kong. In that capac­i­ty, she strong­ly endorsed the pas­sage of the Bill of Rights in 1991. For her ser­vices to the colo­nial estab­lish­ment, Fan was award­ed the title of C.B.E.—Commander of the British Empire.
     When Chris Pat­ten became gov­er­nor in 1992, Fan left both the cab­i­net and the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil. She says now that she quit because she dis­agreed with Patten’s pol­i­cy of “open con­fronta­tion” with Chi­na. Pat­ten has a dif­fer­ent rec­ol­lec­tion. “I chose not to retain her,” he says. “She walked out say­ing she’d nev­er have any­thing to do with pol­i­tics again.” Less than a year lat­er, Fan had become a polit­i­cal advis­er to Bei­jing and, before long, announced that she’d been “mis­led” when she sup­port­ed the Bill of Rights. Fan says now that “I actu­al­ly was nev­er a pro-Britain fig­ure, even though some peo­ple may have seen me that way.”
     Around the same time that Fan switched polit­i­cal camps, she was hired by Albert Yeung to be Emperor’s gen­er­al man­ag­er for admin­is­tra­tion. Yeung told me that Fan’s hus­band, an accoun­tant, has been a friend of his for more than twen­ty years, and is today one of Emperor’s audi­tors. Fan says she was aware when she took the job that Yeung had served time in jail, but that “I always hold the view that if some­one has done some­thing wrong, and paid his dues, there is no rea­son to dis­crim­i­nate against him any­more.” She worked for Emper­or for two years but then quit, she says, because her daugh­ter in Cana­da was seri­ous­ly ill. The daugh­ter recov­ered after Fan donat­ed a kid­ney; even her crit­ics praise her for that.
     She has a lot of crit­ics. For all her years in pol­i­tics, Fan has nev­er run in a gen­uine elec­tion and, judg­ing from pub­lic sen­ti­ment in Hong Kong, would not make a very good show­ing if she did. At her office on a recent after­noon, I asked her whether she had any dif­fi­cul­ty with the fact that eight peo­ple who will serve under her on the Pro­vi­sion­al Leg­is­la­ture had been trounced by pop­u­lar vote in the 1995 elec­tion. She did not. “Win­ning an elec­tion and los­ing an elec­tion is no big deal,” she said. “And those who win today may lose tomor­row, and vice ver­sa.”
     Before leav­ing, I could not resist ask­ing one more ques­tion. Was it true, I inquired, that her late father had fled Shang­hai in 1949 not mere­ly because he was a busi­ness­man and a cap­i­tal­ist, but a mem­ber of the Green Gang, the tri­ad group that had slaugh­tered Com­mu­nist Par­ty mem­bers by the hun­dreds? The rumor had been cir­cu­lat­ing for some time, and, if it were true, I thought it would add a final iron­ic touch to the sto­ry of Rita Fan. At the very least, I expect­ed that the ques­tion would get a rise out of her.
     She did not bat an eye­lash. “In those days, when I was young, the grownups would do their thing, and we kids did not ask too many ques­tions,” she said. “So I do not know.”
     It occurred to me then that her non­cha­lance was the only log­i­cal reac­tion. In the new spir­it of Chi­nese reuni­fi­ca­tion, when gang­sters are patri­ots, what pos­si­ble dif­fer­ence did it make? ♦