The Triads: The Growing Global Threat from the Chinese Criminal Societies - Hardcover

Like Italy's Mafia, China's Triads, whose history may go back as much as 2000 years, were originally secret societies whose spirit and purpose were patriotic. Their power increased substantially after 1644, when the native Ming dynasty was overthrown by the foreign Ch'ing (Manchu) dynasty; the goal of the Triads then became to destabilize the government. To raise money for that ambition, they turned to crime. The Triads played a major role in the "democratic" regimes of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, gradually increasing the scope of their criminal activities, but they alienated the Communists, who remain their implacable enemies. Booth ( Hiroshima Joe ) asserts that the Triads, headquartered in Hong Kong, now are spreading to other countries, especially Canada and Australia, and control the majority of the world's heroin trade. In a book that gets off to a slow start with a highly condensed history of China, the author sounds the alarm that the secretive gangs may pose the world's top crime problem in the 1990s. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For centuries Chinese secret societies like the Triads embedded themselves in the larger Chinese society, frequently engaging in various kinds of criminal and other illegal activity. After the Communists came to power in 1949, they ruthlessly suppressed the secret societies, which then took refuge in Hong Kong. In recent years, as overseas Chinese communities expanded rapidly, the Triads and other secret societies have become increasingly active abroad, including North America. Booth, a Hong Kong writer, presents a rather superficial and impressionistic but intriguing picture of the Triads, focusing on their criminal activities in Hong Kong and their growing involvement in the international drug trade. Better research and organization might have made this more than a "stopgap" book as Booth himself calls it--a judgment which one cannot dispute. For general readers.
- Steven I. Levine, Duke Univ., Durham,
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.