Tai Huen Chai Triad, the ‘Big Circle People’, which was set up in Hong Kong by former Chinese Army soldiers disgraced during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
The Triads are seldom entertaining, but the small-time misbehaviour of Hong Kong can be wonderfully picaresque. The Hong Kong newspapers devote whole pages to the local court news, in the manner of English or American provincial newspapers half a century ago, and bymonitoring them just for a few days I culled the following cases more or less at random:
A house agent, pretending to be the owner of two premises, rents them out to twelve separate clients, taking deposits from each.
A brothel manager is caught by the police hiding on an external second-storey ledge of his premises with an entirely naked employee.
A woman police inspector, charged with stealing five cosmetic items and a birthday card from a store, says she was thinking about an important case she was involved in, and forgot to pay.
A sixty-nine-year-old caretaker, charged with indecently molesting small girls, says that fondling children brings him good luck in gambling.
Two men are fined for smuggling giant-panda furs on a sampan out of China.
Undercover policemen posing as construction workers are caught gambling on the building site by other undercover policemen.
A man advertising his Mercedes for sale is invited to bring it to a Kowloon hotel, where he is obliged to sign the papers of sale and is left bound and gagged while the villains sell the car to someone else.
Most notoriously, Hong Kong has specialized in criminal venality. When it comes to corruption the territory has always sailed as close to the wind as possible, and bribery, variously euphemized as ‘
cumshaw’
, ‘squeeze’, tea money, steak fees, kickback or entertainment expenses, has always been a fact of life, whether it is a street-vendor bribing the local constable to let him stay on his pitch, or a building contractor slipping a few thousand dollars to an appropriate Government department. Ever since the days of the compradors, the Chinese intermediaries who interpreted and negotiated for the early British merchants, Hong Kong has been run very largely by brokers, agents and go-betweens, and it is a small enough step from commission to graft. Besides, it is a dazzling, tempting city in itself – just the place to seduce those who are, as Conrad once wrote of corrupt officials in the East, ‘not dull enough to nurse a success’.
If you find all this difficult to imagine, as you stroll home through a balmy summer evening from some agreeable function, where Mr X, the well-known investment broker, has been so very charming, Mr Y, the property millionaire, has inquired so kindly if he can be of any help to you in your work, and that perfectly delightful trainer from Happy Valley has invited you out on his junk next Sunday, lift your eyes beyond Statue Square to the top floor of the Garden Road multi-storeycar-park. There is sure to be a light burning up there, however protracted your dinner has been, because it is the headquarters of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, a body established in 1974, rather in desperation, to fight squeeze,
cumshaw
and tea money in the colony.
Its powers are immense – it can act without higher authority to inspect any institution, public or private, it can hold suspects without trial indefinitely, and it receives an inexhaustible flow of intelligence about the private lives of everyone, from the Governor down. In 1988 its agents arrested the chairman of the Stock Exchange itself, on suspicion of corruption. Its interrogations are said to be severe, and quite likely some poor devil is being questioned up there at this moment. Brokers and property developers are likely suspects of course, but you would be surprised how many Jockey Club trainers have been invited to the ICAC car-park too.
8
Many foreigners, especially perhaps Japanese and Americans of a certain age, think of
The Triads are seldom entertaining, but the small-time misbehaviour of Hong Kong can be wonderfully picaresque. The Hong Kong newspapers devote whole pages to the local court news, in the manner of English or American provincial newspapers half a century ago, and bymonitoring them just for a few days I culled the following cases more or less at random:
A house agent, pretending to be the owner of two premises, rents them out to twelve separate clients, taking deposits from each.
A brothel manager is caught by the police hiding on an external second-storey ledge of his premises with an entirely naked employee.
A woman police inspector, charged with stealing five cosmetic items and a birthday card from a store, says she was thinking about an important case she was involved in, and forgot to pay.
A sixty-nine-year-old caretaker, charged with indecently molesting small girls, says that fondling children brings him good luck in gambling.
Two men are fined for smuggling giant-panda furs on a sampan out of China.
Undercover policemen posing as construction workers are caught gambling on the building site by other undercover policemen.
A man advertising his Mercedes for sale is invited to bring it to a Kowloon hotel, where he is obliged to sign the papers of sale and is left bound and gagged while the villains sell the car to someone else.
Most notoriously, Hong Kong has specialized in criminal venality. When it comes to corruption the territory has always sailed as close to the wind as possible, and bribery, variously euphemized as ‘
cumshaw’
, ‘squeeze’, tea money, steak fees, kickback or entertainment expenses, has always been a fact of life, whether it is a street-vendor bribing the local constable to let him stay on his pitch, or a building contractor slipping a few thousand dollars to an appropriate Government department. Ever since the days of the compradors, the Chinese intermediaries who interpreted and negotiated for the early British merchants, Hong Kong has been run very largely by brokers, agents and go-betweens, and it is a small enough step from commission to graft. Besides, it is a dazzling, tempting city in itself – just the place to seduce those who are, as Conrad once wrote of corrupt officials in the East, ‘not dull enough to nurse a success’.
If you find all this difficult to imagine, as you stroll home through a balmy summer evening from some agreeable function, where Mr X, the well-known investment broker, has been so very charming, Mr Y, the property millionaire, has inquired so kindly if he can be of any help to you in your work, and that perfectly delightful trainer from Happy Valley has invited you out on his junk next Sunday, lift your eyes beyond Statue Square to the top floor of the Garden Road multi-storeycar-park. There is sure to be a light burning up there, however protracted your dinner has been, because it is the headquarters of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, a body established in 1974, rather in desperation, to fight squeeze,
cumshaw
and tea money in the colony.
Its powers are immense – it can act without higher authority to inspect any institution, public or private, it can hold suspects without trial indefinitely, and it receives an inexhaustible flow of intelligence about the private lives of everyone, from the Governor down. In 1988 its agents arrested the chairman of the Stock Exchange itself, on suspicion of corruption. Its interrogations are said to be severe, and quite likely some poor devil is being questioned up there at this moment. Brokers and property developers are likely suspects of course, but you would be surprised how many Jockey Club trainers have been invited to the ICAC car-park too.
8
Many foreigners, especially perhaps Japanese and Americans of a certain age, think of
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