A Chinese consul general from the country’s embassy in Washington allegedly socialized with convicted Chinese organized crime members in Oklahoma, according to new reporting by two news outlets, ProPublica and The Frontier.
This is the latest piece in a puzzle that gets bigger every day. Why do the U.S. government and our allies continue to countenance the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) historical involvement with international criminal groups, including Mexican cartels and Chinese triads, in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America?
The latest team of reporters to tackle the links between the CCP and organized crime are Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg of ProPublica, as well as Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock of The Frontier. They write that “after a mass murder at a marijuana farm” in Oklahoma, “a Chinese diplomat visited an organization that has been the subject of investigations.”
While some of these investigations are doubtless opened because of anti-Asian bias by law enforcement, the meetings between CCP diplomats and convicted criminals “reflect an international pattern of contacts between Chinese officials and suspected criminal networks,” they write.
In an earlier article, the same authors found that “from California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of [America’s] illicit marijuana trade. ... Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity.”
According to a Brookings Institute study released in January, current and former law enforcement personnel believe that “China-linked criminal groups monitor the Chinese diaspora and act as extralegal enforcers on behalf of Chinese authorities against those who speak and act against the Chinese government and CCP.” Thus, according to the study, the regime unofficially extends its protection and authority to organized crime.
Ironically, these criminal groups can be facilitated by the more than 100 Chinese overseas “police stations” in 53 countries discovered by the rights group Safeguard Defenders. In Italy and Spain, according to Mr. Rotella’s reporting, Chinese underworld characters even contributed to establishing some of the stations.
There is also extensive reporting of CCP links to organized crime in Asia, including the South Pacific islands. Reporting by J. Michael Cole in 2018 showed that the CCP used “thuggish proxies to disrupt Taiwan and Hong Kong.”
According to French scholar Emmanuel Jourda, whom Mr. Rotella quoted, the CCP “takes the most powerful, richest, most successful figures overseas and recognizes them as the nobility of the diaspora.” He added that “it doesn’t matter how they made their money. The deal, spoken or not, is: ‘You gather intelligence on the community, we let you do business. Whether legal or illegal.’”
The secret “police stations” have operated in the United States and Canada, where investigative journalist Sam Cooper discovered links between the Hong Kong triads, Canadian politicians, and Beijing.
One overseas “police station” was established in Manhattan’s Chinatown and allegedly harassed Chinese dissidents in the area. It closed in 2022 when the alleged criminals discovered an ongoing federal investigation. Two of them were arrested, including for the destruction of evidence.
People walk by a building (C) that is suspected of being used as a secret police station in Chinatown for the purpose of repressing dissidents living in the United States on behalf of the Chinese regime, in lower Manhattan in New York on April 18, 2023. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
ProPublica and Frontier reporting found that finances and direction for Oklahoma’s Chinese marijuana network are also centered in New York City. The Chinatown in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens has “developed a reputation as a bastion of Chinese crime bosses with nationwide reach, leading to a refrain in law enforcement: ‘All roads lead to Flushing,’” according to the authors.
The Italian Mafia operated the New York heroin trade starting in the 1930s. Chinese gangs in New York started to muscle in as early as the 1970s. They took advantage of opium fields in Burma (Myanmar) and Laos and merchant marine transportation networks through Thailand and Hong Kong. At the time, Taiwan and the Soviet Union, which were both anti-CCP, alleged that Beijing facilitated the heroin trade to the United States, Europe, and Africa.
By the late 1980s, the FBI had imprisoned most of the Italian American Mafiosi. The Chinese triads then took over, according to a New York Times investigation in 1987, including with “China White” heroin “still wrapped in Chinese newspapers.” Much of it came from Burmese traffickers, including “the armed forces of Burmese warlords, ethnic independence movements, Burmese Communist rebels and Nationalist Chinese generals who retreated from Southern China after the 1949 Communist revolution,” according to the NY Times.
But the history of CCP-triad links extends back even further. According to historian N.J. Ryan, the triads had links to both Chinese Nationalists and the CCP in China and Southeast Asia before the 1940s. However, the triads up to at least the revolution of 1949 in China preferred the nationalists to the communists. After the revolution, the CCP targeted mainland triads, who largely moved to Hong Kong, where British efforts to eradicate them were less effective. By 1992, as the date of the CCP’s control over Hong Kong drew closer, the CCP started to engage the triads, including by coopting them against pro-democracy Chinese dissidents.
In New York, the Italian Mafia was defeated through the enforcement of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) laws starting in the 1970s. However, RICO has not been effectively leveraged against the triads or the CCP, which itself appears to be a form of organized crime, according to Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.). Neither have U.S. counter-terror laws been used against the CCP, which not only enables terrorists but is arguably a terror organization itself.
Based on the latest reporting, the contemporary role of the CCP in transnational organized crime is likely a criminal deconfliction between the gangs, as well as the facilitation of criminal and terrorist financial networks in North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. This includes proxy terrorism and organized crime facilitated by Russia, Iran, and Burmese opium and methamphetamine traffickers. In addition to providing Mexican cartels with fentanyl precursors through its control of the Chinese economy, the CCP facilitates fentanyl-related money laundering for them and other Latin American criminal networks.
All of this CCP criminality results in the ruin of real people and real families here in the United States. In the 1980s, pure “China White” heroin already contributed to increased overdose deaths compared to the weaker stuff peddled by the Italian Mafia. But it paled in comparison to the more than 70,000 Americans who die annually from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl today.
As should be evident from the historical trajectory of the fight against the CCP, since, for example, the Korean War, in which U.S. and allied soldiers fought China directly, the United States is losing ground. During that three-year war, about 36,000 American troops died to save South Korea. Now, about twice that number of Americans die every year from fentanyl alone, while communist China increases its market penetration and political influence every day.
The interlinking of the CCP with deadly illicit drug networks in the United States should be no surprise, as the CCP itself began and arguably continues as an organized criminal and terrorist enterprise. The sooner that our elected officials, academia, and mainstream media understand the deep antipathy of the CCP toward America and its values—and start to oppose it more effectively—the safer we will be.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Anders Corr has a bachelor's/master's in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. His latest books are “The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy, and Hegemony” (2021) and “Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the South China Sea" (2018).
