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Chinese Mafia (Factions and Smuggling Empire)
The Chinese Mafia is organized crime which is ethnically Chinese.
The Chinese Mafia is not a single organization, but consists of various types of organized crime groups. Some of them were founded in China itself and others were founded overseas by Chinese immigrants or their descendants. Most of them are Triads and in turn most of the Triads are Chinese.
When it comes to organized crime, the Chinese Mafia is the most global of all criminal underworlds and it's total membership is vastly larger than any other "mafia". The Chinese Mafia is probably the most progressive and enlightened of the older mafias when it comes to the Awakened, the Emerged, the various metatypes, women, technology, and magic.
That has made the Chinese Mafia the most flexible and adaptable of the major organized crime groups. It is one of the few mafias which actually protects the communities and businesses that make protection payments. They are also one of the most brutal mafias of the underworld, infamous for the level of violence, the savagery used to make an example or deliver a message, and the methods of retaliating via magic.
It has the distinction of having magic that is superior to that of most other criminal underworlds (in both quality and quantity) and of it's "soldiers" using cyberware (and implants) of comparable quality and quantity to the soldiers of any other rich "mafia". It is one of the few underworlds that controls nations (e.g. Cambodia), has armies (warlords) partnered with them, and controls (or is allied) with megacorporations.
They are involved in a wide variety of criminal activities from smuggling to Matrix crime, drug trafficking to illegal gambling, prostitution to weapons trafficking, protection rackets to brand counterfeiting, and so on. Chinese syndicates are operating throughout China, Japan, Southeast Asia, North America, South America, and Australia. They also have operations in Russia, the Commonwealth of Turkestan, Europe, and in Polynesia.
Types of Chinese Syndicates[]
- Triads
- Sino-Khmer Mafia
- Tongs
- Sino-Thai Mafia
- Golden Triangle Drug Lords
Trivia[]
In the real world, Chinese organized crime is made up of thousands of syndicates and outfits with a combined membership of approximately 30 million.[1] The largest, wealthiest, and most powerful Chinese syndicate is the Sun Yee On, which is a Hong Kong Triad with 50-60,000 members.[2] These are criminal organizations that make $100s of billions annually and perhaps even over a $1 trillion annually. For example the manufacturing and global trade in counterfeit goods is worth hundreds of billions a year, and Chinese organized crime dominates that business.[3]
They also dominate the illegal sports gambling industry (especially the global betting on soccer), likewise worth hundreds of billions. [4] Not to mention tens of billions in other illicit markets in China and Southeast Asia, including; drugs, prostitution, environmental crime (ivory, timber, animal parts, coal, etc), arms trafficking, credit card fraud, etc.[5][6] Back in the 1990s when the Colombian cocaine cartels where in the news, it was the Chinese Triads who were the biggest drug traffickers as they made up to $200 billion annually from the Golden Triangle heroin trade, having controlled the heroin trade coming out of the Golden Triangle since the Vietnam War.[7]
Index[]
- Shadows of Asia, 27, 32, 42-44, 130, 148-149, 151-154, 156-157, 161, 166, 205
- Vice, 34, 66-74
- Underworld Sourcebook, 53-59
- Runner Havens, 43-48
- Shadows of Europe, 47, 89, 196
- London Sourcebook, 49, 117-118
- California Free State, 62-63
- Mob War!, 61-62
- Ghost Cartels, 102-103, 107-110
- Target: Awakened Lands, 27-28, 36, 38
- Emergence, 46
- Street Magic, 76
- Chrome Flesh, 38
- Montreal 2074, 8, 13
- Capitales des Ombres, 194 (French expanded version of Runner Havens by Black Book Editions)
Research[]
- Wikipedia: Triads
- Stratfor: Organized Crime in China
- Research Gate: Black Societies and Triad-like Organised Crime in China
- United Nations: Transnational Organized Crime in East Asia and the Pacific
- U.S. Congress: Transnational Activities of Chinese Crime Organizations
- Havoscope: Black Market Crime in China
- Global Strategy: Chinese Organized Crime