Resurgent Triads? Democratic mobilization and organized crime in Hong Kong

Abstract

On 3 October 2014, peaceful pro-democracy protestors were attacked by thugs in Mong Kok, a working-class neighbourhood of Hong Kong. Using this event, we explore whether the attackers came from the same neighbourhood and mobilized to protect their illegal business activities, and whether the attackers were affiliated to the Triads. We conclude that the attackers were low-level Triads affiliates from outside Mong Kok and were paid to attack the protesters. While several scholars have suggested that Triads are in inexorable decline in post-1997 Hong Kong, we suggest that they might have found a new role as enforcer of unpopular policies and repression of democratic protests in the context of a drift towards authoritarianism in Hong Kong. The paper is based on field interviews with Triad members, businesspeople and activists, and on press reports and official documents.

Tolerance of triads, police legitimacy, and self-help amidst the Umbrella Movement

“…However, there is not sufficient empirical data to confirm the police-triad conspiracy hypothesis, which suggests the existence of some form of partnership. Rather, increasingly, recent research has confirmed a “thugs-for-hire” (5) phenomenon in UM (Ong, 2018; Varese & Wong, 2018), whereby individual triad and thuggish groups were paid to use privatized coercion to disperse the protesters on hourly or piecemeal rates, which is a common practice of any authoritarian, communist regime (Ong, 2018).…”

“…Some attempted to identify the antecedents, contingencies, and spaces of the spontaneous occupation in UM (Cheng & Chan, 2017) and searched for the causes of failure of democratization through the lens of UM (Ortmann, 2016). A minority of the papers investigated the role and experience of the activist scholars (Kong, 2019), the participation of the Protestant community in UM (Chan, 2015), and the use of thugs-for-hire to clear the Occupy sites (Ong, 2018; Varese & Wong, 2018) (see Figure 1). However, no academic research has been published on the protesters’ views on the police and triads.…”

Towards a criminology of atmospheres: Law, affect and the codes of the street

“…During the protests, the social, legal and regulatory geographies of the city were temporarily re-written. While the Umbrella Movement has already generated a number of academic studies -from those focusing on the legal, constitutional and normative significance of the movement (Chan, 2014;Jones, 2017;Matthews, 2017), the role of social media in the occupations (Cheng and Chan 2017), the engagement of young people in the movement (Ortmann 2015) and the role of organised crime in the protest (Varese and Wong, 2018) -in this article, we wish to reflect on the meaning and import of the unique sensibility evoked by the sites themselves.…”

Transnational crime of Chinese origin in the EU: False flags and real concerns

“…In 2014, numerous members of the Umbrella movement were beaten by Triad-affiliated thugs-for-hire in the Mongkok area. SeeVarese and Wong, 2017.…”