| An analysis of primary and secondary source documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries challenges many assumptions about Chinese organized crime in the United States. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this analysis provides strong evidence that Chinese organized crime predates, in structure and sophistication, organizations of other ethnic origins later recognized as "modern" organized crime by academics, the media, and the government. This analysis also refutes the conventional wisdom that Chinese organized crime is culturally insular in its manifestations. Rather, it victimizes Chinese and non-Chinese alike and it operates easily and frequently with non-Chinese criminals of the upperworld and underworld.;A qualitative, document-based assessment of Chinese criminal activities in the United States from 1850's to the 1910's and a case-study of the first "tong war" between the New York City branches of the Hip Sing Tong and the On Leong Tong (1899-1907) reveal the existence of a multiethnic social system of organized crime that extended across the United States and to China itself. Implementing a sophisticated social network of Chinese and non-Chinese upperworld and underworld actors, Chinese enterprise and power syndicates of the turn-of-the-century were involved with police and political corruption, labor racketeering, price fixing, prostitution, gambling, immigrant smuggling, slavery, drug trafficking, extortion, and other violent crimes. |
