Chinese Triads: Perspectives on Histories, Identities, and Spheres of Impacts

"The precise origins of the Chinese Triads, also known as the Tiandihui(heaven and earth society) are not clear. It appears that the triads had their origins in the desperate political, social, and economic circumstances of southern China in the seventeenth century, and were subsequently introduced to other regions by Chinese migrants. Triad organizations, based of fictive Kinship which bound its members by blood oath to a brotherhood, provided economic and spiritual support to the marginalised men on Chinese society. The Tiandihui in China also alluede to the political cause of overthrowing the Qing government and restoring the Ming dynasty. Similar organizations were later formed overseas by the immigrant Chinese of the Diaspora to act as mutual-aid societies and to provide their members with a collective means of exploiting new economic opportunities."

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Triads in the Republican Era:

"The Manchus may have gone, but power struggles between feuding warlords filled the political vaccum. For the first three decades of the Republican era, secret societies, both on the mainland and overseas, renewed their activities as indirect agents of political change in China. And not only were they embroiled in the civil war between the Republicans and the Communists, but also they were simultaneously battling against Japanese forces in Manchuria between 1937 and 1945.

Some secret socities, organised along similar lines to the Triads, worked with the Republicans under the leadership of Chiang-Kai Shek, while others joined forces with the Communists. There were even secret socities, though not of the Triad origin, who collaborated with the japanese during the period of Japanese Occupation.

The KMT's relationship with the Triad-like societies has been well-documented. During the Civil War, in Shanghai, both the QingBang(Green-Gang) and the Hong Bang(Red Gang) were mobilized by the KMT government to break up popular movements, expecially those involving factory workers and students. In one particularly notorious incident, the Wingbang captured and exexuted a large number of purportedly communistic elements in the French Concession of Shanghai(The Chinese component of the Police force in Shanghai were mostly members of the Green Gang).

From 1921 until 1949, when the communists finally took over China, the communist leadership contemplated a total removal of secret socieities by means on infiltration, mass detentions, and hard labor. As early as 1926, the Communist leader Mao Zedong expressed his concern over the growing influence of the secret societies among the lower strata of society. He perhaps conceived the problem as more a political issue than a social evil, and felt very uneasy about the close collaboration between the KMT and the secret societies."

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"In order to achieve their aim, Communist Party members were directed to join secret socities, which at that time controlled the workers unions in big cities, mainly those in the Eastern part of China, such as Shanghai. Party members were instructed to swear allegiance to the leaders of both the qingbang and a hongbang and those who joined as initiated members were told to learn their respective societies rules and anhere to them strictly in order to grain promotion to the administrative level.

In July 1936, Mao Zedong even appealed in writing to the Elder Brothers to join hands with him in the fight for the liberation of the Chinese people. The appeal did not receive a warm welcome until the following year when war was declared between Chine and Japan and the KMT and the Communists agreed to establish a National United Front to resist the Japanee invasion. By this time, a number of high ranking communist military commanders had become initiated members of the Elder Brothers who were active mainly in Western, Central and Northern China. In the end, though, all secret societies were outlawed soon after the Communist take-over of China in 1949."

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"The organizing principle of China's triads has always been a fictive brotherhood, largely inspired by popular Chinese literary classics where the central characters are sworn brothers. Unlike the White Lotus sect, where leadership, as well as membership, was inheritable and open to both genders, the Triads have never admitted any female members, let alone offered female leadership. Nor is triad leadership inheritable."

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"..The triads orientation or objectives have evolved in tandem with the trend towards globalisation and capitalism generally. Like many other brotherhood based unlawful collectives in the modern world, the Triads have adapted well to capitalistic influences where the primary objective has been the accumulation of wealth through trading in goods and services."

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"Etymologically, the term triad -- which is the English designation used to describe the emblem of the society, a triangle whose three sides represent the three powers of Heaven, Earth, and Man -- was a rubric that covered three similar, but separate societies: The heaven and earth society, The three in one society, and the three dots society. These are the Hung Societies. They were also known as the Hung Men, Tiandihui, and Sanhehui, Som technically-speaking, the term "triad societies" applies only to the major group of secret socities, known as the Hung."

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"The hungmen were believed by many republican period scholars to have originated in the 17th century, during the reign of the Qing emporer, Kangxi, as a patriotic movement dedicated to overthrowing the qing and restoring the ming. This myth-history traces their origin to the Shaolin monastery in Fujian where Ming loyalists, convinced that their cause was lost, had retreated as monks. In 1674, five of them --"the tive former progenitors"--secretly organized the Hung men to promote the overthrow of the Qing and the restoration of the Ming.

The lin Shuangwen uprising in Taiwan marked the first time the Qing court was aware of the Hung men as the recognized force behund an uprising in progress. Lin Shuangzhou a Zhangzhou native (Fujian Province) and leader of the heaven and earth society of north taiwan, declared a new dynasty with the reign title of Shun Tian (obedient to heaven) maintaining the Manchus had somehow been outraging heaven. The rebellion (1786-1787) was reputedly sparked by the government's execution of a Zhangzhou gambler and murderer. The underlying motive seems to have been a battle for dominance over Taiwan's economy between the two major Fujianese immigrant groups: those from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. In any event, it required 100,000 troops from the mainland, led by some of the empires renowned commanders, to suppress the rebellion.....

...This may account for arguments by scholars that the Hung men were founded by Hokkien(Fujianese) immigrants in Taiwan, where their initial purpose seems to have been one of self defense in communal feuding as an agency of self protecting between feuding Chinese from different districts in Fujian. But, it is much more likely the Hung men first appeared in the 1760's in Zhangzhou prefecture, Fujian Province were transported to mid-Taiwan around 1783 by Zhangzhou settlers and multiplied thereafter. In succeeding decades their activities proliferated rapidly on the mainland, especially among transport workers in south China, and in the feuding villages where patronage appears to have been readily available due to the numberous uprisings.

Toward the end of the eighteenth centurym a general lack of central government control through the peripheries allowed both the new organizations and armed groups to flourish. Hung men networks from the Southeast Coast spread west with transport labourers and migrants, and by 1803 their activities were reported as far away as the Xinjiang region, where the heaven and earth society have organized a large-scale peasent uprising. This was not ascribed to any pro or anti revolutionary mechanism, but the development of a framework of survival based upon predatory and protective strategies in harsh times."

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"By the early nineteenth century the Hung men had organized the marginal elements in the foreign trade -- the money changers, compradores, dock-hands, small shop owners, yamen runners, clerks, and the criminal underworld. They controlled prostitution, gambling, and protection For example in Canton/Guandong, power was shared by the State, merchants, and the Hung men."

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"Recently opened Qing Archival source in Beijing and Taipei tend to support the view that the Hung men were mutual aid societies, contrasting the received opinion that has prevailed throughout much of the twentieth society, namely that the Hung leage was created by Ming loyalists for the purpose of overthrowing the Qing dynasty and restoring the Ming. The Ming loyalist argument tends to be based on internally generated triad sources and, in particular, on Triad creation myths. Thus, despite popular accounts of the Hung men as a noble and patriotic society, historical evidence tends to suggest that the triads were actually a mutual aid society directly linked to the socio-economic circumstances and migration patterns of China's lower classes. Crime played a large part in their activities. In addition to selling membership and protection, the entrepeneurial agendas of the Hung men leaders often included founding societies to conduct robbery. Such motives were certainly an integral part of Hung Men formation on both Taiwan and in Guangdong province and are well documented in Hung Men legal cases."

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"Secret societies in China pre-date the Hung men by many centuries. Because of their subversive nature, especially in periods of turmoil, their existence was a continual threat to the government of the day, whether it was the struggles Liu Pang and his sworn brothers against the Qin dynasty or the Yellow turbans at the end of the Han dynasty, or the White Lotus sect of the Song Dynasty. Secret societies also played an actively seditious role agains the foreign (Mongolian) government of the Yuan dynasty and the Ming dynasty which came afterwards.

Secret societies flourished especially in the autocratic Qing dynsaty where no opposition to the government was tolerated and the only form of organized resistancem apart from open rebellion, were secret societies.

In the late-nineteenth century, Dr. Sun Yatsen estimated there were some 35 million secret society members in China.

Between 1874-1894, as the semi-colonial activities of the foreign powers worsened in Mainland China, the main locus of secret society activities shifted to the Yangtze delta, while the Elder Brothers society intensified their efforts in the major cities of the South. The latter society was not connected with the Hung men; they were robin Hood like bands of poor people, farmers, and canal boatment, who built a complete underworld economy on smuggling. Many of the Communist guerillas of the twentieth century came from this organization -- Gelaohui membership for the Yangtze region alone, at that timem was in excess of 100,000."

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Chinese Triads: Perspectives on Histories, Identities, and Spheres of Impacts
Cheryl-Ann Low
Singapore History Museum 2002
ISBN: 981-04-5351-5