Hong Kong's triad gangs stormed back into the headlines internationally last month when a Hollywood director was attacked on a movie set in the city. But the incident doesn't prove the triads are getting stronger or that their influence is spreading. In fact, experts believe it may signal the opposite, Simon Parry reports.

It was a scene that could have come from one of Hong Kong's famously hammy 1970s action movies. An angry triad brandishing an air conditioning unit chases after Hollywood director Michael Bay and crew members after they brush off demands from him and fellow gang members for HK$100,000 protection money.

"He walked right up to me and tried to smack my face, but I ducked, threw the air unit on the floor and pushed him away," Bay blogged afterwards. "It took seven big guys to subdue him. It was like a Zombie in Bradd Pitt's movie World War Z - he lifted seven guys up and tried to bite them."

The bizarre incident on October 17 on the set of Transformers 4 in Quarry Bay, followed by a second equally clumsy attempt to extort money five days later, saw Hong Kong's triads achieve something they rarely manage to do these days: Make international headlines.

Usually, triad outrages are inter-society affairs. In April, for instance, a top gangster known as Mouse Shing from the Wo Shing Wo triad society was brutally hacked to death and reportedly disembowelled by two masked men in broad daylight outside the North District Hospital.

Three years earlier, in August 2009, senior triad Lee Tai-lung of the Sun Yee On triad society was run over by a car as he stepped from his Mercedes-Benz outside the Shangri La hotel in Kowloon and then stabbed to death by a group of men who jumped from a second vehicle.

Away from violence

Attacks on people outside their immediate sphere of influence are rare. But experts on triad societies in Hong Kong say the Transformer incidents do not reflect an upsurge in gangland violence and influence in the city and may in fact indicate the opposite.

Triad gangs - while still active - are in fact moving away from violent crime in the wake of a sustained police crackdown on their activities and seeking to invest their resources instead in semi-legitimate businesses such as the cross-border trade in milk powder, they say.

Today's triad gangster, in the words of a report co-authored by a Chinese University sociologist Lee King Wa, is "as likely to appear in business suits as sporting tattoos, and to engage in financial manipulation as well as extortion".

However, the shift away from violence and into enterprise has led to a breakdown in the chains of command with lower-ranking triad members sometimes acting independently without seeking permission or wiser counsel from Big Brothers.

Triad researcher Sharon Kwok of City University, who has interviewed scores of gang members and co-authored a detailed academic report on triad organized crime titled "Beyond Social Capital", said it had become tougher to recruit the foot soldiers gangs rely upon.

"In terms of structure they (the gangs) are not as organized as in the past. They used to be more concerned about the Brotherhood," she said. "That made it easier for them to recruit foot soldiers to commit crimes for them - but now it is getting more difficult."

Recruitment problem

Senior triad members with the resources and capital to do so are switching from illicit businesses to "quasi-legitimate businesses" such as casinos in Macao, drug stores in Hong Kong and the trade in milk powder, Kwok said. But lower level members were struggling to get by on the old methods of extortion.

"I have been told they are having difficulty recruiting youngsters to triad societies," she said. "One reason is that young people are getting more materialistic. Foot soldiers used to work for senior members without asking for any return. They did it because of the Brotherhood.

"But nowadays they have problems asking the younger generation to work for them without pay. For example, if they have a negotiation (with a rival gang) and they want a lot of foot soldiers to be present at the scene to increase their power for negotiation, you have to pay the kids around HK$300 each just to show up and stand there. So it is going to cost a lot of money. If you don't pay them they may not be willing to turn up."

While leading triads had turned their backs on violence in order to safeguard their blossoming business interests, however, lower level triads - recruited from schools on a large scale to keep triad societies alive in the past two decades - were operating outside the control of their bosses.

"Violence where it occurs is most likely to be committed by junior members because they are less controlled than in the past," Kwok said. "In the past, if they wanted to fight, they needed to get permission from their Big Brother. Now they don't. They just fight when they want to.

"They have different foot soldiers in different areas and it is difficult (for gang leaders) to check what is going on in every area. They are less picky in choosing members. Juniors recruit their own members so the senior member doesn't know what is going on with junior members."

Lee King-wa, who co-authored a report on the impact of law enforcement and economic change on triad gangs titled "The Transformation of Triad Dark Societies in Hong Kong", agreed that gangs were switching to less violent methods.

"They talk more and they fight less," he said. "They are more calculating, more rational, and it is less about sub-culture and Brotherhood. They talk more about benefits. Different triad groups work together to get business done. Also the population is shrinking so there is less muscle to summon.

"Before, it was the leaders who chose the members. People were keen to join triad gangs in those days. Now, it is the members who choose the leaders. There has been a change.

"I would look at this with reference to the context of Hong Kong. Since the 1980s we have been promoting a flexible work force. Hong Kong is a free society and triad societies operate in that way too.

"They emphasise flexibility and elasticity. They can do business with any triad group and anyone can join the business. It is not necessary to have a triad membership (to do business with them)."

The softer, more business-friendly image of Hong Kong's triad gangs made the incident on the movie set in October a baffling one, Lee said. "It's quite a while since I've heard of that kind of on-the-spot blackmail case where they (the culprits) almost certainly know the police will come and arrest them.

"I'm not sure if it is a low level triad operating independently. Maybe it is someone who wants to show face and tell other triad groups that they have the guts to do it. They know it will fail but they want to send out a message saying 'This is my territory and I can still do this even though I know the police will come and arrest me'."

Whatever the motives, Lee said there were undoubtedly challenges for triads in adapting to a post-industrial society in Hong Kong. "We are moving towards being a service economy," he said. "It is very hard for them to blackmail Wellcome or Park N Shop or 7-Eleven. They used to blackmail individual businesses but they can't blackmail chain stores.

"They used to be responsible for human trafficking before 1997 but there is no human trafficking between the mainland and Hong Kong anymore. There is high mobility in the Pearl River Delta. In the past they managed brothels with lots of trafficked women. Now they just look after one-woman brothels."

Whether triads will continue to exist one generation from now - but the incident on the set of Transformers is a vivid illustration of how, for the secret societies that have for so long been part of the fabric of Hong Kong life, a transformation is under way.

"Their operations are really changing," said Lee. "It is much less about violence now. I don't know whether they will cease to exist or have a declining influence but I can only say that they are certainly changing."

(HK Edition 11/08/2013 page1)