Climbing the mountain of gold

Abstract

For San Lwin, the Burmese chief officer of the Golden Venture, the low point of a long career on the high seas arrived in the pre-dawn chill of 6 June 1993. The dilapidated 30 metre freighter he navigated was floating only a few hundred metres off Rockaway Point in Queen’s, New York. A gun was pressed at San Lwin’s head, and he was ordered to run the Golden Venture aground. At first, the chief officer bravely refused. But the Chinese gangster meant business. San Lwin had no choice but to order one of his men, a younger Burmese called Banyar Aung, to manoeuvre the ship into position. Then it ploughed full speed through the darkness for the shore.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have immigrated to the United States. Many think of the country as Jinshan, or the Mountain of Gold, a place where the streets are paved with gold, and they believe that everyone who makes it there will make a fortune.

—Ko-lin Chin, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark¹

Cooperation between the Hong Kong tycoons, the Triads and the Beijing leadership adds a new dimension to the well-known ‘mass line collection’ strategy followed by the Chinese Intelligence Services. This situation substantially raises the level of the potential threat, revealing the effectiveness of Chinese efforts to obtain Canadian technology and their capability to interfere in the management of the country.

—From Sidewinder, a secret report prepared for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 1997²