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Allen Leung China

Terror in China

Terror in Chinatown
by Roger Canfield, (originally in New American, April 17, 2006

President Bush calls Communist China a “partner” in the war on terror, but some Chinese Americans are accusing China of bringing its own terror campaign to the USA.
Roger Canfield, Ph.D., the author of China’s Trojan Horses, is an associate editor for Military Magazine.
President Bush calls China a “strategic partner” in the war on terror, but some
Chinese Americans are accusing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of bringing
its own terror campaign to the USA. They believe the CCP ordered the murder of
Allen Ngai Leung, 56, an admired community leader in San Francisco. The day
after Leung’s murder, an anonymous caller to the worldwide Sound of Hope radio
said, “You want to know who killed Allen Leung? Call Chinese Consulate and
Chinese Chamber of Commerce.” And then hung up.
Leung’s murder “is spreading terror … [to] warn [those who] … dare to oppose the
CCP,” the Epoch Times reported on March 8. “We have now seen
the long arm of the Communist regime infiltrate the United States itself…. It
is … a frightening escalation of the Communists’ plans to silence and
intimidate the overseas Chinese people, in San Francisco, here, and around the
world.”
These accusations seem well founded. In mid-2005, Chen Yonglin, the 1st secretary of
the Chinese consulate-general in Sydney, Australia, defected and revealed his
network of 1,000 spies and enforcers whose job it was to intimidate people of
Chinese descent. And the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a
resolution urging the U.S. attorney general to investigate Chinese consular
officials in these actions on U.S. soil.
PRC Flag Flies Over Chinatown
The CCP’s presence in America is growing and becoming entrenched, especially in
Chinatown, which historically has been very anti-communist.
Allen Leung fought the CCP’s efforts to make inroads in Chinatown. A Chinese-language
reporter told The New American, “Without Allen every flag in Chinatown
will be red.” A well-placed source, claiming to be close to Allen Leung,
told TNA that the Chinese Consulate pays money to organizations to fly the communist
flag as a show of support for Communist China and has paid perhaps a million
dollars to major organizations to do so.
Our source said that the CCP desperately wanted control of the Chinese Consolidated
Benevolent Association, also known as the Six Companies, to further its
influence. The Six Companies is a single entity representing most of the highly
influential traditional Chinese family fraternal organizations. Evidently, the
CCP has been having success in its efforts. According to the Associated Press,
in March 2004 Daniel Hom, the newly elected president of the Chinese
Consolidated Benevolent Association, ditched his own organization’s ceremony —
which uses the flags of the United States and the Republic of China — to
attend a pro-communist event. Hom and friends went to a restaurant, displayed
flags of the People’s Republic of China, and sang the national song of Mainland
China with the consul general of the PRC, according to an AP report of June 30,
2004.
Leung was openly critical of Hom’s actions.
A city official, insistently nameless, told the San Francisco Chronicle that
the CCP was trying to unify all overseas Chinese under the PRC flag. “Five
years ago you could see flags of the Republic of China…. Today there are many
communist China flags. Communism is the newly rising political power.”
Enter the Red Queen
The CCP is making gains in areas heavily settled by Chinese not only through large
payoffs, but also with the aid of well-placed people. In the San Francisco
area, that person is Rose Pak. The Los Angeles Times once described Rose
Pak as the single most powerful person in San Francisco without benefit of
having been elected to a public office. In that city, you don’t have to say
Rose Pak. Just say “Rose.” Or just say “she.” Everyone knows
who you are talking about. A Chinese-language reporter told TNA, “In
Chinatown, Rose is treated like royalty. ‘She’ enjoys city-subsidized
low-income housing” overlooking the Bay Bridge. And “when ‘she’ goes
to a beauty salon she does not pay.”
Rose Pak’s visible means of income is being a general consultant to the Chinese Chamber of
Commerce. She receives 12 percent commissions on entry fees of reportedly as
much as one million dollars from participants in the annual Chinese New Year’s
Parade. As a formidable fundraiser and organizer, she helped elect at least two
mayors of San Francisco — Art Agnos and Willie Brown. In return, she expects
political “favors.” A political activist told TNA that both mayors
helped Pak — a Chinese national and former Columbia University student —
solve an immigration problem. A community leader told TNA, “Rose is so
well connected to the police chief, district attorney, and city
attorney” that she can get away with almost anything. A political activist
said to TNA, “No one is above the law — except Rose Pak in San
Francisco.”
Pak has a still darker side. “Rose Pak is known to be the spokeswoman of [the]
Chinese Communist Party, as well as a special agent for the Chinese Communist
Party,” according to the Epoch Times. Backing that assertion, the Singtao
Daily
reported in 2001 that Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin once honored Pak for defeating a
resolution by San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly condemning China’s
persecution of the practitioners of Falun Gong, a Chinese system of exercise
and meditation: “President Jiang was very happy … with the work done by
the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Rose Pak.” Friends of Rose Pak told a
Chinese-language reporter, “She came to San Francisco with a clear mission
to go into Chinatown.” And a Chinese-language reporter has recently
discovered that circa 1970, while she was in Australia, Pak made frequent
contact with none other than Li Peng, who between 1998 and 2003 ranked second
in the Communist Party of China behind Jiang Zemin on the Politburo.
A series of setbacks for Pak may have signaled the demise of Allen Leung. Pak began hitting
some roadblocks a couple years ago. San Francisco’s ultra-liberal mayor, Gavin
Newsom, who would seem to be a natural ally of Rose Pak, surprisingly replaced
Pak’s allies on city boards and commissions. This included appointing Allen
Leung to the Chinatown Economic Development Group. Then the Falun Gong sued Pak
and the city-funded Chinese Chamber of Commerce for not allowing the
anti-communist Chinese group to participate in the Chinese New Year’s Parade.
By early 2006, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took up a resolution
condemning Communist China’s persecution of Falun Gong. The Chinese Consulate,
wishing to quash any negative commentary about Mainland China’s human rights
atrocities, warned that “passage of the resolution will affect Sino-US
relations.” Rose Pak ran full-page ads in the Chronicle publicly
threatening the political careers of Supervisors Chris Daly and Fiona Ma. The
resolution passed nine to two.
Within weeks, Allen Leung was brutally murdered. Killing Leung would make sense to the
CCP because in Chinatown only a few stalwarts stand in the way of the CCP’s
goal of being the dominant influence in the community, and Leung was one of the
anti-communist stalwarts. Several sources told TNA that Leung was
systematically organizing opposition to the CCP just before his death. A Mr.
Lin told the Epoch Times, “Allen Leung … was listed on the CCP’s
blacklist.” Norman Yang, executive president of the Cross Strait
Prosperity in Peace Association, told the Epoch Times, “His death …
is a big blow to the anti-CCP … groups.”
Leung did much to make himself a target. He reportedly raised “several million
dollars” to form a new association of overseas Chinese to counter CCP
influence operations. A Chinese-language reporter told TNA of planning to meet
with Leung about his new organization, but Leung was killed before the meeting
could take place.
As part of Leung’s efforts to stop CCP influence in Chinatown, he fought to stop the CCP
buyout of the Six Companies. He believed that the CCP planned the buyout so
that it could put a stop to the annual October 10 celebration of the Republic
of China’s founder Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. A local resident told the Epoch Times,
“The CCP bought off … community leaders … [and] … wanted to abolish the
October tenth parade. It was Leung who … enabled the continuation of the
parade. The CCP faction has always … wanted to get rid of him.”
The Crime
In the late afternoon on February 27, Allen Leung unlocked the front door of his business,
Wonkow International Enterprises, in Chinatown. A masked Asian man of about 30
entered, walked past Leung’s wife, feigned a robbery, refused money, shot Leung
four times in the head, and fled the scene. No witnesses are known to have come
forward despite the fact that up to seven gunshots were fired in late afternoon
and a masked suspect fled from the scene on a typically busy street that is
crammed with as many as 40 businesses.
San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) spokeswoman Maria Oropeza told the World
Journal
, “It wasn’t a random act…. This victim was an intended
target…. This was not a robbery.”
The most widely whispered theory, besides the belief that this was a CCP-ordered
execution, is that Leung was the victim of criminal gang warfare. In 2005,
Leung told the FBI his life was threatened after he refused to give $100,000 to
two young members of the Hop Sing Tong. This is the story being promoted by the
pro-CCP newspapers in Chinatown. An anonymous senior Chinese-American community
leader told the Epoch Times, “At present, Singtao Daily, the
China Press, and Ming Pao Daily … [blame] disputes between
gangs. Do not believe it.” Skepticism is warranted because evidence
suggests that the CCP either owns outright or controls these newspapers. And
the remaining independent Chinese newspapers are intimidated.
A well-placed source told TNA, “It had to be planned. The day after Allen’s
murder all three CCP-controlled papers told the same story.” They claimed
that Leung’s murder was a dispute among the “black societies” and
emphasized that Allen Leung had gone to the FBI for protection and ended up
dead. “The message is you are not safe anywhere.” The message of fear
seems to be working. People are refusing to talk, or will talk only if they can
remain anonymous. But it isn’t for fear of gangs. It’s fear of the Chinese
Consulate.
TNA’s well-placed source believes the CCP had hired an out-of-town contract killer to
murder Allen Leung. Far fetched? Brian McAdam, a retired Canadian foreign
service officer who is a specialist in Chinese organized crime organizations
called Triads, told TNA, “Allied with Communist China’s tyrannical …
regime, the Triad’s wealth and power have been helping China buy and spy”
— and kill. McAdam quoted Martin Booth, the author of two books on Triads, as
saying: “In some diplomatic circles, it is being suggested that the Triads
are … being asked to engage in ‘wet work’ [assassinations] on behalf of the
Communist Chinese secret service.” With the huge trade surplus China
enjoys, they can certainly afford to hire out their dirty work.
This is hardly the first time that such claims have been made. Justin Yu, former
president of the Chinese Language Journalists Association and a longtime
reporter for the World Press, one of the largest Chinese-language
newspapers in the United States, told The New American in 1997: “In the
U.S. the Red Chinese government and their security forces use triad groups to …
intimidate the Chinese community…. In San Francisco … the gangsters
intimidate ethnic Chinese who are critical of the regime. They attack them on
the streets, vandalize their property … to punish and silence them.”
Our source said that he knew from discussions with Leung’s friends and with police
officers that the Chinese Consulate’s “purpose is to make San Francisco a
safe haven for high-level corrupt CCP officials escaping from Mainland
China…. Allen Leung’s murder is … preparation for establishing a more
‘friendly’ environment for a CCP power base in the United States.”
Subsequent investigations may find a personal, business, or gang motive behind the killing
of Allen Leung, but no matter who killed Leung, one thing is sure: the CCP is
glad he’s gone.