New York's Chinatown, once the scene of brutal feuds between gangs like the Flying Dragons and Ghost Shadows, is witnessing a new turf war that police are blaming for up to three unsolved murders.
The unlikely protagonists are the owners and operators of rival bus services that offer discount tickets to cities like Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.
Violence linked to the dispute has reached such a level that police launched a surprise raid last week, seizing 16 buses from various bargain line operators.
While the raid was ostensibly to check for safety violations, many in the close-knit Chinatown community took it as a clear warning that official patience with the feuding was wearing extremely thin.
"There is an ongoing dispute concerning bus routes," acknowledged Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
"There was some violence attended to it last week -- the stabbing of a bus driver and another individual on East Broadway," Kelly said. "We're looking for information anyone might have about what's going on."
Bad blood first turned into spilled blood in May last year, when two operators of the Dragon Coach USA company were driving through Chinatown in lower Manhattan.
Another car drew alongside and gunmen opened fire. Chen Dejian, the company's financial affairs officer, tried to escape but was chased on foot and shot dead.
Chen had been involved in an incident the previous year, when he backed a vehicle into the manager of a rival bus outfit, New Century, breaking his pelvis.
In the wake of Chen's shooting, two New Century buses were torched and a headless torso, which has yet to be formally linked to the turf war, turned up nearby.
In October, a man who allegedly tried to extort a bus company owner was stabbed to death, and police believe the bus wars were also behind a shootout in January, when two men opened fire outside the Super Taste House restaurant with an AK-47 assault rifle and a handgun, killing a man in his 30s.
The discount bus companies have been around for more than a decade, touting their cut price rides -- just US$10 to Boston -- at an unofficial depot under the Manhattan Bridge.
Initially, the clientele was almost exclusively Chinese, and it was the discovery of the service by non-Chinese about two years ago that transformed a sideline business into a serious money earner.
With competition for passengers intensifying, a police task force report cited by the New York Daily News made it clear that intimidation had become a common tool.
"Strong-arm tactics are used and reprisals with the vandalism of each other's buses," the report said. "At times, scare tactics and physical beatings are even used upon customers to ensure that they do not utilize competitors' services."
Most of the bus owners and operators are relatively newly arrived immigrants from China's Fujian province.
According to Robin Mui, a journalist with the Chinese-language Sing Tao Daily here, the violence stems from a desire to protect their foothold in what is a lucrative alternative to the traditional Chinatown restaurant and garment industries.
"Unfortunately it's getting out of hand," Mui said. "The police are right to put the pressure on, otherwise it could become a total disaster.
"That AK-47 shooting happened in the middle of the night ... about 40 shots. Imagine if it happened on a crowded street on a crowded day -- you'd be looking at a war zone," he said.
Leaders of Chinatown's Fujianese community, like Steven Wong, have tried to negotiate between the bus owners who come from different villages in Fujian and are often reluctant to work together.
"We've held some talks, but the results are usually short term," Wong said. "They behave for a little while, but then it starts again. They're like little kids. It's a new business and they didn't get used to it yet."
Following the police raid, which he described as a "wake-up call," Wong said he had called another round table meeting.
"I'm trying to tell them that if they can't work it out between themselves, we will have no option but to talk to the community board and suggest they shut down everything."
Unlike the neighboring district of Little Italy, Chinatown has weathered the recent gentrification of lower Manhattan to retain its strong ethnic identity.
In the 1970s and 1980s, gang culture was endemic with virtually every small business forced to pay protection money or move out.
Chinatown still has a criminal underworld, but its pervasive influence has dwindled considerably since a federal crackdown that began in the mid-1980s put most of the gang leaders behind bars.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
In our discussions of tourism in Taiwan we often criticize the government’s addiction to promoting food and shopping, while ignoring Taiwan’s underdeveloped trekking and adventure travel opportunities. This discussion, however, is decidedly land-focused. When was the last time a port entered into it? Last week I encountered journalist and travel writer Cameron Dueck, who had sailed to Taiwan in 2023-24, and was full of tales. Like everyone who visits, he and his partner Fiona Ching loved our island nation and had nothing but wonderful experiences on land. But he had little positive to say about the way Taiwan has organized its
The entire Li Zhenxiu (李貞秀) saga has been an ugly, complicated mess. Born in China’s Hunan Province, she moved to work in Shenzhen, where she met her future Taiwanese husband. Most accounts have her arriving in Taiwan and marrying somewhere between 1993 and 1999. She built a successful career in Taiwan in the tech industry before founding her own company. She also served in high-ranking positions on various environmentally-focused tech associations. She says she was inspired by the founding of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in 2019 by Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), and began volunteering for the party soon after. Ko
During her 2015 trip to Taiwan, Sophia J. Chang (張詠慧) got fewer answers than she’d hoped for, but more revelations than she could have imagined. “That was the year I last saw my grandmother. She was in hospice care in Tainan, and it was painful to see her in bed, barely able to open her eyes,” says Los Angeles-born Chang. “The grandma I’d known, a fantastic cook and incredibly kind, was already gone.” After their visit, Chang and her grandfather went back to his apartment. There she asked him how he’d met her grandmother. “He hesitated, then started talking a bit.
RSS