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.
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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.
Roger Canfield, Ph.D., the author of China’s Trojan Horses, is an associate editor for Military Magazine.
