CHINA:China's booming economy is providing rich pickings for criminal gangs and authorities are fighting to keep Triad-style hoodlums from gaining a foothold in the country.
The latest dragnet by the government's anti-mobster taskforce has cracked more than 1,300 criminal gangs.
The focus of the crackdown has been on public officials who protect the mobsters, either because they are corrupt or because they are coerced into offering the gangs "umbrella" protection, said Huang Hailong, deputy head of the investigation department of the Supreme People's Procuratorate.
By the end of last month, police had referred 196 cases of alleged organised crime for prosecution and 33 cases involving 47 state workers were uncovered.
There is an old saying in China that "gangsters and police belong to the same family", but mobsters were largely sidelined by the iron rule of Mao Zedong's Communist Party.
As the economy opens up, organised crime has grown and there are now said to be at least one million mobsters in China. Triad-style secret societies are strongest in the southern provinces bordering Hong Kong, long the region's organised crime capital.
Government efforts to control the mob in Hong Kong have been largely effective, although in August Hong Kong lawmaker Albert Ho, who had prosecuted the Triads, was badly beaten by four baton-wielding thugs in a busy McDonald's restaurant. The case shocked the territory and showed the secret societies were not dead yet.
Just as legitimate business has thrived by setting up in mainland China, so too are Hong Kong's mobsters looking across the border for growth, and the territory's organised crime and Triad bureau has been involved in numerous cross-border operations with mainland Chinese authorities to tackle drug trafficking, prostitution and counterfeiting.
Once the Triad gangs arrive in China, they often to find established criminal networks already in place, with crucial protection from corrupt local officials.
The government has set up a police task force with special weaponry in the prosperous city of Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong province, to deal with gangs.
A major income source for the gangsters is intellectual property theft - the trade in pirate DVDs, CDs and software .