1. [11011] The Death of a Thousand Cuts is an encryption
system for 'cleansing' professed traitors of the Hung-Triads.1
'Cleansing' involves draining every-drop of blood from the
victims body through an intricately timed numerical system of
one thousand incisions. "In Chinese they say: 'Only the
mighty 7 (which is Death) keeps 3 (which is Creation) pure!' "2
2. [11010] The global war machine sets "its sights on a new
type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another
regime, but the 'unspecified enemy'. . .multiform, manoeuvring
and omnipresent. . .the unassignable material Saboteur or
human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms."3
3. [11001] "All war is based on deception."4
n the Chinese Criminal Syndicates, the Triads see Boocock, J.
O
(1991) 'Chasing the Other Dragon', in Police Review, 21/6, 1260-61.
Cheung, T-S. & Lau, C-C. (1981) 'A Profile of Syndicate Corruption
in the Police Force' in D.P.C. Lee(ed) Corruption & Its Control in
Hong Kong, HK: Chinese Uni. Of HK. Chin, Ko-Lin. (1995) 'Triad
Societies in Hong Kong', in Transnational Organized Crime, Vol.1,
No.1, Spring 47-64. Chu, Y.K. (1995) 'The Triad Threat to Europe,' in
Policing. Lee, G. (1996) 'Troubled By Triads', 12/1 in Police Review,
16-17. Merritt, B. (1991) 'How the Hong Kong Police Fights the
Triads', 19/7, Vol.99, 1480-81. (1991) 'Beyond the Triad Myth', 26/7,
Vol.99, 1532-1533. Nevin, C. 'Sharks In Chinatown', The Observer
Magazine, 5/3, 37. Posner, G. (1989) 'Chasing the Triad Dragon', in
The Observer Magazine, 5/3, 30.
1
2
121 in H. Arvay (1977) Triad 21 London: NEL.
3
422 in Deleuze, G. & F. Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus,
London: Athlone.
[ I 17] in Sun Tzu (1963) The Art of War (trans. S. Griffith) Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
4
CCRU- Fei Ch-ien Rinse Out sino-futurist under-currency
Texts/Essays/CCRU- Fei Ch-ien Rinse Out_ sino-futurist under-currency.pdf
4. [11000] Sinofuturism is a darkside cartography of the
turbulent rise of East Asia. It connects seemingly
heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary
capitalism. On digital maps sent back from Shaolin (a satellite
entity orbiting somewhere outside history) the modern
Occident appears as irrigated through a modernity of
thermodynamic industrialist aggression. When the modern
nation-state bought its war machines, splitting a constitutive
power into a double articulation between political aims and
militarised means, it adopted a state-centred martial mode.
But the regulation/prohibition of means has, for a long time,
been known as the best recipe for turbulence- control as a
catalyst of non-linearity. It was not surprising, therefore, when
the means (through unprecedented investment in constant
and variable capital), in a flash, emerged from the depths of
the strata, dragging with it the intestines that had held it in
place, pulling the inside of the State onto the outside. Thereby
Clausewitz's formula was reversed, relegating component
States into mere conduits for a planetary military-cybernetic
machine. Phase change. Programmed catastrophe surfing on
pure war. Turbulence simulation. A war against positive
feedback "quantizing it as amplification within an unvariable
metric. . .[and] . . .establishing a cybernetics of stability
fortified against the future."5 Postmodern control is based on
the undecidable proposition because, after the Absolute
Peace of the Cold war, the enemy to the human security
system is a polytendrilled abomination (into which the state is
always becoming) of transnational trade, warlords,
narco-syndicates and millenial death cults. At this precise
point, Sun Tzu rushes in from Shaolin, with tactical cuts on
lant, S. & N. Land, 'Cyberpositive' in (1994) M. Fuller(ed)
P
Unnatural, London: Underground
5
the CNS of the Occidental megamachine as it mutates into
informational ice.6
5. [10111] "The modern Human Security System might even
have appeared with Wiener's subliminal insight that
everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind. Evolving
out of a work on weaponry guidance systems, his was an
attempt to enslave cybernetics to a general defence
technology against alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be
kept under control, under a control that was itself not
cybernetic. It was as if his thinking were guided by a blind
tropism of evasion, away from another, deeper, runaway
process: from a technics losing control and a communication
with the outside of man."7
6. [10110] Cut. When Wiener sanctifies Leibniz as the don of
cybernetics for animating the triadic geometricism of
6
"After many centuries of inspiring kingmakers, generals and spies,
Sun's message was lost on the nineteenth century's Clausewitz,
Moltke, and the iron generals of Total War, who were too fascinated
by industrial technology, military hardware, logistics, and sheer
destructive power. . . Nevertheless, much of what Clausewitz
admired about Napoleon's use of paramilitary units, surprise and
evasion, probably came from the Corsican's early reading of the first
Western translation of Sun Tzu by JJ Amiot, a French Jesuit scholar
in China, which was in circulation in Paris when Napoleon was a
young officer. This preference for cleverness over brute force has
earned Sun Tzu a prominent place ever since on the bookshelves of
diplomats, generals and corporate planners. Filled with terse and
provocative aphorisms, The Art of War is as closely studied by Asian
investors and businessmen today as it was earlier by Mao Tse-tung
Ho Chi-minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. The Japanese say 'Politics is
business, business is war.' If the market place is a battleground,
requiring strategy and tactics, Sun Tzu wrote the Bible." 45-46 in
Seagrave, S. (1995) Lords of the Rim, London: Bantam.
7
op cit. Plant & Land (1994)
Spinoza's Ethics, he wages war on the outside. Wiener's
Cybernetics consisted of on-off electrical switches, a Boolean
algebra of classes based on the yes-no of inside or outside a
class. The crucial point of convergence was Leibniz's
elucidation of the binary counting system. When Leibniz had
developed this he sent some transcripts to his Jesuit
correspondent in China, Bouvet. In return, Bouvet sent
Leibniz a copy of the I Ching thinking he would be amazed to
see that his binary system had been circulating for millennia.
Leibniz was so affected. So affected as to hallucinate it as
evidence as some kind of universalist triumph. He re-routes
Creation through a neo-Confucianist I Ching of binary
arithmetic. "I think the substance of the ancient theology of
the Chinese is intact and, purged of additional errors, can be
harnessed to the great truths of Christian religion."8 It would
seem therefore that Leibniz organizes Spinoza's substance as
Confucius codes the tao. Neo-Confucianism becomes the
mega-organism of the monadology, with God as the binary
machine of the yin-yang, while hiding a darkside cosmic
cartography of the matrix, Spinoza's substance or the
machinic phylum. (It should be noted that Deleuze's Leibniz is
more resilient, a organicism taken to such psychedelic
extremes that it takes merely a nudge to open it out onto a
topology of morals; the monadology unfolds into the
nomadology)
7. [10101] Shaolin takes the I Ching for software assigning the
number 3 as the immobile motor of the encryption system. In
the I Ching, the hexagramic production process involves a
chaotic flow of numbers. A trigram involves 2 machinic
components; rigid, unbroken lines; supple, broken lines. The
8
73 in Leibniz, G.W. (1994) Writings on China, D.J. Cook & H.
Rosemont Jr.(eds) Illinois: Open Court Publishing.
rigid and broken lines correspond to yang and yin
respectively. Either of these lines can be lines of becoming in
that period of transition which makes it impossible to speak of
the yin-yan as dialectic. Trigrams or gua are composed of
three lines stacked upon each other. In piles of 3, the possible
configurations are 23=8. Around these lines function a 64 (82)
piece system comprised of all the possible permutations. A
hexagram cartography maps the non-linear dynamics of
exteriority; self-organization in smooth space, the onset of
turbulence and the folding of stratification.9 As with a
computer, the I Ching samples the actual and runs it through
a binary system- in materialist hyper-reality, simulation is not
a loss of the real (a postmodern idealist nihilism) but the
intervention of the virtual (reality) into the actual (reality).
Reality is always a machinic production.
9
In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze & Guattari (perhaps spuriously)
point to the limit of the I Ching's relation to the plane of consistency
by differentiating the philosophical concept from the figure (which
they argue lapses into a tracing of Nature) "Hexagrams are
combinations of continuous and discontinuous features deriving from
one another according to the levels of a spiral that figures the set of
moments through which a transcendent descends. . .In a sort of
to-ing and fro-ing, Chinese thought inscribes the diagrammatic
movements of a Nature-thought on the plane, intensive ordinates of
these infinite movements, with their components in continuous and
discontinuous features. But correspondences like these do not rule
out there being a boundary, however difficult it is to make out. This is
because figures are projections on the plane, which implies
something vertical or transcendent. Concepts, on the other hand,
imply only neighbourhoods and connections on the horizon.
Certainly, as Francois Jullien has already shown in the case of
Chinese thought, the transcendent produces an 'absolutization of
immanence' through projection." 89-93 (1993) London: Verso. This
seems valid against Confucianism but highly questionable in relation
to a yin-positive Taoism and its sinofuturist guerrilla offshoots.
8. [10100] Oriental and Occidental stratification meet on the
plane of organisation. According to Wiener, Leibniz "replaces
the pair of corresponding elements, mind and matter, by a
continuum of corresponding elements, the monads. While
these are conceived after the pattern of the soul, they include
many instances which do not rise to the degree of
self-consciousness of full souls, and which form part of that
world which Descartes would have attributed to matter. Each
of them lives in its own closed universe, with a perfect causal
chain from the creation or from minus infinity in time to the
indefinitely remote future; but closed though they are, they
correspond one to the other through the pre-established
harmony of God. Leibniz compares them to clocks which have
which have been wound up as to keep time together from the
creation for all eternity. Unlike humanly made clocks, they do
not drift into asynchronism; but this is due to the miraculously
perfect workmanship of the creator."10 Like Hobbes'
Leviathan, where the Man-State is an organism (with the
embryonic bourgeois monetary capillary system as irrigated
network of blood), Wiener points out how in Leibniz's fractal
monadology his "treatment of the living organism [as]. . . really
a plenum, wherein other living organisms, such as the blood
corpuscles, have their life" runs along that same plane;
"scarcely more than a philosophical anticipation of the cell
theory, according to which most of the animals and plants of
moderate size and all those of large dimensions are made up
of units, cells, which have many if not all the attributes of
independent living organism. . .building bricks of organisms of
a higher stage."11
1 in Wiener, N. (1965) Cybernetics, Camb. Massachusetts: MIT
4
Press.
10
11
ibid. 155.
9. [10011] East-West co-stratification. Twined. Organisms on
every scale. For non-organic or machinic desire, exterior to
any system of transgression, law or lack, "PODS= Politically
Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods
hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions,
family and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the
corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells. The global
human security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in
the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all
the resources of repression as concrete collective history."12
10. [10010] "The last organs fall off leper earth revealing
sockets of mangled circuitry and coagulated blood dispersing
out through transcarcerative planomenal veins- drug rush,
energy rush, artillery through the arteries."13 "Heroin goes
triadic, the veins ice over and crack."14 Carried along by the
breakbeats of a cosmic secret numeracy, a whole darkside
network of trade and relays from the Orient infiltrate the
Occident. An intricate system of cuts, sinofuturism is the
acupuncture of the West into planetary schizophrenia. "The
transfer from Empire of China to Empire of the Self is never
ending."15
12
471 in Land, N. (1993) 'Machinic Desire', in Textual Practice 7(3):
471-82.
13
11 in Switch (1998) Flee Control, abstract culture, swarm 3, Ccru.
14
Ibid
V
ictor Segalin quoted in Dean, K. & B. Massumi (1992) First &
Last Emperors, 153.
15
11. [10001] "Five hundred years of modernity fades when the
weaving of bamboo mats converges with the manufacture of
computer games in the streets of Bangkok, Taipei, and
Shanghai. The silicon links were already there."16 Cybernetics
is not just about technical machines. Information warfare is
not just about cyberspace. Its fundamental element is virtual
reality, but an array of practical religions have been surfing it
for many millenia. This is perhaps why so much of the 'new
science' of complexity is ceaselessly converging with the
cosmic materialism of Voodoo, Tantrism, Zen and the
Chinese martial arts, pointing to non-Western influences on
cybernetics, and the emergent lines of a future, beyond the
pale.17 Situated on this continuum, information warfare is
stripped down to a war of perceptions, hacking, jamming and
stealth tactics in the nervous system, whether it be planetary
telecommercial networks or the human organism. As Virilio
puts it, "[w]eapons are tools not just of destruction but also of
perception- that is to say, stimulants that make themselves
16
17
253 in Plant, S. (1997) Zeros & Ones. London: Fourth Estate
. See for example, 675 Fernandez-Armesto, F. (1995) Millennium,
London: BCA, Capra, F. (1975) The Tao of Physics, London:
Fontana, and Briggs, J. & F.D. Peat (1989) Turbulent Mirror, New
York: Harper & Row. Breakbeat culture, Greg Tate, Ron Eglash,
William Gibson, Samuel Delany, Kodwo Eshun, Erik Davis and the
Ccru have already begun to map elements of an Afro-futurism. (see
particularly the unpublished thesis 'Mapping the Liminal', (1997)
Jessica Edwards, Roehampton Institute of London). Marshall
McLuhan (eg. In War & Peace in the Global Village, The Global
Village and The Gutenburg Galaxy) also often alludes to the
Orientalising of the West through electronic circuitry but it remains
unclear whether this involves anything more than a crude
superimposition of a digital-analogue distinction onto west-east.
felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense
organs and the central nervous system, affecting human
reactions and even the perceptual identification and
differentiation of objects."18 It is in this respect that narcotics
can be considered as "a soft plague infecting the nervous
system of commodity cybernetics. . .A global capitalism
fighting its own drugs markets is a horror auto-toxicus, an
auto-immune disease. Drug control is the attempt by the
human species to control the uncontrollable; control
escalation itself, tropisms programmed by the aliens. The
human security apparatuses experiment with drugs as
weapons and tools, their soldiers are stoned, energised, and
anaesthetised on a range of prescribed and proscribed
pharmaceuticals. Their irregular forces are subsidised by
narcotics revenue. The war against drugs is a war on drugs."
19
For Paul Virilio, Sun Tzu is a rumbling undercurrent. In fact
it is Sun Tzu who invents his notion of Pure war, meditating in
Shaolin for two and a half millenia waiting for its actualisation
in military cybernetics. The reason why The Art of War by Sun
Tzu is a tool-box for the 'cutting edge' of cybernetic capitalism,
from business to military strategists, is that it contains an
abstract flow chart or a fluid physics for survival 'far from
equilibrium,' a tactics for turbulence. Camouflage.
Imperceptibility. Speed. "Be so subtle that you are invisible.
Be so Mysterious that you are intangible. Then you will control
your rivals' fate."20
18
6 in Virilio, P. (1989) War and Cinema, London: Verso.
19
Op cit., S. Plant & N. Land (1994).
20
Op cit., (1963) Sun Tzu [VI 9].
12. [10000] "Neo China arrives from the future."21 Or has been
arriving ever since it was by-passed by European militarized
capital, despite a much stronger degree of technological
development. As Manuel Da Landa puts it, "the Europe of
1494 was in a process of 'solidification," as if the different
political entities that comprise Europe had existed in a fluid
form and were now crystallizing into a solid shape. In contrast
with rival empires (Chinese, Ottoman), which for reasons of
geography and religion had developed a mostly uniform
'crystal,' Europe never solidified into one piece, but rather into
a broken conglomerate with shifting boundaries. As 'stress'
built up along those cracks and fissures, it was relieved in the
form of armed conflict following the lines of least resistance.
And it was indeed the dynamical nature of the 'broken crystal'
that allowed Western Societies to surpass China and Islam in
the competition to conquer the world."22
13. [1111] Slow release protracted war run from Shaolin;
Shaolin is swarm catalyser, programming Triad syndicated
film production in Hong Kong, golden triangle poppy
production, Kowloon chemical distillation and encrypted
planetary distribution networks rinsing out global finance in
San Franciscan Laundromats. Shaolin orchestration of the
golden triangle turns the Opium War against itself through
those intricate incisions, routes opened by numeric rhythms in
continuous variation. Chinese narcotic syndicates operate on
the darkside of the guanxi rhizome of Chinese informal trading
markets. Secret cartography. Secret money. Secret
21
1 in Land, N. (1997) Meltdown, abstract culture swarm 1, issue 1,
Ccru.
in Da Landa, M. (1991) War In the Age of Intelligent Machines,
2
NY: Zone.
22
composition. Unknown chemicals to rewire the nervous
systems for the 21st century. When all the instruments of
spying, deception are put in place and functioning smoothly,
the Lords of the Rim shall run the celestial web. As Sterling
Seagrave points out, sino-futurism is less an issue of the
Chinese state in future core conflict (not that this is not of
massive importance to the trajectory of the world system) but
the vast overseas population which runs South East Asia and
produces internal souths in Occidental megalopian jungles. 23
14. [1110] Moebius. The encrypted plane is folded into a
plane of organisation, a twin-headed (69) multi-scalar capture
complex generating closed circuits or laminar turfs extorted by
the state and micro-despotic syndicate protection rackets.
States, clans and gangs plugged together under the dark sun
of total annihilation. A symbiotics of markets and anti-markets,
narco-capital twists prohibition against itself through
escalative waves of mass addiction beyond control. What
brings states into complementary relation with crime
syndicates is those kleptocratic elements which operate as an
anti-market- territorial protectionism and the exortion of rent.
Protection is a mini-despotic service, a vernacular welfarism
founded on micro-monopolies of martial potential. Turkish,
Sicilian, Russian Mafia. Jamaican Gangstas. Mexican and
Colombian Cartels. Japanese Yakuza. Chinese Triads. "It all
mixes in the blood of the junky." 24
15. [1101] Deleuze & Guattari's non-linear social 'evolution'
attempts a radical break from evolution itself. "All we need to
23
Op cit., S. Seagrave (1995).
24
op cit., Switch 1998 4.
do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all
evolutionism crumble."25 Running a tendential system from the
territorialized and coded earth to the decoding and
deterritorializing planet, capitalism is seen to retro-chronically
rework the whole of history which is composed of a
co-existing continuum of rigid lines, broken lines and line of
becoming, with their corresponding modes of social
segmentarity, regimes of signs, modes of numeracy, and
relation to speed (space-time). It constitutes not historical
resolution but a descent into the maelstrom, down the
spiralling slopes into the matrix. But neither does the New
World Disorder become the substitute telos of social
transformation. "From the standpoint of a whimsical
evolutionism according to which packs are lower on the scale
and are superseded by the State or familial societies. On the
contrary there is a difference in nature. The organization of
packs is entirely different from that of families and states: they
continually work them within and trouble them from without,
with other forms of content, other forms of expression."26
16. [1100] The onset of turbulence. From molecular streams
seeping from the damms of Occidental ice to high bandwidth
cables plugged straight into the heart of the jungle, pumping
alternating currents of cocaine, opium, guns, cash and
information into the warped strataplex of the core. A
planomenal jungle topology traced as a tropical geometry of
golden crescents and triangles feeding the internal south.
"Narcotic trade as guerrilla swarmachine. Becoming
imperceptible, Becoming flea. . .but territorial fleas. Dog fleas.
Subterranean networks of molecular distribution,
25
Op cit., Deleuze & Guattari 1988 430.
26
Ibid. 242.
deterritorializing the apparatus of statist commodity control,
but reterritorializing as micro-statist oedipal organized crime
syndicates. Statist and micro-statist Drug Enforcement
Agencies in ostensible opposition, White economies vs. Black
markets, poles of mutually legitimately cybernetic interaction
operating territorial protectionism."27 The internal south is not
neo-primitive but does breed modes of collectivity of the band,
pack or gang type. In Capitalism & Schizophrenia, the
primitive machine is coded and territorialized on the earth. But
its supple segmentarity, its mechanisms put in place to ward
off tendencies of stratification are not confined to
hunter-gathering societies. That is to say, its abstract machine
is not underdeveloped, disorganized or tied to the infancy of
history. The permutations of segmentarity are stretched out
on a virtual continuum of coexistence. The BWO is the
sample bank out of which history extracts its flows. It is the
engine which makes the social flee all over the place. And this
is why Paul Virilio, in Speed & Politics, describes the function
of the police as 'highway patrol'28 , the regulation of escape
velocities, a tendential calculus manufacturing homeostasis.
Axiomatics. The Unspecified Enemy. Propositions
Undecidable. On this continuum, banditry, piracy, gangs,
police and State war machines are merely differences in
consistency, composition and speed. This topology twists the
traditional theory of organized crime upside down. Instead of
the pyramidal Mafia hierarchy run by the mini-despot who
orchestrates the tendrils of the black market with political
corruption and the threat of violence, the abstract machine of
(dis)organised crime works bottom up along the lines of viral
27
28
Op cit., Switch 1998 4
. 14 in Virilio, P. (1986) Speed & Politics, NY: Semiotexte.
contagion and auto-immune response. Markets resonate in
anti-markets. Rhizomes arborified by rhizomaniacs.
17. [1011] Chinese crime syndicates are not nomad war
machines. There is too much engagement in micro-fascism
for that. But its blade politics generate accidental effects
crucially in distinction from the fascist morality of the scalpel.
Instead of the lancing of cancerous growths on the social
body, their incisions into the Occident accelerates trade
through the protective shell of the Western Bodily
Organization. (WBO)29 But even in Shaolin the mission was
always ambivalent, assisting the Empire in fighting off the
invading Eleuth Mongols (and after World War II, against the
Mao's guerrilla swarmachine), while maintaining a secret
organization always in tension with the imperial bureaucracy.
18. [1010] An entwined composition oscillating between mega
and war machinic modes. Undoubtedly, it is the war machinic
threads that prove educational to sinofuturism. For Deleuze &
Guattari, the war machine is diagrammed by an occult
numeracy which forges secret pathways, imperceptible to the
eye of power. Between the nomad war machine and the
apparatus of capture, "[t]he issue is not at all anarchy versus
organization, not even centralism versus decentralisation, but
a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable
sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets."30 In
opposition to the numbered number which measures the
movement of bodies in space, the numbering number
29
see Carlyle, A. (1997) Amortal Kombat, abstract culture, swarm 2,
issue 7.
30
Op cit., Deleuze & Guattari 1988 471.
lubricates collective vectors through layers of social
sedimentation. Nomad numeracy is an abstract engine giving
a distributed population a dynamic consistency- swarmachinic
encryption. For illegal syndicates and guerrilla groups
morphological fluidity are essential. In the "war machine and
nomadic existence, the number is no longer numbered, but
becomes a Cipher, and it is this capacity that it constitutes the
'esprit de corps' and invents the secret and its outgrowths
(strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy etc."31
19. [1001] Triad organisation engages a coding system at
odds with that of the state, even though this informal network
can still be seen to criss-cross through the higher echelons of
an array of corrupt political elites. "The Numbering Number, in
other words, autonomous arithmetic organization. . .appear as
soon as one distributes something in space, instead of
dividing up space or distributing space itself. The number
becomes a subject. The independence of the number in
relation to space is a result not of abstraction but of the
concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied without
being counted. The number is no longer a means of counting
but of moving."32 Cosmic secrecy requires a multi-scalar
encryption system, side-stepping Occidental evolution to
hot-link into the matrix.
20. [1000] Another economy of violence, another cruelty, an
encrypted mnemotechnics. Members are coded through
initiation ceremonies which draw new components of the
collective assemblage into the consistency of the Triad
machinery. A secret semiotics of the body allows undetected
31
Ibid. 390.
32
Ibid. 389.
transfers of information, fluid lines of escape under the
camouflage of officialdom or legality. The secret handshake is
a transversal interlock, disengaging professional masks to
conduct a darkside flow of cash, information, software,
electronics hardware, narcotics and weaponry. "When the
lodge father had accepted Piet's tea and Yung's salute, he
stood to attention placing his left hand slightly below his chest
with thumb, third and little fingers out- stretched. His index
and fourth fingers were bent under his palm. It was the secret
sign which only a lodge father may use. Yung Ming replied by
putting his own hand on the identical portion of his body, the
thumb and the little finger outstretched and the other three
fingers kept tucked beneath the palm. He thereby returned the
secret sign of a branch leader. Then they bowed deeply to
each other." 33
21. [111] "To the Triads the number 3 is of central
significance, both mathematically and mystically: 3 multiplied
by 3 (3 squared) equals 9; and any number that adds up to 9
is divisible by 9. For example: 1,804,563, which reduces to 9
by adding all the digits together (27) and then adding the
result together (2+7=9). To the Chinese, 3 is the mystical
number denoting the balance between Heaven, Earth and
Man. . ."34 Triadic machine coding attributes to each
officer-rank a numerical code which begins with a four. Basic
members are known as SzeKau or 49s. Shan Chu is 489; the
Fu Shan Chu, Heung Chu, Sin Fung and Sheung Fa officers
33
Op cit., Arvay 1978 32.
8
in Booth, M. (1993) The Triads, London: Harper Collins. On the
schizotectonics of digital reduction, geo-cosmic encryption and
Plutonism see D.C. Barker (1997) What Counts As Human,
Kingsport (Mass): Kingsport College Press.
34
(all equal in rank) are 438; the Hung Kwan is 426; Pak Tsz
Sin is 415; Cho Hai is 432. Lodge leaders are termed 489s
and also 21s (4+8+9). 21 is also 3(number of creation)
multiplied by 7 (both the number of death and lucky number);
the coding encrypted into the leader therefore inscribes the
abstract machine or phase space of the whole system in
actuality. Also significant, the incense Master, 438, is 15
(4+3+8); 3 multiplied by 5, or creation and
longevity/preservation maps onto his function in lodge ritual
as conductor of future-history. The internal consistency of this
numeracy is significant in that it offers a mode of composition
lubricating the movement of bodies in space, through jungles
to covert chemical/software factories to towering
mega-corporations as accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers,
and most notably the police itself. For as Martin Booth points
out, "a Triad lodge rarely has a permanent location."35 Interpol
once described the Triad structure as a several storied
building in which the inhabitants of one floor don't know where
the stairs are to the next floor."36 Despite global reach, the
Triads vary from other syndicates in that, while Hong Kong,
especially after return to China, serves as catalytic HQ, there
is no overreaching administration. Globally, the three most
powerful factions are the 14K, the Sun Yee On and the Wo
Hop To. Each lodge is for the most part autonomous even
from other 14K lodges for example. Difficult to penetrate,
subterranean imperceptibility has a long history for gangs
associated with the ancient martial arts.
35
Op cit., Booth 1993 35.
36
45 in Sterling, C. (1994) Thieves' World, London:
22. [110] Opium was not a problem for China until Occidental
infiltration in the late 18th and 19th centuries37 . China had
much that the West desired (tea, silk, cotton, spices and rice).
England, the major mercantile force of the period had to pay
for goods in silver bullion which fluctuated wildly in terms of
price and supply. Through East India Company opium
injected through the skin, the direction of trade reversed as
the drug seeped into every pore. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, all
the major financial institutions which persist today were
instituted on the loot- Dent & Co., Butterfield & Swire,
Hutchison & Co. and Jardine, Mathesons & Co. As Martin
Booth tells us, "all these firms were founded on opium."38 The
taxation on opium trade imposed by the Chinese government
generated the underground network subsequently ploughed
by the Triads who made almost as much money as the
37
see The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes, (1960) A. Waley,
London: Unwin Bros. Ltd. Karl Marx, in his articles for the New York
Daily Tribune from 1853-1860 describes how the second opium war
was the decisive event which opened up China to Western
civilization, ending with the capture of Peking, the legalization of the
opium traffic and the imposition of conditions which laid the
foundations of later imperialism. In this important journalism, Marx
(despite the Hegelian entrapment into a dialectical vision of the
unfolding of European history) stakes his claim as early prophet of
sinofuturism; "It may seem a very strange, and a very paradoxical
assertion that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their
next movement for republican freedom and economy of Government,
may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial
Empire- the very opposite of Europe- than on any other political
cause that now exists- more even than on the menaces of Russia
and the consequent likelihood of a general European war. But yet it
is no paradox, as all may understand by attentively considering the
circumstances of the case." N.Y.D.T., June 14, 1853, 1 in Marx on
China, (1951) Lawrence & Wishart.
38
Op cit., Booth 1990 47.
English did39. "When in 1915, the British ceased importing
opium into China, the French continued to traffic and began
cultivating their own sources of supply in north-western
Vietnam and eastern Laos. French advisors made contact
with the Meo and Yao hill tribes, teaching them to grow
harvest and market opium and thus was the Golden Triangle
born. . .The basis for all of this was of course silver. During
1837, for example, the British sent 2.4 million kilograms of
opium to China. Each kilo of opium was worth five taels of
silver thus, approximately 10 million taels of silver were
transmitted abroad in a single year."40
23. [101] "In the latter half of the T'ang dynasty a growing tea
commerce between the south and the imperial capital began
to underscore the necessity for convenience to exchange. In
response, a medium poetically named 'flying money'
(fei-ch'ien) evolved. Provincial governors maintained
'memorial offering courts' at the capital. Southern merchants
paid the money they made from the sale of goods at the
capital to these courts, which then used it to pay the tax
quotas due from the Southern provinces to the central
O
verthrow the Ch'ing and Restore the M'ing. "While the Imperial
army was occupied with the Taiping rebels, the Triads were busy
massing an army in the south. They captured the port of Amoy and
the important regional centre of Shanghai. They also laid siege to
Canton and Kweilin: but surprisingly they did not consolidate these
gains and in spite of their successes failed to pose a serious threat to
the Ch'ing throne. Why the Triads did not take advantage of the
situation and press home their gains remains a puzzle. Perhaps they
had lost the political will to do so, because by this time their criminal
interests had become extensive, involving the cultivation and sale of
opium outside the registered- and taxed- government network." Ibid.
12.
39
40
Op cit., Cassidy 1994 7-8.
government. In return, the courts issued the merchant with a
certificate. When the merchant returned home, he presented
this certificate to the provincial government and was paid an
equivalent sum of money. Thus did both the merchant and the
local government avoid the risk and inconvenience of carrying
quantities of copper or silk." 41
24. [100] Fei ch'ien rinse out. Extensive underground banking
networks running through gold shops, trading companies and
money changers, where record keeping procedures are
virtually non-existant, and trade takes on the camouflage of
coded chit messages, simple telephone transfers and nested
systems of coding encrypted for travel in cyberspace. "One
Hong Kong police official has stated that he once seized a
piece of paper with the picture of an elephant on it that
represented the collection receipt for $3 million at a Hong
Kong gold shop."42 Hong Kong has neither central bank nor
41
42
ibid. 5.
29 in Gaylord, M.S. (1990) 'The Chinese Laundry: International
Drug Trafficking & Hong Kong's Banking Industry' in Contemporary
Crises 14: 23-37. Contrary to popular opinion, the chit system does
not originate through Chinese trading. "Chits are a colonial invention.
The word 'chit' is itself the diminutive of 'chitty', a word of
Anglo-Indian origin borrowed from the Hindi Chitthi, meaning a mark.
From about the late seventeenth century the word crept into English
usage as meaning a note, pass or certificate given to a servant. The
chitty came to China in the 19th century by way of British custom.
Foreign residents in the treaty ports found handling strings of
Chinese cash or silver ingots a major inconvenience. In order to
eliminate this inconvenience a system was devised whereby; 'the
salary of foreign employees was paid by check drawn on the
Chinese compradore, who then held the funds against which the
employees wrote 'chits'. . .memoranda acknowledged debts for retail
transactions. These were accepted by the shopkeeper and passed
for collection to the firms compradore." Op cit., Cassidy.
currency exchange controls thus virtually eliminating the
possibility of tracing funds entering or leaving Hong Kong. It is
a financial secrecy jurisdiction whereby disclosure of data is
illegal43 . Drug traffickers, like all good investors prefer to
diversify their assets and invest in legit business, concealing
the hot link between globetrotting funds and source crimes. A
petri dish for breeding commercial war machines. For
example: "First cash generated from importations to the US
was moved back to Honk Kong, where it was held in a
number of bank accounts under false names of individuals or
businesses. The bank was BCCI. The approach appears
simple. Cash, usually in amounts of approximately
US$1million, was taken to a money transmission company in
the US. The most often used was a company called Piano,
which is known for its Colombian cocaine connections. These
amounts were then transferred to Bankers Trust and simply
transferred telegraphically to the various Hong Kong BCCI
accounts, one of which was sarcastically called Launderland."
44
"Overseas banks, left with piles of small bills, then ship
them back to the US in exchange for larger bills. . .[the]
consistent increase in US currency repatriated from Hong
Kong to the US from 1982 to the first half of 1984 strikingly
correlated with the steady increase in Southeast Asian heroin
marketed in the US from 1981 to 1983. This volume of
smaller-denomination bills exceeds the total volume of all
currency transactions with any European country. . .and the
flow of US currency from the US to HK is minimal when
43
44
Ibid.
381 in Dobinson, I. (1993) 'Pinning a Tail on the Dragon: The
Chinese & the International Heroin Trade.' Crime & Delinquency,
Vol. 39, No.3, July 373-381.
compared to the reverse flow of US currency from Hong
Kong. . ."45
25. [11] When the battleground is in cyberspace, deception is
not merely about masks, but functions in numerical operations
flat with the terrain. Money laundering and secret crime
societies were always waiting for the vast encryption system
that constitutes the Internet. Planetary electronic networks
compress space-time into vectors of pure speed, emanating a
protean geography traversed by torrents of electron flow
coded into zeros and ones. From the darkside of the
military-cybernetics complex, cyberspace is a vast digital
capital Laundromat facilitating short-circuits through the ice of
the world banking system of the New World Order. "Money
communicates with the primary process because of what it
can melt, not what it can obtain."46 Welcome to the jungle.
26. [10] Euro-dread for the End of Man. As the CIA hacked
into the jungle, cutting its share of Golden Triangle opium
(re-routing it into US ghettos in the first hits of programmed
catastrophe47), William Burroughs simulates the meltdown of
White Man Face as his colonial damms collapse and floods
wash away his entrenched encampment. "When I closed my
eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and mouth eaten away by
disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an
ameboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull, crustacean
eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of
45
Op cit., Gaylord 1990 27.
46
Op cit., Land 1993 480.
47
McCoy, A. (1991) The Politics of Heroin, NY: Lawrence Hill
Books. Here, McCoy gives a massive and comprehensive chronicle
of CIA complicity in the global drug trade.
faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place
where the human road ends, where the human form can non
longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it."
48
Meltdown in your face.
27. [1] "He breathed in deeply and whispered, 'Finish it.
Please.' As if by response to his request, the executioner took
the largest knife from its case and with one swift stroke cut
Lee's throat just below the strap. The Death of a Thousand
Cuts had taken exactly twenty-seven minutes."49
[0] White out.
48
133 in W. Burroughs, Junky.
49
Op.cit. Arvay 1977 123.