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Police link party to
organized crime
DODGY DEALINGS: New Taipei City’s police
department said that a local Bamboo Union gang branch was using the China
Unification Promotion Party as a cover
By Cheng Shu-ting and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff
writer
Wang Huan-hua’s China Unification
Promotion Party membership card, with the corner snipped, is seen in a
screengrab from Facebook on Wednesday.
Photo: Facebook
Members and former members of the China
Unification Promotion Party have been arrested over the past two years for
direct involvement in organized crime-related incidents, showing that it may
still have strong ties with local organized crime groups, police said.
Founded in 2005 by former leading Bamboo Union member Chang An-le (張安樂),
commonly known as “White Wolf” (白狼), the party’s main objective is unification
with China.
Chang, who had been on the run in China for more than 17 years, returned to
Taiwan in June.
Though it boasts a total membership of close to 20,000, it is not one of the
more active political parties. Each party branch is named after a Chinese person
of note from antiquity, such as Zilu (子路), one of Confucius’ 72 most renowned
disciples, and Yeh Shih (葉適), an official in the Southern Song Dynasty from
Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province.
Taoyuan County police department’s criminal investigation division raided the
party’s Yeh Shih party headquarters branch early on Wednesday and arrested Wang
Huan-hua (王煥華) and four other party members.
The division said that Wang claimed to be the chief of the Yeh Shih branch
office, which was located at a local car-washing lot, adding that while he
seemed to just be a businessman on the surface, he had used Chang’s support to
secure his “turf,” obtain illegal guns and used them to “settle” disputes, and
engaged in racketeering across Taipei, Taoyuan and Greater Taichung.
Wang, who had also been on a government list of gang figures to be cracked down
on, had met Chang in China in 2010, the division said, adding that Chang had
tasked Wang to become the head of the Yeh Shih branch after learning that Wang’s
family originated in Wenzhou.
The division also said that Wang had ordered two gang members to rob an art
collector surnamed Tseng (曾) in Taipei City after learning that Tseng had
various valuable paintings in his house.
The gang members had not succeeded in the attempt, but the Vietnamese girlfriend
of Tseng’s son had been pushed from the fourth floor of the building as she was
in the process of calling the police during the robbery, the division said.
The police said Wang had also hosted a drug party in June and raped a woman who
went by the pseudonym “shuiling” (水靈) who worked at a bar and had also severely
beaten her in the bar where she worked, as well as uploading audio files of the
rape.
Wang was arrested on Wednesday and sent to Taoyuan District Prosecutor’s Office
on charges of organized crime, extortion, obstruction of liberty, obstruction of
sexual autonomy and illegal ownership of guns and drugs.
Meanwhile, the China Unification Promotion Party said on Wednesday night that
Wang had applied to leave the party in July, which had been approved following
his breaking of party regulations.
The announcement, made on Facebook, included an image of Wang’s party membership
card with a corner cut off as a sign of its invalidation.
Hsinchu police said that during an anti-crime operation in February last year,
one of the prime suspects, You Chia-how (游家豪) had been a deputy director of the
China Unification Promotion Party’s Zilu branch.
New Taipei City (新北市) police department said that during a raid on a local
Bamboo Union branch they discovered that the union was using the party as a
cover, and even handing out party membership cards to absorb students into the
gang.
Additional reporting by Chiang Hsiang
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