Big Circle Gang
| Founded | 1950s |
|---|---|
| Founding location | Hong Kong |
| Years active | 1950s-present |
| Territory | Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Malaysia, United States, Canada, Australia |
| Criminal activities | Racketeering, Murder, drug trafficking, extortion, money laundering |
Tai Huen Chai (大圈仔) (THC), Big Circle Boys, is perhaps the most progressive of the organized Triads formed since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. The Big Circle Gang (大圈幫) is the designation given to the soldier members of the group. The highest ranks, considered equivalent to Commanding Officer or Commissar, are generally involved in legitimate business, gambling, and in the position of Lutsze-yeh (a managing or controlling lawyer's clerk).
In the early 1950s members of the "Ultra-Left" were purged at all levels of the Communist Party of China. On Josef Stalin's' birthday in 1951, Mao Zedong is reported to have ordered the execution of some 50,000 intellectuals and communists. Many were executed on one night, usually shot in their bunks at the camps where they were interned.
Expelled from society, the left was continually harassed, facing summary execution, exile, banishment to their home villages or internment in prison camps. In order to specify that those interned were political offenders and in an attempt to maintain solidarity, those camps that later housed the Left Faction of the Red Guards were defined as containing political subversives, and depending on their size and location, an exclusion zone was established around them. The exclusion areas were marked on PLA and internal state maps by a large printed red circle.
The groups that survived evolved under intolerable conditions. The Anarchist/Communists moved to Hong Kong with some of the older leadership of the party from the Trotskyists and Anarchists. The more proletarian elements, as well as utopian fighters, formed a series of underground and secret societies in imitation of the Triads (traditional clan organizations for social and civic mutual protection, kept secret from the authorities).
Violent centers evolved along the Hong Kong border, with small groups formed out of the core factions. Their activity was subject to much folklore and movie distortion. Some of the smaller splinter groups started a lucrative business in the 1980s to use shock tactics in robberies throughout Hong Kong and Kowloon of jewelers' shops, manufacturers, businessmen, politicians, lawyers and civil servants.
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