Illicit Flows in the Hong Kong-China-Taiwan Triangle

Abstract

The exhaustive focus on conventional military confrontation in the China-Taiwan relationship has obscured a number of other security issues. Despite the lack of extensive formal communication and legal travel, there is in fact a gnat deal of illicit movement particularly smuggling, across the Taiwan Strait, and more generally within the Hong Kong-China-Taiwan triangle. How does the internal geography of the triangle affect the non-traditional security problems associated with illicit movement of people and goods that Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan face? Do the conditions in the triangle have any effect on the non-traditional security problems of other countries? In this article I use expert and practitioner interviews conducted in Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as the occasional police document from Hong Kong, the Philippines, and China, to argue that the geographic characteristics of the triangle encourage illicit flows of people and goods, and exacerbate the security problems of the entities within the triangle, particularly Taiwan. Perhaps more significantly, the ”export flows” of transnational organized crime from the triangle, in the form of smuggling and triads, cause security headaches for other countries, near and far without a shot being fired. In the first two sections, where I lay out the argument, the empirical evidence chiefly consists of pirated goods and the illicit movement of criminals and migrants, in part to show that the geographic factors at work affect all types of illicit flows in similar ways. In the third section, I take drug trafficking as a case study in which we can see how all of the geographic factors combine to impinge on the security of countries both within the triangle and without.