My Take | Wave of violent criminals got what they deserved
The death of notorious gangster Yip Kai-foon brings back terrible memories of a time when Hong Kong was stalked by heavily armed criminals with no regard for human life
Nowadays Hong Kong people may complain about mainland parallel traders and rude tourists, but try to be thankful – people of my generation lived in fear of criminals who wouldn’t think twice about shooting up our streets with powerful weapons. Nicknamed the “Hong Kong-Guangdong soldiers”, they were criminals who operated out of the mainland’s south.
During the 1980s and 1990s when Yip and other criminal kingpins such as the executed “Big Spender” Cheung Tze-keung and Kwai Ping-hung were active, no jewellery stores, goldsmiths or foreign exchange shops were safe. They were part of a violent crime wave that swept criminals across the border and back to do their dirty deeds. Cheung took the game to a whole new level by taking ransoms worth billions by targeting the families of the city’s most prominent developers. Yip, who died this week from cancer aged 55, made the AK-47, his weapon of choice, a household name in Hong Kong.
One of the first achievements in the years straddling the 1997 handover was in fact cooperation between Guangdong public security authorities and Hong Kong police that helped put an end to this crime wave.
Today, the streets of Hong Kong are among the safest in the world. Mainland officials were mocked and ridiculed at the time when they praised some Hong Kong triads as “patriotic”.