Social issues in Chinatowns

Like many other communities, Chinatowns face certain social problems. The early reputation of Chinatowns in the West was that of dilapidated ghettos and slums, sites of brothels, opium dens, and gambling halls. While Chinatowns are generally valued as tourist attractions today, local governments have often sought to generate revenue by commodifying their Chinese identity and encouraging international investment. Paradoxically, such efforts have often contributed to the erosion of their Chinese identity, as gentrification has led to shrinking Chinese populations and the replacement of authentic cultural spaces with businesses catering primarily to tourist expectations rather than the needs of the community.

In modern times, competing Asian street gangs and organized crime, such as the tongs and the Hong Kong-based triads, continue to plague the metropolitan Chinatowns worldwide where Triads have their operations, including London, United Kingdom; New York City/New Jersey, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and Boston, United States; Sydney, Australia; and Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. Tongs are Chinese secret societies, which were prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries. There have been 'Tong wars' or Chinatown in-fighting, between the Tong groups in the older Chinatowns. A tong war occurred in a Chinatown could be spread to other Chinatown communities. Initially, many Chinatown gangs were formed to defend the community from the lo fahn (Cantonese word and transliteration for "Caucasians") but later turned on members of their own ethnic community. This had a huge impact on the gang.

The Chinatowns of the 1960s and 1970s experiences a rapid influx of working-class immigrants from Hong Kong. Since their inception in the late 1960s, the Hong Kong-born immigrants and mostly unemployed though some work as waiters and busboys Wah Ching (華青) gang members began a campaign of harassment and assault of white tourists in San Francisco's Chinatown, which ultimately proved to be a predicament for the tourism-minded conservative Chinatown elite of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (the biggest problem is that the CCBA simply advocated tougher policing against the gangs rather than resolve Chinatown social inequalities at the core). In North America, Chinese American street gangs often have connections with the tongs and triads. Examples of such street gangs include the Joe Boys and Jackson Street Boys, which are named after the major street of San Francisco's Chinatown.

Turf wars have been common in the older Chinatowns. Gang rivalry among Chinatown gangs has sometimes have a high profile. As Chinatowns tend to be tourist attractions, tourists in Chinatowns have sometimes been victims of these gang warfare crimes. In 1977, a shoot-out occurred in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant (where the rival gang were normally based), in which two tourists and three waiters were murdered by stray gunfire in a botched assassination attempt on a Wah Ching gang member. Eleven other people were injured. This incident is notoriously known as the Golden Dragon massacre and it mobilized the San Francisco Police Department to create an Asian crime unit. The five suspects involved in the attack were sentenced and convicted. On June 30, 1995 involved two factions of the Jackson Street Boys. One faction opened fire on the other on a busy Chinatown street, Stockton Street, during the daytime. Seven innocent bystanders were struck, including a pregnant woman. Three males, ages 18, 16, and 14, were arrested in connection with the shooting. Jackson Boys were also the primary trafficker of illegal fireworks back when fireworks were blatantly sold on the streets of Chinatown. In June 1998, shots were fired at Chinese Playground, wounding six teenagers, three of them critically. A 16-year-old boy was arrested for the shooting, which was believed to be gang-related.

Seattle's generally pacific International District-Chinatown was rocked by one particularly spectacular incident of gang violence in February 1983, when the Wah Mee massacre killed 13 people at an illegal gambling club, among them several prominent restaurant owners.

In the late 1970s, some amount of the ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam would also start gangs.

In the Los Angeles Chinatown of 1984, Chinese Vietnamese gang members shot and killed a white Los Angeles Police Department officer and wounded his Japanese American partner. The officers were responding to a silent robbery alarm at a Chinatown jewelry store and a shoot-out ensued. The wounded Japanese American officer returned fire, killing three of the five suspects. A three-year trial concluded in 1988, and the remaining killers received the verdict of life imprisonment.

In Chinatown, Manhattan in May 1985, a gang-related shooting injured seven people, including a 4-year-old boy, at 30 East Broadway. Two males, who were 15 and 16 years old and were members of a Chinese street gang, were arrested and convicted.