Tong

In North America, a tong is an organization found in the Chinatowns in American and Canadian cities. In the Chinese language, tong means “hall” or “meeting place.” In the North American Chinese immigrant community, the term tong came to refer to the secret societies or fraternal organizations that would become a greatly influential part of the Chinese immigrant community during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The structure of a tong can be most closely compared to that of fraternal organizations of the Western world; in fact, members of some tongs are known as Chinese Freemasons. Tong halls were (and continue to be) marked clearly in Chinese in most American Chinatowns. Starting with the first major wave of Chinese immigration in the 1800s, tongs helped [Page 2081]establish and protect the interests of Chinese immigrants when others were overtly hostile to these individuals. Tongs claim simply to be benevolent community organizations, and indeed, some are, but many are also involved in organized crime. Contemporary tongs have street gangs associated with them instead of being blatantly attached.

Tong Wars

As tongs and their corresponding territories grew in size, they inevitably came into conflict with each other. The high point of these conflicts, known as the Tong Wars, ranged the 70-year period between the 1850s and the 1920s. Although conflicts could include issues surrounding turf, business, and long-standing feuds that could be traced back to China, the primary cause of conflicts between tongs of this era centered on prostitution.

Chinatown's Friendship Archway is seen looking west on H Street in Washington, D.C. The area is known for its annual Chinese New Year festival and parade. Tongs provide essential services for communities such as these.

To understand the Tong Wars period, one must understand the male-to-female ratio of Chinese enclaves in America in the 1800s. Labor offered in the United States was male dominated; additionally, immigrant laborers could not typically afford to bring their families with them. These factors combined to result in very few Chinese women in the United States. As a result, the highly patriarchal tongs attempted to alleviate this situation by “importing” prostitutes from China, bringing them either willingly or unwillingly. Interviews with former gang members in the mid-20th century revealed that if an individual paid off the debt incurred by a woman's indentured servitude to the individual she owed that debt, conflict between tongs would not result. Thus, these were not conflicts over romance; they were conflicts over property. The involvement of the tongs only aggravated these prostitution-centered property [Page 2082]disputes, with an end result of violent street brawls with hatchets and knives, as opposed to fistfights behind bars.

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