In the back of our minds, Americans may suspect that China is an environmental wasteland — after all, we know what happened in the Soviet Union. But the truth has yet to be revealed in all its ghastly vividness, not least because of China’s restrictions on foreign journalists. I recently spent six weeks traveling unmonitored throughout China, interviewing everyone from senior government officials and scientific experts to unpaid workers and newly prosperous peasants. Everywhere, it seemed, the land had been scalped, the water poisoned, the air made toxic and dark.

Five of the 10 most air-polluted cities in the world are in China, and one of every four deaths is caused by lung disease. Yet coal consumption will triple over the next 25 years, making China the world’s leading greenhouse gas producer and all but dooming global efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by the 60 to 80 percent recommended by U.N. scientists.

Moreover, China’s infamous “one-child policy” has been withdrawn for fear of social unrest, and population growth is out of control. China claims it has 1.22 billion people — nearly one of every four humans on earth — but the true number is surely higher and growing by 15 million people a year. These people understandably want to join the global middle class, with all that entails: cars, air conditioning, jet travel, closets full of clothes and dire ecological consequences.

China’s government admits that its factories and smokestacks must be cleaned up, but it fears that doing the right thing environmentally would be political suicide. The problem is that faithfully implementing China’s environmental laws would mean closing thousands of factories and throwing tens of millions of people out of work, and the Party’s tattered legitimacy might not survive that. The transition to a private market free-for-all has caused much more social unrest than most outsiders realize, including numerous riots in recent months. Thus even top environmental officials accept that economic growth must take precedence over environmental protection for years to come.

“You cannot stop a billion people,” says one advocate who regrets the losses China’s rapid growth will cause to ecosystems around the world. But the scope of those losses can be influenced — if swift, decisive action is taken. Beginning with this week’s summit meeting in Washington between Chinese President Jiang Zemin and President Clinton, the Chinese environmental crisis must be elevated to the highest level of importance in the world’s dealings with China. With (self-interested) help from the United States, Japan and other wealthy nations, a program to install efficient equipment and processes throughout China’s energy system could reduce its energy consumption by 50 percent. But there is no time for delay or half-measures. As a government scientist in Chongqing, perhaps the world’s most polluted city, told me, “It is never too late to learn, but it is very late.”

Salon spoke to Dannen at his home in New York.

Is China actually doing business with the triads now?

Yes. One of their biggest partners is the People’s Liberation Army, which is in partnership with the triads in the kinds of business that the triads know very well — for example, nightclubs and karaoke clubs. In Shanghai, both the PLA and the Public Security Bureau, China’s secret police, own nightclubs and even brothels with various triad groups. It’s believed that the PLA is involved in a number of smuggling enterprises with triad groups, including bootleg cigarettes, illegal aliens and possibly even arms smuggling and heroin smuggling to the United States.

The PLA also has a number of above-ground businesses.

It has a multibillion-dollar portfolio. It includes phone networks, hotels, restaurants and pro basketball teams, not to mention many businesses in the United States. And if the triads have the protection of the PLA, we’re talking about a rogue state here. We’re talking about the collusion of the world’s last great totalitarian power and the world’s largest criminal fraternity.

How did this alliance between Beijing and the Hong Kong triads come about?

It was part of (former Chinese leader) Deng Xiaoping’s plan for Hong Kong from the beginning. Before China and Britain signed their agreement for the handover of Hong Kong in September of 1984, Deng was making strange noises about the triad societies. On three different occasions, he publicly referred to the triads as “good” and “patriotic.” I have a friend who was part of the Hong Kong delegation to the talks with China. Now this friend knows his history, and he could not believe his ears. He was asking himself, “Is the old man losing it? What does he mean — patriot gangsters?” But Deng wasn’t losing it at all. It was very calculated on his part.

Calculated to do what?

It was part of Deng’s broader strategy to figure who wasn’t on China’s side and get them on its side. The triads had been traditionally loyal to Taiwan. Deng made loyal patriots out of them in a way any triad can understand — he bought their patriotism.

How do you know?

Last May, Wang Min-feng, who was the deputy secretary-general of Xinhua, the New China News Agency, and China’s de facto ambassador in Hong Kong, was speaking at Baptist University in Hong Kong. There he disclosed that before China signed the treaty with Britain, he was asked by Beijing to sit down with all the heads of the Hong Kong triad societies and talk business with them. He said that he told the triad leaders that as long as they did not disrupt Hong Kong stability, China would not prevent them from making money. Now that’s an extraordinary admission.

Especially considering that triads are supposed to be officially outlawed.

Right, and it means that China’s assurances that Britain’s legal system and judiciary will remain untouched for 50 years is utter nonsense. Under British law, it’s illegal even to be a member of a triad society. Even to say you’re a member of a triad society is illegal. It’s considered a threat, an act of extortion. China has made a mockery of that law. Instead, they sat down with a bunch of mafia bosses and told them essentially that they can go about their illegal business, and China will turn a blind eye.

So in the new Hong Kong, you’re saying, the criminals will run free?

It means that the triads, who were already quite powerful, may now be untouchable. Which means Hong Kong becomes a criminal colony. If organized crime figures can’t be touched, how is the legal system going to survive? Moreover, now that China is protecting the triads and doing business with them, they can call upon them to perform all kinds of services. Just as they did for Chiang Kai-shek in 1929, they make a very good secret police force. I wouldn’t be surprised if next June 4, when people in Hong Kong come out to protest Tiananmen Square, triad hooligans wearing black clothing, sunglasses and tattoos suddenly materialize and crack heads open while the police just stand by. I wouldn’t be surprised if triads are used to rig local elections, to spy on people and to kidnap people Beijing wants to punish.

The triad societies started in China, as a nationalist movement, then fled mostly to Hong Kong when the communists took over in 1949. How big are they in Hong Kong today?

Today, there are four major triad societies in Hong Kong and probably more than a dozen smaller ones. The largest, the Sun Yee On, founded in 1919, has, conservatively 30,000 members, which is already larger than the entire Hong Kong police force. By some estimates, it may number twice that. That’s just one society. The others, the 14K, the Wa Shing Wa, the Wa Hop Toe, are all very large as well. They’re all involved in prostitution and illegal gambling. They’re very big in narcotics. Hong Kong is the key transit point for the Southeast Asian heroin that’s shipped to the United States. They’re extremely big in counterfeiting, both goods and financial instruments, particularly credit cards. They’re very big in extortion. They’ve divided up Hong Kong into geographic sections, and establishments are required to pay protection money if they don’t want something unfortunate to happen. That includes the luxury hotels in Sim Sa Choy, the most touristy part of Kowloon.

And if you don’t pay, what happens?

You get chopped. A chopper is a long machete-like knife that is used to kill and maim. One way that the triads traditionally show displeasure is to chop off limbs. One man I interviewed was named Leung Tin-wei, the publisher of Surprise weekly, one of the many gossipy, tabloid-style magazines in Hong Kong. In May 1996, Leung Tin-wei was about to launch the premier issue of Surprise weekly when two well-dressed men walked into his office, escorted him into the conference room, closed the door and chopped off his left forearm with a chopper. No one knows for sure why they did this, but we do know that a triad-related article was dropped from the premier issue. When I submitted my article to the New Republic, I had to reassure (editor) Michael Kelly that triads do not traditionally chop white people. He said he was glad to hear that because he was rather fond of his left forearm.

Like the Yakuza in Japan, do they also run legal enterprises?

They run all the mini-buses in Hong Kong. They’re very big in the property market and they pretty much control the foreign exchange business. The biggest triad-run industry is the Hong Kong movie business. Triads have used extremely violent methods, including murder, kidnapping and rape, to ensure that Hong Kong’s biggest stars act in their movies.

Why haven’t the British-run police been able to stop them?

In the 1970s, the corruption of the police was so serious that Hong Kong almost came apart at the seams. Matters reached a head when Peter Godber, a high-ranking officer in the royal Hong Kong police, was asked to explain why his bank balance was six times greater than his income. Rather than explain, he fled to Britain, where he was later arrested, extradited to Hong Kong and convicted of corruption. There was such unrest over this and other police corruption scandals that in February 1974, the crown government created the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

What will happen to the commission under the Chinese?

Many in Hong Kong, and elsewhere, ask the same question. Until now, the United States has had terrific cooperation with the ICAC. We had an extradition treaty which was much used, particularly against large-scale heroin traffickers. Now law enforcement people in the United States and Canada are wondering whether they can trust the Hong Kong police anymore. How can we be sure triads haven’t infiltrated the police? And how can we be sure that China might not force the police to compromise an investigation? For the past two decades or so, our law enforcement window into what went on in Southeast Asia was through Hong Kong. Now I fear we’re going to lose that.

Most of us who were listening to his speech — which the president made just after jackbooted Chinese soldiers had raised the Chinese flag and goose-stepped down from the podium — were mildly surprised, to say the very least. For wasn’t it in fact China that had suffered, or had weathered, most of these supposed vicissitudes of history?

Wasn’t it China that had undergone, for example, the 1911 Revolution, had put up with the long traumas of the warlords in the ’20s, had seen the great civil war between Mao’s men and those of Chiang Kai-shek, had undergone the 1949 Communist Revolution, had suffered the terrible trials of the Great Leap Forward, the madness of the Cultural Revolution, the terrors of Tiananmen Square? Hadn’t these been China’s problems, rather than Hong Kong’s?

What “vicissitudes” had Hong Kong ever suffered? The Japanese invaded in 1941, to be sure — and there is no doubt that was a vicissitude writ large. But otherwise, essentially nothing. There was not a single trial or period of turbulence in the colony that was truly worth its name — just the odd typhoon, the occasional revelation of a small-scale scandal and a few riots sparked off by Mao’s agents during the time of the Little Red Book. Otherwise, total (and occasionally, for a journalist, rather tedious) social and political peace.

It was the very fact that the territory was invariably so stable, so free and so prosperous that prompted so many millions of frightened Chinese to swarm there over the decades. Its stability and freedom from vicissitudes allowed them to prosper in turn — to the point where the riches of this little colony are now of staggering dimensions, and are the source of much pride and no little envy.

And yet now, to judge from this first speech, the history books are to be changed, the perspective is to be altered.

China is in control now, and as so often results from the kind of totalitarianism her rule brings in its train, truth becomes the first casualty of the change. Listening to the Chinese president sent a chill down a million collective spines. The people I was with had to blink hard, and to ask around them: Did he really say that? Did he really think Hong Kong was a place that had suffered, and now would not do so again, forever?

The ceremonial that preceded all of this was inexpressibly sad, a sadness made infinitely more so by the onset, as had been feared, of quite atrocious weather. Or at least weather that was atrocious in part. At the very moment that the British soldiers made their formal farewell salute to the monarch’s son, rains burst from the sky, drenching everyone, the prince included. Yet while it was windy and wet at the place where the British were leaving, just 40 miles to the north, where the first of the 4,500 Chinese soldiers to be garrisoned in Hong Kong were sweeping into the territory, all was quite dry and still.

The augury was poor, at least so far as the departing British were made to feel: an ill-tempered prince and a teary-eyed governor quitting in the rain, a glittering array of Chinese soldiers roaring in to take their place, with the weather clear and fair. Some benign Oriental weather god, it will no doubt soon be said, was smiling down on the new masters, and was betimes telling the old to get out, to push off, just as fast as their legs could carry them.

Jiang Zemin’s brief speech came two hours after this weather god’s augury. The former colony was in for better times, he said, was in for a period of benign invigilation by a China who would see to it there were no further vicissitudes to suffer. He clapped himself down from the podium. His soldiers shouldered their rifles and goose-stepped away. Thirty minutes later all the Britons were sailing away on their ships: The territory was China’s once again. And the inhabitants started to go home, mouthing the word “vicissitudes” as an early sign of the enormous new reality that such a change seems now surely bound to imply.

The king of Tonga, a man so massively heavy that his hotel has to give him a bed reinforced with iron, has arrived. Tony Blair is going to look in briefly, as is, from Washington, Madeleine Albright and a junior bureaucrat named Richard Boucher, who will attend the Communists’ swearing-in that the White House had earlier said it would rather boycott.

But all the photographers — and there are thousands here already — are busy looking out for a glamorous British society woman and professional party animal named Tara Palmer-Tompkinson, whose only declared interest in finding a marriageable partner is to ensure, as she puts it, “that she never has to turn right when entering a plane.” And David Tang, a tycoon and playboy who is set to open a Chinese clothing store in New York next November, is being interviewed by everyone — Brokaw included — trying to make the case for the new China being now seriously chic.

The Hong Kong handover, in short, seems in sudden danger of becoming a frivolous and bubbly affair, attracting mainly the international society set, and of being commercialized to the hilt. Never before has a moment of international history seemed so tinted by the spirit of Disneyland. It is rather like the Treaty of Paris being sponsored by Gucci, or having Metternich perform synchronized swimming while carving up the Hapsburg empire, or giving up V-E day to the sale of Kodak film.

The whole business is rapidly shifting from being a grave affair of state, a truly historic, end-of-era moment, and becoming instead as tawdry as the Atlanta Olympics. The simile is apt: Next Tuesday’s celebratory fireworks, supposedly the biggest and gaudiest in world history, are being organized by one of last year’s Atlanta team, prompting one to wonder, among other considerations, just how tasteful an event we are in for.

(One’s curiosity on this score may well be satisfied by yesterday’s announcement that the handover is going to be followed by an hour of something called “mass karaoke,” doubtless every bit as dire as it sounds, and which probably hints at the general tone of the evening.)

For the moment, though, everything looks and feels more or less as usual. The Star ferries chuckle back and forth across the harbor, dodging the frequent squalls. The Peak Tram hitches itself up the alarming slope, taking commuting lawyers and bankers from home to office. The jets bank steeply on their approach into Kai Tak airport.

The courts preside, the legislators argue, the police patrol — and supreme above it all, the governor sits calmly in Government House, saying his farewells to his retinue. He is getting a year’s paycheck by way of golden parachute: half a million dollars, tax-free. The soldiers of the Black Watch are sitting around in their barracks, waiting to skirl their way into the history books with bagpipe laments composed by their own pipe-major, in a ceremony due in what is now just a few dozen hours.

The contrast between the rank vulgarity of what seems about to happen next week and the serenely old-fashioned realities of the end of British rule is going to be quite stunning. One sign on Connaught Road, suspended from an awning, seemed to catch the spirit: “Handover Sale, all goods off 40%, this day only.” The Chinese, who have a formidable aptitude for making money out of any given situation, are cashing in on this one too: reunification with the motherland, hotel rooms going cheap, ticket touts on hand and mass karaoke, 50 bucks a song.

There is a steady gradation in both the levels of climatic ugliness and
the measures Hong Kong has designed as a response. It begins when a
typhoon — the word comes from the Cantonese for big wind — is spotted on
radar, hundreds of miles out in the Pacific and coming in the general
direction of the colony. Once it comes within 500 miles
of the coast, the Royal Observatory announces to the public the so-called
Raising of Signal No. 1. People are told to watch and listen, that a
storm is in the offing and may possibly cause the territory some trouble.

If the cyclone does indeed worsen, if it strengthens and moves closer still, to
within 100 miles, then Signal No. 3 goes up. (The numbers are
randomly chosen, but known by all.) With this news, everyone starts listening to the radio, all the time. Charts go up in the lobbies of the skyscrapers and men with pens are charged with plotting the movement of the weather patterns, hour by hour. People are told to bring their geranium pots in from
their windows and their children in from the playgrounds, and small
boats make for the concrete-walled storm shelters that huddle in the
smaller bays around the coast. Everyone becomes tense, nervous; eyes peer up
at the skies, at the threatening bands of black cloud, at the gusts of wind.

Then, if the typhoon appears to be strengthening still and roaring in to
within 10 miles of Hong Kong, the observatory takes the fateful step of
raising Signal No. 8. Hong Kong now officially closes down.
All government offices shut. People are told to go home or stay indoors. The
Star Ferry runs its jaunty little boats for only half an hour more, shuttling
the last few brave passengers across a harbor that is fast becoming roiled by
huge, green, greasy waves. All buses stop. Cars pull off to the sides, to lie
abandoned. Those people who are caught in the driving rain and howling winds
all pour down, if they can, into the subway stations. The territory empties of
people within minutes. Aside from the mad crashing and rushing of the trees,
the place just seems to die.

Once in a while — twice, when I lived here — the Royal Observatory puts up
Signal No. 10. This tells a frightened citizenry that they may soon expect
a Direct Hit, that the eye of the coming storm will pass directly over
Victoria Peak, and that an explosive torrent of rain and wind will lash
without surcease at the territory, for hour upon hour of misery and ruin.
People get killed during direct hits. Huge ships are torn from their moorings
and cast up on the rocks. All aircraft are diverted to cities hundreds of
miles away. Hong Kong’s life is utterly disrupted. The meteorologists run out of words to describe the condition of the sea, raging in its hurricane. They say simply that the sea state is phenomenal.

And this is what the organizers are now worrying about, for Monday. This is the beginning of the Pacific storm season, and the weather has of late been unusually bad here — hot, sticky, oppressive and given to massive and noisy little storms. The perfect breeding ground, in short, for the typhoons for which this region is notorious.

Four thousand dignitaries, scores of heads of state, $20 million worth of fireworks — and every moment of the ceremonies planned for outdoors. The thought that all of this might well be rained out, and that a huge storm — a perfect storm — will rage while so many of the world’s leaders are in town is causing nightmares.

Sixty percent chance of heavy rain, say the forecasters. And the chance of a typhoon? Not saying, reply the experts. But it is possible. Hedge your bets. Keep thinking of a Plan B. And keep your powder dry.