Tse Chi Lop: The CCP’s Shadow Commander in the Global Drug War— Part I

First in a series of six articles on the CCP's Reverse Opium War

Author’s Comment: It’s important to understand that criminal organizations cannot not exist China without close oversight and direction from the CCP. Official China may deny it, but the CCP has long imposed strict controls on public gatherings (of five or more), particularly those perceived as a threat to social stability or political control. Furthermore, China now has elaborate monitoring of every citizen with digital tools that rank online ‘patriotism’ and facial recognition systems that track the entire population. So, it’s absurd that vast and powerful organized crime networks thrive in greater China without the consent, encouragement, and direction from the CCP.

Born in the industrial city of Guangzhou in the 1960s, Tse Chi Lop emerged from the shadows of China’s post-Mao upheaval to become one of the most powerful—and enigmatic—drug lords in modern history. Known in Cantonese as Tse Chi Lop, in Mandarin as Xie Zhi Le, and in the underworld by the knick-name Brother Number 3 or Sam Gor, Tse would eventually command a sprawling transnational crime syndicate so vast that Australian authorities likened it to “the Amazon of the drug trade.” But the roots of Tse’s rise lie in a little-understood convergence of revolutionary residue, underworld initiative, and state strategy.

Tse's early years were shaped by the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, a brutal period when Red Guards terrorized and murdered over one million of China’s most educated citizens. Among the gangs that sprang from this chaos was the Big Circle Gang, an organization forged by disaffected Red Guards and former PLA soldiers. By the time Tse was a teenager, he was active in the gang’s early exploits—starting with credit card fraud, then reinvesting criminal proceeds into the narcotics trade.

In the 1980s, Tse moved to Hong Kong, then a British colony but increasingly under Beijing’s watchful eye. There, he received a kind of informal but highly professional criminal training, learning logistics, money laundering, and how to manage clandestine operations across borders. This era also coincided with an aggressive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) campaign to cultivate triads in Hong Kong and Macau, a strategy intended to provide cover and orientation for thousands of mainland operatives sent to the region in preparation for the 1997 handover. Triads were not only tolerated but, in some cases, trained and co-opted—serving as intermediaries in intelligence, political influence, and illicit finance.

Tse was reportedly part of this current. The pattern was not unique: Lai Changxing, the notorious smuggler from Fujian province, was another figure reportedly sent to Hong Kong for specialized underworld-political training. When Lai returned to Fujian from Hong Kong he referred to himself as a PLA intelligence officer and he his car had license plates reflecting that designation.

By the late 1980s or early 1990s, Tse had relocated to Toronto, part of a broader wave of triad migration documented in Canada’s Operation Sidewinder—a joint RCMP-CSIS investigation that alleged mainland Chinese intelligence and organized crime were collaborating to infiltrate Canadian society. Tse gained Canadian citizenship and quietly built a heroin trafficking network that spanned North America.

Tse Chi Lop was a rising figure in the Asian drug trade, but his empire had not yet reached the massive scale it would later attain. During the 1990s, Tse was reportedly affiliated with the Wo Hop To triad and played a mid-level role in heroin trafficking, particularly in coordinating shipments from the Golden Triangle to North America. His operations at that time were significant but still dwarfed by more established syndicates. Tse's network was involved in multi-kilogram heroin deals, often in coordination with other ethnic Chinese and Southeast Asian criminal groups, but he had not yet developed the vast methamphetamine and synthetic drug distribution empire—spanning Asia-Pacific and generating billions—that he would be accused of masterminding decades later through the Sam Gor syndicate.

In 1998, he was arrested in New York on heroin distribution charges. Though a U.S. judge sentenced him to prison, the term was relatively lenient, leading some observers to speculate about undisclosed cooperation or political protection. While incarcerated, Tse met a fellow inmate, Lee Chung Chak, with whom he would later form a partnership that underpinned the next, more global phase of his criminal enterprise.

Upon his release in 2006 or 2007, Tse returned to Toronto, adopting a low profile that belied the precision and ambition of his moves. His operations from this period suggest he was not acting alone, and that he may have been receiving guidance from higher-level strategists or protectors, possibly connected to more covert or state-aligned interests.

Then, in 2011, Tse returned to Hong Kong—a move that appears not as a retreat but as a strategic repositioning. It was, by all accounts, a return to headquarters. From this point onward, Tse would consolidate his role as the alleged leader of the Sam Gor syndicate, a multinational narcotics empire with footholds in Myanmar’s Golden Triangle, Chinese chemical labs, Australian streets, and Mexican cartel corridors.

Coming in Part II:
We examine how Tse built the Sam Gor syndicate into the most efficient methamphetamine super-cartel in modern history—leveraging Chinese chemical exports, Southeast Asian militias, and Macau-based money laundering schemes to supply drugs to the world.