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On the Party's use of triads: people often miss how much of Party control outside of the mega-cities (and sometimes even there) is effectively outsourced to gangsters.
Not so much the ideological control, but the day-to-day business of 'who gets to control what,' where thugs often serve to enforce it - not just uniformed thugs, like chengguan, but straight-out gangsters.
Criticize the village boss? Get the shit kicked out of you. Bid against the wrong company for a government tender? Have your legs chopped off and be left to bleed to death on top of a building site.
generally speaking organized crime exists primarily at the *local* level, where it crosses over with local party power - but that party power exists within a much bigger hierarchy that spans the country.
in other words, the CPC sometimes functions as the higher levels of the mafia and other syndicates do; it allocates and controls lower levels of criminal activity while demanding a cut of the action in return
this often clashes with the more ideological side of the party - but the most common way that gangsters seriously fall is when somebody else *within* the party wants the things they're running
a classic example being Bo Xilai's 'strike black' campaign in Chongqing, where existing criminal enterprises were replaced with his own people. That should give pause to anyone looking at the 'sweep black' campaigns across the country now
