Sister Ping
Cheng Chui Ping (; January 9, 1949 – April 24, 2014), also known as Sister Ping (), was a Chinese woman who ran a human smuggling operation bringing people from China into the United States from 1984 to 2000. Operating from Chinatown, Manhattan, Ping oversaw a snakehead smuggling ring which brought as many as 3,000 Chinese into the United States, earning her more than $40 million. The United States Department of Justice called Ping "one of the first, and ultimately most successful, alien smugglers of all time." Born and raised in Fujian province, Ping moved to Hong Kong in 1974, and then New York City in 1981. She was arrested in Hong Kong in 2000 and extradited to the United States in 2003. In 2006, she was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison, and remained there until her death. Early life Ping was born on January 9, 1949, in Shengmei, Mawei, Fuzhou, a poor farming village in northern Fujian, China. She was one of five children born to her father, Cheng Chai Leung, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fujian
Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capital is Fuzhou, while its largest city by population is Quanzhou, both located near the coast of the Taiwan Strait in the east of the province. While its population is predominantly of Chinese ethnicity, it is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse provinces in China. The dialects of the language group Min Chinese were most commonly spoken within the province, including the Fuzhou dialect of northeastern Fujian and various Hokkien dialects of southeastern Fujian. Hakka Chinese is also spoken, by the Hakka people in Fujian. Min dialects, Hakka and Mandarin Chinese are mutually unintelligible. Due to emigration, a sizable amount of the ethnic Chinese populations of Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cargo Ship
A cargo ship or freighter is a merchant ship that carries cargo, goods, and materials from one port to another. Thousands of cargo carriers ply the world's seas and oceans each year, handling the bulk of international trade. Cargo ships are usually specially designed for the task, often being equipped with crane (machine), cranes and other mechanisms to load and unload, and come in all sizes. Today, they are almost always built of welded steel, and with some exceptions generally have a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years before being scrapped. Definitions The words ''cargo'' and ''freight'' have become interchangeable in casual usage. Technically, "cargo" refers to the goods carried aboard the ship for hire, while "freight" refers to the act of carrying of such cargo, but the terms have been used interchangeably for centuries. Generally, the modern ocean shipping business is divided into two classes: # Liner business: typically (but not exclusively) container vessels (where ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Golden Venture
''Golden Venture'' was a cargo ship that smuggled 286 undocumented immigrants from China (mostly Fuzhou people from Fujian province) along with 13 crew members that ran aground on the beach at Fort Tilden on the Rockaway peninsula of Queens, New York on June 6, 1993, at around 2 a.m. The ship had sailed from Bangkok, Thailand, stopped in Kenya and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, then headed northwest across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City on its four-month voyage. Ten people drowned in their attempts to flee the ship that had run aground and get to shore in the United States. The survivors were taken into custody by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and were held in various prisons throughout the U.S. while they applied for the right of asylum. Roughly 10% were granted asylum after U.S. Representative William Goodling entreated President Bill Clinton; minors were released, while about half the remainder were deported (some being accepted by South American co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Tiananmen Square Protests Of 1989
The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth Clearing () or June Fourth Massacre (), troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. The protests started on 15 April and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army to occupy parts of central Beijing. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded. The popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests is sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement () or the Tiananmen Square Incident (). The protests were precipitated by the death of pro-reform Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Hu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Forged Identification Documents
Identity document forgery is the process by which identity documents issued by governing bodies are copied and/or modified by persons not authorized to create such documents or engage in such modifications, for the purpose of deceiving those who would view the documents about the identity or status of the bearer. The term also encompasses the activity of acquiring identity documents from legitimate bodies by falsifying the required supporting documentation in order to create the desired identity. Identity documents differ from other credentials in that they are intended to be usable by only the person holding the card. Unlike other credentials, they may be used to restrict the activities of the holder as well as to expand them. Documents that have been forged in this way include driver's licenses (historically forged or altered as an attempt to conceal the fact that persons desiring to purchase alcohol are under the legal drinking age); birth certificates and Social Security c ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Commercial Airline
An airline is a company that provides air transport services for traveling passengers and freight. Airlines use aircraft to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for codeshare agreements, in which they both offer and operate the same flight. Generally, airline companies are recognized with an air operating certificate or license issued by a governmental aviation body. Airlines may be scheduled or charter operators. The first airline was the German airship company DELAG, founded on November 16, 1909. The four oldest non-airship airlines that still exist are the Netherlands' KLM (1919), Colombia's Avianca (1919), Australia's Qantas (1920) and the Czech Republic's Czech Airlines (1923). Airline ownership has seen a shift from mostly personal ownership until the 1930s to government-ownership of major airlines from the 1940s to 1980s and back to large-scale privatization following the mid-1980s. Since the 1980s, there has also been a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Knickerbocker Village
Knickerbocker Village Limited is a housing development situated between the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge, in the Two Bridges section of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City. Although the location was generally considered to fall in the Lower East Side, it has come to be thought of as part of Chinatown in recent years and the majority of residents are Chinese. It is located a short distance from New York City Hall, Civic Center, and the South Street Seaport. The complex consists of 1,590 apartments in twelve 13-story brick buildings surrounding two courtyards at 10-12-14-16-18-20 Monroe Street and 30-32-34-36-38-40 Monroe Street on the Lower East Side, taking up two whole city blocks and bounded by Catherine Street, Monroe Street, Market Street, and Cherry Street. Knickerboker Village is in ZIP Code 10002. History The land that is now Knickerbocker Village was previously home to one hundred buildings that were deemed slums and torn down. These actions were la ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fuzhounese Americans
Fuzhounese Americans, also known as Hokchew Americans or Fuzhou Americans or imprecisely Fujianese, are Chinese American people of Fuzhou descent, in particular from the Changle district. Many Chinese restaurant workers in the United States are from Fuzhou. There are also a number of undocumented Fuzhounese immigrants in the United States who are smuggled in by groups such as snakeheads. Fuzhounese Americans helped develop the Chinatown bus lines system, which originated as a means to transport restaurant workers from New York City to various parts of the northeastern United States. Unlike other Chinese Americans and Asian American groups, Fuzhounese Americans are almost completely concentrated in the U.S. Northeast. The vast majority live in New York City and on Long Island, but some also live in Middlesex and Morris counties in New Jersey; and in the Boston and Philadelphia metropolitan areas. Immigration After the lifting of emigration restriction in the 1980s, people b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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People Smuggling
People smuggling (also called human smuggling), under U.S. law, is "the facilitation, transportation, attempted transportation or illegal entry of a person or persons across an international border, in violation of one or more countries' laws, either clandestinely or through deception, such as the use of fraudulent documents". Internationally, the term is understood as and often used interchangeably with migrant smuggling, which is defined in the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime as "...the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a state party of which the person is not a national". The practice of people smuggling has seen a rise over the past few decades and now accounts for a significant portion of illegal immigration in countries around the world. People smuggling general ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. The Revolution marked the effective commanding return of Mao –who was still the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)– to the centre of power, after a period of self-abstention and ceding to less radical leadership in the aftermath of the Mao-led Great Leap Forward debacle and the Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961). The Revolution failed to achieve its main goals. Launching the movement in May 1966 with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao charged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. Mao called on young people to "bombard the headqu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |