Smuggling, these two words are very unfamiliar to most of us, it is not compliant and illegal, stowaways will also disrupt border management and security, bringing security risks to the entire country, so the world's efforts to smuggle are very strong, those who assist others to smuggle "snakeheads" will also encounter iron fists.
Logically, these "snakeheads" are so harmful that they will be hated by most people, but when a famous "snakehead" died in the United States on May 23, 2014, thousands of overseas Chinese in New York spontaneously took to the streets and dispatched hundreds of Lincoln luxury cars to send them off.
This person is Zheng Cuiping, who is known as the "snakehead queen", her life is enough ups and downs, the US government hates her so much that it even issued a global wanted warrant, but some people who are favored by her say that "she is just a kind woman."
So, what has Zheng Cuiping done in this life?
In 1949, Zheng Cuiping was born in Shengmei Village, Tingjiang Town, Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China, which is close to the sea, and locals mostly make a living from fishing. Her father, Zheng Jiliang, was more flexible and did not want to live a life of relying on the sky to eat, so he joined a shipping company in Hong Kong as a seafarer.
To tell the truth, China was much poorer than the Western world at that time, and Zheng Jiliang often went to sea to see the prosperous foreign countries, and his heart was envious, so he secretly disembarked in 1964 while the freighter was docked in the port of New York in the United States to unload, and evaded supervision and stayed in the United States.
Since then, Zheng Cuiping has lived with her mother in her hometown, and her father will send some money to her home every once in a while, and at the same time, she also depicts the United States as a paradise on earth in her letters, and over time, Zheng Cuiping also has the idea of going to the United States.
In 1973, Zheng Cuiping's family left Fujian and arrived in Hong Kong, and the money sent by her father was saved in addition to her daily needs, and this money became her entrepreneurial fund. She seems to have been born to do business, running a department store well.
Soon after, Zheng Cuiping used the money she earned to open a garment factory in Shenzhen, which was already a successful businessman at that time.
But her father's influence on Zheng Cuiping was too deep, even though her life was already very good, she still wanted to go to the United States, and was even willing to give up her career. To this end, she and her husband Zhang Yide tried to follow their father's old path - smuggling them into the United States on a merchant ship. However, without their father's cleverness, they were arrested and repatriated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service two years later.
The blow did not make Zheng Cuiping give up, she has been silently waiting for the opportunity, and then in June 1981 she finally waited for it.
At that time, an American couple traveled to Hong Kong and became acquainted with Zheng Cuiping because of shopping in the store run by Zheng Cuiping. The couple was very touched when they heard about Zheng Cuiping's "American Dream" and agreed to assist Zheng Cuiping to go to the United States as a "nanny".
With this reason, Zheng Cuiping immediately went to the U.S. Embassy to apply for a visa, and the official in charge of the visa saw some of her information and found that she was a person with a certain amount of property, so she asked: "Why are you willing to give up everything in Hong Kong and go to the United States to be a nanny?" ”
Zheng Cuiping replied in broken English: "When I was still studying at school, I knew that the United States is a highly civilized country." It would have been easy to survive in The Americans, and I would have been an excellent nanny. ”
This reason is really ironic.
On November 17, 1981, Zheng Cuiping finally arrived in New York, USA. At first, she also had a very difficult life, and her lack of proficiency in English made her run into walls everywhere, so she had to go to Chinatown to live.
Fortunately, there are many Fujianese in Chinatown, and these people accepted Zheng Cuiping, so she opened a department store again.
After life gradually stabilized, Zheng Cuiping began to have other thoughts, she found that many Fujian people, including her relatives and friends, are looking for opportunities to smuggle to the United States, so she decided that this was a business opportunity and began to run a "smuggling business".
At first, the scale was very small, only transporting about a dozen people at a time, but Zheng Cuiping's "service" was very intimate, it was herself or her family to pick up, and she was different from other "snakeheads" in that she respected those stowaways.
As long as others pay money, she will treat the other party as a customer, will take care of it carefully on the road, and will provide some help in life after arriving in the United States. Coupled with the fact that the route she chooses is relatively less risky, so many people are willing to look for her.
With the development of the smuggling business, Zheng Cuiping has a wide network of contacts in Fuzhou, New York, and Hong Kong, and she has a certain wealth accumulation in all three places, which is more convenient in currency exchange, so she has a new business - helping smugglers send money home.
In the traditional concept of Chinese, home is very important, and stowaways want to remit money back home when they make money outside, but their black identity and channels are troublesome, so Zheng Cuiping appears again.
The Chinese who want to send money home will hand over the dollars to Zheng Cuiping, and after two or three days their families will receive the converted yuan, of course, Zheng Cuiping is not engaged in charity, she has to charge a commission of three percent for each transaction.
Don't look at only three percent, the money that is remitted back to China through her is at least a few million dollars every year, and she can earn benefits ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through this business, and it has been rising.
Later, because of Zheng Cuiping's good service and fast speed, she gradually monopolized the remittance network in Fuzhou, and many overseas Chinese called her "Sister Ping". Her business grew bigger and bigger, and later involved in loan sharking.
Those who smuggle people have just arrived in the United States basically have no surplus money, and when there is an emergency, they will ask Zheng Cuiping to borrow money, and Zheng Cuiping will borrow it, but the interest rate is as high as 30%.
Fujian stowaways in New York's Chinatown have no other way out, and almost all of them have borrowed money from Zheng Cuiping. If you don't have the agreed time, then you have to work in Zheng Cuiping's shop until the money is paid off.
Through these "income-generating" means, Zheng Cuiping made a lot of money, and she bought a house to entertain her Fellow Fujian villagers, in fact, this building is also her smuggling center.
Of course, Zheng Cuiping still did some public welfare undertakings, with the loosening of american immigration policy and China's beginning of reform and opening up, Zheng Cuiping returned to her hometown to build a four-story building, which was the largest and most luxurious in their village at that time. At the same time, she also funded the construction of a school in the village to teach children to learn English, hoping to portray herself as a philanthropist.
If people who are familiar with micro-business should be very familiar with her set, building the best and largest house is to set an example and tell the villagers: You can make a lot of money in the United States, you can come to me to smuggle it, and when you go to the United States, you can also make so much money and return to your hometown. This really stimulated the people of Sheng Mei Village at that time.
And the establishment of schools to teach children to learn English, but also to solve their concerns, without language barriers, then it will be easy to find a job. This is simply a caring "one-stop service".
But Zheng Cuiping's measures are not completely without benefits, she really gives the people in her hometown the motivation to struggle, and strengthens the education of the locals, to some extent, she is benefiting the people of her hometown. This is also the reason why after Zheng Cuiping was arrested, many villagers sent letters to the United States expressing their willingness to serve her sentence instead.
The peak of Zheng Cuiping's smuggling career was the cooperation with Guo Liangqi, the boss of the Fuqing Gang, but the later "overturning" also originated from this. Guo Liangqi was also a stowaway at first, but with the style of daring to fight, he gradually became a big brother in the underworld, and he also chose to help people smuggle directly by ship, which can transport hundreds of people at a time.
Guo Liangqi has a way, Zheng Cuiping has a source of customers, and the two have become close partners.
In 1993, during a smuggling trip, the boat they often used broke down and ran aground, and hundreds of people on board were stranded on the island. After Zheng Cuiping learned the news, she and Guo Liangqi re-established a boat to pick up people.
The newly acquired ship, called the Golden Adventure, was shipped out of the factory in 1969, it was already a bit tattered, and it was not suitable for carrying passengers, but this group of stowaways really wanted to go to the United States, so they gritted their teeth or got on the ship.
After drifting at sea for a few months, the Golden Adventure reached the Atlantic Ocean near New York City.
The ship did not dare to go near the coast for fear of being spotted by the Americans. In their plan, there will be a speedboat to pick them up. However, they never saw the speedboat, and what they didn't know was that the person in charge of the reception had died in the gang's vendetta.
The "snakehead" on the ship found that something was wrong, and loudly said on the ship that the person who received it could not come, and that if he wanted to go to the United States, he would swim over by himself.
So nearly three hundred people jumped into the sea, and such a large battle soon alarmed the United States, and even with the help of the American police, 10 stowaways paid for their lives. An American police officer involved in the rescue later recalled: "I could even hear the sound of cartilage coming from cartilage as their bodies squirmed, and they surfaced, then collapsed on the beach and died.
This incident attracted widespread attention in American society, and since then the US government has begun to vigorously crack down on smuggling by sea, and some smugglers have also been arrested. Zheng Cuiping took advantage of the chaos to run ahead of time and went to Hong Kong and the mainland to hide.
The US government learned from other "snakeheads" that Zheng Cuiping was an important organizer, so it issued a worldwide arrest warrant for her. What can be embarrassing to the US government is that Zheng Cuiping still frequently travels to and from Fuzhou, Hong Kong, and New York, and her husband and children are in the United States, and some compatriots will also help her cover.
It wasn't until 2000 that a U.S. consulate official in Hong Kong discovered the name of Ms. Cheng's son while sorting through a stack of missing green cards at the airport, and he realized that if Ms. Cheng was also in Hong Kong, she would contact him.
So he asked the Hong Kong police to cooperate and notified Zheng Cuiping's son to go to the airport to go through the relevant procedures. Zheng Cuiping's son did not know what was happening behind the scenes and promised to come and do it the next day.
At around 11 a.m. the next morning, Ms. Zheng arrived at the Hong Kong airport, where she was recognized by Hong Kong police while waiting for her son and subsequently arrested with a Belize passport that was not her own, a stack of passport photographs belonging to a stowaway and tens of thousands of dollars.
Ms. Cheng was held in Hong Kong for three years before being extradited to the United States.
The US government accused Zheng Cuiping of human smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, money laundering and other crimes, and Guo Liangqi, Wen Yuhui and other "snakeheads" who had been arrested earlier made tainted witnesses, Zheng Cuiping argued irrefutablely, she complained for herself in court, and said to a pregnant prosecutor: "You are about to become a mother, I bless you." When you truly become a mother you will understand me. ”
But the judge did not approve of her, bluntly saying: "You have not been framed, you have turned Chinese desire for the United States into a tool for your own profit." In the end, Zheng Cuiping was sentenced to 35 years in prison, and after the news returned to her hometown, many villagers wrote to the US government saying that they were willing to serve their sentences instead of "Sister Ping".
Zheng Cuiping was not satisfied at first, and has been trying to appeal, but all of them were rejected, and in October 2010, she seemed to admit her fate, and in a letter to Li Zhu, a reporter of the Overseas Chinese Daily in the United States, she said: I have lost confidence in the lawyer, I will not continue to appeal, fantasizing that someone will have a sense of justice, and one day stand up and tell the truth.
On April 24, 2014, Zheng Cuiping died of pancreatic cancer in prison, and her funeral was as mentioned at the beginning of this article, and many people who received her favor spontaneously sent her off. Americans have counted that at least 3,000 people smuggled into the United States with the help of Zheng Cuiping, and she herself has made more than $40 million.
Her life is complex, and it is not something that can be summed up in a simple "black and white" sentence.