She is a kind woman, and the snakehead queen and the underworld are all media reports.
- Fat balls of stowaways
In 1949, a legendary and controversial Chinese woman was born in a small village in Tingjiang Town, Mawei District, Fuzhou City, Fujian Province. In this small, remote fishing village, people can only rely on fishing to survive. The so-called patron eats the mountain and relies on the water to draft water.
This person's name is Zheng Cuiping, his father is a seafarer of a Hong Kong freighter, when Zheng Cuiping was 15 years old, Zheng Cuiping's father Zheng Jiliang planned for a long time, and finally successfully smuggled to the United States. He jumped out of the ship while it was docked in the port of New York and sneaked into the United States while dockworkers and porters were haggling offloading cargo.
At that time, China was still very poor, and in order to find a better way out, many people wanted to smuggle themselves to the United States. But smuggling into the United States is not so easy and requires a lot of risk.
In 1973, Cheng's family moved to Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, Cheng opened a department store. Because of her natural alertness, flexibility and sensitivity to numbers, Zheng Cuiping's store business is very good. Not long after, she opened a garment factory in Shenzhen again, and her life was getting better and better.
In fact, with Zheng Cuiping's ingenuity, if you continue to do it normally, you can also have a very good deed and career. But she was not satisfied, she still wanted to go to the United States. The opportunity finally came —
In 1981, an American couple bought something at Zheng Cuiping's store and met this Fujian woman with an American dream. They promised to help Zheng Cuiping go to the United States as their nanny.
Someone asked her, why did she give up her privileged life in Hong Kong to go to the United States?
Zheng Cuiping replied: I know that the United States is a highly civilized country. In America, people are easy to survive, and I would be an excellent nanny. I hope that one day I can bring my child to the United States.
In this way, she successfully came to the United States, and quickly settled in the United States with the local Hokkien community.
In the 1980s, more and more people smuggled from Fuzhou to the United States, and at first Zheng Cuiping's relatives and friends asked her to help, and Zheng Cuiping charged a commission of 18,000 US dollars per person to help others smuggle.
In the beginning, the risk of smuggling was actually relatively small. Zheng Cuiping's fame is also getting bigger and bigger, so many people look for her. At that time, most of the villages in Tingjiang Town, where Zheng Cuiping was located, were gone, and Zheng Cuiping earned the first bucket of gold by helping people smuggle.
With more and more stowaways in the United States, who often worry about sending money home after accumulating a certain amount of savings, Zheng Cuiping once again smells business opportunities. She has extensive contacts and wealth in Fuzhou, Hong Kong, and New York, and is freely convertible between dollars and renminbi.
Who needs to send money home, just send the dollar to Zheng Cuiping's hands, leaving the name and contact information of the relatives, two or three days later the Chinese family can receive the money sent by Zheng Cuiping, Zheng Cuiping charges a 3% commission per order.
Don't underestimate this 3%, every year these Chinese send home millions of dollars in money, to the back of even geometric growth, Zheng Cuiping almost monopolized the remittance network in Fuzhou. Zheng Cuiping was not criticized by others, but accumulated a good reputation.
In addition to his money-changing business, he borrows money from people who can't afford to pay smuggling fees, charging 30 percent interest a year, or usury. When those people arrived in the United States, they could only work hard to earn money and pay off their debts.
This state of affairs lasted until the late 1980s, and Zheng Cuiping's reputation was well known among the local Chinese.
From 1988 to 1993, it was the golden age of China's smuggling into the United States, when the smuggling industry reached more than $3 billion. Zheng Cuiping made a fortune from the smuggling industry, but she began to return her money to Fujian and built the largest house in the village in her hometown, with four floors, each with balconies and prominent pagodas on the roof.
Zheng Cuiping tried to run herself as a philanthropist, not as a snakehead.
However, there are often wet shoes at the riverside station, and on the night of June 6, 1993, tragedy occurred.
The Golden Adventure carrying more than 300 stowaways ran aground, and the stranding was still a certain distance from the shore, resulting in hundreds of people jumping into the sea together. The incident alarmed the American police, who quickly dispatched to rescue the more than 300 chinese smuggled, but in the end 10 people died.
After the incident, the relevant responsible person was arrested, and Zheng Cuiping was the culprit, so she was wanted by the United States worldwide.
Because Zheng Cuiping had already heard the sound of the wind, she rushed back to her hometown in Fujian, China.
In fact, this incident did not damage Zheng Cuiping's smuggling business, and the people who sought her smuggling were still endless. However, the tragedy has happened again. In 1998, the boat on which the stowaways were travelling capsized off the coast of Guatemala, drowning 14 people.
Although the global wantedness of the United States has had a great impact on Zheng Cuiping's personal freedom, she frequently travels to and from Hong Kong, New York and Fuzhou through a fake passport.
Until early 2000, Zheng Cuiping was arrested at the Hong Kong airport. Police found a Belize passport that was not her own, a stack of passport photos belonging to the stowaways, and $31,000 wrapped in newspaper.
After two years in prison in Hong Kong, Cheng was extradited back to the United States. In 2005, a New York court tried Ms. Zheng and sentenced her to 35 years in prison on charges of human smuggling, illegal money laundering, and kidnapping.
After being sentenced, Zheng Cuiping insisted on appealing, but until October 2010, there was still no effect, and she gave up hope of appealing.
In a letter to Li Zhu, a reporter for the Overseas Chinese Daily, Zheng Cuiping wrote: I have long 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.
In prison, due to her high cholesterol and blood lipids, the medical conditions in prison were poor, resulting in Zheng Cuiping losing 17 pounds in two consecutive years. On April 24, 2014, Zheng Cuiping died of pancreatic cancer in prison.
On the day of her burial, thousands of people and hundreds of Lincoln luxury cars were at the funeral site to send her off. The people on both sides held up signs and shouted the slogan "Sister Ping is good", and the scene was extremely spectacular...
For Zheng Cuiping, what do you think? Everyone is welcome to discuss together in the comments section.