Tongshi - (Mandarin) Colleague, business associate.

Tong - (Mandarin) Similar, or united. (Cantonese) A family gathering place. The character depicts many things (kou, mouth) under one cover (mao, cover). Usually used to describe a hui similar to a triad but without the political history.

Hui - (Mandarin) A social group, especially a secret society.

Triad - (English, from sānhéhuì, "Three Harmonies Society") One of several secret societies descended from Shaolin monks brutally suppressed by the Qing emperors, probably instrumental in their eventual overthrow^*, and now more popularly known for involvement in organized crime. The "three harmonies" are between Heaven, Earth and Man. For more, see Wikipedia:"Triad" and the home page of the Black Dragon Triad Society: http://www.geocities.com/boohowdoy/tong.html .

I'm not sure which usage of tong would be appropriate for this recent story out of San Francisco. It's definitely a story about hui that call themselves tongs, with all that this implies^**.

Leung, 56, was gunned down inside his import-export business Monday afternoon. Police do not know whether the people he feared were behind the slaying, but they do know that the attack at 603 Jackson St. was not random.

"This person was intended to be shot -- this was not a robbery. (Leung) offered him money, but he shot him and left," said San Francisco police homicide Lt. John Hennessey of the shooting. The masked assailant fled into a heavy rain.

The slaying at Wonkow Art Centres and Wonkow International Enterprises Inc. reverberated through the tightly knit Chinatown community, where Leung was a mediator who settled personal and political disputes.

Leung was an elder in two historic Chinese fraternal organizations, or tongs -- the Hop Sing Tong and the Chinese Freemasons, also known as the Chee Kung Tong. And he was a leader in several other Chinatown business and community groups.

..."This takes Chinatown back to a long time ago," said James Chung, a San Francisco insurance agent and Chinatown leader aligned with Taiwan. "This is not a society we want in the United States, a modern and democratic country. We shouldn't have the old traditional way to solve these problems. I wish we can stop these kinds of things and go back to law and order."

History: still going on.
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^*...which is why there's a fuss over odd religious groups like Falun Gong.

^**Note the connection between tongs, triads and the GMD -- the Nationalist Army the Communists drove out of the country to Taiwan.