FRENCH security services and police are battling against a rising tide of crime and violence among Chinese gangs linked to far-eastern Triad organisations. 
The Year of the Tiger in France, punctuated by kidnapping, racketeering, illegal sweatshop raids and shoot-outs in the streets, will be remembered as one of unprecedented growth in the ranks of the Chinese mafias. Until the recent outbreaks, the violence was confined to the Chinatowns in the 13th and 19th arrondissements of Paris. Last month the French police special branch, les Renseignements Généraux (RG), closed an illegal Chinese food processing factory in Ivry-sur-Seine in the outskirts of Paris, where food unfit for human consumption was found by veterinary services. 
The12th section of the RG has produced an alarming report on illegal garment manufacturing, following a six-month investigation during which they discovered a dozen illegal sweatshops in the Paris area. The security services also accuse the Chinese mafias of laundering huge sums col-lected from karaoke clubs, non-registered medical services, the piracy of European video films and the reproduc-tion of Hong Kong-made kung-fu and "yellow" - Chinese pornography - films. 
To create the Invisible Empire, as it is labelled, the gangs deal with Chinese businesses which place orders with the illegal factories and retail them in the French market. The laundering process involves "tea money", in Triad parlance: money produced by fraud through restaurants, a growing number of prostitution rings involving children, and illegal casinos, including virtual operations on the Internet. Police say there are 80,000 illegal Chinese immi-grants in the Paris area. Many are thought to have travelled from Zhejiang province in south China by tortuous routes through Russia and eastern Europe under the oppressive protection afforded by the Triad gangs. Jean-Pierre
Chevènement, the interior minister, admit-ted that 10 per cent of the illegal immigrants caught last year were Chinese, compared with only four per cent in 1996. The price for smuggling Chinese into France is believed
to be Ffr150,000 ($25,200) per person.