Scott D. Seligman is a historian, retired corporate executive and career China hand, and he holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard. Fluent in Mandarin and conversant in Cantonese, he lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, and has worked as a legislative assistant in Congress, a businessman in China and a communications director of a Fortune 50 company.

He is the author of many scholarly and business books, including CHINESE BUSINESS ETIQUETTE and THE FIRST CHINESE AMERICAN. He has published articles in the Asian Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Seattle Times, the China Business Review, the Jewish Daily Forward, China Heritage Quarterly, and the New York History and Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center blogs.

Books by Scott D. Seligman

Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York's Chinatown

by Scott D. Seligman - History, Nonfiction, True Crime

TONG WARS is historical true crime set against the perfect landscape: Tammany-era New York City. Representatives of rival tongs (secret societies) corner the various markets of sin using admirably creative strategies. The city government was already corrupt from top to bottom, so once one tong began taxing the gambling dens and paying off the authorities, a rival, jealously eyeing its lucrative franchise, co-opted a local reformist group to help eliminate it. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next 30 years.