I've travelled across the world to request an interview with one of Taiwan's most elusive, divisive and feared figures, Chang An-lo, the man they call White Wolf, who last year returned from exile in mainland China to be the president of Taiwan's newest political lobby group, the China Unification Promotion Party or CUP. The party's message is blunt: it's Taiwan's destiny to be "reunited" with the Chinese "fatherland" and no amount of posturing about democracy and independence is going to change that. Ever since the Kuomintang (KMT), led by Chiang Kai-shek, fled across the Taiwan Strait after Mao Zedong came to power, mainland China hasn't shifted from its view of Taiwan as a recalcitrant breakaway province. Just as Hong Kong was reunited with China in 1997, so will Taiwan. It's just a matter of time.

But the thought of reunification is stirring fear in the hearts of many Taiwanese, with surveys showing that those who define themselves as "Chinese" is actually falling, despite strengthening economic ties across the strait. Apart from an elite group of business leaders, many of whom stand to reap millions and in some cases billions from reunification, and a powerful group of pro-Beijing politicians, a majority of Taiwanese say they have no desire for their country to become an economic satellite of China or for their home-grown democracy to be shorn away. And a shady figure such as White Wolf - who is often described as the "spiritual godfather" of the Bamboo Union, one of Taiwan's most powerful triad organisations - personifies those fears. Despite his slogans of peace, White Wolf has links with organised crime that date back to the 1960s (he was also on Taiwan's Most Wanted list for 17 years), and his suspected associations with power brokers in Beijing have placed many in Taiwan deeply on the defensive.

About four months ago, on the night of March 18, student activists barricaded themselves inside the Legislative Yuan (parliament) in Taipei to demonstrate against a trade pact with China that had been rushed through without due process - a pact many Taiwanese feared would leave their country dangerously susceptible to political pressure from the mainland. One student brought in a huge bunch of sunflowers, to symbolically bring sunlight into the secretive political processes that determine cross-strait affairs.

When they called themselves the Sunflower Student Movement they chose a direct transliteration from the English word for sunflower, with its sense of being a likeness of the sun, rather than the Chinese term "flower facing the sun", which has less democratic connotations. Sunflower protesters were meticulously and deliberately civil, but also stubborn. The use of force by police - to remove a group of protesters who had occupied the nearby Executive Yuan - worked to strengthen the sense of solidarity among them.

A host of community groups joined the street demonstrations, swelling the numbers of peaceful protesters in the surrounding streets to nearly 500,000 on some estimates, while a local florist dispensed 1000 sunflowers to the crowd, fixing the sunflower appellation. But on April 1, an incensed White Wolf turned up at the gates of the Legislative Yuan with hundreds of associates, and there were reports of assaults, fights and violent threats. "You are all f...ing offspring of Chinese, but you do not deserve to be Chinese," thundered White Wolf at the protesters, after failing to breach police cordons outside the building. "The Chinese people do not want you."

White Wolf has since involved himself in further counter-protests, some of them violent, the most recent one being to "protect" one of his mainland allies, the head of the People's Republic Taiwan Affairs Office, Zhang Zhijun.

"We were really afraid of police, KMT spies and followers of White Wolf," a member of the Sunflower movement's security contingent, Wang Yun-hsiang, told me after the street demonstrations. Wang described how he discovered a hidden stash of weapons inside the Legislative Yuan, which he feared had been planted by opponents as a pretext to use violence. "Someone wanted to make trouble and blame it on us," said Wang, contemplating the combustible turn that events may have taken.

Now there are signs White Wolf is exerting his clout in the lead-up to the municipal elections, to be held across Taiwan in November, and presidential elections in 2016. The tensions between Beijing and Taipei, high wire at the best of times, become high voltage when the Taiwanese line up to vote. Back in 1996, China fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait as a show of force to the independence-minded presidential candidate Lee Teng-hui, but the threats backfired terribly, with the US dispatching two aircraft-carriers into the strait, and a voter backlash against the mainland that saw Lee sweep to victory.

Since then the world has largely accepted that Beijing has been exerting influence through a more sophisticated strategy of "soft" economic enmeshment, rather than outright brinkmanship, although military analysts say its arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles pointed at Taiwan is expanding by the day.

"White Wolf?" snaps one of Chang An-lo's assistants, a man with a huge forehead and pockmarked face, who eyes me suspiciously. "What White Wolf? "Whoever calls him that? You mean you are looking for President Chang!" It's only after I name-drop members of the Chinese Communist Party aristocracy that he ushers me into an inner office space, where he jots down my details and gives me an undertaking that my name will be passed on to the "President". In an adjacent room I notice a resplendent dragon, carved from a million-dollar slab of Burmese jade, suggesting that the business of pan-Chinese patriotism has some pay-offs. Last year another CUP branch office was raided by the police, who alleged that it was a front for one of Chang's Bamboo Union proteges to engage in organised crime, extortion, illegal ownership of guns and drugs, and rape.

To say that White Wolf has a colourful past would be a bit like saying China has a budding economy. When he first returned to Taiwan in the mid 1990s after a prison sentence in the US and a politically motivated assassination (more on this later), the White Wolf was caught up in bid-rigging scandals in the construction industry. At the time, he called himself "Wolf Chang" on the English side of his business cards. After his eldest son, Chang's heir in business, was stabbed to death outside a Taipei karaoke club in 1998 by members of a rival gang, a funeral procession comprising gang members, politicians, businessmen and senior crime figures, chauffeured in about 70 Cadillacs, stretched for more than 1 1/2 km. "I cannot deny I have influence," White Wolf boasted at the time.

On my way out of the CUP offices, with no guarantee I'll meet White Wolf, let alone interview him, the man with the pockmarked face thrusts a baseball cap into my hands, with the words "We are all Chinese" embroidered across the sides. Those simple words - seven Chinese characters - are aimed at negating the political "indiginisation" that has evolved with democratisation. To many Taiwanese, the process began three decades ago when Taiwanese president Chiang Ching-kuo delivered one of his most famous and revealing quotes: "I am also Taiwanese." These two formulations, "We are all Chinese" and "I am also Taiwanese," seem to define the battle lines for the future of Taiwan. To really understand White Wolf, and why he has set his formidable machine against the idea of an autonomous Taiwanese identity, you need to delve into his shadowy past and find out what makes this white wolf run.

Chang An-Lo's path to Taiwan's underground began before his teens. His parents brought him to Taipei from mainland China, from the former Kuomintang nationalist capital of Nanjing, after an odyssey that ended when he was just two years old in 1950. As low-ranking exiles, Chang An-Lo's parents struggled to eke out a living in the teeming, impoverished laneways of old Taipei, so that by the time their son was in primary school in Old Bamboo Road he knew how to use his fists, joining a gang of former mainland boys doing battle with crews of local Taiwanese.

When he was 16, the streetwise Chang graduated to become a fully blooded member of the Bamboo Union gang (literally: the initiation rite was to drink a glass of wine containing drops of your "brothers' " blood). Chang, who took the name Bai Lang, or White Wolf, after a famous bandit leader who pillaged the towns of central China in the early 1900s, swiftly moved up the ranks of the gang with his cunning, nerve and sheer intelligence. White Wolf's schoolmate and "elder brother", Chen Chi-li, was given the nickname "Dry Duck" (because he couldn't swim) and the pair became inseparable partners in crime.

The Bamboo Union began making a name for itself in the "protection" business, extorting money and bribes from local shops and factories, but the gang's coffers overflowed in the late 1960s when thousands of well-paid American GIs flocked to Taipei while on R&R from the Vietnam War. Chinese nightclub owners, most of them recent arrivals from the mainland, welcomed Bamboo Union members to their premises to banish rival gangs of ethnic Taiwanese trying to carve out a share of the lucrative trade in gambling, prostitution and drugs. By this stage the Bamboo Union was fast developing into a transnational crime syndicate or "triad".

All of which seemed to mix in perfectly with White Wolf's elaborate travel and higher education plans. In 1968, when he was 20, Chang moved to Las Vegas, to study, among other things, philosophy at the University of Nevada, before moving on to Stanford University near San Francisco. Between philosophy lectures and mathematics tutorials, he kept abreast of the Bamboo Union's expanding empire, particularly in the Chinatowns of California and the gambling halls of Las Vegas, as profits reached into the stratosphere.

In the early '80s, Chang rose to be among the most senior members of the Bamboo Union, which in 20 years had grown from a school gang into a multi-

billion dollar business with thousands of members spanning the Chinese-speaking world, the US and Europe. This huge expansion was made possible when the ruling KMT cut a deal in 1979 - according to testimony from Dry Duck - to outsource the means of political violence to the Bamboo Union in return for turning a blind eye to its racketeering.

But the unholy relationship between the Kuomintang and the Bamboo Union was severed on October 15, 1984, when a Taiwanese journalist, KMT critic and pro-democracy activist named Henry Liu was gunned down in the garage of his San Francisco home. Dry Duck and two other Union "brothers" were sentenced to life for the murder.

When KMT president Chiang Ching-kuo started co-operating with American investigators and rounding up the leaders of the now 40,000-strong organisation, Chang was hungry for revenge. He handed over a tape recording which recorded how his brothers had been trained and briefed by Taiwanese military intelligence, in full knowledge of the bureau director. Crucially, he also implicated the president's son.

The controversy became headline news on prime-time American television, setting off a chain reaction that shattered political goodwill towards the KMT in Congress and, indirectly, may have set Taiwan on its dramatic course from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1980s. What White Wolf may have helped accomplish, if unintentionally, was postpone, if not derail, the dreams to "reunify" the nation that were held by both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the conservative members of the KMT, even if they were planning it from different ends of the political spectrum and were still technically at war.

But while all this was happening, White Wolf was behind bars in a federal penitentiary in Kansas, after being nabbed first for a visa infringement and then jailed for his links to one of America's largest-ever drug busts, involving a plan to import 300 kilograms of pure heroin. In 1986 he was sentenced to 15 years' jail for a conspiracy to distribute narcotics, but productively passed the time in his jail cell by continuing his studies, so that by the time he was released in the early '90s he'd collected five bachelor's degrees.

After returning home to Taiwan, he found a home country in many respects unrecognisable from the one he'd grown up in, now a democratic and self-empowered nation comprising indigenous Taiwanese and immigrants from mainland China who defined themselves as "Taiwanese" rather than "Chinese".

In 1996, White Wolf was forced to leave the island again when a new warrant was issued for his arrest, amid a renewed crackdown on triad organisations (which followed another political assassination in which he was not implicated). He took refuge under a new set of political patrons in the south of mainland China. He and dozens of his relatives adapted their "dispute resolution" business (translation: standover tactics) to the Taiwan-owned factories of Shenzhen.

Meanwhile, tensions between the mainland and Taiwan were ratcheting up again. In 2000, Taiwan's opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), formed government for the first time under president Chen Shui-bian. Beijing responded to Chen Shui-bian's autonomous policies by refusing to deal with either him or his party.

At the same time, it opened party-to-party channels with pro-Beijing members of the KMT, many of whom had their own business links, which led to economic integration deals as soon as the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou came to power in 2008. In just two months, the number of direct flights between China and Taiwan jumped from zero to 36. Taiwan's richest man, Tsai Eng-Meng, announced he was building a media empire to "use the power of the press to advance relations between China and Taiwan", after the mainland enabled him to build a US$10 billion fortune selling biscuits.

Senior Chinese officials - who face no comparable electioneering challenges at home - even toured regional Taiwan to shower market opportunities on groups of small-time farmers and fishermen. Tens of thousands of investors, who might otherwise have little natural affinity for either mainland China or the pro-unification Kuomintang, grew dependent on the mainland market place and came to see that only the KMT had been given the key.

Speak to conservative members of the KMT and they'll tell you they're still committed to a dream of a "united" China, just like the communist mainland, and they have no sympathy with the Sunflower protesters. One of these is a former general, Hau Pei-tsun. In 1984, when the leaders of White Wolf's Bamboo Union triad conspired with military intelligence to assassinate Henry Liu, Hau Pei-tsun was the chief of the general staff in the Ministry of National Defense. Hau, now 95, remains lucid, and committed to the KMT-CCP dream of a "united" China. He is disparaging about the more open-minded elements of his party. "They're very soft-shelled," says Hau, criticising the leadership's tolerance for protests. "I would have taken them into custody."

Hau says he is all for democracy - indeed, that's what gives Taiwan leverage to unite on favourable terms with his old enemies in mainland China - but problems in "education" and "propaganda" have led students to precipitate chaos by "separating Taiwan and Chinese history". "The biggest crisis in Taiwan is that people are saying 'we are Taiwanese' and not 'we are Chinese'," says Hau. "If I was premier I would find a way to tell the truth."

To my surprise, halfway through my interview with Hau, I receive a phone call from the headquarters of the China Unification Party. I straighten my tie, finalise my questions, and return to the ninth-floor office on East Nanjing Road.

A senior police official has told me that Chang no longer has any strong direct links to the Chinese triad, and when I come face to face with White Wolf, I'm struck by his scholarly demeanour. Still youthful looking at 66, he's wearing an unusual pin-striped shirt with a white collar that looks a bit like a Sun Yatsen uniform, but is also reminiscent of a Catholic priest's. He speaks in urbane American English and chooses a huge photo of lush green fields, dotted with red love hearts, as a backdrop for our interview and photograph.

He obligingly fills me in on his history as an enforcer of unification politics, beginning with his street battles as a school boy against local Taiwanese gangs on Bamboo Forest Road. Yes, he says, he will never speak ill of his good friend Chen Chi-li (Dry Duck) - his "elder brother" since 1964, who passed away in 2007 in an exile mansion in Cambodia. Chang is still bitter, however, about how the KMT civilian leadership "arrested, double-crossed and tried to kill" Dry Duck and other "brothers", prompting him to embark on his own journey of cold and calculated revenge. "They are all my friends," he says.

The closer we get to the present day, however, the more closely Chang's tone and message begin to resemble that of a spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party. "I call them opium, not sunflowers, because opium makes you happy in the moment but eventually it hurts you," says Chang of the protesters dismissively. "That movement gives people a bad example. All the people say 'Oh, we can do this, we can occupy the [Legislative Yuan], we can occupy the police department ...' "

Would he ever use violence against the sunflower protesters? "I ask the public to follow me, so a lot of people followed me to the [Legislative Yuan]," he answers. "These were not Bamboo Union people. Some people got hurt because they tried to attack me. They used their shoes to attack me."

White Wolf points to the shifting, murky boundaries of reunification politics by naming leading figures in the DPP - his traditional enemies - who opened the door for him to return and roam free in Taiwan, despite outstanding charges for triad-related crimes. But on the bigger mystery, of how he survived and thrived in mainland China for 17 years, he remains stubbornly tight-lipped.

My questions about his support in high places in mainland China get nowhere until I show him a photograph I'd taken on my phone. It's of a scroll of calligraphy that I'd seen in the entrance hall of a luxury condominium in Beijing. It is in an idiom that translates roughly as "Superb Literary Talent", signed by none other than the Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeoh. But it's the dedication, written in smaller characters on the right-hand side, that piques his interest. "You know Hu Shiying?" he asks, referring to the princeling son of the Chinese Communist Party's "first pen" and famous propaganda chief, Hu Qiaomu.

Suddenly, it seems, we are on common ground and he becomes more candid, providing insights into the intricate web linking the KMT, the DPP, the Taiwanese business community, and the triad underworld in Cambodia, Burma, Shenzhen and Taiwan. Most tellingly, for the first time, he reveals and details intimate ties to the red "princeling" aristocracy of the Chinese Communist Party.

Our conversation is running overtime when it's suddenly interrupted by an "emergency". Rioters are attacking Chinese- and Taiwanese-owned factories in Vietnam, in response to a billion-dollar oil rig that China has just planted on Vietnamese-claimed waters in the South China Sea. Naturally, says Chang, he needs to call together his supporters and run off to organise a protest. "We are all Chinese," he says, striding out the door, as if there is nothing more that needs to be said.

Lead-in illustration by Adam Nickel/The JackyWinter Group.