Chinese underground organizations are taking over one of the world’s biggest illicit industries—the international money-laundering networks that facilitate crimes from drug smuggling to cryptocurrency theft by North Korean hackers. Since money-launderers do not publish quarterly reports it is difficult to know exactly how large their industry is. America’s Treasury department has estimated that around $154 billion in illicit proceeds—mainly from the sale of illegal drugs in America by cartels based in Mexico—flow through China each year…. Like many other Chinese industries moving into new markets, its money-launderers have squeezed out competitors by driving down costs and innovating. Older money-laundering services have been unable to compete with the efficiency, reach and low fees of these Chinese networks. In the past, Mexican drug traffickers often used black-market peso exchanges, which would launder dollars by paying for goods exported from America to Mexico, which would then be sold for pesos. Since t…