Oh for the love of Nurgle and Khorne! The dunmer are whatever you guys wish them to be, even the dumb ass people of Jupiter.

I should note that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tong_%28organization%29 is a term used to refer to Asian syndicates often dominated by the Chinese. To this day there are a number of Tongs operating both within Asia and within Asian communities, especially Chinatowns world wide. Much like the different Tongs of Morrowind they operate within varying levels of morality and lawfulness. They've often been compared to Italian and Irish mobs or Japanese Yokuza although in the case of Tongs not all of them are exclusively criminal guilds. The decision to use the term "Tong" in its real-world spelling and in a very similar context is one of the more explicitly borrowed things in Morrowind.