China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi yesterday called on Southeast Asian countries to take strong measures to crack down on online gambling and fraud operations, citing the worrying persistence of criminal operations in many parts of the region.
Wang’s call came as he chaired a meeting with ambassadors from the 10 member states of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Beijing, the state-run China Daily reported.
According to the report, Wang expressed concern about the “consecutive severe cases of online gambling and telecom fraud along the Myanmar-Thailand border,” which had posed “serious threats to the vital interests of citizens from China and other countries.”
The Chinese foreign minister called on relevant countries to shoulder responsibility and adopt strong measures to ensure people’s safety and property, and “to ensure criminals do not go unpunished.” He added that China was willing to strengthen bilateral and multilateral law enforcement cooperation with ASEAN nations in order to help stamp out the epidemic of scam operations.
The past few years have seen an alarming rise in industrial-scale online scamming operations in the region, particularly in loosely regulated parts of Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. Established in casinos and high-rise apartment blocks during the COVID-19 pandemic, armies of indentured workers staff these operations, many of them innocent jobseekers who were attracted by promises of employment, only to be kept imprisoned and forced to operate various types of digital scams, often on pain of beatings, mistreatment, and torture.
As Reuters noted, Wang’s statement suggests “a new urgency” on Beijing’s part to bolster coordination with ASEAN to tackle a wave of criminality that has victimized untold numbers of Chinese nationals, either as trafficking victims or as victims of fraud.
In a recent case that attracted considerable attention within China, the Chinese actor Wang Xing went missing on January 3 near the Thai-Myanmar border. After his girlfriend raised the alarm on social media, Wang was rescued on January 7 from a scam center in Shwe Kokko, a notorious scam hub in eastern Myanmar close to the Thai border. Thai police said last week they believed he was a victim of human trafficking, and that he had been communicating on WeChat with people he believed were Chinese employees of a major Thai entertainment firm. Upon arrival in Thailand, Wang was picked up and transported to Myanmar, where his head was shaved and he was forced to run online scams.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security said that it is making what the China Daily described as “all-out efforts” to rescue Chinese citizens who went missing or were trapped after being deceived into traveling abroad.
This is not the first time that China (or Wang himself) have called for their Southeast Asian counterparts to crack down on scam operations, and the state media reporting on yesterday’s meeting did not contain any details of what forms the deepened cooperation might take.
China’s government has already put considerable pressure on Myanmar’s military junta to rein in the online scamming operations that were established under the control of the proxy Border Guard Force (BGF) in the Kokang region of northern Shan State. Indeed, the failure of the junta to show sufficient urgency in this regard was one of the reasons that the Chinese government greenlighted the Operation 1027 offensive, which was launched by three armed resistance groups in late 2023 and saw the Kokang BGF driven from power. Aside from this, China claims that authorities in Myanmar handed over 31,000 online fraud suspects to China in 2023; many thousands more were deported from territories controlled by armed groups like the United Wa State Army.
Under Chinese pressure, Laos has also clamped down on scam operations in the notorious Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in the country’s northwest. After imposing a ban in late August, Lao and Chinese security forces detained 771 people running scams within the zone, and more arrests have since followed.
Despite these efforts, Myanmar’s fragmented mess of jurisdictions and ongoing conflict have provided ideal conditions for transnational organized crime syndicates, which have shown a remarkable ability to relocate in response to law enforcement operations.
Significant challenges also persist in Cambodia, where prominent members of the political and business elite reportedly have close links with online scamming operations. By all accounts, Chinese officials have been frustrated by the government’s lack of effective action against the scam syndicates, but the centrality of scam revenues to Cambodia’s patronage-based political economy has made it difficult, if not politically impossible, for the Cambodian government to tackle the issue head on.
Wang is certainly right to identify that a transnational threat requires a transnational response. The problem is that Southeast Asia’s scamming epidemic is a parasitic outgrowth of structural features of the region’s political economy. Without a fundamental change in this regard or a significant rebalancing of incentives, Southeast Asia’s online fraud syndicates will continue to ply their destructive trade
