In the context of post-COVID regulation on international mobility for Chinese nationals, Dr Tang Ling examines the catchphrase 'cutting off a kidney', adopted in various media to fuel a narrative and moral panic about a dangerous Southeast Asia.
Official film poster for 'No More Bets' (2023). The poster art copyright is believed to belong to the distributor of the Film, the publisher of the Film or the graphic artist.
Dr Tang Ling is a Lecturer in Sociology at Open University.
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia, are among the top overseas destinations for Chinese tourists. It was not until December 2022, with the unprecedented nationwide protests known as the A4 Revolution, that China relaxed its zero-COVID policy, which included mass testing, enforced quarantine, and targeted lockdowns. International mobility was also severely undermined and banned under the Zero COVID policy. During these two years, China has had one of the strictest and longest lasting COVID policies in the world.
It was not until January the 8th 2023 that China resumed quarantine-free cross-border travel. But the pace of recovery for outbound tourism is much slower than it is expected. The Chinese economy suffered immensely during the COVID pandemic. Its reintegration into the global economy also seemed ambiguous due to its zero COVID policy and, more importantly, the changing global political context with the Sino-US trade war and the Russian-Ukrainian war. In the Two Sessions of 2024, the word security is placed on the key agenda, referring not only to national security but also to cybersecurity, where transnational scam is particularly highlighted. It specifically refers to the online scam centres in Southeast Asia that target Chinese nationals.
Shortly after the reopening of the country's borders to tourism, discussions about online fraud centres in northern Myanmar went viral on the Chinese Internet. These scam centres are located on the border with China and Thailand, where land is controlled by local warlords. Many of these heavily guarded scam operations are run by Chinese targeting Chinese, with many workers trapped and forced to work there through scams, criminal gangs, or even human trafficking. Many of the forced labour victims are Chinese nationals, and since the zero-COVID policy, increasingly Chinese speaking people including these from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia. There has been little mention on the Chinese media of the complex relationship and close cooperation between the junta and the Chinese government, even though the emergence of northern Myanmar as a hub for online gambling and fraud is a result of these politico-economic forces. Instead, it is a very specific term that has gone viral - 割腰子 (ge yaozi), which can be translated as cutting off a kidney.
On Douyin, Xiaohongshu, WeChat public account and other popular social media platforms, the following narrative went viral:
“Prior to the 2019 outbreak, Southeast Asia was the region that received the highest number of Chinese tourists... However, as we begin to receive more and more information… crime, drugs, and the rampant sale of human beings and organs, as well as some unmentionable horrors, began to enter our minds... Do we, really, understand Southeast Asia?”
These narratives then introduce northern Myanmar as a hub for scam operations where forced labourers are recruited through scams that claim to offer high-paying jobs with low barriers to entry. Only when the victims arrive do they understand that these operations are guarded sites for forced labour. These victims are forced to set up scams for other people, usually in the form of romance scams targeting middle-aged women. Colloquially, it is referred to as pig butchering scam. For forced labourers who cannot perform the scam well enough or at all, illegal organ transportation is then performed with their organs being sold in black market.
In their work Policing the Crisis, sociologist Stuart Hall and others use moral panic to describe “discrepancies (that) appear between threat and reaction, between what is perceived and what that is a perception of” (Hall et al. 1978,:29). They focus on the moral panic against "muggers" in the 1970s and 80s, in which the traditional crime of violent robbery was constructed by the media and the state into a new crime, one specifically committed by Black youth. In post-World War II Britain, while colonialism fuelled the prosperity of the metropolitan state and eased the living standards of "local" proletarians, people of colour immigrants to the UK from the (ex-)colonies from the 1950s onwards created new social stratifications. The representation of an "other" based on race and immigrant background created a rift within the working class. Black youth lived in the country but were not fully accepted as full members of society. Accepting a different identity from their first-generation immigrant parents and marginalized by the "host" country, young Blacks gathered in ghettos with the least hope of social mobility. In this context, street violence received widespread attention and became a moral panic. As a result, increased policing was justified.
To argue for a case of moral panic is not to deny the crimes, but to look at the discourse around these crimes. The scam operation in Southeast Asia is also widely reported by media outside China, including the BBC. In China, however, during and after the relaxation of the zero-COVID policy, the image of a "dangerous Southeast Asia" has become a well-curated and heated topic that is not only viral on social media, but also portrayed in movies and reported by state media CCTV. In 2022, Lost in the Stars, a movie about a Chinese woman who almost became a victim to organ trafficking in Southeast Asia during her wedding anniversary tour, became a box office hit, grossing 3.5 billion yuan. In 2023, the crime thriller No More Bets, about Chinese being trafficked to Southeast Asia for internet fraud, again topped the box office. The same month the movie was released in August, CCTV Channel Four released some footage of "first-hand accounts of victims who escaped from northern Myanmar".
This discourse, which constructs a dichotomy between a safe China and a dangerous overseas, can also be seen beyond Southeast Asia, although it is most obvious in the case of Southeast Asia. Footage of BlackLivesMatter protests, for example, is also used to show the "danger" of the US. Thus, while outbound tourism from China has yet to recover after the lifting of the zero-COVID policy, tourism within China, especially to second- and third-tier cities such as Zibo, has flourished.
BBC News Chinese “杀猪盘”爱情陷阱揭秘：“我们如何诈骗数百万美金” “pig butchering scam” love trap revealed: 'How we scammed millions of dollars' https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-64885188 Published 9/3/2023. Accessed 16/5/2024.
cctv.com [中国新闻]缅北亲历者讲述缅甸逃亡经历 [China News] first-hand accounts of victims who escaped from northern Myanmar https://tv.cctv.com/2023/08/28/VIDEoXBu0027M0LjlY4tamyX230828.shtml Published 28/8/2023. Accessed 16/5/2024.
Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Robert. 1978. Policing the Crisis : Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Macmillan. London: Macmillan.
Wang, Quyou. 柬埔寨行记：对外界的危险想象与恐惧，是华语圈的共同语境Cambodia Travelogue: Dangerous Imagination and Fear of the Outside World, a Common Context in the Chinese-speaking World. 端传媒 Initium Media (theinitium.com) https://theinitium.com/zh-Hans/article/20231117-mainland-cambodia-fraud-fear-trip Published 17/11/2023. Accessed 16/5/2024.
163.com东南亚到底有多危险？泰国做人彘、缅甸噶腰子、巴厘岛离奇遇害！How dangerous is Southeast Asia? Thailand’s human swine, Myanmar's cutting off kidney, and a bizarre murder in Bali! https://www.163.com/dy/article/IQ1SPQL10553SWQ5.html Published 3/2/2024. Accessed 16/5/2024.