Behind the Blood Slaves in Sihanoukville: My Three Years in Cambodia

By I-An from Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, Published in GLOBUS

（https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/OmmgNISdLUXD7ApeW5ZmzA）

Blood slaves, murders, kidnappings, gunfights, drugs, scams, gambling ...... When it comes to Cambodia, people think of this Southeast Asian country as "full of all kinds of evil", which makes people shy away from it.

I have been working in a Hong Kong-owned children's clothing factory since I arrived in Cambodia before the epidemic in 2019. For more than three years, as an ordinary labourer and overseas worker, I have witnessed the whole process of Sihanoukville from the influx of money causing disorderly expansion, to the collapse of law and order and strict government control, to the return to (ruinous) calm today.

Not long ago, a story of "blood slavery" of Chinese workers had stirred up public opinion in the country. Although the story was debunked a few weeks later by the Chinese embassy in Cambodia and the Cambodian police, it seems to have reinforced the negative image of Cambodia on the internet.

What else is there in Cambodia besides social cases? Perhaps I have some answers.

The former Sihanoukville: chaos and prosperity

Named after Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia's largest seaport and only special economic zone, the port was once known as Sihanouk Port.

As a key development city under the Belt and Road Initiative, Sihanoukville has built a special economic zone where hundreds of Chinese companies have moved in and are doing business all over the world, contributing to the development of Sihanoukville as well as themselves, especially in terms of local employment. The factory I work in, which produces on behalf of a famous American children's clothing brand, has a large number of local Cambodian colleagues, where they earn around US$200-300 per month, a little more than the average local salary, and even more if they can speak simple Chinese and can do supplementary translation work.

However, the casinos in Sihanoukville are more lucrative than the large and small brick and mortar businesses, and even more lucrative than the casinos is online gambling. Political stability, legal gaming, economic freedom and the absence of foreign exchange controls have provided good conditions for the rapid development of online gambling, and also provided room for the black and grey industry to survive. At the same time, in the face of the ongoing crackdown on cross-border online gambling and fraud crimes by the Chinese authorities, the gambling hordes that had been moving around Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam have started to move to Sihanoukville and are slowly growing.

The smell of windfall profits makes people lose their cool thinking, and with a large number of flights between China and Cambodia starting in 2016, countless people with dreams of striking gold want a piece of the developing tide of the times.

People say that this is the Shenzhen of 20 years ago, where there was gold everywhere, and everyone was looking for a "shortcut" in life, and stories of overnight riches were spread by word of mouth: a second-hand property developer renting a building and renting it out with six months' deposit and one month rent, making a million in a month; a real estate developer selling a property as soon as it is built. Real estate agents don't even have to go out to do business, they are asked to buy a house on the road. ...... Stories of people buying a building with a bag of dollars and paying full price are being told every day.

With the influx of money from investors, speculators and developers into this small seaside town, Sihanoukville was on a rollercoaster ride, beginning a period of rapid and freakish development. Prices were soaring, rents were soaring, and land was being bought and sold at a daily rate; in early 2017, the price of a square metre of land in Sihanoukville was less than $100, but by 2019 it was thousands of dollars, an increase of dozens of times. The bubble in this can be imagined.

In those years, the gambling industry was the mainstay of all businesses in Sihanoukville, with tens of thousands of online investors driving the development of the restaurant, real estate and entertainment industries in Sihanoukville. It is not uncommon for a restaurant to earn thousands of dollars a night, and it seems that overnight riches are within reach. There are restaurants, hotels, KTVs and clubs opening every day. Walking through the streets of Westport, you can see construction sites everywhere, long queues of cars and honking horns on the muddy and ramshackle streets. Locals say that they used to not see Chinese people in Sihanoukville, but now, there are Chinese everywhere.

In an interview with the Bangkok Post in July 2019, Sihanoukville's police chief Chuon Narin once revealed that almost 90 per cent of businesses in Sihanoukville are run by Chinese. Of the province's nearly 200 hotels and guesthouses, 150 are Chinese, as are 41 karaoke parlours, 46 massage parlours and nearly 400 Chinese restaurants.

And the gaming industry is still expanding rapidly. In those years in Sihanoukville, there were a dozen or hundreds of gaming companies, large and small, spread throughout Cambodia (Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh, Bavet, Poipet) in any one of the parks. There are even hidden online investment (editor's note: i.e. telecoms fraud) companies scattered in countless villas and flats. Almost all of these people who join the online investment companies are from China, and most of them are gullible enough to believe the high-paid job advertisements on the Internet, being attracted by information such as free air tickets, "typists earning over 10,000 a month", "online customer service", "programmers", etc., and thus take the risk. Others, even hoodwinked by online investment companies into travelling to the border areas of China and subsequently illegally smuggled out of the country while being hijacked.

As ordinary manufacturing labourers, we have no dealings with these online investment company people, but our lives are still strongly influenced by their entire industry. At some point, Sihanoukville became synonymous with crime. In this otherwise quiet little town, the money-spinning outsiders and the local residents struggling to make ends meet live in two worlds. The majority of Cambodian locals without property or land have struggled to enjoy the dividends of the Chinese influx and have been forced to accept the rising cost of living, which has made extremes more and more frequent, with some Cambodians using the Chinese as an outlet for their grievances. Some Chinese are not in the serious business in the first place, and many more are facing the dashing of their dreams of a gold rush.

In Cambodia, we have our own group of workers and local Chinese information websites, and every now and then we hear about where there are jumps, where there are shootings, where there are kidnappings for ransom ...... There is also a local rumour that some people who do online investment will set off fireworks to celebrate once they have succeeded in scamming a big order, even though each of their big orders corresponds to is a broken family in the country.

And behind this chaotic boom, a storm is coming.

The "818 gambling ban": a watershed in the fate of Sihanoukville

The night before the storm was 22 June 2019, when a building under construction in Sihanoukville collapsed without warning. The accident killed 28 people and injured 26 others, making it the worst construction safety accident in Cambodia in recent years.

Prior to this, the real estate industry in Sihanoukville was a short-cycle, high-return business that was both prosperous and chaotic, with many people entering the industry with capital to get a piece of the action, and no professional qualifications or government regulation in place. The building under construction that collapsed on 22 June was the culmination of this chaos: the investigation later concluded that the building had changed owners for serval times during the construction period and that, in order to make a profit, each owner had changed the design and raised the floors again when reselling the building, resulting in the final height of the building far exceeding the initial design. The building was designed to be much taller than it was at the beginning and eventually the whole building collapsed.

The June 22 collapse led Cambodia to start a nationwide review of construction permits, to stop construction without a permit, and to scrutinise the quality of construction work, throwing the first cold water on the booming real estate industry in Sihanoukville.

No one knew at this point that the next to collapse would be the faltering gaming industry. On 13 August, a delegation from China's Ministry of Public Security arrived in Phnom Penh late at night to begin its visit to Cambodia, determined to overhaul Sihanoukville after the June 22 building collapse. On the first day of the visit, the delegation joined Cambodian police in arresting 127 Chinese nationals suspected of telecoms fraud and said on the same day that China and Cambodia would jointly set up an office to clean up online gambling. On August 18, 2019, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen issued a circular to stop granting and issuing licenses to operate various Online gambling businesses in Cambodia, and on August 31, Hun Sen formally ordered that all illegal online gambling must be blocked within 2019.

In September of that year, an English-language Cambodian media outlet published an investigative report revealing the dark side of the "China Town" in Sihanoukville. The report caused quite a stir when it claimed that thousands of Chinese, Malaysians, Filipinos, Vietnamese and Thais were being illegally imprisoned and forced to work as online gamblers in Chinatown in Sihanoukville. From what we Chinese in Cambodia have been told, this report, although exaggerated to a certain extent, reflects part of the reality, such as the fact that the netball parks are heavily guarded by security guards 24 hours a day, so they remain very secretive to outsiders.

The "8.18" gambling ban reversed the fortunes of Sihanoukville, and was followed by arrests all over Cambodia, with a large number of online gamblers fleeing the country. I heard that one of the parks in Sihanoukville had even taken a deposit of tens of thousands of dollars from companies that were going to move in, but once the "8-18" gambling ban was issued, the online gamblers fled and didn't even want the deposit.

After losing its growth pillar, the Sihanoukville prosperity bubble has burst, leaving a mess. The game of "pass the buck" came to an abrupt end when the capital chain broke and investors withdrew in large numbers, leaving Sihanoukville with a ubiquitous collection of badly built buildings and construction workers being owed wages. Business in the restaurant, entertainment and hotel industries was in decline, with rents and prices plummeting and businesses unable to support their operations, closing down and returning to their home countries.

At almost the same time, the epidemic broke out, the National Immigration Bureau tightened its grip on non-essential travel for Chinese nationals, and the crackdown on telecoms fraud continued to grow. The lack of fresh blood to replenish the online investment park in Sihanoukville led to desperate outlaws beginning to turn their attention to the Chinese in Cambodia. During the most chaotic period, armed robberies of Chinese shops, street kidnappings, extortion, murder and dumping of bodies ...... were all over the news, especially when ordinary beaten workers were kidnapped into the online gambling park, and once inside, they were forced to participate in online scams under the threat of beatings and imprisonment, and faced tens of thousands of dollars if they wanted to get out. Ransom.

In 2021, a total of 53 Chinese people died in Cambodia. Apart from accidents and illnesses, a large number of them had no identity information and were probably wanted criminals or smugglers who were trapped and died in Cambodia, and most of the serious cases have not been solved.

After the storm subsides, Sihanoukville is still Sihanoukville

It was during this time that the Cambodian "blood slave" case, which caused such a stir in the country in February this year, came to Cambodia. At the beginning of the case, the Jiangsu boy, surnamed Li, confessed that he had been forcibly smuggled into Cambodia after believing a well-paid job advertisement on the internet, and then resold several times as a "blood slave" for the seller because he refused to participate in the scam. When the story first broke, both countries were shocked, but two weeks later the Cambodian police announced that the story had been fabricated.

The heat of the incident quickly dissipated, but in Cambodia the story is far from over. The man in question was repatriated in April by agreement between China and Cambodia, but because of his involvement in his rescue and because he had believed his story and helped him to speak out, Chen Baorong, the leader of the China-Cambodia volunteer team, was implicated and taken away by the Cambodian police to cooperate with the investigation and has not been released.

In the past few years, the team led by Chen Baorong has rescued many compatriots from the parks, and as a Chinese who came to Cambodia many years ago, he has been deeply rooted in the region. Many Chinese in Cambodia have accepted his help, but now he is in trouble because the parties deliberately fabricate the case.

We, too, who work in Cambodia, have once again received frequent greetings from family and friends because of this fabricated case.

Just as there is online gambling parks in Sihanoukville where unruly elements are present, there are also members of the China-Cambodian volunteer team such as Captain Chen Baorong, Chinese people in Cambodia are not all connected to crime, as the news and public perception suggests. We work in a variety of businesses, all of which are legitimate.

Since the beginning of the crackdown on internet fraud in China, Chinese people in Cambodia have been affected to some extent, and many of my colleagues around me have received frequent calls from police stations back home to investigate. Another problem is remittances back home. In the past, we used to remit our salaries directly to our home country through money changers in Cambodia, but since the second half of 2020, because of the crackdown on internet fraud, our accounts from money changers to our home country have been frozen, causing a lot of inconvenience.

Now we are using the ICBC card handled by the company, and although the procedures are cumbersome, the exchange rate is low, the timeframe is slow and the fees are high, we finally have a safe channel for remittances. As overseas workers, we strongly support the fight against crime, but we also hope that when the policy is implemented, there will be multiple verifications and precise crackdowns on those who engage in telecoms fraud.

Cambodia is not all darkness, there are warm and simple people here, and there is also an ordinary and normal life. I have been working and living in Cambodia for over three years, and whenever my relatives and friends ask where I have developed my career, I am always met with looks that, although not malicious, are still strange. As a member of the Sihanoukville today, which is trying to rebuild from the ruins left by the gaming industry, most of my colleagues and I have not been back home for more than three years since the epidemic began, I hope that it will get better and better, but also that there will be less misunderstanding from home.