Scams, casinos and high-rises: The BBC visits a bizarre city in a war zone

 

BY Jonathan Head

 

The tall, shiny buildings which rise out of the cornfields on the Myanmar side of the Moei river are a sight so jarring you find yourself blinking to be sure you haven't imagined it.

Eight years ago there was nothing over there in Karen State. Just trees, a few roughly-built cement buildings, and a long-running civil war which has left this area of Myanmar one of the poorest places on earth. But today, on this spot along the border with Thailand, a small city has emerged like a mirage. It is called Shwe Kokko, or Golden Raintree.

It is accused of being a city built on scams, home to a lucrative yet deadly nexus of fraud, money-laundering and human trafficking. The man behind it, She Zhijiang, is languishing in a Bangkok jail, awaiting extradition to China.

But Yatai, She Zhijiang's company which built the city, paints a very different vision of Shwe Kokko in its promotional videos – as a resort city, a safe holiday destination for Chinese tourists and haven for the super-rich.

The story of Shwe Kokko is also one of the unbridled ambition which has rippled out of China in the last two decades.

She Zhijiang dreamed of building this glittering city as his ticket out of the shadowy world of scams and gambling which he inhabited.

But by aiming so high he has drawn the attention of Beijing, which is now keen to stamp out the fraud operations along the Thai-Myanmar border which are increasingly targeting Chinese people.

Publicity about the scams is also hurting Thai tourism – Thailand is shutting down power to compounds over the border, toughening its banking rules and promising to block visas for those suspected of using Thailand as a transit route.

Shwe Kokko has been left marooned in post-coup, war-wracked Myanmar, unable to bring in the flow of investment and visitors it needs to keep going.

Yatai is trying to fix the city's sinister image by allowing journalists to see it, holding out hope that more favourable reporting might even get She Zhijiang out of jail.

So they invited the BBC to Shwe Kokko.

Inside Shwe Kokko 

Getting there is tricky.

Ever since construction began in 2017, Shwe Kokko has been a forbidden place, off-limits to casual visitors.

As the civil war in Myanmar escalated after the 2021 military coup, access became even more difficult. It takes three days from the country's commercial hub Yangon – through multiple checkpoints, blocked roads and a real risk of getting caught in armed skirmishes. Crossing from Thailand takes just a few minutes, but requires careful planning to avoid Thai police and army patrols.

She Zhijiang's colleagues took us on a tour, highlighting the newly-paved streets, the luxury villas, the trees – "Mr She believes in making a green city," they told us. Our guide was Wang Fugui, who said he was a former police officer from Guangxi in southern China. He ended up in prison in Thailand, on what he insists were trumped-up fraud charges. There he got to know She Zhijiang and became one of his most trusted lieutenants.

At first glance, Shwe Kokko has the appearance of a provincial Chinese city. The signs on the buildings are written in Chinese characters, and there is a constant procession of Chinese-made construction vehicles going to and from building sites.

Yatai is vague about the tenants of all its buildings, as it is about many things. "Rich people, from many countries, they rent the villas," they told us. And what about the businesses? "Many businesses. Hotels, casinos."

However, most of the people we saw were local Karen, one of Myanmar's ethnic minorities, who come into Shwe Kokko every day to work. We saw very few of the overseas visitors who are supposed to be the customers of the hotels and casinos.

Yatai says there are no more scams in Shwe Kokko. It has put up huge billboards all over town proclaiming, in Chinese, Burmese and English, that forced labour was not allowed, and that "online businesses" should leave. But we were quietly told by local people that the scam business was still running.

Starting a decade ago in the unchecked frenzy of Chinese investment on the Cambodian coast, then moving to the lawless badlands of Myanmar's border with China, the scam operators have now settled along the Thai-Myanmar border. Around them, the Myanmar military and a hotch-potch of rebel armies and warlords are fighting for control of Karen State.

The scams have grown into a multi-billion dollar business. They involve thousands of workers from China, South East Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent kept in walled-off compounds where they defraud people all over the world of their savings.

Some work there willingly, but others are abducted and forced to work. Those who have escaped have told harrowing stories of torture and beatings. Some have come from Shwe Kokko.

We were able to speak to a young woman who had been working in one of the scam centres a couple of weeks before our visit. She had not enjoyed it and been allowed to leave.

Her job, she said, was as part of the modelling team, made up mostly of attractive young women, who contact potential victims and try to build an intimate online relationship with them.

"The target is the elderly," she said. "You start a conversation like 'oh you look just like one of my friends'. Once you make friends you encourage them by sending pictures of yourself, sometimes wearing your night clothes."

Then, she explains, the conversation moves to get-rich-quick schemes, such as crypto investments, with the women claiming that's how they made a lot of money.

"When they feel close to you, you pass them on to the chatting section," she says. "The chatting people will continue messaging with the client, persuading them to buy shares in the crypto company."

During our brief time in Shwe Kokko we were only allowed to see what Yatai wanted us to see. Even so, it was evident that the scams have not stopped, and are probably still the main business in the city.

Our request to see inside any of the newly-built office buildings were turned down. Those are private, they kept telling us. We were escorted at all times by security guards seconded from the militia group which controls this part of the border. We were allowed to film the construction work, and the outsides of the buildings, but not to enter them. Many of the windows had bars on the insides.

"Everybody in Shwe Kokko knows what goes on there," said the young woman who used to work in a scam centre.

She dismissed Yatai's claim that it no longer permitted scam centres in Shwe Kokko.

"That is a lie. There is no way they don't know about this. The whole city is doing it in those high-rise buildings. No-one goes there for fun. There is no way Yatai doesn't know."

Who is She Zhijiang?

"I can promise that Yatai would never accept telecom fraud and scams," said She Zhijiang on a call from Bangkok's Klong Prem Prison, where he is being held.

Yatai wanted us to hear from the man himself, and hooked up a ropey video link. Only Mr Wang could be seen talking to him; we had to stay out of view of the prison guards, and had to rely on Mr Wang to put our questions to him.

Not much is known about She Zhijiang, a small-town Chinese entrepreneur who Beijing alleges is a criminal mastermind.

Born in a poor village in Hunan province in China in 1982, he left school at 14 and learned computer coding. He appears to have moved to the Philippines in his early 20s and into online gambling, which is illegal in China. This is where he started to make his money. In 2014 he was convicted by a Chinese court of running an illegal lottery, but he stayed overseas.

He invested in gambling businesses in Cambodia, and managed to get Cambodian citizenship. He has used at least four different names.

In 2016, he struck a deal with a Karen warlord Saw Chit Thu, who controls territory in Myanmar along the Moei River, to build a new city together. She Zhijiang would provide the funds, the Chinese construction machinery and materials, while Saw Chit Thu and his 8,000 armed fighters would keep it safe.

Glitzy videos by Yatai promised a $15bn (£12.1bn) investment and depicted a high-rise wonderland of hotels, casinos and cyberparks. Shwe Kokko was described as part of Xi Jinping's Belt-and-Road Initiative or BRI, bringing Chinese funds and infrastructure to the world.

China publicly dissociated itself from She Zhijiang in 2020, and the Myanmar government launched an investigation into Yatai, which was building far beyond the 59 villas authorised by its investment permit and was operating casinos before these had been legalised in Myanmar.

In August 2022, acting on a Chinese request to Interpol, She Zhijiang was arrested and imprisoned in Bangkok. He and his business partner Saw Chit Thu have also been sanctioned by the British government for their links to human trafficking.

She Zhijiang claims to be a victim of double dealing by the Chinese state. He says he founded his company Yatai on the instruction of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and insists that Shwe Kokko was then a part of the BRI.

He accuses China's communist leadership of turning on him because he refused to give them control of his project. They wanted a colony on the Thai-Myanmar border, he says. China has denied any business relationship with She Zhijiang.

While he denied any wrongdoing on Yatai's part, She Zhijiang, however, admitted to "a high probability" that scammers were coming to Shwe Kokko to spend their money.

"Because our Yatai City is completely open to anyone who can go in and out freely. Refusing customers, for a businessman like me, is really difficult. This is my weakness."

It is, however, stretching credulity to believe that Yatai, which runs everything in Shwe Kokko, was unable to stop scammers coming in and out of the city.

It is also hard to think of any business other than scams which would choose to operate here. With Thailand cutting off power and telecommunications, electricity comes from diesel generators, which are expensive to run. And communications go through Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system, which is also very costly.

Yatai's strategy is "to whitewash the project to create a narrative that Shwe Kokko is a safe city", says Jason Tower, from the United States Institute for Peace, which has spent years researching the scam operation in Shwe Kokko.

He says they may even "begin moving some of the more notorious components of the scam industry, like torture, into other zones".

But he doesn't think the plan will work: "What kinds of legitimate businesses will go into Shwe Kokko? It's simply not attractive. The economy will continue to be a scam economy."

A business in a war zone

When we were eventually allowed to see inside one casino in Shwe Kokko, run by a genial Australian, he told us they were going to close it down.

Inside the only customers were local Karen, gambling on a popular arcade-like game where they had to shoot digital fish. We were forbidden from doing any interviews. The back rooms, with the card and roulette tables, were empty. The Australian manager said the casino - built six years ago - had been popular and profitable when there were just one or two of them, before the civil war. But these days, with at least nine in operation, there were not enough customers to go around.

The real money was in online gambling, which he said was the main business in Shwe Kokko.

It is impossible to know how much money is made through online gambling, and how much through outright criminal activities like money laundering and scams. They are usually run from the same compounds and by the same teams. When we asked Yatai how much money they made they would not tell us – not even a ballpark figure. That is private, they said. The company is registered in Hong Kong, Myanmar and Thailand, but these are little more than shell companies, with very little income or revenue passing through them.

We turned down Yatai's offer to see the go-kart track, water park and model farm that they have built. We did glimpse one other casino, while being taken to eat breakfast in Yatai's own luxury hotel, though we could not go inside it. It seemed empty.

The only other facility we were allowed to see was a karaoke club, with spectacular private rooms, cavernous domes entirely covered in digital screens on which huge tropical fish and sharks swam. They also ran video loops extolling the vision and virtues of She Zhijiang. This club too seemed deserted, except for some young Chinese women who worked there.

They wore opera masks to avoid being identified, and danced unenthusiastically to music for a few minutes before giving up and sitting down. Interviews were not permitted. We were allowed to talk to a local Karen member of staff, but she was so intimidated by this we got little more than her name.

In his absence, She Zhijiang has left the running of Shwe Kokko to a young protégé, 31-year-old He Yingxiong. He lives with Wang Fugui in a sprawling villa they have built on the banks of the Moei River, overlooking Thailand, and guarded by massive Chinese bodyguards. There they play mahjong, eat the finest food and drink, and keep an eye on business.

Mr He has a slightly different explanation from his boss for the scams still operating under their noses. "We are just property developers," he said. "I can guarantee that this kind of thing does not happen here. But even if it does, the local people have their own legal system, so it is their job to deal with it. Our job is just to provide good infrastructure, good buildings and supporting industries."

But there is no legal system in this part of Myanmar, nor any government. It is ruled by the various armed groups which control different bits of territory along the Thai border. Their commanders decide who can build or run a business, taking their cut to help fund their wars against the Myanmar military, or against each other. Many of them are known to be hosting scam compounds.

Mr He admitted that it was the war which had allowed Yatai to obtain the land so cheaply. Karen human rights groups have accused Saw Chit Thu of driving the original inhabitants off their land, with minimal compensation, though it is clear Yatai is also providing badly needed jobs for the locals.

It is the lawlessness of Karen State which makes it so appealing to illegal businesses – and that doesn't help the image of Shwe Kokko.

Neither do recent headlines.

Last month a 22-year-old Chinese actor, Wang Xing, was rescued from a scam centre on the border after being lured to Thailand with an offer of work on a movie shoot. His disappearance spurred a barrage of questions on Chinese social media, forcing the Thai and Chinese authorities to mount a joint operation to free him.

Chinese tourists have been cancelling their holidays in Thailand, fearing for their safety. Other rescues have followed. The BBC has been sent emails by some scam victims pleading for help; rescue organisations believe there are still thousands trapped. Nearly all are in smaller compounds along the border south of Shwe Kokko.

Yatai stressed to us that they are not the same as these rougher operations, some little more than a collection of sheds built in forest clearings. That is where all the bad things happen now, they said. They talked about KK Park, a notorious compound south of the border town of Myawaddy, and Dongmei, a cluster of low-rise buildings run by a prominent Chinese crime lord called Wan Kuok Koi, better known as Broken Tooth.

That distinction hasn't helped She Zhijiang, who once had the ear of politicians, police bosses and even minor royalty in Thailand. Today he appears to have lost even the influence he once had in prison, to buy himself special privileges. He has complained of being roughed up by the guards.

His lawyers are appealing against the Interpol red notice used to justify his arrest, but China's voice will probably be loudest in determining his fate.

From our interview with him, Shi Zhijiang seemed genuinely outraged over his sudden reversal of fortune.

"Before, I had no understanding of human rights, but now I really understand how horrible it is to have human rights infringed upon," he said. "It is hard to imagine how the human rights of ordinary people in China are trampled upon when a respected businessman like me, who used to be able to go to the same state banquets as Xi Jinping, does not have his human rights and dignity protected in any way."

It seems he really did believe he could build something which would one day transcend Shwe Kokko's sordid origins as a scam city.

What happens to it now is hard to guess, but if the Thai and Chinese governments keep acting to shut down the scams, the money will start to dry up.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04nx1vnw17o

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE SINS OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

 

 

BY Tarik Cyril Amar

 

Trump has a devious plan for Gaza
Help your allies destroy a place, then swoop in to rebuild, but first kick out all the locals and annex the land – that seems to be the idea

What could Donald Trump and Bianca Censori possibly have in common?

Trump is the US president and bestie of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man wanted by the International Court of Justice (ICC) “for the war crimes of starvation […] and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”Censori is a – very – visual artist and wife of publicly mentally unstable rapper Kanye West.

And yet both Trump and Censori have made a habit of staging attention-grabbing provocations for so long that they now seem to be running out of extremes in outdoing themselves.

For Censori, after full frontal de facto nudity at the Grammys, there’s really only live intercourse left (she may not know she’s long been beaten to that trick by faded Western “freedom/civil-society” favorite Nadya Tolokonnikova from ancient-history “Pussy Riot”). For Trump, you really have to wonder now: He has just delivered such a double whammy of sheer shock value that it’s hard to imagine him topping it again (and yet he will, of course).

While hosting Netanyahu in Washington – as the first foreign leader officially visiting, no less – Trump has declared that the US wants to annex the Gaza strip, ethnically cleanse its entire Palestinian population (he used different terms, of course, but so did the Nazis, and we do not parrot their euphemisms), and then develop the area into a “riviera” of high-end real estate and businesses.

 

Meanwhile, the Palestinian victims of this plan are supposed to be de facto expelled to neighboring countries – except Israel, of course, which is really Palestine (layers…) – such as Jordan and Egypt, both US “allies,” i.e. vassals, notwithstanding their explicit objections. Let’s note in passing that Trump’s “development” plans prove that Gaza can be rebuilt. The issue is not “technical” but political: Trump suggests rebuilding but only after a very violent mass eviction. Call it the real-estate-with-genocidal-oomph business model.

Yet, while Trump’s insane as well as evil – yes, that’s the word – ideas about Gaza’s future have attracted most attention, there are two scandals here: Even receiving Netanyahu is outrageous. And it remains so, even if the entire US “elite” – in truly bipartisan fashion – pretends it is normal, or even something to celebrate.

Meeting the Israeli leader – for anyone anywhere, really – is such a disgrace because Netanyahu is not “only” the object of an ICC warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is also one of the top perpetrators of Israel’s geocide against the Palestinians (a crime recognized by Amnesty International but that the ICC failed to acknowledge, clearly for political reasons), the leader of Israel’s vicious apartheid regime (as a UN report has long recognized), and a war monger addicted to assaulting neighboring countries via bombing, assassination campaigns, and direct invasions.

Israel is, by far, the worst source of violence and injustice (and thus more violence) in the Middle East. Beyond that region, its relentless settler-colonialist drive to dispossess, ethnically cleanse, and kill Palestinians and its ceaseless aggression toward its neighbors is constantly disrupting global stability.

The second reason American presidents, ideally, should not touch Netanyahu with a barge pole is, of course, exactly why they won’t stop embracing him in sordid reality: money. Israel has run the, by far, most successful foreign influence operation in modern history, even beating those of the US itself. While the whole West has been its target, the American establishment has clearly been the bull’s eye.

Hence, in an ideal world, from which we are very far, Americans would not celebrate Israeli leaders but rebel against them – AIPAC tea party, anyone? – since no other country has ever remotely done so much so successfully to undermine US sovereignty and dismantle what very little democracy has been withering away inside the rusty cage of oligarchy that America really is. None of this is a secret, an “antisemitic” smear, or a “conspiracy theory.” Indeed, the Jerusalem Post, for instance, has boasted of Zionist success in massively influencing US elections as recently as last November.

It is also well-known that Trump himself is a perfect example of this shameless buying – and being bought – among America’s “elite”: Zionist megadonor Miriam Adelson, for instance, bankrolled this campaign alone with 137 million dollars, making her family one of his top supporters, again. Her support for Israeli expansion and annexations is a matter of record. Since coming to power, and not for the first time, Trump has shown that he will pay his debts. For instance, by sending more 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs to Israel and lifting even the preceding Biden administration’s weak and symbolic sanctions against the ultra-violent settlers in the West Bank, who are in the process of producing their very own pogrom against the local Palestinians.

The US “elite’s” breathtaking, open, traitorous readiness to be corrupted by foreign interests as long as they are Israeli is one obvious reason why, in a sane world, Israeli leaders should find at least all other Americans highly averse.

The other, second scandal about smirking Netanyahu’s visit to Washington is, of course, Trump’s proposal to complete the Israeli campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing. It makes no difference that Trump pretends not to understand the clear implications of his scheme. Trump’s hypocritical invocation of “humanitarian” intentions to “save” Gaza’s Palestinians from the wasteland that his predecessor Genocide Joe Biden mightily helped the Israelis make is – to say it in plain New York English – for suckers. 

The fact is that the US president has publicly announced a plan to engage in an enormous crime under international law, together with Israel. That, in and of itself, is not new. But there are two things about Trump’s current move that make it special.

First, there is the backdrop of mass murderous violence and devastation that Israel has already inflicted since October 2023. Trump himself revealingly keeps referring to “1.7 or 1.8” million Palestinians alive in Gaza now. Yet there is general agreement that before the Israeli genocide campaign, Gaza’s population numbered at least 2.1 to 2.3 million. Clearly, the American president has seen or been told about figures that imply that not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by bombing, snipers, in mass executions, by blockade and starvation, and illnesses, deliberately promoted by the comprehensive destruction of infrastructure. Such an outcome was predicted in the gold-standard medical journal The Lancet back in July 2024.   

All of this – plus the long prior history of Israeli violence and in particular the systematic laying waste of Gaza since 2005 – Trump’s US now intends to reward with success. All that strenuous Western rhetoric about never “rewarding the aggressor”? It really seems to mean: Except when the aggressor is also a certifiable Israeli genocider. In the most immediate context, that American signal can only embolden Netanyahu and friends to break the current, fragile ceasefire which they punctuate with constant killings even now.

That is bad enough. But there is also a wider precedent here: Israel is dependent on American support for its extreme policies of genocide and war. What we are seeing, then, is a perverse tag team game: First the US provides Israel with everything it needs to devastate Gaza, then Israel creates a wasteland, and finally, Washington – “generously” – takes a look and finds that the only way to rebuild said wasteland is by first completing the total dispossession of its Palestinian inhabitants. Think about what a fine recipe that is for the rest of the world: Wreak havoc first, then swoop in to “save” the ruins by annexing them. If we let the US get away with it this time, this time will not be the last time. 

That brings us to the one upside to Trump’s brutality: Unlike his predecessor Biden, Trump is not even trying to apply a fig leaf to his imperialism or his complete complicity with Israel. Where the Biden administration accompanied their co-genociding with nauseating hypocrisy, the Trumpists give it to us straight.

Don’t get me wrong: that doesn’t make Trump’s approach morally “better.” If you are still looking for fine distinctions between Trumpist and Democratic viciousness, stop wasting your time. It’s all the same bad old, if increasingly deranged, US establishment. Yet Trump’s frankness has one great advantage: The world needs to finally learn to do the obvious, namely – as they say in International Relations Theory – “balance” against Washington, the most dangerous rogue state on the planet. Trump’s lack of filters should make it easier even for the slowest to finally acknowledge that fact: Multipolarity is good but not enough.  Humanity has to learn to stand together to contain and deter the US. Pro-actively.

https://www.rt.com/news/612286-trumps-gaza-riviera-plan/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE SINS OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

 

UNFORTUNATELY, THE REST OF THE WORLD IS NOT PREPARED TO DO ANYTHING TO STOP TRUMP BUT TO "PROTEST" WITH LIMP WRISTS AND "POINT THE FINGER—HOLALA"... HIS PARTNER IN CRIME, BIBI, IS LOVING IT....