Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Kiensvay/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
CAMBODIA HAS SENT 179 Taiwanese fraud suspects to China. This is thought to be a gesture of goodwill by Cambodia to China, as a gesture of recognizing China’s claims of sovereignty over Taiwan.
Cambodia, like China, is an authoritarian country under military rule. Political and economic ties between the two countries are strong, as is often the case with military regimes in Southeast Asia. It is reductive to see such countries as puppets of China, but China operates as a regional hegemon. For any regime to maintain power in Southeast Asia, then, China is at least a stakeholder. For military governments with antagonisms against Western governments, this is all the more the case, in that China is a possible source of support and, at the very least, must be placated in order to maintain power.
Indeed, the Chinese government has stepped up efforts against fraud as of late, in that it no longer tolerates fraud and scam centers on its border in countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand as it once did. These fraud and scam centers have sometimes built themselves up into impressive urban environments in border areas, backed by Chinese investment through organized crime entities that sometimes enjoy close ties to the Chinese state.
Specifically, the Chinese government has decided to no longer turn a blind eye to such scam centers, or even be complicit in their development, because its own citizens are often among those targeted.
Taiwanese, too, are among those who are targeted. Indeed, past years have seen increased awareness that thousands of Taiwanese have been tricked into forced labor at scam centers in Southeast Asia. These are often young people who are lured into traveling to Cambodia or other destinations with the promise of high-paying jobs with subsidized meals and lodging.
Consequently, the Taiwanese government has in recent times sought to warn of the potential dangers of traveling to Southeast Asia, sometimes leading to pushback from Southeast Asian countries that try to emphasize that they are, on the whole, still safe. Thailand, for example, responded to warnings from Taiwanese travel authorities by emphasizing that there are 200,000 Taiwanese living in Thailand, making Thailand home to one of the more substantial Taiwanese diasporas outside of China and the US.
It is not uncommon for individuals to be deported to the countries where they committed crimes to face trial there. But one of the challenges with such cases of fraud, however, is that victims and victimizers may not be so easy to sort out. Individuals may have become involved in defrauding efforts after being kidnapped and having their passports confiscated, facing the threat of violence. Likewise, even if the fraud suspects may have genuinely committed crimes, there is the strong possibility of the Chinese government politicizing the issue in order to intimidate Taiwan. For its part, Taiwan has sought to emphasize that fraud suspects would face fair trials in Taiwan, and would be punished for wrongdoing.
This is not the first time that Taiwanese fraud suspects have been deported to China, in spite of protests from the Taiwanese government officials. Other cases include Spain in 2016 and 2019, as well as Kenya in 2016. The deportations in Spain occurred with the Spanish government ignoring the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights calling on the government to stop deportations of Taiwanese to China.
Indeed, China has used the threat of extradition to intimidate Taiwan in the past. The global applications of China’s Anti-Secession Law raises dangers that China could seek to extradite Taiwanese supporters of independence to China from a third country to face trial. This could occur in countries with which China has close relations. For example, incidents such as Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai disappearing from his home in Thailand to reappear in Chinese custody, thought to have occurred with the cooperation of Thai authorities. Thailand also recently extradited a number of Uyghur prisoners that it had imprisoned for over a decade to China.
While Taiwanese authorities state that negotiations over the case are still ongoing with Cambodian authorities, it seems likely that Cambodia will prioritize pleasing China. It is to be seen as to the fate of the fraud suspects, then.