Last fall, a coalition of rebel groups known as the Three Brotherhood Alliance launched a rapid-fire offensive across Myanmar’s northern Shan state, quickly overrunning more than 100 military outposts and seizing several key towns along the country’s border with China.
This in itself was not unusual. Myanmar’s military government has faced insurgencies from ethnic and political militias for decades, and there’s been a major uptick in rebel activity since the 2021 coup, which brought the country’s current military junta to power, ending a short period of representative government. Over the past few months, the government has been rapidly losing ground to rebel forces in several regions of the country.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last fall, a coalition of rebel groups known as the Three Brotherhood Alliance launched a rapid-fire offensive across Myanmar’s northern Shan state, quickly overrunning more than 100 military outposts and seizing several key towns along the country’s border with China.
In addition to their long-term aim of overthrowing the military government, one they share with a variety of other groups throughout the country, the Three Brotherhood Alliance also vowed to “eradicate telecom fraud, scam dens and their patrons nationwide, including in areas along the China-Myanmar border.”
But the statement was a testament to both the rapid rise in Southeast Asia of a novel form of criminal enterprise — abducting people across national borders and forcing them to carry out internet scams — and how this practice has drawn China’s government to become ever more enmeshed in the dizzyingly complex and increasingly bloody war in neighboring Myanmar.
China has often turned a blind eye to the growing gambling centers on its borders, some of which even pitched themselves as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global program of Chinese infrastructure investments.
So last September China began cracking down on its own, issuing arrest warrants for government-linked militia officials in Myanmar’s northeastern Wa state, on the Chinese border, accusing them of being “kingpins” in the scams.
The film, which made $500 million at the Chinese box office, does not name the Southeast Asian country where it takes place, but its release prompted diplomatic protests from both Cambodia and Myanmar, suggesting both thought it could plausibly be about them.
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What
“China also launched a PR campaign last fall with what appeared to be the coordinated release of several hit movies about the dangers of southeast Asian scam centers. The most popular of these, No More Bets, tells the story of a computer programmer and model who are lured abroad by a job offer and forced into scamming through imprisonment and torture. The film, which made $500 million at the Chinese box office…”