Just days before Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Phnom Penh for a state visit in April, Cambodian authorities deported nearly 180 Taiwanese nationals to China after a raid on an online scam compound in the capital. However, the identities and exact number of those deported remain unclear due to the lack of diplomatic channels with Taiwan and the terse nature of the official Cambodian statements.
Predictably, the move drew condemnation from Taipei and praise from Beijing.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, speaking on the matter at a press conference during Xi’s visit, said that Beijing “highly appreciated” Cambodia’s “handling of the issue,” while Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry expressed its “serious concern and protest” regarding the deportation.
The deportations were the latest in a years-long pattern of renditions that has seen Taiwanese fraud suspects arrested and sent to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), even before the scope of trafficking in the online scamming industry was fully understood.
But sources familiar with the case tell a different story.
A Taiwanese official who reviewed the caseload and interviewed one of the detainees before losing contact, along with an anti-trafficking specialist with years of experience rescuing forced labor victims from Cambodia’s scam compounds, both told The Diplomat that many of those sent to China were likely trafficking victims rather than willing participants in a fraud ring, as the Cambodian authorities claimed. And it wouldn’t be the first time; sources suggest that there have been hundreds more instances over the years.
The failure to formally screen for trafficking victims during ad hoc – and allegedly performative – raids on scam compounds contradicts Cambodia’s claim to be combating organized crime, which has increasingly blurred into state structures, according to some transnational crime experts.
Yet even as Cambodian authorities seemingly ignored international standards to screen scam center detainees for trafficking and Taiwanese requests to coordinate – a nod to Cambodia’s “ironclad” relationship with China, which has warmed since the late 1990s – the diplomatic pageantry surrounding Xi’s visit also revealed the partnership’s limits, particularly in allowing Cambodia to save face over its role in allegedly providing a base for the illicit industry.
Caught between opaque bilateral maneuvering and sprawling transnational criminal networks, suspected victims of forced criminality are seemingly being offered up as diplomatic currency.
Lost in the Diplomacy of Cambodia-China Realpolitik
Weeks after seizing full power in a coup de force in 1997, longtime Cambodian strongman Hun Sen shuttered Taiwan’s trade office in Phnom Penh – a move that severed Cambodia’s ties with Taipei and signaled its turn toward Beijing amid growing alienation from the West.
Since then, relations with China have steadily deepened. After Hun Sen handed power to his son Hun Manet in 2023, the relationship locked into its warmest setting: mutual non-interference as doctrine.
In the years that followed the 1997 coup, Cambodia repaid China’s diplomatic and economic support by deporting dissidents and others wanted by Beijing. This has included Chinese nationals, such as ethnic Uyghur asylum seekers and Falun Gong practitioners. However, it has also included Taiwanese nationals, who have been swept up and sent to the mainland in line with Beijing’s contention that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the PRC. Cambodia, like many close Chinese partners, frequently voices its support for Beijing’s position on Taiwan.
For Taipei, this has become a troubling pattern, especially given the number of Taiwanese citizens that continue to land in Cambodia, sometimes trafficked, sometimes willing, to work in the online scam compounds that have proliferated to nearly every province in the country.
“Even if we believe our citizens are human trafficking victims, we don’t have diplomatic channels to help,” said a Taiwan official who reviewed the arrest of the 180 nationals in Cambodia. The official requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.
According to figures from Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, at least 600 Taiwanese citizens accused of scamming in Cambodia, Kenya, and Spain have been deported to China since 2016.
But officials are hard pressed to track whether any of them ever return home. As of April, none of the Taiwanese deported to China in 2024 have made it back, the official said.
The official also noted a pre-arrest interview with one of the 180 deported from Cambodia in April, suggesting that he was a clear trafficking victim. That case, paired with immigration records showing it was the first time abroad for many of these people, suggest that a significant number of the group were forced into criminality. This outcome is highly plausible in an illicit industry that has trafficked 150,000 forced laborers in Cambodia alone, according to research from the Cambodia Counter Trafficking in Persons Project (CTIP).
Three charter flights carrying the detainees to China took off on April 13 and 14, the official added, but Taiwanese officials have yet to obtain the passenger lists.
The raid on the alleged scam compound in Phnom Penh, where fewer than a dozen Chinese “co-conspirators” were also detained, appears to have followed a familiar pattern. Cambodia’s rare stings on the estimated 350 scam compounds scattered across the country, many sprawling and industrial-scale, often fail to screen for victims of human trafficking.
The Cambodian law enforcement authorities that conducted the sting and the government’s anti-trafficking unit did not respond to The Diplomat’s requests for comment on whether any formal victim screening took place.
Similarly, according to a report at the time from the local independent outlet CamboJA, no police officials responded to questions seeking to confirm a screening.
When officials have spoken, the message has been clipped. In an April 15 press release, Cambodia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described those arrested, without specifying how many, as “criminals, not ordinary people.” Their transfer to China, the ministry said, was “no different from the practice by some other countries with a one-China policy.”
Diplomatic compacts aside, deporting people without confirming if they were forced into criminal activity on pain of torture or mistreatment falls well short of what anti-trafficking specialists recommend.
“There is no independent information that suggests the Cambodian authorities made any attempts to screen these Taiwanese nationals,” said Mark Taylor, former chief of party at Winrock International, which ran the U.S.-funded CTIP program before it was shuttered in February amid the Trump administration’s broader rollback of USAID initiatives.
Taylor, who has advised Cambodian officials, said CTIP helped rescue and repatriate more than 200 trafficking victims. The true number may be higher, he added, but tracking efforts collapsed after the program’s abrupt shutdown.
Looking at the roughly 600 Taiwanese scam suspects sent to China over nearly a decade, “there is reason to believe a significant number of these are victims” who were trafficked to Cambodia, Taylor said, drawing a comparison to the 180 recently arrested. “But there were no apparent efforts made to screen them.”
CTIP has worked on cases involving Taiwanese forced into online scamming in Cambodia, but these have proved tougher than most due to Taiwan’s unusual diplomatic status. Cambodian authorities, Taylor said, are often reluctant to grant Taiwanese nationals formal trafficking victim status, making repatriation even harder.
Fortunately, none of the Taiwanese victims CTIP assisted wound up in China, he noted.
Ventriloquized Praise, Real Impunity
Sending Beijing its most-wanted may have played well during Xi’s visit, sending a message that Cambodia is willing to crack down against a transnational crime industry that China wants contained.
Beijing even held a multilateral meeting earlier this year at which it urged the Mekong nations to launch broader crackdown on the illicit industry that has become deeply entrenched in the region. It was Thailand – arguably the least complicit – that moved first, launching the most extensive raids and victim screenings at scam compounds in eastern Myanmar.
Cambodia’s seemingly perfunctory step came during a Central Committee meeting of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, where it announced an Inter-Ministerial Task Force Committee to bolster the fight against online scams and organized crime. The committee would be led, the party announced, by Prime Minister Hun Manet himself.
However, less than a week later, two local journalists were detained and charged with incitement after publishing a video that appeared to show a forced scammer being beaten inside a Phnom Penh compound. Police claimed the footage spread false information – a move echoing the two-month imprisonment last year of journalist Mech Dara, who has reported extensively on scam networks.
Both journalists have since apologized. Their outlet even posted copies of their apology letters to Hun Manet on its Facebook page.
Beyond the optics, Cambodia’s mutually beneficial relationship with China often stops short of requiring real accountability. This fact was underscored by the diplomatic ventriloquism that attended the Chinese leader’s state visit in April.
In a press release after Xi’s departure, the Cambodian government claimed that Beijing had “applauded” its clampdown on online fraud and illegal gambling. But in a joint statement released subsequently by the two governments, the praise was dialed back. This said that China merely “appreciates the fact that Cambodia has announced the clampdown.” The original Cambodian version has since disappeared from government social media.
“Cambodian government press releases are notorious for inserting words into their counterparts’ mouths as a means of helping prop up a mirage of international legitimacy,” said Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center who researches cybercrime networks in the region.
“Cambodia’s intractably deficient response to countering their scam industry has been a major source of international scrutiny for the regime, so it makes sense that they’d want to send this message,” he added.
Sims, like other scholars, has long attempted to call attention to the fact that Cambodia’s scam economy is state-abetted and poses a global security threat. In a recent report on Cambodia’s illicit economy, he argued that China’s role in tackling scam operations across the Mekong region is that of a fragmented enabler and self-styled enforcer.
He said that China’s approach to the issue had been “favorable” to the Cambodian government, as it “has not resulted in accountability for kingpins closely linked to the ruling party nor true disruption of the criminal industry, which has become a key patrimonial resource for the regime.”
Beijing appears willing to let Cambodia carry out performative crackdowns but has stopped short of explicit praise – perhaps to preserve its own credibility. Public pressure from Beijing, when it comes, tends to be indirect.
In 2023, a Chinese blockbuster film depicting large-scale trafficking in scam compounds in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar hit the big screen. The script was reportedly based on actual Chinese police case files. Cambodia banned the film.
But even after Beijing’s censors permitted portrayals of trafficked labor and the full scale of the crisis, China has displayed its own shortcomings in screening for human trafficking. Sims attributes this to Chinese law enforcement’s imperative to project strength and maintain leverage over criminal elites.
Roughly 60,000 Chinese nationals have been removed from regional scam compounds (mostly in Myanmar and Cambodia) and forcibly returned to China, according to Sims’ report. Only a small number of the deported individuals have been formally classified as trafficking victims by any of the authorities involved.
For specialists focused on organized crime and trafficked labor, the wave of deportations – whether of Taiwanese, Chinese, or other nationalities – now turning up in scam compounds as syndicates expand into new victim economies underscores a critical gap in victim identification. This is a failure that they hope can be addressed through stronger screening practices – or, at minimum, steps aimed at reducing harm, even if the current geopolitical alignments remain deeply entrenched.