China has executed 11 members of Myanmar’s Ming family, convicted of crimes including murder, drug trafficking and telecom fraud.
According to the Wenzhou Intermediate People’s Court, from 2015 to 2023 the Ming syndicate reaped more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) from cyberscams, illegal gambling and other criminal enterprises in the Kokang region of northern Myanmar.
The Mings were one of Myanmar’s notorious “Four Families”, a group that also included the Bai, Liu and Wei organisations. Collectively they turned the border town of Laukkaing into a nest of criminal activity, with unregulated gambling halls, houses of prostitution and as many as 100 scam compounds.
China: ‘You will pay the price’
Like similar operations in the Philippines and Cambodia, the compounds relied on forced labour to conduct so-called “pig-butchering” scams. According to the United States Institute of Peace, workers were often “duped by fraudulent ads for lucrative high-tech jobs and trafficked illegally into scam compounds. … (I)n prisonlike conditions, they [were forced to] run online romance and investment scams”.
Armed guards routinely abused and tortured workers who failed to meet financial quotas and killed others who tried to escape. The court confirmed that 14 Chinese citizens died at the hands of their criminal overlords.
The empire started to topple in 2023, when Beijing pressured the Myanmar junta to crack down on cross-border scammers. Ringleader Ming Xuechang, once a member of a Myanmar state parliament, was arrested and killed himself while in custody. According to the Xinhua News Agency, his son Ming Guoping of the Kokang Border Guard was among those executed on Thursday. His granddaughter Ming Zhenzhen also died.
The crackdown continues. Last November, a Shenzhen court sentenced five members of the Bai family to die after following their convictions on murder and fraud charges. In that case, six Chinese workers died from abuse and a seventh reportedly committed suicide. The Bai family empire was reportedly worth more than 28.5 billion yuan.
In a documentary about the Four Families, an investigator said China pursued the gangs “to warn other people, no matter who you are, where you are, as long as you commit such heinous crimes against the Chinese people, you will pay the price”.