Global China's Dark Side? Challenging Racialised Readings of the Online Scam Industry in Southeast Asia

Chinese - 2025-09-11
11 Sep 2025 01.00 PM - 02.30 PM SHHK Meeting Room 2 (03-93) Alumni, Current Students, Industry/Academic Partners, Prospective Students, Public

Drawing on his new book Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds (Verso, 2025, co-authored with Ling Li and Mark Bo), Ivan Franceschini examines the rapid growth of online fraud operations in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines. While often framed in racialised terms as an exclusively 'Chinese' problem, these operations are better understood as a transnational industry shaped by complex intersections between Chinese business networks, local elites, and global criminal economies. Operating from heavily guarded compounds, scam syndicates rely on the labour of tens of thousands of people—many trafficked or deceived—forced to defraud others under threats of violence and confinement. At the same time, the Chinese government has taken a leading role in regional crackdowns, working to dismantle operations and repatriate victims. Combining survivor testimonies, field research, and investigative reporting, this talk foregrounds the lived experiences of those trapped in these systems of coercion and rethinks the relationship between Global China and this form of transnational crime.

Ivan Franceschini is a lecturer and deputy director at the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Melbourne. He is a founder and co-editor of the Made in China Journal, The People’s Map of Global China, and Global China Pulse. He is a co-author of Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds (Verso, 2025). His previous books include Global China as Method (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Proletarian China (Verso, 2022), Xinjiang Year Zero (ANU Press, 2022), and Afterlives of Chinese Communism (ANU Press and Verso, 2019). He co-directed the documentaries Dreamwork China (2011) and Boramey: Ghosts in the Factory (2021).

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