BEIJING – In this summer’s blockbuster hit No More Bets, the lead character, played by one of China’s top celebrities Lay Zhang, ends up being forced to work for a crime syndicate in a fictitious South-east Asian country after accepting a fake job offer in Singapore.
In suspense-thriller Lost In The Stars, a woman who travels with her husband to (again) an imagined country in South-east Asia ends up – spoiler alert – getting killed.
Netizens and moviegoers in China say the two movies have hardened their impression of South-east Asia as a region of rampant scams and other crimes, after months of reports of Chinese visitors getting killed or going missing, adding that they would avoid travelling there.
For the first seven months of 2023, Malaysia replaced China as Thailand’s top source of tourists – the first time since 2012 – according to local media reports.
State media Global Times reported on Aug 17 that Chinese tourists have also been spurning Myanmar due to concerns over telco scams, citing results of a poll in which nearly 96 per cent of 9,298 Chinese netizens said they would not consider going there due to safety concerns.
According to statistics on telco scams in China, which were shown at the end of No More Bets, the Public Security Bureau has cracked 1.156 million cases, arrested 1.553 million suspects, frozen payment and funds amounting to more than 916.5 million yuan (S$173 million), dissuaded 93.85 million from being cheated, and recovered losses of more than 286.1 billion yuan as at end-2022.
On Sunday, the Global Times reported that Lost In The Stars is this summer’s top-grossing film, followed by No More Bets. In Singapore, Lost In The Stars is currently showing in cinemas while No More Bets will open on Sept 14.
On popular Chinese review site Douban, user Liuyisi said Lost In The Stars depicts a missing woman who ends up getting killed, while No More Bets is about getting duped and kidnapped in South-east Asia, so “who still dares to go to the region?”
Another reviewer, SaturnRings, said the two movies will “really hurt travel to South-east Asia”.
Ms Lin Minjie, 26, an insurance agent who watched both films in Beijing, said the helplessness of the male lead in Lost In The Stars gave her the impression that the police in the fictitious South-east Asian country were unreliable.
“I don’t think I can trust the local police to help me, even if they can understand me,” said Ms Lin, who speaks Mandarin and English.
Ms Lin said Lost In The Stars also reminded her of how a Chinese woman was tortured and drowned by her boyfriend, who is also Chinese, in a Bali hotel room in May, an incident which made headlines for days.
The scariest part for Ms Lin was an anecdote shared in the movie about how a woman falls through a trapdoor in the changing room of a night market in a South-east Asian country. Many years later, her husband finds her on display at a cabaret show with all her limbs cut off when he is on a business trip to another country in the region.
“The woman didn’t even have time to scream when she fell through the trapdoor,” she said. “What if that were me?”
On Chinese video-streaming platform Bilibili, escapees of Myanmar fraud farms, where victims of scams are forced to work as scammers themselves, share about the atrocities they experienced during their imprisonment. As recently as last Saturday, the Chinese embassy in Myanmar said four suspects involved in telco fraud were sent back to China as part of a joint operation with neighbouring countries.
Social media influencer Yadianna, who has 40,700 followers on the Instagram-like platform Xiaohongshu, is suspected of having been sold to a fraud farm by her friend, after she disappeared in Thailand in April. She is yet to be found.
The Association of Thai Travel Agents said in June that potential Chinese tourists are more put off by falling prey to scams than Thailand’s political uncertainty, referring to May’s general election that saw a prime minister sworn into office only three months later.
The Global Times praised the Thai embassy in China in an editorial in March, after the embassy said on micro-blogging platform Weibo that “Thailand attaches great importance to the quality and safety of Chinese tourists’ travels as well as their positive impressions of the country”.
The editorial, titled “No reason for Thailand not to take good care of Chinese tourists”, pointed out that previous Thai prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha ordered the Ministry of Tourism and Sports to look into allegations of human and organ trafficking made on Chinese social media as an example of how Chinese tourists are valued by the country.
The editorial added that prominent online articles that carried “horrifying rumours related to ‘trafficking of women’ and ‘removing of kidney’... have been criticised and refuted by many Chinese social media users, who believe that some bloggers are writing fake stories to attract attention”.
Thailand’s new Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said last Friday that the country will come up with measures to boost the number of Chinese tourists. His pledge came after Thailand eased visa restrictions for Chinese visitors on Aug 11, shortening the time needed for visas to be approved.
Earlier in 2023, Myanmar and Cambodia, both of which have been in the spotlight in China for being havens for human traffickers, also rolled out initiatives to draw Chinese tourists.
But netizens in China have ridiculed their campaigns. Users on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, scolded a local government in China for working with the tourism bureau in Myanmar to encourage locals to visit as they were worried about being able to return home safely.
