Chinese travellers are returning to Myanmar despite the country’s online reputation as a “paradise for scam syndicates”.
By Zhengyang Zhou
When Jin Zexuan, an automotive marketer from Shanghai, tells his colleagues he is travelling to Myanmar, they respond, “You’re gonna be taken to a scam centre as soon as you land, and I will not believe a word you message me.”
On December 21, 2025, Jin flew to Yangon for a 10-day visit. It was one of several unconventional destinations he had travelled to, including Bangladesh, Cambodia and Iran.
On Chinese social media, however, Myanmar is often associated almost entirely with scam syndicates. The country is widely seen as a “paradise for scam syndicates”. According to estimates from the International Criminal Police Organization, hundreds of thousands of people have fallen victim to human trafficking and ended up in scam centres.
One high-profile case surfaced in January 2025, when Chinese actor Wang Xing was captured by a scam syndicate in Myawaddy, Myanmar, after being lured to Bangkok for a fake acting job.
But Jin is still determined to go after reading RedNote posts saying cities in central and Southern Myanmar cities, such as Yangon, Bagan, and Mandalay are relatively safe for travellers. These cities are controlled by Myanmar’s junta government, a military force that overthrew the country’s democratically elected government. Northern Myanmar, by contrast, is associated with scam hubs and collusion with ethnic insurgents.
While travellers are unlikely to be taken to scam centres when visiting the southern major cities, daily life has been shaped by the turmoil that follows the civil war beginning in 2021. Yangon has been under curfew until last December, when the military government set out to “improve economic, social and religious matters” before elections. Foreign visitors cannot buy local SIM cards before arrival, and the gap between the official exchange rate and the black-market rate can be as high as twofold.
But this is not too much of a problem for Jin after looking through travel advice on RedNote. After landing, Jin takes a cab straight from the airport to Grandma’s House (WAI PO JIA), a restaurant opened by a middle-aged Chinese man in Yangon’s Chinatown, to exchange money at a black-market rate and buy SIM cards.
His first impression of Yangon is that it is more modern than he had imagined. “The road from the airport to the city was quite fancy, but the driver told me it was built to impress foreign officials,” Jin says. “But all other roads in Yangon are quite rundown. Colonial buildings are falling apart. The walls were peeling.”
“You can see the raw vitality there, which cannot be found in touristy cities like Bangkok,” he adds.
On the last day of his trip, he met a group of underground music artists in Yangon through social media. They ended up hanging out and talking until late at night. According to Jin, the group found a way to channel their creativity and artistic expression under curfew, using karaoke venues as live music spaces.
“You can engage in genuine conversations with people and see that they are fighting for self-expression under oppression. Whereas many tourist cities feel like a big marketing scheme trying to sell you the exact same thing,” Jin says.
Jin is not alone. Searching “Myanmar Travel” on RedNote, one can find many posts sharing travel experiences and tips. Many of them debunk the irrational fear toward Myanmar, stating cities like Yangon, Bagan, and Mandalay are safe and praising Myanmar’s rich tourism resources and its kind local people.
Tian Zenghui, a 33-year-old restaurant owner from Beijing, shares Jin’s adventurous spirit. She has visited North Korea, Cambodia and Laos and prefers distinctive cultural landscapes to shopping and city lights. Last November, she visited Yangon and Bagan for 11 days.
Tian is interested in Buddhism and traditional architecture. Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has long been on her travel list.
“I found it fascinating that those ancient temples didn’t just turn into pure tourist attractions like Angkor Wat in Cambodia. People still go there to worship after more than 1,000 years,” Tian says.
She says Myanmar has retained much of its cultural distinctiveness. In the streets, she sees many people wearing longyi and htamein, the traditional Burmese wraparound garments worn by men and women.
“People in Myanmar are very peaceful. Every morning, I saw the receptionist at my hotel reading Buddhist mantras,” she says.
Transportation between cities, however, is one of Tian’s frustrations. “The bus that travels between Yangon and Bagan takes ten hours, which is very uncomfortable, but on the other hand, flights are infrequent and expensive,” Tian says.
News about people being lured into scam compounds does not alarm her as much as it does many people online. She says she has been following news about Myanmar and has spoken with locals to understand its political situation.
“I knew some Burmese students back in college, and they told me Northern Myanmar had been in active conflict for years. It is quite different from junta-controlled areas,” Tian says.
Kevin Yong, a Malaysian-Chinese owner of a hostel in Yangon that opened in 2019, has lived in Myanmar for around 10 years. He says the scam operations feel quite far away from his daily life.
“I learned about it on the news like everyone else. It’s pretty far away from our daily life and northern Myanmar almost feels like another country. Since the junta took power, northern Myanmar has become much harder to access, and you can’t really travel there now,” Yong says.
Yong says his hostel enjoyed strong business shortly after opening and attracts guests from around the world. At times, it was completely full. Then Covid-19 broke out in 2020, and all international commercial flights landing in Myanmar were suspended.
After the pandemic, tourism began to recover globally, but Yong says this did not happen in Myanmar because of political and economic instability that followed the 2021 military coup.
“We were still holding on when Covid-19 hit because business was really good in the months before. But then in 2021 the junta took over, and everything kept going downhill,” he says.
The civil war, which broke out shortly after the military seized power, had killed over 6,000 civilians by early 2025, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. It has left Myanmar in deep political and economic turmoil to this day.
Basic utilities such as electricity and water also have become unreliable. “Sometimes the water would be cut off without notice. We are in the hospitality business…we can’t just tell our guests they can’t shower,” Yong says.
During the country’s democratic transition in the 2010s, tourism grew rapidly and reached 4.7 million tourists in 2015, according to the World Bank. The number then dropped to 0.9 million in 2020 following the pandemic.
Yong says his hostel now receives fewer than a third of the guests it did in 2019. He also has begun to notice signs of burnout in himself and has decided to step back, leaving day-to-day operations to his business partner.
“It’s a survival game now. We are just waiting to see if things will get better.”
Specializing in Myanmar studies, Professor Zhong Xiaoxin at Yunnan University sees the “Myanmar phobia” on Chinese social media as a result of “information asymmetry”.
“People weren’t paying attention to Myanmar for a very long time, and when news about scam centres came up, it became over-dramatised,” Zhong says, “because what people say on social media goes for virality instead of reality.”
Having done extensive field work in Myanmar for a total of 30 months, Zhong keeps in touch with many locals, including one who previously worked at a scam centre in Myawaddy.
The professor says the scam centres in northern Myanmar emerged around 2015. At that time, the syndicates do not have to worry about labour shortages due to considerable revenue. After borders close in 2020, they begin to struggle to find enough people, “so they wouldn’t let people go so easily”.
“Some claims are clearly exaggerated. For example, organ trafficking is highly unlikely in those scam centres because it requires advanced technology,” Zhong says.
For Zhong, Myanmar’s image on the internet is a perfect example of an echo chamber. People who think Myanmar is extremely dangerous and people who actually travel to Myanmar are exposed to very different information, and “the chambers don’t communicate”.
“It makes views polarised”, Zhong says, “even if someone actually saw videos shot on the streets of Yangon saying it’s safe, they would probably be gonna say ‘Are you trying to trick me into going there?’”
For travellers who have already decided to visit Myanmar, “setting aside the stereotypes about Myanmar and getting a real taste of what Myanmar is like,” Zhong suggests.
Edited by Isa He
Sub-edited by Jennifer Liu
