Don’t Speak Chinese: Stigma and Fear in Cambodia’s Chinese Community
Organized crime and online scamming operations have tainted the image of Chinese migrants, who have been a part of Cambodian society for centuries.
When Henry Cui, a Chinese-Canadian real estate investor, first arrived in Phnom Penh in 2019, he was optimistic about the opportunities awaiting him in Cambodia and the support that he would receive from the city’s large Chinese community. Yet, when he returned from abroad in 2022, another Chinese expatriate gave him some unexpected advice: “Don’t speak Chinese.”
This warning highlighted the shifting fortunes and perceptions of Cambodia’s Chinese community, which has been an indelible part of Cambodian society for the better part of a thousand years. But as the community’s image has become less about beautiful red temples and more about towering skyscrapers, so too have the perceptions of their role in Cambodia changed.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cambodia – particularly the capital Phnom Penh – was an economic hotspot. Cui marveled at the country’s rapid transformation, describing how it had “gone from the ground to the sky” in just a few years. Chinese investors like him flocked to the city. For new arrivals, the local Chinese community offered invaluable support.
“It was easy to make friends in Chinese,” Cui recalled, describing a warm, welcoming network of expatriates who would “invite me into their homes.” Cambodians, eager to capitalize on the economic wave, embraced the Chinese language, and schools teaching Chinese rapidly proliferated.
“There was a craze about learning Chinese because there was money to be made in Chinese,” Cui said, recounting instances where Cambodians would happily try to talk to him in Mandarin. In November, the Cambodian minister of education, who is himself studying Mandarin, announced that over 100,000 Cambodian students were studying the language.
A Changing Atmosphere
However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought darker undercurrents to light. The rise of scam compounds, where trafficked workers are forced to run online scams targeting victims abroad, cast a shadow over Cambodia’s Chinese community. Thousands of laborers, many of them Chinese nationals, have reportedly been kidnapped, tortured, or held against their will in these factories of fraud. This grim reality began eroding trust within and toward the Chinese population.
“The Chinese community, we have our own media,” said Andrew Wenjun Chun, a Chinese filmmaker who lived in Cambodia for a year-and-a-half during the pandemic. “I saw a lot of kidnapping stories.”
Chun recounted how Chinese language outlets regularly reported disappearances, many linked to scam compounds. “It wasn’t limited to Chinese nationals,” he added. “Anyone who spoke Chinese” could become a target, particularly Malaysians.
Chun’s experiences in Cambodia underscored the pervasive fear. Originally recruited as a video director for an entertainment group tied to a major Chinese conglomerate accused of human trafficking and money laundering, he was lured by promises that the company would “make [my] dreams come true.” But the reality in Cambodia was far from what he expected. When he had spoken to his future boss in Beijing, she had seemed professional and “willing to listen,” he said. But that changed quickly upon arrival at his new workplace. “There are no laws in Cambodia,” he said. “She let her demons out.”
He described an atmosphere of fear and bullying where the management routinely screamed at employees and seemed to encourage that as a matter of practice. When dealing with actors and models for filming, he said he was told by his superiors to remember that “they are not your friends. They are not your colleagues. They are the product.”
Although some lower-level managers ran “decent companies,” Chun realized the broader organization was likely linked to human trafficking and money laundering. His neighbors warned him not to discuss the kidnappings, as the neighbors on the other side of the hall were involved in the criminal groups responsible.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable making friends with those types of people,” he said, and described becoming isolated from the Chinese community. “Don’t trust any Chinese in Cambodia,” one person cautioned him.
Deep Roots
The Chinese presence in Cambodia is nothing new; the two peoples have been in close contact for centuries. When the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan came to Cambodia in 1296, he found a society already linked closely with China by bonds of commerce and migration. In his book, “The Customs of Cambodia,” the first and most comprehensive description of life during the height of the Khmer Empire, he detailed the substantial amounts of Chinese products like lacquerware and pewter dishes that were circulating in the Angkorian capital. Though he did not estimate how many Chinese were living there at the time, he mentioned that many Chinese merchants found it advantageous to marry Khmer women to help develop their business ventures.
Antonio De Morga, a Spanish lieutenant governor of the Philippines, likewise mentioned several times in his chronicles of the late 16th century that news was spread from and to Cambodia via Chinese merchant ships, which passed frequently enough to be a reliable form of communication. Later Spanish delegations also noted the presence of large Chinese communities in Longvek, the capital at that time.
Chinese immigration to Cambodia quickened under French colonial rule in the late 19th and early 20th century, as poor peasants flowed out from the ports of southern China to Siam, British-ruled Malaya, French Indo-China, and the Dutch East Indies. By the early 20th century, French colonial administrators noted the existence of a Chinatown in Phnom Penh – or more accurately, Chinatowns. By this time, five different Chinese language groups had established their own areas of commerce, worship, and leisure in the Cambodian capital. The largest group, the Teochew, occupied a few blocks next to the Central Market, as did the Hainan and Hakka. This was the main “Chinatown” of the city, while the Cantonese and Hokkien subdistricts were a bit further north, forming an enclave of Chinese culture in the French Quarter of the city.
Unlike their neighbors to the east, Cambodians have largely had a positive view of China and Chinese culture. Culturally and politically, Cambodian resentments have tended to be directed more at Vietnam and Thailand, the country’s two main neighbors, which historically posed a more direct threat to Cambodian independence. Over the generations, Chinese immigrant communities intermarried and intermixed with Khmers, and today many Cambodians, particularly those living in urban areas, have some Chinese heritage, right up to Prime Minister Hun Manet.
Like other minority groups, the Chinese community suffered particular hardships under the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge. It is estimated that 230,000 Chinese Cambodians, more than half of the total, were killed during the regime’s 1975-1979 rule – despite the fact that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was one of the Khmer Rouge’s only foreign allies. Many others chose to leave Cambodia, and their communities, most notably in Phnom Penh, were often taken over by Khmers after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. In the capital today, only a single Hokkien temple stands as a reminder of the bustling community that once surrounded it, 144 years after it was constructed.
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Daniel Zak is a freelance journalist and data report writer based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.