Chinese netizens said No More Bets and Lost In The Stars have hardened their impression of South-east Asia as a region of rampant scams. - GOLDEN VILLAGE
BEIJING (The Straits Times/Asia News Network): 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 travelled with her husband to (again) an imagined country in South-east Asia ends up - spoiler alert - being killed.
Netizens and movie-goers in China said 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 being killed or going missing, adding that they will avoid travelling there.
For the first seven months this year, Malaysia has replaced China as Thailand’s top source of tourists - the first time since 2012 - according to local media reports.
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 that they would not consider going due to safety concerns.
According to statistics on telco scams in China shown at the end of No More Bets, the Public Security Bureau has cracked 1.156 million cases, arrested 1.553 million suspects, froze payment and funds amounting to more than 916.5 million yuan (S$170 million), dissuaded 93.85 million from being cheated and recovered losses of more than 286.1 billion yuan as at end-2022.
State media Global Times reported on Aug 27 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 being shown in cinemas while No More Bets will start its run on Sept 14.
On popular Chinese review site Douban, user Liuyisi said that Lost in The Stars depicts a missing woman who ends up being 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 that the two movies will “really hurt travel to South-east Asia”.
Lin Minjie, 26, an insurance agent who also watched both films in Beijing, said that the helplessness of the male lead in Lost in The Stars impressed upon her 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 Lin, who speaks Chinese and English.
Both Dong and Lin said that Lost in The Stars also reminded them of how a Chinese woman was tortured and drowned by her boyfriend, who is also Chinese, in a Bali hotel in May, creating headlines for days.
The scariest part for Lin was an anecdote shared in the movie about how a woman fell through a trapdoor in the changing room of a night market in a South-east Asian country. Many years later, her husband found her displayed in a cabaret show with all her limbs cut off when he was 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 the Chinese video-streaming platform Bilibili, escapees of Myanmar fraud farms, where victims of scams are forced to work as cheats themselves, share their experiences of the atrocities committed during their imprisonment.
As recently as Aug 26, the Chinese embassy in Myanmar said that 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 elections that only saw a prime minister sworn into office three months later.
Global Times praised the Thai embassy in China in an editorial in March, after the embassy said on the 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 the 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 on Aug 25 that the country will come up with measures to boost the number of Chinese tourists.
His pledge came after Thailand eased visa restrictions for the Chinese on Aug 11, shortening the time needed for visas to be approved.
Earlier this year, 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 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.
