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. Last month, the Cambodian minister of education, who is himself studying Mandarin, announced that over 100,000 Cambodian students were now 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, were reportedly kidnapped, tortured, or held against their will in these factories of fraud. This grim reality began eroding trust within and towards 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.”
Though 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.
The 144-year-old Hokkien Temple in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 11, 2024. (Josephine St Ana Baliling)
But as Cambodia opened up to foreign investment after the end of its civil war in the late 1990s, it has gradually become a desirable destination for a new wave of Chinese migrants. Adding to the country’s attractiveness as a destination is the close relationship that has grown between China and Cambodia, which has embraced Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative and thrown open its doors to Chinese investment.
Over the past decade, the arrival of these “New Chinese” immigrants and expats has started to reshape the country’s economy and social landscape. The change has been jarring for many locals. While new arrivals from the PRC trod a path laid down by centuries of Chinese migrants, they have walked that path in a markedly different fashion. While the previous wave of Chinese immigrants spoke regional Chinese languages, often migrated as a result of political instability at home, and have since integrated themselves into the local culture, the “New Chinese” tend to be well-off Mandarin speakers from all four corners of the PRC.
Cities like Sihanoukville, a port city on the Gulf of Thailand, became symbols of this transformation, with Chinese-funded casinos springing up seemingly overnight in the late 2010s. These developments initially brought prosperity, turning sleepy coastal towns into bustling economic hubs. However, the influx of casinos soon strained local resources and relationships. Concerns about crime, environmental degradation, and social dislocation began to erode the once-favorable view of Chinese migrants that Cambodians had held for centuries. By the late 2010s, stories and media reports of criminal activity by Chinese nationals, including murder, drug trafficking, and money laundering, strained long-standing bonds of allyship and marked the beginning of a reputational shift for Cambodia’s Chinese community.
A recent survey of Cambodians’ attitudes towards the “New Chinese” by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute reported that while most Cambodians still had a positive or neutral overall attitude towards them, 59 percent of respondents also reported a “high” or “very high” degree of “social tension.” The most cited reason among these respondents was the perception that the New Chinese did not “respect the laws and norms” of Cambodia.
Caught in the Middle: The Double Burden of Bias
Not all Chinese expatriates have shared Andrew Chun’s disconcerting encounter with the Chinese criminal world. One Chinese teacher at an international school, who wished to remain anonymous, observed that criminals rarely targeted those uninvolved in illicit activities. “If you’re just doing your job or running your business, you don’t see them,” he told The Diplomat. “Only people who are motivated by greed meet them.” He added that as a teacher with little interest in pursuing wealth, he never felt unsafe or threatened, though, like many Chinese residents in Phnom Penh, he had heard the stories.
Another Chinese teacher said that because she was “more liberal,” she never found herself with “those kinds of people.” However, she described facing subtle prejudices from both Cambodians and other expatriates since the scam compounds became widely publicized. When interacting with Cambodians, she noticed mixed attitudes. “Some of them hate Chinese people…but also, they want to be like us: they think we are all rich,” she explained.
Her interactions with other foreigners also became tinged with prejudice. She observed apprehension among some European expatriates, including her neighbors when she introduced herself as Chinese. Reflecting on these biases, she drew a parallel: “I see older European expats, and I could assume they are here because they like underage women,” she said, “but I know they aren’t all like that.” She added that some people just like to make generalizations, and that this was “their problem.”
The strained atmosphere has had profound effects on Cambodia’s economy. Chinese investments, once a driving force behind the country’s development, have sharply declined in recent years, leaving many infrastructure and real estate projects in limbo. Most notably, Chinese tourist numbers have also dwindled, hindered by concerns about criminal activity.
“The turning point was that Al Jazeera documentary,” said Kevin Britten, CEO of a talent recruitment company based in Cambodia. In his opinion, the exposé on scam compounds catalyzed widespread fear. Britten’s business, where Chinese clients once made up 15 percent of his portfolio, has seen this number shrink by two-thirds. He also told The Diplomat that since then he has had prospective Chinese clients arrive in the country, explore some promising business opportunities, and then decide to leave without further explanation, saying they would “disappear off the radar.”
An abandoned Chinese tombstone in Pailin Province, Cambodia, May 11, 2024. The engraving dates to 1972. (Daniel Zak)
Britten also described difficulties recruiting Chinese or Mandarin-speaking workers from places like Taiwan, as authorities now warn travelers about the risks of trafficking, pulling legitimate visitors with all their papers out of line to warn them that they might be being trafficked.
A Community at a Crossroads
The interplay of fear, distrust, and economic uncertainty highlights the precarious position of Cambodia’s Chinese community in a new age of Chinese power. Once celebrated for their contributions to the country’s development, they now grapple with stigma and diminishing opportunities. There is a rapid decline in Chinese investments, while the continuation of scam operations perpetuates the community’s tarnished reputation. While Chinese tourism had seen a strong resurgence in 2023 compared to 2024, this was still only about a quarter of the amount received in 2019, even as the global tourism industry has largely recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet, there are whispers of change. Several members of the Chinese community, who declined to be named, told The Diplomat that the rumor was that the new Chinese ambassador to Cambodia has begun leveraging Chinese influence to convince the Cambodian government to be more proactive in shutting down the criminal groups that have taken root. Agreements have been signed promising stronger law enforcement against transnational crime between the two countries, but it is too soon to tell how serious these efforts will be.
Still, for many, the outlook remains uncertain. Andrew Chun, reflecting on his time in Phnom Penh, painted a nuanced picture of the Chinese expatriate community. “There are chill and cool artists like myself,” he said, “and small business owners or even people doing shady business who are actually pretty nice. But there are also people who seem legit but are really evil bastards. Honestly, every community has its mix of good and bad people.”
Chun expressed less concern for the foreign population than for Cambodians themselves, who he noted often lack the means to escape the fallout of foreign influence. “If Cambodia is not fun anymore, we can always leave,” he added. “But the people here are stuck with whatever [expletive] us foreigners dump on them.”