China's Scam-Compound Documentary Reveals Executions and Secret Graves in Myanmar
The three-part series state broadcaster CCTV began airing on Monday details an underground firing range where workers in the Ming family's scam compounds were executed, and shows Chinese detectives unearthing the bodies of three Chinese nationals Myanmar long insisted were never dead. It is the fullest official account yet of the case that triggered China's cross-border crackdown.
On Monday evening, the first episode of "The Fall of the Myanmar Scam Empire" (缅北电诈覆灭纪实) — a documentary produced jointly by the Ministry of Public Security and state broadcaster CCTV — began a three-night run on national television. It is the most graphic official account yet of what happened inside the compounds, and it settles a question that has hung over the case for three years.
The programme's centrepiece is Wohu Villa (卧虎山庄), the flagship compound of the Ming family, one of the four clans that ran Kokang's fraud industry. Beneath it, the documentary shows, was an underground firing range whose walls are pocked with bullet marks, where lower-level scam workers — the trafficked and the indebted — were taken to be "executed". "They would even use machine guns to strafe, then pull up another batch of people for follow-up shots," one speaker says. "This is beyond the bottom line of what we call human."
The second disclosure is forensic. Senior detective Na Xin of the Kunming public security bureau recalls that Myanmar authorities kept reporting that no Chinese nationals had died in the October 20, 2023 shooting at the compound — the "10·20 case" that precipitated China's crackdown. When Chinese police finally entered Kokang, under active fighting with Myanmar fighter jets passing overhead, they dug into the soil at Wohu Villa and immediately uncovered three bodies of shot Chinese citizens. Myanmar at first refused to let the bodies leave the country; the team extracted DNA samples on the spot, split into two groups — one to escort the evidence home, one to guard the remains — and eventually brought all three back. Forensic examiners found all three had been shot, two with bullets still lodged in their bodies, physical proof that contradicted the Myanmar account.
The documentary also names the economics. The Mings and the other "four families" ran casinos, mines, property and black industries across Kokang, and operated compounds including Wohu Villa, Luyi International and Yuxiang International as armed campuses for fraud "bankrollers", who paid the family a cut of 20 to 30 percent. Chinese victims, the programme notes, were called "walking RMB" — a phrase it traces to the Ming operation.
The story is dominating far beyond Weibo: it holds the top slot on Caixin's and Huanqiu's boards and several of the top positions on Baidu's. Caixin reports that Bao Junfeng, deputy commander of the United Wa State Army, was arrested in Kunming with jewellery, luxury watches and cars at his residence — a sign the net is widening beyond Kokang's four clans — and that Chinese workgroups had met the families' representatives three times with little to show for it. Huanqiu has published footage of Ming Zhenzhen, recorded before her execution, describing on camera how killed workers were buried.
This is the second wave of coverage the documentary has earned on this site: this morning's piece looked at the testimony it gathered from survivors; the new episodes add the deaths. Episodes two and three air on Tuesday and Wednesday. What they are unlikely to resolve is the question the exhumed bodies pose: how many workers who disappeared into compounds like Wohu Villa will ever get a named grave — and, as reporting from the border last week showed, the industry they were sold into is rebuilding faster than it is being dismantled.