Two Chinese Tourists Vanish in Thailand, Feared Taken Into Myanmar
Three men flew to Bangkok for the National Day holiday. Two took a car ride on October 6 and have not been heard from since; Thai police assess they were likely moved into Myanmar, where the scam-compound industry demolished in last year's crackdown has quietly rebuilt.
The last message the family received was a photograph from the road: a pickup truck, a wall of trees behind it. Hu Xing, a 38-year-old IT engineer, sent it to relatives on the afternoon of October 6, early in a National Day holiday trip to Bangkok, along with word that everything was fine. Within the hour, he and Song Huating, 35, had stopped answering their phones.
The two men had gone out sightseeing while the third member of the party — Song Huating's elder brother, who has been speaking for the family — rested at the hotel with an upset stomach. Hu Xing is married to the Song siblings' elder sister, making the two men brothers-in-law. They sent a safety message around two in the afternoon, then photos of the car they were riding in, having switched vehicles once. The final location stamp pointed to Tak province, in Thailand's mountainous west, along the border with Myanmar. When calls went unanswered, the family reported the pair missing to Thai police that same evening. By October 7, the family says, Thai police had assessed that the two had likely been moved into Myanmar.
On October 9 came the call they had been waiting for and dreading. Hu Xing's wife picked up a WeChat video call from her husband. "I'm fine in here," he told her. "Wait for me to come out" ("我在里面很好，等我出来"). He said the younger man was with him; the younger man never spoke. The family says the tone was wrong, and that he asked them to transfer money — signs, they believe, that the call was being monitored or dictated.
What has unsettled Chinese social media is not that it happened, but how little it took. The country has followed the Myanmar scam-compound story for two years: an actor lured to the border by a fake casting call, a livestreamer tricked into the trip by an online acquaintance, and a satellite record of the compounds demolished in the crackdown quietly rebuilding. Every one of those cases began with a bait — a job, a fee, a friendly stranger online. This time, posts note, there appears to have been none: two tourists on holiday who got into a car. "Don't just get into a car a stranger has arranged when you're abroad," one widely shared post warned. "Don't trust improvised pickups — especially near border areas, where the risk is extreme."
The response machinery has ground into motion, at the pace families of the missing know too well. The relative reported the case to Thai police on October 6, went to the Chinese embassy in Bangkok on October 8, and turned to the Chinese embassy in Myanmar as well; when he called, he was told the embassy would urge local police to handle the case according to law and reply by email. A missing-person appeal with the two men's photographs has spread across Chinese platforms. Behind it stands a household holding itself together: a 59-year-old mother who lost her husband in 2001 and raised the three siblings alone, kept unaware of the situation at first until the online appeal reached her anyway, and an elder sister who is one month pregnant.
As of Saturday night, October 10, there had been no further word from either man. The family is waiting — for an email from an embassy, and for two holidaymakers who sent a photo from the road and vanished.