Chinese mafia take over favourite Cambodian beach town

Expats who’ve made the Cambodian beach town of Sihanoukville their home are being driven out by a Chinese invasion.

Once a haven for international expatriates for its laid-back lifestyle, inexpensive living costs, beautiful beaches and traditional culture, Sihanoukville is now a nightmare of casinos, rampant construction, high-rise apartment buildings, violence, prostitution and drugs. The city is home to some 90,000 people, but some 120,000 Chinese tourists arrived last year. It’s not the genuine tourists that are the problem, it’s the Chinese gamblers who flock to the 30-plus recently built casinos and the mafia groups who run them. Local people at first welcomed the increase in tourism but, after the dodgy money moved in, expat retirees and small-business owners who’d arrived from neighbouring Thailand began leaving in droves for Kampot and Kep.

The formerly sleepy, charming tourist city is now a huge, dirty construction site crammed with trucks carrying concrete speeding down potholed, muddy roads 24-7. Thousands of Chinese labourers imported to speed up the building boom work all hours on erecting even more casinos, condo blocks and a vast US-funded theme park. It’s not that the chaos benefits the locals in any way, as the entire enterprise is a closed economic loop, financed and built for Chinese by Chinese and with Chinese tourists only using Chinese businesses. Locals are cut out, with hundreds of family-owned businesses now shut down and Cambodian tenants forced out of their homes.

Prices for everyday necessities are now spiralling, with local residents who’ve lived in the city for most of their lives forced to leave for more affordable areas and, worst of all, a crime wave is now a reality, causing expats and digital nomads to leave town in a hurry. Shootings are common, as are brawls, assassinations and even kidnapping, all perpetrated by Chinese on Chinese, and locals are now terrified as nothing seems to be done by local police to prevent the violence. Victory Hill, once a favourite expat haunt, is now a red light district, and the popular Serendipity Beach with its bars and small eateries is now vacant, rubble-covered land with huge posters advertising glitzy hotels in Mandarin Chinese.

One Cambodian former minibus driver working with tourists told the media Chinese tourists only use Chinese drivers, adding he’s missing his regular Australian clients who aren’t ever coming back. He’d been forced to sell his minibus to a Chinese to pay his rent, and is planning to leave for his home province and take up rice farming again. One Shanghai-based economist is touting ‘great benefits’ to Sihanoukville from the Chinese invasion, saying although development is unbalanced and China is profiting more than the host city there will be a trickle-down effect for locals. Unfortunately, most of the locals as well as their expatriate customers will be long gone by the time that benefit, if any, is seen.