Chinese abductions

“The country largely perceives the influx of foreign Chinese workers as ‘a threat to the country’s overall security.’ Those security worries may now need to be stretched.

Merely shrugging our collective shoulders over what seems to be an all-Chinese affair isn’t at all a consolation.

In fact, Chinese workers of the offshore casinos abducted by their fellow Chinese nationals should exercise our caution over criminal activities happening right under our very noses.

Mainland Chinese stirring troubles, even if at the moment has not claimed Filipino victims, will have consequences and repercussions we are only beginning to see. We should be wary.

One consequence of the spate of abductions is, as anti-kidnapping crusader Teresita Ang-See bluntly put it in a TV interview, “We are becoming a haven of Chinese criminals.”

Being a haven of foreign criminals is not only an alarming development. It needs to be nipped in the bud before these criminal gangs become bolder, brazen and violent.

In fact, the recent public, and viral, abduction of a Chinese woman offshore casino area manager in the heart of the country’s financial district, Makati, is an instance of brazen violent change.

Inevitably, the first question is: What makes these Chinese crime syndicates bold enough to commit kidnappings and abductions of their fellow countrymen right on our streets and right outside our premier airports?

Our police authorities, as yet, have no clear answers. But our police know they can’t and won’t dismiss such unpublicized crimes as there is a rise of kidnapping cases involving not only Chinese workers in the Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGO) but also Chinese casino gamblers.

Ang-See, however, says the suspected Chinese criminal gangs may have prior experience, having transferred here from Cambodia after that country cracked down hard on criminals targeting their POGO. Police officials say they have yet to confirm whether the Chinese gangs here relocated from Cambodia.

At any rate, according to the Philippine National Police (PNP) Anti-Kidnapping Group (AKG), 75 kidnapping cases were reported this year, of which 42 were linked to POGO and casinos.

Of the total number, 27 cases were solved, leading to the arrest of 88 suspects, mostly Chinese nationals and a small number of Filipinos.

The AKG has counted kidnapping cases since 2012, casino-related kidnapping cases since 2017, and POGO-related abduction cases since 2018.

The AKG has divided these abduction cases into three types: kidnap-for-ransom cases, casino-related cases, and POGO-related cases.

In a phone interview with an online news site, PNP-AKG spokesman Lt. Col. Joel Saliba said, “They created the new categories throughout the years to keep track of the new schemes of abduction.”

Kidnap-for-ransom cases refer to incidents where a ransom is demanded for a broad set of reasons.

Casino-related kidnappings involve Chinese getting kidnapped after contracting huge debts from loan sharks.

POGO kidnapping is a new scheme, which involves companies abducting their own employees attempting to leave them.

For casino-related kidnappings, Chinese tourists are usually lured by loan sharks to borrow large amounts of money once they lose heavily in casinos. If they fail to settle loans, they are kidnapped and allegedly tortured to produce either payment or ransom from their families.

Ang-See says legitimate Chinese businessmen are also abducted upon their exit from the airports and hauled into vans and then brought into a safe house for ransom negotiations.

Ang-See claims her group found six cases of Chinese businessmen getting abducted in October or November, with “shocking” ransom payments amounting to hundreds of millions of pesos.

The shift into illegal recruitment is a growing activity. “What is disturbing now is they have expanded. It’s not only about people with debts to a casino… It’s now expanding. It now involves employees enticed under false pretenses, somewhat like to our OFW who are victims of illegal recruitment,” Ang-See says.

Such illegal recruitments involve Chinese nationals signing up for Internet Technology (IT) jobs in POGO with promises of eight hours of work daily and a P50,000 monthly salary, only to find they are working long hours and for less money.

“They (companies) entice particularly those from (Mainland China’s) provinces, then tricked them by saying, ‘you don’t need sophisticated education, all you need is to know how to type Chinese and know how to speak Chinese.’ They promise a lot of things,” Ang-See says.

Illegally-recruited Chinese wanting to quit after finding out the job isn’t what they had signed up for are allegedly either badly tortured or beaten up to force them back to work.

Mainland Chinese, however, are not the only victims of illegal recruitment. A Taiwanese national was recently rescued in Laguna after he wanted out of his contract.

The victim arrived in the country on 17 November to work in a POGO and was promised a salary of 6,000 yuan. However, he quit after only 11 days. His recruiter did not follow their agreement regarding the payment of his debts in Taiwan.

The victim was forced to stay inside his house and made to pay 10,000 yuan as processing fee if he wanted to go back to Taiwan. His passport had been held by the company since he arrived.

Illegal recruitment, or worse, human trafficking, however, is not what worries most Filipinos on the influx of Chinese workers.

According to the Bureau of Immigration, more than three million Chinese nationals entered the country between 2016 and 2018. Many came in as tourists, but authorities have no exact number of who came in to work for the POGO nor the criminal syndicates who slipped in with them.

In general, the country largely perceives the influx of foreign Chinese workers as “a threat to the country’s overall security.” Those security worries may now need to be stretched.

To put it all together, while it is normal for foreign Chinese nationals to seek employment abroad as we Filipinos do the same thing, criminal gangs taking advantage of such workers is an ugly consequence we need to decisively deal with now before these gangs are unmanageable and become even more violent.