Dr Xu Peng on Scam Logistics: Building and Governing the Digital Illicit Economy in China–Southeast Asia Borderlands

This talk shows how “scam logistics” are built and governed across the China–Southeast Asia borderlands, arguing that online fraud compounds are not aberrations but infrastructural regimes that couple platforms, militarised enclaves, and brokerage to move people, money, and persuasion at scale. Drawing on corridor-based analysis of flows between Myanmar’s conflict-affected borderlands and regional hubs such as Yunnan/Thailand/Cambodia, I map how brokers, zonal governance, and platform routines convert illegality into predictable circulation—producing uneven development through what I call a logistics fix. The analysis traces three interlocking circuits—commodities (digital services and kit), capital (settlement rails and laundering), and people (recruitment, coercion, and labour churn)—to show how centres and margins co-produce one another via “adverse incorporation,” and why security-first crackdowns often raise risk premiums, displace harms, and entrench the very economies they target. The talk closes with policy implications for regulating platforms, financial intermediaries, and corridor governance.

Dr Xu Peng is a postdoctoral researcher at SOAS University of London and an incoming Hallsworth Fellow at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester. Her research examines ethnic conflict, rebel governance, and digital illicit economies in the China–Southeast Asia borderlands. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Asia and China Perspectives, with articles forthcoming in Asian Studies Review and Current History. She is developing two book projects on borderland statecraft and the politics of the digital illicit economy.