A Chinese court has sentenced five top members of an infamous Myanmar mafia to death as Beijing continues its crackdown on scam operations in South East Asia.
In all 21 Bai family members and associates were convicted of fraud, homicide, injury and other crimes, said a state media report published on the court website.
The family is among a handful of mafias that rose to power in the 2000s and transformed the impoverished backwater town of Laukkaing into a lucrative hub of casinos and red-light districts.
In recent years they pivoted to scams in which thousands of trafficked workers, many of them Chinese, are trapped, abused and forced to defraud others in criminal operations worth billions.
Death penalty is entirely up to Supreme People’s Court and has been since CCP took over. It basically means the authoritarians decide which cases are death worthy. But it’s truethere have been some “reforms” that reduced what is death worthy and try to legitimize the system. Either way, all of that is moot in an authoritarian system and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.