Cambodia banned online gambling in December 2019. The following month, the country’s Immigration Department said “there were 447,676 Chinese nationals who left the Kingdom, including those who held long-term visas.” The decision to terminate online gambling came after Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen linked their operations to money laundering and other crimes.
Where have all these Chinese gone?
In February, a whistleblower said about 90 percent of Bureau of Immigration personnel are involved in the so-called “pastillas” scheme, which allows paid special treatment to Chinese nationals entering the country.
The Philippines is a logical destination of the 447,676 Chinese nationals that left Cambodia considering the number of Chinese-run Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators in the country, with an estimated 200 that are reportedly operating without a permit. Officially, about 70,000 Chinese nationals are reportedly working in Manila-based Pogos. But the number could be higher considering reports that hundreds more are operating underground.
In February, the BIR disclosed during a Senate labor committee hearing that all foreign-based Pogos are not paying their franchise tax. It said that majority of the 60 licensed Pogos failed to pay the government an estimated total of P50 billion in withholding income and franchise taxes in 2019.
Senator Richard Gordon, in a privilege speech on March 3, said that the moral fabric of the Philippine society is “being damaged” through corruption, prostitution, and damage to property brought about by the influx of Chinese Pogo workers in the country.
Now comes the news that there are a total of 27,678 Chinese retirees in the Philippines, many of them in their 30s and 40s, alarming senators who said it may have implications on the country’s national security. At the budget hearing of the Department of Tourism and its attached agencies, Sen. Gordon noted that before World War II, there were Japanese sleeper agents in the Philippines who posed as construction workers. “This is now a national security issue,” he said. Philippine Retirement Authority General Manager Bienvenido Chy explained that foreigners aged 35 years old and above are eligible for the special resident retirees visa.
In a speech during the opening of the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, President Duterte affirmed the Philippines’s arbitral victory against China over their South China Sea dispute, which was issued by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. “The award is now part of international law, beyond compromise and beyond the reach of passing governments to dilute, diminish, or abandon,” Duterte said in the speech, which followed an address by Chinese President Xi Jinping. “We firmly reject attempts to undermine it.”
The tribunal gave a verdict saying that China has no legal basis or historic claim on the Nine-dash line. China rejected the ruling, despite stating that all nations should “respect international laws.” Since the award was handed down in 2016, China has refused to recognize it, saying it was “nothing more than a piece of waste paper and cannot be enforced.”
Here’s the sixty-four-dollar question: What if the Philippine government decides to “walk the talk” after Duterte affirmed before the UN the arbitral award that junked China’s claims to Philippine waters? Will China retaliate by ordering all Chinese Pogo workers and “retirees” in the Philippines to occupy, for example, Kalayaan municipality, which is part of the Spratly Islands and drive away the island’s 200 or so Filipino residents?