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Paper short abstract

This paper argues scam compounds persist via brokerage: recruiters move labour into compounds through debt, logistics, and coercion; legal brokers in China manage return, detention, restitution, and reintegration. Coercive and legal brokerage co-produce survival under crackdowns.

Paper long abstract

Online scam compounds across the China–Myanmar–Thailand–Cambodia corridor are often explained as products of “weak governance” or purely criminal innovation. This paper instead foregrounds brokerage as the organisational infrastructure that enables scam economies to scale and persist amid intensifying border controls, armed fragmentation, and periodic crackdowns. It advances a two-stage argument about how brokerage distributes risk, produces differentiated (im)mobility, and mediates power across fragmented jurisdictions.

First, the paper examines recruitment and transfer brokers who translate dispersed labour pools into captive, work-disciplined populations inside compounds. These brokers operate through layered networks—kinship/provincial ties, debt and wage advances, logistical facilitation, and coercive protection—linking would-be workers to armed actors, transport routes, and compound managers. Brokerage here is not merely intermediation but a mode of governance that converts uncertainty into controllable mobility.

Second, the paper analyses “legal resettlement brokers” in China—lawyers and quasi-legal fixers who manage return, detention outcomes, plea negotiations, restitution arrangements, and re-entry into everyday life for repatriated scam workers. Rather than existing outside the state, this legal brokerage is shaped by securitised campaigns and uneven enforcement, turning anti-scam governance into a new field of intermediated access and bargaining.

Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2018 and 2025, the paper contributes to brokerage debates by showing how illicit digital markets are sustained through the co-constitution of coercive and legal brokerage across a fragmenting political order.