its Scam Centre Strike Force is tackling the biggest form of financial crime ever to hit Americans, who are reckoned by their government to lose at least $10bn a year to scams, and probably considerably more. China began squeezing the industry years earlier: its citizens are both the scammers’ prime victims and also supply much of the workforce inside the compounds. Liu Zhongyi of China’s Ministry of Public Security visited Cambodia just as the current crackdown began. China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam now share intelligence and mount joint operations against the industry. Scams cost Cambodia in other ways, too. Chinese tourists, increasingly fearful of being grabbed and forced to work in the scam farms, numbered just 850,000 in 2024, down from 2.4m in 2019. Cambodia now offers them visa-free entry in the hope of encouraging a revival. Yet the industry is adapting rather than dying. Operations are shifting yet again, this time to Laos and Myanmar, the other main hosts of the world’s scam compounds; Sri Lanka and Indonesia are home to yet others, says John Wojcik of Infoblox, a security firm. Cybercrime will also continue in Cambodia. Selective enforcement has eliminated some scam compounds, but not the system that protects them. No sitting or former ministers have been charged by Cambodia’s officers, despite a number of donations that Prince Group has been documented as having made to the ruling party. ■ For exclusive coverage of Asian politics, economics and security, sign up to Asia Bulletin, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/07/16/a-real-but-selective-crackdown-on- cambodias-scam-industry
An incomplete list of falling objects in India Prosperity and infrastructure development have not come with improved safety July 16th 2026 NO METROPOLIS IN India and few big cities anywhere receive as much rain in as little time as Mumbai. Even by the city’s own standards it has been an exceptionally soggy July, the wettest bit of the monsoon. It rained as much in the first week as it normally does over the whole month. Wind speeds of over 75kph wreaked havoc. By July 7th, 830 trees had fallen (compared with 855 in all of 2025) in addition to 1,238 branches. An 11- year-old was crushed inside his school bus; an 18-year-old on his bike; a 63- year-old outside his shop. Citizens blame the authorities for blocking the roots of trees with concrete. Officials counter that no city in the world could weather this weather. They
have a point. Strong winds in Beijing last year knocked down 843 trees and 2,572 branches in a single day. But the problem with that explanation is that the phenomenon of objects falling on and killing people is not restricted to the monsoon, to trees or to Mumbai. Everything that can crush someone has done so in India—including an actual anvil (in 2024). On just one day this month a jamun tree cracked a man’s skull, a tanker overturned and squashed two people in an autorickshaw and a trash mountain tumbled onto a building, which then collapsed, killing nine. India is the land of death from above. The good news is that death by tree should become less common. India is cutting them down to make way for flyovers, metro lines and other infrastructure. The bad news is that this brings its own hazards. Among the things that have fallen on people in recent years are slabs of concrete, iron rods, iron pipes, iron plates, a 40,000kg block of iron, a piling rig, a crane’s trolley and various sections of under-construction bridges. Airport-terminal canopies have collapsed in Delhi, Jabalpur and Rajkot. As one newspaper put it recently, “Yet another unsuspecting citizen walks past an infra-project and nearly pays with his life.” That India is at last creating much-needed infrastructure is laudable. If it could do so without killing passers-by that would be even more so. When it is not the new stuff that is collapsing, it is the ageing and decrepit. The roof of a school in Rajasthan—which gets almost no rain—crushed seven children last year. Two more school roofs in the same state fell the next day. Another two in the past few weeks. In April a student died when a basketball post toppled over onto him, the third such incident in six months. Nothing is too absurd or tragic. In 2024 an illegal billboard, three times the maximum permitted size, collapsed and killed 17 people at a petrol station. Nine workers were killed at a steel plant last month when a bucket dropped molten metal at 1,600°C on them. The authorities’ response is usually to suspend a few officials, arrest a scapegoat or offer “ex gratia” compensation and move on. For citizens, the answer to this crisis is not to walk around looking up, forever fretting about what might befall them. For there is another hazard: that the ground beneath simply crumbles away. Well before the monsoon
started, motorcycles and whole cars were being swallowed up by unmarked open pits in streets across India. In May two dozen candidates outside an exam centre fell into a sewer when the pavement gave way. This month the staircase collapsed in the offices of one northern city’s development authority. Last month a Mumbai municipal official fell into a drain while accompanying the mayor to inspect drainage. One response would be for the state to do a better job of enforcing health- and-safety regulations and road-traffic rules designed to prevent exactly this sort of needless loss of life. Another is to marvel at the sheer absurdity of it all, as Ameet Satam, a legislator and the Mumbai president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, was no doubt doing when he was captured on video laughing, “Yesterday it was because of a tree, today it is a manhole.” In 1996 Steve McCurry, a photographer, took a picture that captured the essence of Mumbai at the time: framed against the city’s magnificent Indo- Gothic railway terminus, a taxi driver reclines on the bonnet of his car reading a local tabloid. The front-page headline reads: “BLDG CRASHES IN FORT, 2 DIE”. Much has changed in the decades since, not least India’s income per person, which has quadrupled. But some things remain the same. Earlier this year another newspaper summed up in a front-page headline what many Indians know to be true: “NOWHERE IS SAFE”. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/07/12/an-incomplete-list-of-falling-objects- in-india
China is dealing with its own manosphere Xi Jinping expels another leader from his top team China wants to end AI romances A squeezed China is trying to wring more from its state assets
China is dealing with its own manosphere But online misogyny is only one corner of a much bigger problem July 16th 2026 To get a flavour of how some university-educated male influencers in China think, log on to Zhihu, a social-media platform, and find the account of someone who calls himself Peng Huitang. Mr Peng has 50,000 followers and regularly spews vitriol at modern women. “Young women brainwashed by feminist thinking became increasingly man-hating, which then evolved into the idea that men are born owing women something,” he rants. Another man, who goes by the name Ying Yueyong, in a post viewed 4m times on Bilibili, a video platform, issued “a rallying cry to men to no longer remain silent in the face of years of bullying and to rise up in resistance”. He slips in some of the nationalism popular with such influencers: “Extreme feminism is a common choice favoured by academic cliques and foreign
forces.” Welcome to the Chinese manosphere. (Neither Mr Peng nor Mr Ying accepted a request for an interview.) Like most countries, China has lots of online communities of unmarried men. Some are angry nationalists. Some are hardcore misogynists. They post messages claiming that society favours women, who they believe should stay in the kitchen and the bedroom. There is plenty of overlap. Many of them remain anonymous. Tellingly, however, there is no direct translation of the word “manosphere” in Chinese. That is because the online anger of Chinese men is only the most hostile expression of a more widespread frustration felt by tens of millions of men, online and offline. Traditional patriarchal values remain much more deeply rooted than in the West, and feminism is a more recent phenomenon. Involuntarily celibate men are struggling to adapt to the changing dynamics of gender relations. In Western democracies, right-wing populists aside, there is plenty of opprobrium towards the manosphere. In China, traditional masculinity and anti-feminist rhetoric have long had substantial support from the Communist Party. The Communist Youth League has said “extreme feminism” (which it does not define, but generally includes anything that encourages activism or conflict and discourages women from getting married and having children) is a “cancer” afflicting the internet. Despite the fact that Mao Zedong famously said that “women hold up half the sky”, the party has regularly cast feminism as a destabilising, insidious foreign force. China does have unique problems. The most obvious is the effect of its one- child policy, which ran from 1980 to 2015. This led to the abortion of many female fetuses and thus a surplus of adult men today, many of whom struggle to couple up. The number of surplus men, known as guanggun, or bare branches, is huge. By 2027 there will be 22.5m more marriage-age men than women. That translates into 119 men of marriage age for every 100 women of that age; in 2012 the ratio was 105 to 100. Young women are also increasingly well educated: they often have more qualifications than men. By 2024 they made up 51% of higher-education students, 14 percentage points more than 20 years earlier. This younger generation of women benefited from the one-child policy, as resources were funnelled towards only daughters. And, while urban Chinese women have