A Critical Genealogy of the Logistics of the Forced Migratory Labor in the Asian Mediterranean Sea

Principle Investigator：Joyce C.H. Liu, Professor & Director, ICCS & IACS, NYCU.

“Taiwanese Sold by Taiwanese—Escape from the Scam Industrial Park. A confession of a Human Trafficking Victim” (August 10, 2022), a recent report by the independent Taiwanese media, The Reporter, exposed the stories of Taiwanese people trapped by human- smuggling groups in Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone, Cambodia.  Sihanoukville is a port city famous for its role as a gateway to international sea trade, casinos, and organized crimes. Today it is one of the major cities in China’s One Belt One Road Initiative, and more than 80,000 Chinese live in this city. Chinese entrepreneurs run the organized scam industries with Cambodian elites, assisted by Taiwanese gangs to recruit people.  According to Al Jazeera’s documentary on July 15, 2022, “Forced to Scam: Cambodia’s Cyber Slaves,” the smuggled victims have to work 15 hours a day on a cryptocurrency romance scam or a cryptocurrency investment scam. The victims are from China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thai, Vietnam, and Burma. The criminal enterprises of the Global Scam operations involve massive corruption of high-level officials, both the Cambodian elites and the Chinese entrepreneurs. The sites of the cyber scam enterprises scatter around various places, from the port cities to Phnom Penh and the northern borders of Myanmar, Vietnam, and China.

This project intends to trace the genealogy of the sea route of forced migration that links Northeast and Southeast Asia through the Asian Mediterranean Sea. The core research question is about the nature of forced labor's institutionalized logistics that persist throughout histories. My argument is that the logistics that facilitate the flow of forced migrant labor date back to the feudal tribute system over thousands of years, from the pre-modern era to the 21st century. The institution and technology of the logistics went through a long history of metamorphosis, but the nature of the mediating institution remains unchanged. Pig is the term used for the coolies in the 19th and 20th centuries, through cheating or kidnapping poor people in the rural villages, the labor force that cost nothing, operated by the broker system to ship the indentured laborers to Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. The pig of the 21st century serves different kinds of labor but is still in the same mode of slavery, with torture and unaccounted death. Port cities turn out to be the chokepoints for the supply chain for the commodities, including crude labor force, through the water route.  The objective of this study is to propose a perspective of critical legal study that challenges the persistence of the legalized institutions that legitimate and rationalize the extraction of labor and ignore the fundamental equality of all human lives.