From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 11, October 2025:
In Kayin State in southeastern Myanmar, the silhouette of an ornate city gleams along the Moei River. The town of Shwe Kokko was once a rural backwater on the Thai border, but since 2017, the construction of Yatai New City, a $15 billion project, has promised to transform its 46 square miles of farmland into a futuristic cosmopolis catering to Asia’s entrepreneurs and tourists. In a 2020 promotional video, Yatai’s Chinese-born founder, She Zhijiang, pitched the planned city as “Myanmar’s Silicon Valley,” a hub for technological innovation that might one day rival Shenzhen or Singapore.
On paper, Yatai may resemble a promising experiment for innovation and prosperity. The city, which labels itself as a “special economic zone,” is also historically beyond the direct reach of the Burmese central government. The new city’s private developer provides public utilities and maintains security. It’s also welcomed new technologies: Branding itself as a “blockchain smart city,” Yatai has embraced cryptocurrencies to facilitate everyday transactions. In 2019, it collaborated with BCB Blockchain, a Singaporean startup, to build Fincy, an app that maintains the city’s on-chain finance. By 2020, Fincy was adopted by 90% of the city’s merchants. Far away from Myanmar’s state infrastructure, the city has adopted Starlink for internet communication and solar panels for electricity.Shwe Kokko would seem to provide fertile grounds for a startup society as envisioned by Western proponents of charter cities. In California, technologists have long reimagined cities of “exit.” Unfettered by the burdens of regulations, social ills, and vested political interests, self-governed cities could catalyze technological breakthroughs without regulatory oversight from Washington’s bureaucrats. Patri Friedman, Milton’s anarcho-capitalist grandson, for example, saw a future in cities that float on international waters. In 2008, he founded the Seasteading Institute with backing from Peter Thiel, who viewed seasteading as a means to “escape from politics in all its forms.” Balaji S. Srinivasan, who famously called for Silicon Valley’s “ultimate exit” by building “an 0pt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology,” now envisions a world of “network states”— social networks with shared consciousness, made possible by crowdfunded territories around the world, sewn together by the internet and cryptocurrencies.
But despite its stated ambitions, Yatai didn’t become Myanmar’s Silicon Valley. Today, its largest industry is cyber scams. According to news reports, inside Yatai’s low-rise office buildings, scammers pulled victims from faraway countries into virtual romances, cultivating a trusting relationship before defrauding them with “investment advice.” Yet the scammer on the other end shouldn’t always take the full blame. Many are themselves victims of forced labor, abducted to the region from countries in Asia and Africa after responding to supposedly legitimate job postings and having little freedom to leave. In China, anecdotes of human trafficking in the region have evoked nationwide fear and anxiety as the country’s educated workers look for employment abroad in a dire domestic economy. One postdoctoral researcher, thinking he’d taken up a job in Singapore, was instead kidnapped to Myawaddy, the township in which Yatai is located, in 2022. He was only able to escape a year later after paying a ransom. In another high-profile case in January 2025, an actor responding to what he thought was an acting job in Bangkok was abducted to Myanmar, only to be rescued following the media attention triggered by the disappearance of a minor Chinese celebrity. Most aren’t as lucky: Within the high fences which enclose the city’s industrial parks, foreign workers live behind barred windows under the surveillance of armed guards. Some are tortured into obedience.
There are obviously clear differences between innovation-oriented charter city projects and rogue scam cities. Yatai’s founder, She Zhijiang, is not a tech visionary: He built a fortune running online and physical casinos in the Philippines and Cambodia. Since 2012, he’s been on the run from Chinese authorities for targeting gamblers from mainland China, where gambling is illegal. Charter cities aren’t policed by warlords, and residents and visitors come and go freely; and of course, they were not designed, like Yatai was, for scams or other criminal activities. But the stories of Yatai — and many other privately run cities in the region — should serve as a reminder of what things could look like when startup city projects go awry. As charter cities style themselves as laboratories of autonomy and exception, the “zone” as a vehicle can either catalyze economic prosperity when executed properly or facilitate global crimes when guardrails fail.***
Building a new city outside the usual law from scratch isn’t a novel idea. In 1959, Ireland’s Shannon airport outside Limerick, which served as a fuel stop for trans-Atlantic flights, first demonstrated the economic feasibility of free-trade zones — regions where special laws and tax codes attracted foreign capital. By the 1970s, the international development community came to view special economic zones as a vessel to jumpstart economic growth. None have proved more exceptional than Shenzhen. Once a humble fishing village across the border from Hong Kong, the city was designated one of China’s first SEZs in 1980....
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