Shwe Kokko: A Case Study in Military Greed and National Betrayal

The Shwe Kokko New City project, once touted as a symbol of regional development, has instead become a glaring testament to corruption and exploitation. Initially constructed through the partnership of Yatai International Holding Group, led by Chinese tycoon She Zhijiang, and Sa Chit Thu’s Shwe Lin Myaing Company, the project was later transferred from Thailand to Chinese control.

Saw Chit Thu’s involvement was not merely entrepreneurial. As a commander within the Border Guard Force (BGF), operating under the Myanmar military, he held shares not through legitimate investment but through privileges granted by senior generals. These concessions—effectively licenses to profit—were distributed in place of financial capital, underscoring the military’s entrenched practice of monetizing authority rather than fostering genuine economic growth.

The ambitions behind Shwe Kokko were vast. Its architects sought not only to dominate Myanmar’s domestic economy but also to extend influence into the global gambling market. This vision mirrored the military’s broader strategy: monopolizing national resources while leveraging illicit industries to secure wealth and power.

At the center of this web of greed stood Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. The military elite, including his family, invested little of their own resources, instead lending their names and authority to ventures that promised immense returns. Such practices reveal the depth of their avarice and disregard for national welfare.

In June 2020, the National League for Democracy (NLD) government received credible reports of illegal gambling operations within Shwe Kokko. Acting on these findings, the government ordered the project’s suspension and established an investigative committee. Yet, the military responded with obstruction, applying pressure to derail inquiries and shield its interests.

This confrontation was not incidental. The Shwe Kokko scandal was among the critical factors driving the military coup of February 2021. The generals feared that continued NLD governance would expose their dealings and strip them of unchecked authority. Their desperation to protect illicit profits translated into a ruthless seizure of power.

Today, Shwe Kokko stands as more than a failed development project. It is emblematic of Min Aung Hlaing’s personal empire, with his family deeply entangled in its operations. Should this case be pursued with determination and transparency, it holds the potential to bring accountability not only to Min Aung Hlaing himself but to his entire family network.

Conclusion

The Shwe Kokko affair is a stark reminder that Myanmar’s struggle is not merely political—it is economic and moral. The military’s greed has compromised national sovereignty, undermined legitimate governance, and betrayed the people’s trust. Exposing and dismantling such ventures is essential if Myanmar is to reclaim its future from the grip of corruption and authoritarianism.

In 2021, She Zhijiang and Saw Chit Thu revived the Shwe Kokko gambling operations that had been suspended under the NLD government. This revival generated vast amounts of foreign currency for Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, strengthening his personal economic empire.

As a gesture of gratitude, Min Aung Hlaing awarded Sa Chit Thu the Thiri Pyanchi title in 2023. In early 2024, he further elevated Sa Chit Thu to the unprecedented rank of Regional Military Operations Commander ဒေသဆိုင်ရာစစ်ဆင်ရေးကွတ်ကဲရေးမှုး (ဒကစမှုး) ရာထူး—a position never before granted to any ethnic leader. These honors and promotions stand as clear evidence of the deep entanglement between She Zhijiang, Sa Chit Thu, and Min Aung Hlaing.

Yet today, Min Aung Hlaing appears increasingly anxious about exposure. Reports suggest he is preparing to eliminate Sa Chit Thu to erase traces of his own involvement. His sudden declaration to “clean up KK Park” is widely seen as an attempt to cover his tracks.

At this critical juncture, Sa Chit Thu has an alternative path. By surrendering arms and cooperating openly with the National Unity Government (NUG), he could help bring Min Aung Hlaing to justice. Such cooperation would not absolve him entirely, but it could reduce the severity of his punishment. The central target must remain Min Aung Hlaing—the architect of Myanmar’s suffering.

Strong evidence is essential. Just as the U.S. judicial system requires solid testimony before issuing warrants, Myanmar’s struggle also demands credible witnesses. The case of U Saw, convicted through the testimony of Government witness Ba Nyunt ဖော်ကောင်ဘညွန့်, demonstrates how decisive evidence can secure justice. (Even Al Capone, it should be remembered, was ultimately arrested for tax fraud.)

Min Aung Hlaing’s behavior betrays his fear. He has rushed to Karen State, loudly proclaiming plans to “clear KK Park.” His actions resemble a desperate performance, a man trembling under the weight of accountability. Since the U.S. established its Scam Center Strike Force, Min Aung Hlaing has grown visibly unsettled. Only yesterday, he insist that “this has nothing to do with me—it is outsiders, the Chinese.” Today, he rushed to Karen State to stage a show of force. His panic is plain to see.

But fear will not save him. Justice is inevitable. Min Aung Hlaing’s fate is sealed: the gallows await. This is not merely political retribution—it is the consequence of his own deeds, the karma of a man who betrayed his nation for greed.

Conclusion

The Shwe Kokko affair continues to unravel, exposing the fragile alliances and deep corruption at the heart of Myanmar’s military leadership. Saw Chit Thu’s choices in the coming days may determine whether he becomes another casualty of Min Aung Hlaing’s cover-up—or a pivotal witness who helps bring the dictator and his family to justice.

READ ALSO: Scam Centers in Myanmar: Min Aung Hlaing and His Inner Circle.

By Myo Yan Naung Thein

November 15 , 2025

This document provides a comprehensive overview of the individuals and networks associated with Myanmar’s scam centers, with a primary focus on the country’s military leadership under Min Aung Hlaing. It examines his pivotal role in orchestrating the scam centers network, details the involvement of his closest associates and influential families, and explores the scope of alleged criminal activities and international sanctions linked to his regime.

Min Aung Hlaing and the Scam Centers Network

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Min Aung Hlaing is widely recognized as the chief architect behind the scam center network—a term that has come to represent the Burmese military’s deep ties to criminal enterprises. Under his leadership, the military has been repeatedly implicated in the coordination and facilitation of scam operations throughout Myanmar and neighboring regions.

Key Associates and Their Roles

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· Bai Suocheng: Former head of the Kokang Border Guard Force and a trusted subordinate of Min Aung Hlaing, Bai Suocheng was sentenced to death in China for his criminal activities and died in custody. He previously served as the military-appointed governor of Kokang and was an MP for the military-backed USDP Party.

· Bai Yingcang (Khin Maung Win): The younger son of Bai Suocheng, Bai Yingcang leads the Kokang militia under military supervision. He is regularly present at official events in Nay Pyi Taw and has met with Min Aung Hlaing multiple times.

· Bai Yingneng: The elder son, Bai Yingneng, serves as a member of parliament for the USDP. Since 2021, he has been entrusted by Min Aung Hlaing with the administration of Kokang and was awarded the Thiri Su Dhamma Manizaw Ta Dhara honor.

· Major General Wai San (Wei Huairen): As commander of the Border Guard Force, Wai San has been sentenced to death and is notorious for his involvement in criminal activities.

· Lyo Apauk: A figure of notable influence, Lyo Apauk was honored with the Sri Sudhammana Manizawada title by Min Aung Hlaing. His brother, Lyo Kyaw Chi (U Maung Maung), also received this distinction and has served on the Konkyan Township Administrative Committee as well as in parliament.

· The Ming Family: Among the first to be apprehended, the Ming family’s arrest shed light on the depth of Min Aung Hlaing’s influence. The military junta reported that Ming Xuechang, an MP for the USDP, died by suicide during detention—a claim widely seen as an attempt to obscure the family’s deeper involvement in the network.

· Ming Kaw Ping: The eldest son of Ming Xuechang, now leads the Shwe Ying Si militia, operating under military directives.

· Ming Go An: Serves as commander of the 21st Police Battalion in Kokang, under the Military Council’s authority.

· Li Keen Chan (Liu Zhengxiang): Another influential figure, Li Keen Chan heads the Kokang Border Guard Force and holds a prominent role in the region, further distinguished by receiving the Srisuthammanizawthara medal from Min Aung Hlaing.

Patterns of Criminal Activity and International Implications

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A clear pattern emerges: many individuals convicted or under investigation in China have direct connections to Min Aung Hlaing’s military leadership. These associates are often appointed as generals, militia leaders, or members of parliament within the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Notably, China has aired testimony from Major General Wai San, who confessed that his criminal actions were enabled by the Burmese military, further implicating Min Aung Hlaing at the center of these operations.

Several members of this network have been subjected to international sanctions. For example, Saw Chit Thu, a leader of the Border Guard Force, was sanctioned by the United States and served under Min Aung Hlaing’s command. Saw Chit Thu’s associate, Shi Zhi-jian—leader of the LTTE—was recently extradited to China from Thailand.

Conclusion: The Consolidation of Power and Influence

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The leadership of Myanmar’s scam centers is predominantly composed of military appointees, USDP parliamentarians, and close confidants of Min Aung Hlaing. The evidence overwhelmingly points to Min Aung Hlaing as the mastermind driving the operations and expansion of these networks, consolidating his power and influence within Myanmar and beyond.

Edited from: U Myo Yan Naung Thein‘s post wrote in Myanmar on his FB. He is a Burmese pro-democracy activist, and former chief research officer of the National League for Democracy‘s Central Committee for Research and Strategy Studies. He is a former political prisoner who spent more than 10 years in prison during his three terms. Myo Yan Naung Thein is the founder and director of the Bayda Institute. On 13 February 2021, in the aftermath of the 2021 Myanmar coup d’état, Myo Yan Naung Thein and six other high profile individuals were charged and issued arrest warrants under section 505 (b) of the penal code by the State Administration Council for inciting unrest against the state and threatening “public tranquility” through their social media posts. On 4 March 2022, the military council announced that his citizenship had been terminated.

His post in Myanmar: ကျားဖြန့်ဌာနချုပ်ဖြစ်တဲ့ ရွှေကုက္ကိုမြိုသစ်ကို အခုထိုင်းကနေတရုတ်ကိုလွှဲလိုက်တဲ့ ကျားဖြန့်ဘုရင် ရှီကျီကျန်းရဲ့ ရထိုက်အင်တာနေရှင်နယ်ဟိုးဒင်း နဲ့ စောချစ်သူရဲ့ ရွှေလင်းမြိုင်ကုမ္မဏီတို့က တည်ဆောက်ခဲ့တယ်။ စောချစ်သူက စစ်တပ်လက်အောက်ခံ BGF အနေနဲ့ အစုရှယ်ယာပါဝင်ခဲ့တာဖြစ်တယ်။စောချစ်သူက စစ်တပ်အနေနဲ့ စစ်ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တွေရဲ့ ( ပိုက်ဆံအစားလုပ်ပိုင်ခွင့်တွေချပေးတဲ့) အစုရှယ်ယာတွေကိုကိုင်ပြီး လုပ်ခဲ့တာဖြစ်တယ်။ သူတို့က ရည်ရွယ်ချက်ကြီးတယ်။ မြန်မာစီးပွါးရေးဦးပိုင်ဖွဲ့ပြီး မြန့်မာ့စီးပွါးရေးချုပ်ကိုင်ခဲ့သလိုသလိုမျိုး ရွှေကုက္ကိုကနေ ကမ္ဘာ့ကျားဖြန့်စျေးကွက်ကို လွမ်းမိုးဖို့ရည်ရွယ်တယ်။ စစ်ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တွေကလောဘကြီးတော့ အလုအယက်ပါကြတယ်။ မင်းအောင်လှိုင်က ထိပ်ဆုံးကပါတယ်။ သူတို့က ငွေစိုက်ရတာမဟုတ်ပဲ အမည်ခံယုံသက်သက်ဆိုတော့ လောဘက အလွန်ကြီးကြတယ်။ ၂၀၂၀ ခုနှစ်ဇွန်လမှာ NLD အစီုးရက ရွှေကုက္ကိုမှာ တရားမဝင်လောင်းကစားတွေလုပ်နေတယ်ဆိုပြီးသတင်းရလို့ ရွေကုက္ကိုကိုပိတ်ဖို့NLD အစီုးရက ညွန်ကြားခဲ့တယ်။ စုံစမ်းစစ်ဆေးရေးအဖွဲ့ဖွဲ့ပြီးစုံစမ်းစစ်ဆေးမှုတွေစတင်ခဲ့တယ်။ အဲ့ဒီအချိန်မှာပဲ စုံစမ်းစစ်တေးမှုကို စစ်တပ်ကတောက်လျောက်ဖိအားပေးနှောက်ယှက်တာတွေလုပ်ခဲ့တယ်။ စစ်တပ်က အာဏာသိမ်းတဲ့အထဲမှာ ဒီကိစ္စတွေလည်းအဓိကပါဝင်တယ်။ NLD အာဏာဆက်ရနေရင် သူတို့လုပ်ချင်တိုင်းလုပ်လို့မရမှာ၊သူတို့လုပ်သမျှတွေ NLD က အကုန်လိုက်ဖော်မှာကို အရမ်းစီုးရိမ်သွားကြတယ်။ အခုကျားဖြန့်ကိစ္စက မင်းအောင်လှိုင်ရဲ့ စီးပွါးရေးလုပ်ငန်းဖြစ်တော့ ၊ မိသားစုလိုက်ပါဝင်ပက်သက်နေတာဖြစ်တယ်။ ဒီကိစ္စကိုသာ ထိထိရောက်ရောက်ကိုင်တွယ်နိုင်ရင် မင်းအောင်လှိုင်တို့ မိသားစုလိုက်ကြိုးစင်တက်ရလိမ့်မယ်။

ရှီကျီကျင်း နဲ့ စောချစ်သူတို့ဟာ NLD အစီုးရလက်ထက် ရပ်ဆိုင်းလိုက်ရတဲ့ ကျားဖြန့်လုပ်ငန်းတွေကို ၂၀၂၁ ခုနှစ်မှာ ပြန်လည်စတင်ခဲ့ပြီး မင်းအောင်လှိုင်အတွက်နိုင်ငံခြားငွေမြောက်များစွာရှာပေးခဲ့တယ်။ အဒါကို ကျေးဇူးတင် အသိအမှတ်ပြုတဲ့အနေနဲ့ ၂၀၂၃ ခုနှစ်မှာ မင်းအောင်လှိုင်က စောချစ်သူကို သီရိပျံချီဘွဲ့ပေးခဲ့တယ်။ ၂၀၂၄ နှစ်ဦးမှာ ဒေသဆိုင်ရာစစ်ဆင်ရေးကွတ်ကဲရေးမှုး (ဒကစမှုး) ရာထူးတိုးမြင့်ပေးခဲ့တယ်။ဘယ်တိုင်းရင်းသားကိုမှမပေးဖူးတဲ့ ရာထူးတာဝန်ကိုပေးအပ်ခဲ့တယ်။ ဒါတွေဟာ ကျားဖြန့်ဘုရင်ရှီကျီကျန်း ၊ စောချစ်သူ ၊ မင်းအောင်လှိုင်တို့ရဲ ပက်သက်မှုရဲ့သက်သေတွေဖြစ်တယ်။ အခုမင်းအောင်လှိုင်က သူ့ရဲ့အကြောင်းတွေဖော်မှာစီုးတဲ့အတွက် စောချစ်သူကိုအပြတ်ရှင်းဖို့စီစဉ်နေပြီလို့သိရတယ်။ အဲ့ဒီလိုလက်စဖျောက်ဖို့အတွက်ပဲ KK Park ကိုအပြတ်ရှင်းမယ်ဆိုပြီးမင်းအောင်လှိုင်က ကြုံးဝါးတာဖြစ်တယ်။ အခုအချိန်မှာ စောချစ်သူအနေနဲ့ NUG ဆီမှာလက်နက်ချအလင်းဝင်၊ NUG နဲ့ပူးပေါင်းပြီး မင်းအောင်လှိုင်ကိုကြိုးစင်တင်ဖို့ကြိုးစားသင့်တယ်။ ဒါဆို စောချစ်သူအနေနဲ့ သေဒဏ်ထက်ထက်လျော့ပေါ့တဲ့ပြစ်ဒဏ်ကျခံဖို့မျော်လင့်ချက်ရှိတယ်။ ကျွန်တော်တို့ရဲ့အဓိကပြစ်မှတ်က မင်းအောင်လှိုင် ဖြစ်တယ်။ မင်းအောင်လှိုင်ကို ကြိုးစင်တင်နိုင်ဖို့ စောချစ်သူတို့က အခုလိုအချိန်မျိုးမှာ NUG နဲ့ ပူးပေါင်းဆောင်ရွက်ရင်ကောင်းတယ်။ ခိုင်လုံတဲ့ သက်သေရတယ်။ ဖော်ကောင်ဘညွန့်လိုမျိုးလူရှိမှ အမေရိကန်တရားစီရင်ရေးစနစ်က အလုပ်လုပ်ရတာပိုအဆင်ပြေတယ်။ ခိုင်လုံတဲ့သက်သေမရှိပဲ အမေရိကန်တရားရုံးတွေက ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ်ပေးလေ့မရှိဘူး။ မြန်မာပြည်မှာတောင် ဦးစောကို ဖော်ကောင်ဘညွန့်ကြောင့်သေဒဏ်ချလို့ရတာဖြစ်တယ်။ (Note by KKG: Even AlCapone was arrested for Tax fraud) ပယောဂ (Witch-craft) ရှိရင်တုန်ဆင်း(shivering) လာလိမ့်မယ်ဆိုတာ ၊ မင်းအောင်လှိုင်က တရောသောပါးပြေးဆင်းလာတာ ၊ အခုကရင်ပြည်နယ်ရောက်နေပြီ။ KK Park ကို အပြတ်ရှင်းမယ်ဆိုပြီးကြေညာနေပြီ။ တော်တော်ရယ်ရတဲ့ကောင် ။ ကယောင်ချောက်ခြားလျောက်လုပ်နေတာဖြစ်တယ်။ အမေရိကန်က Scam Center Strike Force ဖွဲ့လိုက်ကတည်းက မင်းအောင်လှိုင်ပြာယာခတ်နေတာဖြစ်တယ်။ မနေ့က သန်းဆွေကိုသံတမန်တွေခေါ်ပြီး “ သူနဲ့မဆိုင်ပါဘူး၊ အပြင်ကဝင်လာတဲ့သူတွေ ( တရုတ်တွေကိုဆိုလိုချင်တာ) လုပ်တာပါ” ဆိုပြီး ရှင်းခိုင်းတယ်။ ဒီနေ့ချက်ချင်းပဲကရင်ပြည်နယ်ကိုသွားပြီး ကျားဖြန့်ကို အပြတ်ရှင်းမယ်၊ ဘာညာဆိုပြီးလုပ်ပြတယ်။ ဒီကောင်တော်တော်ကြောက်နေတာမြင်ရတယ်။ မကြောက်နဲ့ဟေ့ကောင်။ စိတ်အေးအေးနေပါ။ စိတ်ချ, မင်းကကြိုးစင်တက်ရမှာ။ အဲ့ဒါက မင်းရဲ့ကံကြမ္မာဖြစ်တယ်။