{
  "id": "four-families-of-kokang",
  "title": "Four families of Kokang",
  "lang": "en",
  "source_lang": "en",
  "summary": "Four clans that dominated the Kokang region of northern Myanmar after 2009, controlling its economy, politics and illicit businesses until a 2023 crackdown.",
  "category": "history",
  "subcategory": "",
  "type": "concept",
  "aliases": [
    "Four Families of Northern Myanmar",
    "Four Big Families of Kokang",
    "Big Four Families of Kokang"
  ],
  "generated_at": "2026-10-16",
  "model": "pro/claude-haiku-5-5",
  "url": "https://aiwiki.page/en/four-families-of-kokang/",
  "translations": {
    "zh-Hans": {
      "url": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/four-families-of-kokang/",
      "json": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/four-families-of-kokang.json"
    }
  },
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "",
      "text": "The Four Families of Kokang is a term for four clans that became the dominant local power in the Kokang Self-Administered Zone of northern Shan State, Myanmar, after an armed realignment in 2009. Each clan was headed by a former subordinate of the region's long-time leader, Peng Jiasheng. The families controlled mining, gambling, real estate and trade in the zone's capital, Laukkai, and from the 2010s onward several of them were associated with online fraud operations that targeted people from mainland China. Their rise and fall involved the Myanmar military, Chinese state security, and ethnic armed groups."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Background: the Peng era in Kokang",
      "text": "Kokang is a border territory whose population is largely of Han Chinese origin. Its modern politics were shaped by Peng Jiasheng, who was born in the area in 1931 according to most accounts (some sources give 1932). He first rose as a senior figure in the Communist Party of Burma, which controlled the region in the 1960s. In March 1989 he led a mutiny within that party, which fragmented the organisation, and he then aligned with the Burmese government. The junta recognised the area as a special region with a large degree of autonomy and allowed Peng to keep his own armed force.\n\nDuring the following two decades Peng became known as the \"King of Kokang\". Casinos proliferated in Laukkai to the point that Chinese visitors nicknamed the town \"little Macau\". Peng's rule also involved rivalry with the Yang family, which dominated local politics before the 1990s, and periodic internal conflict. Reports from this period describe the regime as profiting from gambling and the drug trade, though the scale and the extent of Peng's personal involvement are disputed."
    },
    {
      "heading": "The 2009 realignment",
      "text": "The immediate cause of the break was a demand from the central government that Peng's forces be incorporated into the Border Guard Force under military command. When he refused, his deputy Bai Suocheng (also romanised as Bai Xuoqian) and several senior commanders mutinied and sided with the government. Fighting broke out in late August 2009 and ended with the defeat of Peng's forces. Peng went into exile, and tens of thousands of residents reportedly fled into China's Yunnan province as refugees.\n\nAfter the fighting, Bai became the interim head of the zone and later its chairman. The military allowed government troops to be stationed in Kokang for the first time, and local residents were granted Myanmar nationality. The zone was formally created in 2010. Peng later reappeared as the leader of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), but his forces were not able to reverse the change."
    },
    {
      "heading": "The four families",
      "text": "The core membership is generally given as the families of:\n\n- Bai Suocheng, the former deputy who became the leading figure in the region and was reported as the most senior of the four. He later served in the upper house of the Myanmar parliament, and his relatives were reported to have profited from scam operations even though he was not directly involved.\n- Wei Chaoren (and later his relatives), whose family controlled a border guard battalion and, in later years, the Kokang Border Guard Force.\n- Liu Guoxi, a former USDP-affiliated lawmaker and senior officer whose family mainly ran mining and casino businesses. His death in 2020 weakened the family.\n- Liu Zhengxiang (also known as Liu Abao), frequently described as the wealthiest man in Laukkai, whose family's business interests included a gaming company and real estate.\n\nLists of the four vary by source. Some Chinese-language sources and Chinese Wikipedia name the Ming family, led by Ming Xuechang, rather than Liu Zhengxiang, and others count Liu Zhengxiang as a fifth major family alongside the four. Some English-language reports describe the group as \"the Bai, Wei and two Liu families\" with the Ming family as a later rising power. After Liu Guoxi's death, the Ming family became more prominent, and it had its own police battalion in the zone."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Economic and criminal activities",
      "text": "The families were reported to control the most lucrative sectors of Laukkai: casinos, mining, real estate, hotels and commerce. They were also said to maintain private armed forces, with Chinese state media reporting a force of around 2,000 men attached to one of the families.\n\nFrom about 2014 onward, Chinese police and media described the zone as a base for telecom and online fraud. Scam compounds reportedly employed large numbers of workers, many of them trafficked from China and other countries and forced to carry out fraud under threat of violence. Chinese investigations described punishments such as confinement in cages and deprivation of food and water. Peng's allies later alleged that the scam industry in Kokang involved as many as 100,000 workers and was protected by the military. Official Chinese figures put the number of Chinese nationals arrested in Shan State for scam activity at more than 40,000 over a period of months. Pro-Beijing outlets described the families as having built \"industrial chains\" that combined gambling, drugs, pornography and fraud. These figures are not independently verified, and the families and the Myanmar government have disputed many of them.\n\nDrug production is a further strand of the history. Kokang has a long association with the opium and heroin trade that reached neighbouring Thailand and northern Myanmar, and the region's older leaders were linked to it. Under Peng, drug production was partly suppressed in the late 1990s for economic and political reasons. Later reports still associated the families with narcotics, but direct evidence for each family's role varies."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Relations with China and Myanmar",
      "text": "The four families depended on a complex patronage network. The Myanmar military needed local partners to control the border, and the families used their connections in Myanmar's parliament and security forces to protect their interests. China maintained a policy of non-intervention in Myanmar's internal affairs, but it tolerated the flow of money, goods and people across the border that sustained the local economy. For years the Chinese state allowed the families to operate with what observers described as tacit approval.\n\nThe relationship changed in 2023. In October, powerful Kokang business figures were arrested at a trade fair in China, and in November Beijing issued arrest warrants for a senior Kokang politician and several family members, accusing them of organising online fraud. Ming Xuechang, the head of the Ming family, was reported to have died by suicide shortly after the warrant was issued, though accounts differ on the circumstances."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Collapse, 2023 to 2026",
      "text": "On 23 October 2023, the MNDAA launched a campaign with other ethnic armed groups, presenting it as an effort to eliminate criminal groups that had frustrated China. The campaign lasted roughly forty days and returned Laukkai to the MNDAA by early January 2024. The Kokang Self-Administered Zone was de facto dissolved on 5 January 2024. Members of the four families were arrested, extradited to China or taken into custody by the MNDAA and other forces.\n\nCriminal prosecutions in China followed. The Ming family group was indicted in Wenzhou in late 2024, and its trial began in February 2025 with a large number of defendants. A separate case against members of the Bai family and associates was brought in Shenzhen in July 2025. In February 2026, an opinion column based on Chinese media reports described the execution of eleven members and associates of the Ming family in Wenzhou. Charges in these cases included fraud, murder, kidnapping, illegal gambling, drug trafficking and the organisation of prostitution."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Historiography and interpretation",
      "text": "Scholarly work on Kokang has treated the four families as an outcome of long-running factional competition within the Kokang leadership, shaped by Myanmar's central government and by China's border policy. From this perspective the 2009 and 2023 conflicts are seen as successive mutinies in which rival families used alliances with state and non-state actors to gain control. Commentary in Chinese media has tended to emphasise the criminal dimension, and it has presented the crackdown as an effort to protect Chinese citizens. Coverage in Myanmar-focused outlets has been more ambivalent, pointing to the role of the Myanmar military and of China in the families' rise and downfall.\n\nThe degree of each family's involvement in scam operations is a matter of dispute. Some reports suggest that certain families, such as the Liu Guoxi family, were mainly engaged in mining and gambling, while others were heavily involved in online fraud. Official and media claims about the scale of forced labour, drug production and the families' revenue have often not been independently verified."
    },
    {
      "heading": "See also topics",
      "text": "The four families are closely related to the history of Kokang and the broader Chinese border regions, the criminal cases brought against them, and the regional trade and migration flows that shaped the area."
    }
  ],
  "links": [
    "myanmar",
    "china",
    "human-migration",
    "opioid",
    "thailand",
    "criminal-law"
  ],
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Four Families of Kokang_Baiduwiki",
      "url": "https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Four%20Families%20of%20Kokang/1458169"
    },
    {
      "title": "2025 was a terrible year for the ‘Four Families’ accused of running global cyber scam operations",
      "url": "https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/04/asia/china-myanmar-scam-crime-families-intl-hnk-dst"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tentative truce shows China’s influence",
      "url": "https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/20/tentative-truce-shows-extent-and-limit-of-chinas-influence-in-myanmar"
    },
    {
      "title": "Full article: The Enduring Legacy and Historical Continuity of Kokang’s Mutinies in the China–Myanmar Borderlands",
      "url": "https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2025.2468511"
    },
    {
      "title": "OPINION - Cross-border crime in Laukkai: The rise and decline of four Chinese families",
      "url": "https://macaubusiness.com/opinion-cross-border-crime-in-laukkai-the-rise-and-decline-of-four-chinese-families/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Misfortune for Kokang’s Bai Family - ISP-Myanmar",
      "url": "https://ispmyanmar.com/ex-09/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Myanmar Military ‘Provided Protection For US$ 14 Billion a Year Scam Hub’ on China Border",
      "url": "https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/myanmar-military-provided-protection-for-us-14-billion-a-year-scam-hub-on-china-border.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Myanmar rebels take control of ‘pig butchering’ scam city amid Chinese pressure on junta",
      "url": "https://therecord.media/myanmar-rebels-control-pig-butchering-scam-hub"
    },
    {
      "title": "果敢四大家族 - 维基百科，自由的百科全书",
      "url": "https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9E%9C%E6%95%A2%E5%9B%9B%E5%A4%A7%E5%AE%B6%E6%97%8F"
    },
    {
      "title": "缅北电诈“四大家族”覆灭记：曾纵横政商军警生活极尽骄奢，如今骨干悉数落网_腾讯新闻",
      "url": "https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20240131A0706300"
    },
    {
      "title": "果敢四大家族研究 - 知乎",
      "url": "https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/668821091"
    },
    {
      "title": "缅北汉人军阀：果敢，为什么被四大家族搞成“电诈天堂”？ - 知乎",
      "url": "https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/688966674"
    },
    {
      "title": "缅北为何成为电诈的温床，果敢“四大家族”各有什么来头？",
      "url": "https://m.mp.oeeee.com/a/BAAFRD000020231120877360.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "流落缅甸的明朝汉人遗民：果敢族 - 缅华网",
      "url": "https://www.mhwmm.com/lishihuimou/9449.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "果敢（缅甸掸邦北部果敢自治区、缅甸联邦第一特区）_百度百科",
      "url": "https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%9E%9C%E6%95%A2/5065"
    },
    {
      "title": "Who Is Peng Jiasheng?",
      "url": "https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/peng-jiasheng.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Pheung Kya-shin",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheung_Kya-shin"
    },
    {
      "title": "What role did China play in a rebel group’s victory in northern Myanmar?",
      "url": "https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/conflict-01162024171117.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "2009 Kokang incident",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Kokang_incident"
    },
    {
      "title": "Fourteen years after their patriarch was betrayed, Kokang's Peng clan are finally poised to get revenge - ABC News",
      "url": "https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-09/myanmar-mndaa-brotherhood-alliance-kokang-battle/103159456"
    },
    {
      "title": "Can China Untangle the Kokang Knot in Myanmar?",
      "url": "https://thediplomat.com/2015/05/can-china-untangle-the-kokang-knot-in-myanmar/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Kokang Self-Administered Zone",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokang_Self-Administered_Zone"
    }
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}