Slightly more than a week has passed since the 7.7-magnitude earthquake devastated Burma. Widespread destruction all around—buildings tumbled, lives thrown into chaos. Mandalay was one of the worst hit, practically a sitting duck on the Sagaing fault. The last I heard, more than 3,300 people had been confirmed dead, with countless others still missing. Burma being a semi-closed country under military control doesn't exactly make for smooth information flow to the outside world. They need help from outside to cope with this disaster but there're still lots of resistance to aid activities and movement.
That said, the scammers have been very busy. Independently busy. Just a few days after the quake, I received a mysterious phone call from an unknown number with a Burma country code. Of course, my guard went up—as I don't know anybody there, I didn’t even bother answering. Still, the question lingered: how do scammers move so quickly to exploit tragedy? They prey on our sympathies, twisting people’s goodwill into a tool to scam us. It’s sickening, but sadly, not surprising.
Not long ago, China Railway 10th proudly released a promotional video featuring drone footage of the building, praising the quality of its construction. That video—and all related posts on the company’s WeChat account—have since disappeared from public view. But not before sharp-eyed netizens archived one post from last April, which marked a construction milestone and described the tower as a “business card” to promote the company’s presence in Thailand.
Following the collapse, four Chinese employees were arrested by Thai authorities when they removed documents from the site. These questionable developments—the crumbled tower and the attempted document removal—sparked wider concerns about the Chinese company’s professionalism. Did greed play a part in this disaster? Can we ever trust Chinese companies to be totally transparent and above board? There have long been murmurs about poor construction standards and corner-cutting in China’s overseas projects. That fear of false promises doesn't just vanish after the ink dries on the contracts.
According to the New York Times, China Railway 10th Engineering Group is now at the centre of scrutiny. Behind it stands its parent company, China Railway Group—a Chinese infrastructure behemoth weighed down by rising debt, a constant appetite for new projects and a string of subsidiaries with questionable safety records. Workers in Bangkok told the Times that China Railway 10th underpaid contractors, who in turn used lower-quality materials and columns that were narrower than usual. Thai officials testing twisted metal from the wreckage found sub-standard steel bars—traced back to a Thai factory with Chinese owners, which had been shut down just a few months earlier.
An anti-corruption watchdog also said it had flagged construction irregularities at the tower before the 28th of March, the day the building collapsed. “The pillars on the third floor—where I stood and looked back—the beams didn’t burst,” said Netiphong Phatthong, 38, an electrician who barely escaped. “They crumbled as the metals inside were squashed.”
Back in China, any open conversation about the collapse didn’t last long. News spread quickly on Chinese social media, where users began questioning the structural integrity of Chinese-led projects abroad. But the clampdown came just as fast. Posts were deleted, search results filtered and even official reports quietly removed. State media like People’s Daily and CCTV had reports up briefly—but those links went dark too. Keyword searches around the incident now yield nothing. Even China Railway 10th’s online celebration of the project couldn’t escape the censors, though it lived on through screenshots and archives.
It’s a troubling picture that while the tragedy in Burma was natural, what unfolded in Bangkok feels tragically human—and entirely avoidable.
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