From Trade Payment to Suspicious Transfer: Governing Huan Qian on the China–Myanmar Border

ABSTRACT This article examines huan qian , a local term for informal currency exchange and value transfer on the China–Myanmar border. In Ruili, huan qian long functioned as a practical payment infrastructure for border trade. Yet traders and money changers increasingly found that payments understood locally as commercial settlement could be reclassified by Chinese authorities as suspicious finance and subjected to bank account freezes. On the basis of fieldwork in Ruili between 2024 and 2025, the article asks how this transformation occurred. We argue that it resulted not simply from intensified policing but from a jurisdictional reconfiguration within China's public security system. This reconfiguration emerged from China's efforts to combat cyber scams, and it expanded antiscam enforcement into a way of governing ordinary monetary flows at the border by changing who could intervene in huan qian and how money was traced and acted upon. The article contributes to scholarship on informal value transfer systems by identifying jurisdictional change as a mechanism through which mundane transfers can be detached from their local meanings and reinterpreted as suspicious finance. In this way, cyberscam governance did not merely target criminal networks; it also reshaped the payment ecology of the China–Myanmar border.