Last month, a handful of Chinese developers sat around a desk on the fifth floor of a beachside hotel in Sihanoukville, the Cambodian coastal city they once saw as a promised land.
Over tea and cigarettes, they described how their dreams of seaside success had turned into a nightmare of costly stalled projects and drawn-out legal disputes with landlords.
“There was a lot of greed,” said Zhang Jiawei, head of a Chinese business association in Sihanoukville.