Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma

by Wen-chin Chang

The Yunnanese from southwestern China have for millennia traded throughout upland Southeast Asia. Burma in particular has served as a "back door" to Yunnan, providing a sanctuary for political refugees and economic opportunities for trade explorers. Since the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949 and subsequent political upheavals in China, an unprecedented number of Yunnanese refugees have fled to Burma. Through a personal narrative approach, Beyond Borders is the first ethnography to focus on the migration history and transnational trading experiences of contemporary Yunnanese Chinese migrants (composed of both Yunnanese Han and Muslims) who reside in Burma and those who have moved from Burma and resettled in Thailand, Taiwan, and China. Since the 1960s, Yunnanese Chinese migrants of Burma have dominated the transnational trade in opium, jade, and daily consumption goods. Wen-Chin Chang writes with deep knowledge of this trade’s organization from the 1960s of mule-driven caravans to the use of modern transportation, and she reconstructs trading routes while examining embedded sociocultural meanings. These Yunnanese migrants’ mobility attests to the prevalence of travel not only by the privileged but also by different kinds of people. Their narratives disclose individual life processes as well as networks of connections, modes of transportation, and differences between the experiences of men and women. Through traveling they have carried on the mobile livelihoods of their predecessors, expanding overland trade beyond its historical borderlands between Yunnan and upland Southeast Asia to journeys further afield by land, sea, and air.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published December 20, 2014

Reviews

[Sоe W · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the book is rich in first-hand accounts, it is very pro-Yunnanese without acknowledging the damage inflicted by their activities such as drug trade, casual racism, extreme arrogance, corruption, and illegal migration on the indigenous communities. I am appalled by how normalized racism seems to be in Chinese communities. For example, one migrant yelled racist abuses at a teenage toll collector. Another migrant beat up a Burmese woman who, without knowingly, entered into consensual relations with the migrant's husband--while absolving the chief culprit, her husband, of all blame. In addition, many migrants feel inherent superiority toward the natives based on their high exam grades fueled by drug money and child abuse. (i.e., wealthy parents hire many tutors and starve, beat, and kick their children to obtain a high score and enter high-paying professions at all costs. Their children get high scores but become mindless automatons in the process. Their interests in the subjects wither once they don't get the kick anymore. That explains why one billion PRC citizens have one Nobel Prize in science, Tu Youyou, who won it for a malarial drug discovered centuries ago.)

In essence, this book is very similar to Bo Yang's A Home Too Far, which celebrates and lionizes KMT in Burma. Not mentioned in that book were KMT's enslavement of Lahus, Shans, and Burmese to grow opium, a heavy tax exacted on the natives, and the instantiations of the Golden Triangle's opium trade and the military rule in Burma. Thus, while the author offers a detailed exploration of the experiences of Yunnanese migrants, the book fails to engage with the broader historical, social, and political contexts in which these experiences are situated. It should focus on not just migrants but their impacts on the indigenous communities in which those migrations have occurred.

[CL Chu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid ethnography expanding the scope of study of Yunnanese in Burma-Thai borderland from Han to Kokang (Yunnanese settled in Burma since 17th century) and Hui (Yunnanese Muslims), and from male-dominant solider/trader circles to the network of women.