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Beyond Borders

Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma

Wen-Chin Chang
Copyright Date: 2014
Edition: 1
Published by: Cornell University Press
OPEN ACCESS
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1287cz8
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  • Book Info
    Beyond Borders
    Book Description:

    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.

    eISBN: 978-0-8014-5451-6
    Subjects: Anthropology, History

Table of Contents

  1. (pp. 1-18)

    “Three days and three nights would not exhaust my story” (wode gushi santian sanye ye shuo buwan). “Even three books would not be enough to record my story” (wode gushi sanbenshu ye xiebuwan). Over the years my informants, Yunnanese migrants of Burma/Myanmar, have frequently prefaced answers to my questions with such words. I was intrigued by these recurring phrases at the beginning. Their literal meaning must refer to many severe hardships in the experience of migration. But because only a few speakers then recounted what they considered important or appropriate for my data collecting, these phrases seemed to indicate reticence—...

  2. Part I. Migration History

    • (pp. 21-45)

      Zhang Dage, born in a mountain village in Shan State, Burma, in 1962, is one of my key informants. Like many Yunnanese migrants, his life has been marked by a series of migrations. Since 1980 he has settled in Taiwan, but every Chinese New Year he takes his family back to his parents’ home in Reshuitang Xincun (often called Xincun), a primarily Yunnanese Han village in Chiang Mai Province in northern Thailand. We met there for the first time during the Chinese New Year in 1996 when I was conducting my doctoral fieldwork on the history of the KMT Yunnanese...

    • (pp. 46-79)

      Ae Maew, meaning cat girl, is the Shan nickname of a Yunnanese graduate student I met in Taiwan in 2004 when I was invited to lecture at her university on the diasporic Yunnanese consciousness of time and space. After the lecture, Ae Maew came to see me and shared briefly her own migration experience, which sparked my interest in her Yunnanese origins and her effort to come to Taiwan for higher education. She was a second-generation migrant in Burma who had grown up in Laikha in Shan State. I hired her during two winter breaks (2005 and 2006) to assist...

    • (pp. 80-113)

      I met Mr. Li and his eldest son, Guoguang, during my third field trip to Taunggyi in June 2007. Zhang Dage had mentioned the father to me two years earlier. He told me that Mr. Li had been in the Ka Kwe Ye (KKY)¹ force and could tell me much of its history. Zhang Dage originally tried to arrange a meeting for me with Mr. Li in 2006 while I was conducting fieldwork in Taunggyi, but electronic communication was not convenient in Burma at that time, and when he finally got in touch with Mr. Li via one of Mr....

    • (pp. 114-146)

      If the Yunnanese Han feel marginal in Burma, the Yunnanese Muslims sense their peripheral position even more. While the mainstream Burman-Buddhist majority constitutes Burma’s core in terms of ethnicity and political power, the Muslims in the country have experienced acute social and religious discrimination imposed by the government, including random arrest, destruction of mosques, confiscation of property, closing of religious schools, and denial of citizenship (Aung Su Shin 2003; Berlie 2008; Priestley 2006; Selth 2003; Tagliacozzo 2014). In addition, since June 2012, ethno-religious violence organized by Buddhist fundamentalists against Muslim communities in Arakan State, Meikhtila, Lewei, Pegu, Yangon, and Lashio...

  3. Part II. (Transnational) Trade

    • (pp. 149-175)

      Economic ventures across borders have been a significant part of Yunnanese life, and the mule caravan trade, which lasted for more than two millennia, was, as noted in the introduction, the most distinctive commercial practice in the region. The ways in which the trade was carried out were connected to the mountainous environment, which obstructed fluid communication and contributed to arduous living conditions. Able to endure hard work, mules were central for the transportation of commodities to different corners of the region. With their help, the Yunnanese traversed upper mainland Southeast Asia. The accrued knowledge and ethos regarding this peripatetic...

    • (pp. 176-206)

      These are a few old songs and poems in Yunnan that vividly describe the stressful situation faced by women left behind by their husbands and sons for the sake of long-distance trade. In contrast to the mobility of Yunnanese men engaging in this type of trade, Yunnanese women⁴ were traditionally confined to domestic life and restricted from the public sphere (buke paotouloumian). Men were considered the active participants in economic undertaking, although women (especially those in the lower class) in practice also contributed to the family income by weaving, making clothes, raising animals, and working on farms (Fei and Chang...

    • (pp. 207-236)

      In September 2006, I made my first field trip to Guangzhou via Hong Kong in order to extend my earlier research on the jade trade among the Yunnanese migrants of Thailand and Burma that I began in 2000. The purpose of my trip was to research the expansion of the Yunnanese trading networks of the jade business from Burma—where the most precious jadeite in the world is procured—to Guangzhou, current developments in state and non-state trading regulations, new forms of transaction, capital flows, and shipments of jade stones and products. My second field trip to Guangzhou took place...

  4. (pp. 237-244)

    Throughout history, the migration culture of diasporic Yunnanese has largely been characterized by political instability and a peripatetic tradition, which have pushed them to keep moving and often take up itinerant professions. Their economic possibilities have ranged from being muleteers, soldiers, miners, rotating-market traders, or migrant laborers, to caravan traders or jade stone dealers. One may try multiple undertakings during one’s lifetime. The transition from one profession to another, however, does not guarantee upward mobility. In reality, one’s fortune may fluctuate, as shown in the narrators’ stories. Despite this fact, travel has been a prevailing means among migrant Yunnanese for...

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Funding is provided by Knowledge Unlatched Select 2017: Backlist