Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1215/00219118-10773671
Magnus Fiskesjö
Bertil Lintner is a longtime observer of Burmese and Asian affairs and is the author of many books, notably on Asia's illicit drug trade as well as on North Korea and other topics. His books include Land of Jade: A Journey through Insurgent Burma (1990), in which he describes the journey he and his wife undertook in 1985–87, on foot, to visit all the insurgent forces active in Northern Burma (Myanmar)—including what was then the Communist Party of Burma's base camps in today's Wa State.The semiautonomous Wa State is located in the part of the Wa lands that ended up as part of Burma in the 1960s, when the newly independent Burma and Communist China cut the ancient Wa lands in two. In China, they came under direct Chinese rule and suffered Mao's Cultural Revolution; in Burma, the Chinese-supported and Chinese-supplied Communist Party of Burma moved in and were able to recruit Wa foot soldiers. But the Chinese-supported CPB made no headway toward a Communist revolution in Burma—what would have been the first attempt to realize what the current book's subtitle refers to as “China's Quest for Global Dominance.” This was “the plan that failed.”In 1989, while the world was busy with other things, the Burmese Communist leaders were ousted (and exiled to China) by their former foot soldiers, who now declared themselves to be the United Wa State Army. Lintner told the CPB story in another book1 and retells this fascinating story, with additional details from new research, in the present one. He is proud to have predicted, two years ahead of time, the mutiny of the Wa former foot soldiers.Over the years, Lintner has continued to publish innumerable news reports and analyses about the Wa, the UWSA, and other insurgents in Burma, not least in terms of their involvement in both opium and (later) the synthetic drug trade, as well as several books on China's expansive strategy in Burma, the Indian Ocean, and in its confrontations with India. This new book is a rewarding summing up of the modern history of the Wa and of Lintner's own nuanced understanding of this intriguing people, including their strategic importance for Chinese policy.Having done research on Wa culture and history, I very much sympathize with Lintner's call for a better understanding and more communication with the Wa, including the ethnonationalist leaders that rule the Wa State. Drugs may have been important in the past, but we should not think of this as the only story. Today, Lintner says, the Wa State supplies China with rare earths. And as for the concerns of the Wa leaders, they lie in self-preservation and autonomy, to be “masters of their own destiny” (8) and to avoid the fate of ending up as someone else's proxy. Given these goals, their chief challenges are to delicately navigate relations both with the blood-soaked Burmese military regime and with the even more dangerous and increasingly economically and militarily powerful Chinese regime—on which the Wa depend for both trade and we
{"title":"The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance","authors":"Magnus Fiskesjö","doi":"10.1215/00219118-10773671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00219118-10773671","url":null,"abstract":"Bertil Lintner is a longtime observer of Burmese and Asian affairs and is the author of many books, notably on Asia's illicit drug trade as well as on North Korea and other topics. His books include Land of Jade: A Journey through Insurgent Burma (1990), in which he describes the journey he and his wife undertook in 1985–87, on foot, to visit all the insurgent forces active in Northern Burma (Myanmar)—including what was then the Communist Party of Burma's base camps in today's Wa State.The semiautonomous Wa State is located in the part of the Wa lands that ended up as part of Burma in the 1960s, when the newly independent Burma and Communist China cut the ancient Wa lands in two. In China, they came under direct Chinese rule and suffered Mao's Cultural Revolution; in Burma, the Chinese-supported and Chinese-supplied Communist Party of Burma moved in and were able to recruit Wa foot soldiers. But the Chinese-supported CPB made no headway toward a Communist revolution in Burma—what would have been the first attempt to realize what the current book's subtitle refers to as “China's Quest for Global Dominance.” This was “the plan that failed.”In 1989, while the world was busy with other things, the Burmese Communist leaders were ousted (and exiled to China) by their former foot soldiers, who now declared themselves to be the United Wa State Army. Lintner told the CPB story in another book1 and retells this fascinating story, with additional details from new research, in the present one. He is proud to have predicted, two years ahead of time, the mutiny of the Wa former foot soldiers.Over the years, Lintner has continued to publish innumerable news reports and analyses about the Wa, the UWSA, and other insurgents in Burma, not least in terms of their involvement in both opium and (later) the synthetic drug trade, as well as several books on China's expansive strategy in Burma, the Indian Ocean, and in its confrontations with India. This new book is a rewarding summing up of the modern history of the Wa and of Lintner's own nuanced understanding of this intriguing people, including their strategic importance for Chinese policy.Having done research on Wa culture and history, I very much sympathize with Lintner's call for a better understanding and more communication with the Wa, including the ethnonationalist leaders that rule the Wa State. Drugs may have been important in the past, but we should not think of this as the only story. Today, Lintner says, the Wa State supplies China with rare earths. And as for the concerns of the Wa leaders, they lie in self-preservation and autonomy, to be “masters of their own destiny” (8) and to avoid the fate of ending up as someone else's proxy. Given these goals, their chief challenges are to delicately navigate relations both with the blood-soaked Burmese military regime and with the even more dangerous and increasingly economically and militarily powerful Chinese regime—on which the Wa depend for both trade and we","PeriodicalId":47551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asian Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135022661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1215/00219118-10471931
Joseph S. Alter
{"title":"Editorial Foreword","authors":"Joseph S. Alter","doi":"10.1215/00219118-10471931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00219118-10471931","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asian Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136066364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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