The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance

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 weaponry.Lintner describes these relations in great detail: the spillover of the Chinese civil war, of World War II, the troubled history of the CPB, and the subsequent “Growth of the UWSA” (chapter 4) and its entanglements with narcotics, complicated further by the Chinese government's fleeting alliances with drugmakers (chapter 5).Lintner's main argument about China's role is that while the Chinese regime may have abandoned its former quest to impose the Communist model around the world, the original underlying strategy of using Burma as a springboard to global dominance actually remains the same. It finds new life in “The Plan That Might Succeed” (chapter 6): today's China mainly exports consumer goods but is also busy securing trade dependencies and installing infrastructure that can give access to natural resources beyond its borders. The Wa State, because of its status as a buffer pacifying the “economic corridor” from China to the Indian Ocean through Burma, has come to represent a site of certain strategic importance in China's renewed quest. And by way of its economic dominance (even the currency of the Wa State is Chinese, not Burmese money), China gains leverage on Burma as a whole.Here, I have long felt there is room for comparison with Russia's insidious, engineered “frozen conflicts,” meant to paralyze and subdue its “near abroad.” As Lintner discusses, China's government inserts itself into the Burmese domestic peace process (now suspended, of course), but not necessarily to achieve the lasting, just peace that many Burmese are hoping for. Instead, it is simply to secure a stable environment for its own investments and infrastructure “corridors.”It is true that China's means of influence are sometimes less crude, such as in the COVID vaccinations that China recently offered to the Wa State in Burma, as Lintner points out. But China also interferes more crudely in Burma, even to defend its new dams on Burma's rivers (so they can provide electricity for China!). But its outward framing is often phrased as “friendship” and is conceived as more long-term, “not just for this year, or next year,” as Lintner puts it in an excellent half-hour NIAS podcast interview about his research.2Exploited as a key target of Chinese policy, the Wa need our sympathy and understanding. Lintner's book is a major contribution, dispelling myths and laying out the facts about the geopolitical challenges faced by the Wa. The key takeaway message is: “The Wa deserve a better future.”