Where is the hole in the wall?

Note: The following is an excertpt from my Ph.D. thesis work. The feildwork was conducted in the bordertowns of Muse (In Myanmar) and Ruili (China's 'BRI' Bridgehead) between

2016-2018.

Hamidah, a young Rohingya woman, a little weary and frail from long travels, asked me in Burmese:

‘Mala^[1], where are you going, are you waiting to pass the hole in the wall?’ I found myself reflexively pointing to the lane with the militia path where the boys were facilitating the cross over (see cover image), saying ‘over there is the hole’. She said ‘I know, I cross it every week. I will go again today.’

One of the fence-shops on the Muse (Myanmar) side of the China Myanmar border fence. These fence shops are found alongside huge Blue Chinese notices warning Chinese citizens against crossing illegally, or gambling.

I had met her the previous day as she helped her friend, Mobina, sell betel nuts to Burmese customers across the fence in China. These shops^[2] sell cigarettes, small candies, cheroots (the filter-less Burmese cigars), Indian medication, and most importantly over the counter ‘information’, both political and business, particularly on market rates, informal job openings and gaps in the Ruili market in need of migrant workers to fill them up. These little corner shops are on-site recruitment and trade desks (see photo below) that make sense in the context of the borderland, and were important for Rohingyas in connecting with potential patrons who would help them obtain important documents to avert their otherwise ‘illegal’ status. Initially, it was through working here on the fence shops where Hamidah heard about opportunities for jade polishing in Ruili, which was especially appealing because so many other Rohingyas were already well established in the trade.

‘When it comes to working on Jiegao street (sex work) for a lady, of course it’s always faster, and we know you can earn more. Many desperate Burmese girls fall for that. Even then there is competition, they prefer young and unmarried. For us, we have to wait because the competition is high, and it goes to Burmese [Bama] first. Be careful when you cross sister, and just cross, it is so easy, within minutes, you are in China!’

I explain to her that, as a researcher from a reputed foreign university and as an Indian national, I am not allowed to cross; I would have to take the long route by car first from Muse to Lashio, then by flight to Mandalay, and then an international flight into China. We converse in a mix of Bengali, Hindi and Burmese, but I was struck by her use of Chinese with customers. I found myself marvelling at where we were (as noted in the official city’s maps, right behind the official customs gate) but also how she spoke, awe-struck at her language skills that she had to learn as she bricolages through multiple borders to get here. We shared a cup of tea as she told me of her crossings, first from Myanmar to Bangladesh, then across Thailand, passing through various middlemen (always men).

She explained that she is not ‘allowed to cross anywhere’ either, except, she has been doing so multiple times in the last 10 months. I asked why she would choose the ‘holes’ instead of the legal paths (she was already in possession of a fake border red card^[4]). She explained that it was not the small tax she had to pay every time she crossed legally, but the flexibility of the informal paths - in case of a Chinese police crackdown or a health emergency, she has slightly better (and cheaper) resources with the INGOs in Muse, than in Ruili.

Officially, she still resides in a sprawling camp in Cox Bazar, Bangladesh, where her one daughter and two sons still live. She says she must be in her late 20s, but is unsure. She has not received money for the last two years from her husband, who went to work on a Thai shrimp farming boat off the coast of Bangkok in 2013 (four years before I met her), and had not been heard from him at all in the previous two years even as she tried to trace him in Thailand. Because of that, she had to take up a family contact’s jade selling business in Ruili, embarking thus on her great exilic journeys from Cox Bazar, back into Rakhine state, travelling by land all the way from the eastern to the western side in Myanmar and then entering Thailand illegally by finding work in the household of a Shan family living in Mae Sot. She left that life over a dispute over wages, deciding to try her luck with the infamous but lucrative opportunities in the China gems frontiers in Ruili. Her children were entirely left to the primary care of her 50-year-old mother Mumtaz, who herself was working as a part time cook in a small eatery near the camp, while taking full time care of her grandchildren^[5]. While the common impression is that refugees do not have access to technology (many indeed do not, when governments and smugglers are able to confiscate their wares), Hamidah, like many other Rohingyas across the world, is able to keep in touch with them by cell-phones. She has several sim cards and two phones, which she is able to switch depending on the context and space, just as easily as she switches languages.

As we sipped tea by the little fence shop, she lamented that she had not seen her family in four years, but she showed me photographs of her children, and even video-called the shy but happy looking teenagers to introduce us on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. She told me she had worked in a ‘misti’ (sweets) shop in Cox Bazar where she learnt all her dairy recipes, which she now utilised when she worked part time at a tea house in Ruili, a favourite among the Kalar community. She informs me. ‘When you come to Ruili, I will cook the chana rasgulla^[6]. I am addicted to misti.’ ‘Too sweet for me’ I joked, to which she replied, ‘Sister, without a little misti, what is life?’

When Hamidah stepped ‘illegally’ through the wall in Muse (which the Burmese authorities have named the ‘city of the silver elephant’), she stepped into Ruili, China’s small but famous ‘oriental gem city’, or the ‘beautiful land’ literally translated in Chinese, and sometimes also nicknamed ‘Yunnan’s wild west’ - after generations of the jade trade, extracted largely out of the now government-controlled jade mining part of Kachin state, Hpakant. Jade, gems and timber were the town's trademarks until the Chinese state. No wonder, the infamous ‘Wild Man’ was the city’s first discotheque in the 1990s in what was then perhaps the PRC’s only ‘night town.’ (Time 1997)

Ruili and Jiegao, are small but spectacular border trading towns in the Shan hills with yearlong pleasant weather (Rui-li means ‘the sunny land’ in the Shan language). In the winter months, when the rest of Northern Myanmar and Yunnan is chilly, a day in Ruili is often steeped in warm sunlight, a destination perfect not only in its weather conditions, but in its geo-strategic and economic position as a border city attracting migrants and concentrated resource frontiers as well. Although many in more central parts of Yunnan like Kunming have heard of or know where the city is, they are still unfamiliar with what it represents. Internal tourists in China come only as far as the spring cities of Kunming and Dali. Beyond that, up until the 1990s, this was more or less terra incognita for tourists, the hills, the unimagined, the land of the ethnic yi (夷 loosely, barbarians or outsiders) in the eyes of a majority of Han inland tourists. The old discotheque (perhaps aptly but not ironically) named ‘Wild Man’, since dismantled, is still alive in the memory of Ruili’s people, encapsulating the town’s early border spirit. But its economic prowess just beyond the border is clear. The economic disparity between China and Myanmar became apparent in the 1990s after Deng’s policies boosted China’s rise. As China’s economy boomed, so did casinos and night lights across Ruili.

In the last few decades, a rising tourism frontier has been deliberately built up by China, invested in a development with a goal of ‘border development’ and for showcasing ethnic minority diversity (Yang et al. 2008). Today, most of the tourists who venture into Ruili are aware of what they seek to find and bargain for, namely the jade (Fei Cui 翡翠), the precious Burmese timber woods (aged Burmese teak, rosewood, mahogany etc.), a few bets in the casinos, a round on Muse’s cheap golf course on the Burmese side, and more recently (as we will find out in the next chapter), the spectacle of ethnic conflict and bombings on the Burmese side^[1].

While the tourists come to see the cities, ninety five percent of those who cross the border are Burmese migrant workers. The rest are Chinese traders, and ethnic or faith-based crossers, and some local development workers. Although the population of Ruili is small (201,872 people, 42% of them ethnic minorities in 2019) compared to many other Chinese cities, Qian and Tang (2019) note:

‘the city is positioned by the national, provincial and local states as a key nodal point in the rapidly expanding networks of socio-economic connections involving China, Myanmar and other South/ South-east Asian countries. This has resulted in the transnationalisation of the urban strategies of Ruili.’

China’s babao here was a microcosm to its larger ‘peaceful rise’ posturing in 1999. In the South West of China which borders South East Asia, that diplomatic posturing materialised as ‘Go Out’ (出去陳詞 or ‘走出去’战略 ) strategy. This is a strategy designed to: ^[2]

‘encourage and actively support Chinese companies with comparative advantages to develop various forms overseas based on the principles of equality and mutual benefit, practical results, diverse forms, and common development to create mutually beneficial economic cooperation.’

Yunnan fell under the China Western Development strategy (西部大开发) proposed in 1999 by general secretary Jiang Zemin. The goal was for economic development in the West of China to take off like it had in the East of China with the opening of seaports and SEZs in Shenzhen and Tianjin. Closer to Myanmar, China’s Western Development strategy saw Yunnan as a connective economic bridgehead to Southeast Asia (Su 2016), a way into the Indian Ocean through the Myanmar side of the Bay of Bengal, with roadways running all the way up to Kunming. This was combined with places for establishing a Southwestern refinery base in the province to receive and process the oil from the Sino-Burmese pipelines easily, efficiently and quickly (Sarma and Reinert 2013).

The policy would open a direct route into Myanmar's natural resources. China’s flagship project here in the 2000’s was the Sino-Burmese Oil and Gas pipelines. This project was designed to ship crude oil and hydrocarbons from the Indian Ocean to China from the port of Kyaukphyu, crossing the border at Ruili, to Kunming; over a billion US dollars-worth of Chinese money was pledged to the oil pipeline alone with more for the natural gas pipeline. As expected, this new resource frontier around oil opened new prospective frontiers, and accompanying investments in infrastructure took over the region - roads, highways and railroads - to transport commodities into the Chinese market. This region was on China’s mind even before this entire infrastructure metamorphosed as the BRI in the last decade.

Figure 4.11 Latest photo of the fence in Ruili in 2019. The poster shows ASSK and Xi’s commitment to the CMEC and amplifies the mutual economic importance and benefits to both economies with the timely completion of China’s BRI projects in Myanmar, as people cross the border to go about business as usual. Source: Nick Aspinwall for SupChina, September 2019.

Ruili’s frontier ‘marketplace’ epitomises the nodal connections that process and market various resource frontiers extracted out of neighbouring Myanmar, many of which have evolved since the 1990s. At the same time, these connections define the making of this border as a ‘dirty’ illicit border, therefore needing redevelopment and refurbishment given its geostrategic location.

This following factual timeline of the development of Ruili as a border town explains this. In 1989, Ruili first came to national attention when 75-80% of all of China’s HIV cases were recorded in the city (ributed to rampant drug use). In the late 1980s, the Sino-Burmese borderlands witnessed a relative pacification. Bilateral trade resumed. The Chinese border town of Ruili soon transformed into the bustling heart of an increasingly lucrative trade of both legal and illegal Chinese and Burmese commodities. Whilst thousands of Chinese fortune-seekers began to flock southwards around the Burmese borders, Burmese traders who had, till then, been based in Myanmar’s urban trading centres such as Yangon, Mandalay, and Taunggyi, started to venture northwards toward Ruili. The town soon became the main entry point into China for all Burmese migrants (though there were also the towns of Zhangfeng (Longchuan), Mangshi (Luxi) and Wanding (Wanting), as well as other places further away along the ‘Burma Road’ towards Kunming). Burmese Muslim traders are not the strongest competitors to the Chinese, Kachin, and Shan traders.

By the early 1990s, the city received a face lift out of its ceasefire capitalist image (Woods 2011), when the China’s state council approved Jiegao as a border trade zone integrated with special customs protocol exemptions (such vehicles and goods coming in and out of Myanmar require no customs clearance) and exempted/relaxed customs tariffs and import-related taxes. By the late 1990s, both China and Myanmar governments signed the Border Areas Management and Cooperation treaty to provide special rights and make it easier for border residents to cross legally for commercial, religious and cultural activities without the need for visas, so long as they did so through legal checkpoints (a step commemorated today as the ‘brotherhood’ moment in the modern history of this border). With more and more policies in China to support ‘minority’ tourism, Han Chinese developers rushed to take advantage of tax breaks to build so many leisure stops, KTVs, parlours, brothels and casinos. Of course, as the casino boom got bolder, the local officials had to retaliate in keeping with the PRCs cleaner capitalism with Chinese characteristics values; between 2005-2010, more than 150 casinos were shut down as crackdowns on gambling, and cuts to the casinos' access to Internet networks, electricity and bank services intensified. There was even an official exchange of delegates from China to assist doing the same on the Myanmar side in 2011. An insistence on raw resources also gave the town a bad name, thus in 2010, China opened up to the big picture possibilities in Myanmar, and named the city as one of the ‘Major Pilot Development and Opening-up Zones’(along with Dongxing of Guangxi, Kashgar of Xinjiang, and Manzhouli of Inner Mongolia). The government enacted preferential policies and measures to support the development and opening up of Ruili and other border cities on the list. (Su And Cai 2019, Yang et. al. 2008, Qiang and Tang 2019, Song 2020.)

Ruili’s image has undergone scrutiny. In 1999, for example, Time Magazine named Ruili ‘the only real night town in the People's Republic of China’, elaborating, ‘Ruili is China's great border town, and what a border it is: between new and old, controlled and unrestrained, a tidy but tawdry town China considers both a dirty little secret--and also a promising new tourist destination.’ (Spaeth 1999). Today, the manufacturing, refurbishing, urbanising drive to replace that casino-heavy, back of beyond drugs and HIV infected reputation is seen as vital for the BRIs success in Myanmar^[3].

A masterplan was quickly drawn up^[4], and Ruili city started to grow fast, with a range of new facilities, like a new airport, more jade markets and trade centres, and a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). A customs-free rule was set out in the ‘master plan’ - ‘inside the border, outside the customs’ (境内，关外) page 1221 (Master Plan 2013), under which, Ruili and adjoining Jiegao would be considered to be outside the jurisdiction of Chinese customs, and goods traded there would enjoy tariff exemption or export rebate.

The impetus now was for the money and labour to be restricted to Ruili and Dehong (the Autonomous Prefecture to which Ruili belongs) at large, in order to avoid the spill over of Burmese migrants going to other cities or taking up Chinese jobs for cheaper wages. For this, an integrated border control service was developed in 2013, called the Centre for Foreign Migration Service, an amalgamated service of three departments (Ruili Exit–Entry Inspection, Ruili Police Department, Ruili Bureau of Human Resources, training, and translation); by 2014, documentation of all migrant workers began in full flourish, introducing biometric data identification, fingerprint and data identification.

As of 2020, Ruili finds itself central to the Belt and Road plans, vital to access resources in Myanmar. The goal of these plans to create a set of major infrastructures, SEZs with the bonus (for the Chinese government) of being able to turn an obviously illicit, back of beyond border town into a revitalised, industrial and manufacturing ‘made in Dehong’ based border city, serving as China’s bridgehead into South East Asia - a resource frontier as a city in its own right. With the opening of petty trade which utilises a steady supply of cheap Burmese migrant labour to work China’s manufacturing revolution sealed the deal, especially with the rest of the world-imposed trade embargos on the SLORC, the state government of Burma at the time.

Su and Cai (2019) recognise how a policy of ‘compromise’ has come to dictate Chinese border regulation to make sure Burmese migrants, like Hamidah, are contained, and kept perpetually precarious. They note,

‘Many have lived in Ruili for more than ten years without being detained or deported, but neither have they been granted permanent residency or Chinese citizenship, which means that they cannot become immigrants in China.’

In Ruili’s border space, migrant bodies are often subject to many forms of securitisation, deportation and surveillance, apart from being ‘fixed’ to only certain parts of Dehong. Su and Cai note that the city has also ‘undergone a deliberate process of economic transformation. In the past, economic development in Ruili relied on the import of raw materials... and the processing of these materials into furnishings and accessories for the Chinese market.’ However, despite such attempted diversification from a resource based to market / manufacturing-based economy, like Muse, Ruili too is highly conscious of itself as a border marketplace for the resources /migrant workers from Burma, where old habits would die slowly, and hard, if at all. The remnants of the old resource frontiers, where the ethnic Shans, Kachins, Burmese Kalar and Rohingyas communities working in timber, teak, lumber, rosewood, jade and gems primarily; and migrant workers from the Delta and Myanmar at large, working in manufacturing and agri-business plantations, despite all efforts to destroy them, are still very much in place.

Raw resources and selected flows of people coming from Myanmar have been the historical and contemporary trajectory of this complex interrelationship. The largest jade market in the world is right here, neatly compartmentalised into various jade markets.^[5] Huge chunks of timber logged from the Kachin and Shan hills lay strewn along the shops of Ruili. Chinese developer-built casinos to attract tourists seem like they are everywhere. Gem markets flourish despite official policies to reduce them. A majority of raw goods go from Myanmar to China through here, and Chinese-finished products come from China to Myanmar. One prime example is the pervasive and dynamic survivability of the gems (primarily jade) economy. Even though a lot of the ills of the jade industry are well known and documented, the jade frontiers keep reinventing its permanent prospects. Its Burmese conduits are the boys we met at Muse. Møller (2019) poignantly surmises, how the border serves as a ‘moral filter’ whereby, ‘morally embarrassing facts and conditions related to the extraction and trade of jade in Kachin State were almost invariably erased from biography of the jade stones, once they had passed through the Chinese borders.’ The latest iteration of this is the introduction of live streaming to the Yangyanghao Taobao Raw Jade Trade Market in Ruili. (Xu 2019) By nightfall, a buzz of Chinese buyers bid on jade stones, peering through cell phone cameras and asking their proxies for a description of the feel of the stone. While the dusty grey rocks can now be scrutinized and assessed in exacting detail by buyers across China, the fact that hundreds of jade miners were lost in the floods in 2017, and then most recently again in 2020 is, unsurprisingly, never a part of the stone’s ‘value’ or allure (even though such news is circulated widely on the Chinese social media WeChat.)

The layers of the resource frontiers and this evolving repositioning of the city is reflected in the stories of its buildings. Use the dingy one lane red light district lined with 3 to 4 story buildings as a microcosm of all that the town is. On the bottom floor of these shop houses, teak and jade dealers have establishments with stacks of cut-down timber from Kachin state (Figure 4.12). Some of these timber shops are adjoined with small jade corners - cutters, drafters, and fine liners arranging massive rocks into shiny polished scores of small jade pieces. The second floors are mostly residential complexes for Burmese migrant workers in dormitory type dwellings. The same street moonlights as Ruili’s red-light district by night. The third-floor windows of these shophouses often have the identifying pink lantern hanging at night. Now posters and announcements with Xi Jinping and the BRI are pasted all over the same buildings, promoting Ruili as the BRI frontier’s bridgehead.

Figure 4.13 Jade and timber raw materials, and finished products, both on the Ruili market street. Source: Author, Ruili, China, 2018.

Today, agribusinesses and infrastructures have been folded into bigger, some call ‘gigantic’ ‘BRI’’ dreams in the region, and Muse connects to BRI ambitions^[6]. In Muse, the oil pipeline carrying oil from the Bay of Bengal was finished in 2014, crossing the border and continuing to Kunming. A requisite range of Chinese resource projects are planted into this territory with aspirations to bring resources from Myanmar to China. Rapid urban hyper building in Ruili has accompanied this, like in other Chinese cities finding themselves to be new frontier cities for energy and resource extraction. Woodworth (2019: 157) notes, ‘the gigantic might be seen, on the one hand, to reflect political impulses toward control of resource‐abundant borderlands, while, on the other, paradoxically throwing fuel on the fires of speculative bonanzas.’ A sheet of urban development enfolds the city, with empty buildings waiting to house an expected ‘bridgehead’ connectivity city.

Hamidah, after she and others like her, step into through the wall in Muse, plays a small part in this story by heading straight to the first floor shophouse in Jiegao’s red light area where she finds works part time as a gem polisher with a Chinese Muslim boss, earning 30 yuan a day (about seven times less than a Chinese worker). She also finds part time work in one of the Kalar tea stalls that primarily serves the town’s largely itinerant, but some settled, Rohingya community, who themselves have come here after making several dangerous and circuitous journeys from Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh, into Thailand, through Myanmar’s Karen and Shan states before finally ending here on the China border. On break days, when she is not out making tea in the Kalar part of town, Hamidah joins a gang of other Rohingya women (sometimes accompanied by children) to ‘beg’ on the streets of Ruili. Doing this, she earns about 100 yuan a day, a more profitable endeavour than gem polishing albeit an unstable means for a daily livelihood. Systematic begging is rampant in Ruili - young mothers with children surround me and my students when we arrive in Ruili the first day in 2017. Over time, I learn that begging is tolerated on some days, and not on others. For example, once a month, or sometimes, more frequently, Chinese SWAT teams arrive very visibly, and spectacularly drive overstaying migrants (with children) and Rohingyas out to the deportation facilities or sometimes even straight to jail. Such a commotion is depicted in Chapter 5.

Unlike Hamidah, who is a Rohingya woman, Ruili’s other more prosperous Muslims are a mixture of Burmese Kalar and the aforementioned local Panthay (Hui) Muslims. Both groups (by and large Sunni) have forged peaceful and convivial networks of trade and community for generations, establishing themselves as successful businesses conduits in the gems, jade, groceries and textile shops, over time integrating business shrewdness, inside trade knowledge, brokering and networking expertise into a flourishing cross border community. Many of the former, who were forcefully ousted out of Burma after the ‘Burmanization’ campaigns in 1948 as noted by Egreteau, have been ‘highly mobile, they frequently master several languages and use their own ethnicity-based networks for communication, trade, knowledge exchange and circulation.’ In Ruili, they prefer to connect via ethno-religious solidarities with men like U Manthar and other Kalars on the China side, turning the borderscape into a safe space for settlement and cross border trade^[7]. The same sort of ethnic networks works for other communities too, such as faith-based affinity networks for Kachins (Ho 2018), Lahus and Shan. As Qiang and Tang (2019) write, ‘in Ruili, the outlook of venturing beyond the border to enhance the urban economy draws from a rich history of grassroots cross-border relations based on ethnic ties’. What is unique in Ruili is the conspicuous presence of a vibrant Muslim community, absent from other border towns (Cangyuan, Nancan, Mengla, Lancang, Luakkai etc.) where cross-border links are mostly dominated by Shan, Wa, Kokang and Kachin. The other famous part of town is the Burmese migrant worker informal living colony.

But Hamidah, as a Rohingya stateless, landless woman and illicit migrant in Ruili, is not integrated with the other more established Muslim communities, and, therefore, lacks the means to bribe and navigate through the machinery of safe, flexible travel. She accepts the meagre wage, like many of the other women she knows, as a burden of her double illegality, one for being a stateless Rohingya with a fake Burmese nationality card, and second, for illegally passing over through the hole in the wall in Muse after payments to the boys of frontier expediency, without the paper that every other local had in this region - the bianminzheng or ‘border people ID’. There are others double refugees like herself, who are not Rohingya, but ethnic Kachin, who are forced to cross illicitly in times of conflict, and who have found a little bit of work in various low skilled positions in the supply chains of the gems industry. Often, they end up in jail after being detained for the lack of documents. Still, for those like Hamidah, crossing into the China side allows some ephemeral sanctuary and opportunities to work and support themselves; if the laws are dodged carefully enough, they may survive within the border’s resources, surviving within because it is a grey area with murky rules.

Scholars who have worked on the China-Myanmar border see the China border space as a ‘safe sanctuary’, or a border regime, based not on spectacular militarisation and deportation, but as a zone of ‘compromise.’ Hamidah, and others like her, have described their experiences as ‘suspected till caught’, ‘fixed till deported’, an everyday game of gaining a livelihood and survival. This delicate balance of labour exploitation and border control mechanism is summed up by Su and Cai (2019), as ‘a state of compromise’, whereby:

‘border control turns border cities into spaces of compromise, a term borrowed from Gramsci (1971), to describe a politico-economic condition where Burmese migrants can live and work but must endure economic exploitation, spatial confinement, and social discrimination. In return for the Chinese state allowing Burmese migrants flexible border crossings for employment and decent living conditions, these migrants comply with China’s border regime in mobility control and economic exploitation.’ (Su and Cai 2019)‘

It is less a compromise, and more a utilization of using the liminality and persecution of the border as an excuse to extract. For Hamidah and the hundreds of others like her, this may be interpreted as what has been otherwise understood as living shadow lives, as ‘disposable labour’ and invisible, ‘fixed’ in certain kinds of spaces.

^[1] I focus more on this in the first half of my doctoral thesis.

^[2] Introduced in 1999, and incorporated into the 十五计划 (Tenth 5 year plan.)

^[3] As such, a ‘make in Dehong’ initiative by the local government from 2015 to encourage companies to invest in factories in Ruili to produce value added goods for the Southeast Asian Market. On this drive, two big companies - the Yinxiang Motor from Chongqing and Beijing Automobile from Beijing were invited to invest in Ruili, both of which at the time of writing, are the highest legal employers of Burmese migrants who had to be secured and regulated.

^[4] See Master Plan of the Experimental Zone, approved by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2013.

^[5] In my theiss, I talk about the extraction of jade from Hpakant (the biggest and most dangerous jade mines in the world.

^[6] New set of BRI infrastructures: Myitkyina Economic Development Zone (Kachin State, Myanmar, 100 km from the Sino-Myanmar border), developed by Yunnan Tengchong Heng Hong Investment Company Unlimited, Urban infrastructure development in the county level city of Tengchong (China, 100 km from the Sino-Myanmar border opposite Myitkyina): new infrastructures at both sides of the Sino-Myanmar border, respectively, in Zhongfeng/Mai Ja Yang; Nabang/Laiza, Houqiao/Pangwa, Diantan/Kambaiti.

^[7] For a discussion on the Muslim Kalar community’s association with border/jade trade as brokers and middlemen, and place making in the borderworlds around Ruili, Yunnan, see Egreteau, 2017, who states that apart from their obvious networks in jade business and the fact that they are ‘useful outsiders’, they also find the city scape of Yunnan more tolerant for Muslims than other places in Myanmar. He writes: “This borderworld offers them a site where they can safely prosper,” (p 190); “their presence as intermediaries and their brokerage skills are much needed and hardly replaceable.” (p 191); “In comparison to what they can expect inside contemporary Myanmar, they have found in Yunnan their ‘little paradise’.) (p 201).

^[1] Amma Ma La ာေူေ is my Burmese name.

^[2] From the China side, these shops can be seen right next to official Chinese notices against illegal crossings. (See Figure 4.10)

^[3] More on bricolage (adapted from the sociologist Levi Strauss’s’ (1962) ideas from ‘The Savage Mind’) as a conceptual way to think of mobility across borders in Chapter 6.

^[4] These red cards are issued by the Burmese Immigration and National Registration Bureau and name the holder and are called Myanmar-China border passes. ‘缅甸中国边界通行证’

^[5] For a Marxist feminist critique on the relationship between migrant labour, carework and Rohingya women’s embodied displacement and appropriation in cities in the US and Malaysia, see Frydenlund (2020) dissertation ‘Support from the South: How Refugee Labor Reproduces Cities.’

^[6] A curdled milk sweet dipped in sugar syrup.