Note: The following text is a short excerpt from my thesis chapter. It explores the border worlds of war, resource extraction, and refugee dynamics during a time of intense conflict and violence. Please get in touch to read the full chapter.

In 2017, a journalist writing about Ruili and Muse as a gateway to China speculated, ‘If everything goes according to plans, it may not be too long before bustling expressways, bullet trains and energy pipelines radiating from Kunming form a vast network of interconnected cities and towns’ (Aneja, 2017.) Curiously, the journalist did not mention what was happening on the Myanmar side at the same time, certainly the most obvious thing that anyone standing in the border between 2016-2018 would have encountered. Conflict. Sometimes full blown but incessantly present at low scale. At its core - a spectacle. By the winter of 2016, Muse was under attack.

The perpetrators, the newly formed, self-titled ‘Northern Alliance’ (NA), viciously and violently opposed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) process which was originally conceived in 2013 by Thein Sein’s ‘civilian’ government, and later propelled after ASSK’s victory in 2016. Only seven of the fifteen EAOs invited by the newly transitioning Burmese civilian government ended up signing the ceasefire. The NA was (and is) composed of 4 EAOs; the Arakan Army (AA), the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), and the Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) all operating with, and under the general structure and leadership of, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), all vehemently opposed to the terms of the ceasefire (see Thawnghmung 2017 for an account of the reasons). They targeted and attacked strategic border locations, achieving the prize of Muse, with its approximate population of 165,000 by the winter of 2016. Fighting intensified in December when the Myanmar military made heavy use of airstrikes and artillery against NA positions. By then, Muse was no longer just a fragile, carefully managed, illicitly mobile and flexible border boom town with high (BRI) hopes and big dreams for frontier capitalism. It was an active battleground precisely for those characteristics; it was now a target, a spectacular site for war.

On the face of it, war is, or should be, terrifying.

Speaking on the phone in late 2016, U Manthar described his hopes for Muse and his own prospects declining quickly. ‘Perhaps it’s time to move to another border town.’

Just that month, fighting in Muse Township claimed 16 lives within the town, internally displaced more than 2,000 people, killed at least 160 people overall along the border, and sent thousands more fleeing across the border to China (Associated Foreign Press 2017). I was there with a research team of 12 graduate students from Kunming’s Yunnan Normal University’s geography department. Despite both their proximity as Yunnan residents and my extensive travels in the region, none of us had ever seen anything like this before.

One sunny winter morning about 15 km northeast from Muse along the border, the university team and I were standing together in Wanding, usually a well-known tourist spot for tourists coming to see the China section of the World War 2 era ‘Burma Road’ and the museum dedicated to it. As I watched, van after van of Chinese tourists pulled into the tourist border gate, disgorging their passengers who took up positions on the other side of the checkpoint. I politely asked one of the tourists why they were here in the middle of a working weekday. Xiao Han, a contractor of jade in the neighbouring city of Mangshi said:

kàn dàzhàn a, hǎo kǒngbù! 看大战啊， 好恐怖！[ We came to see the war. So scary!]’ and offered to let me borrow his pair of Porro Prism binoculars. He appeared high on adrenaline and excited, and not a bit scared, perhaps in full knowledge of the presence of the Chinese protective state security agencies within plain sight. He had heard that one could glimpse Burmese tanks and planes along the border, so he bought his entire family from the inland city of Yingjiang to witness the spectacle of war from the China border^[1].

Figure 5.1 Still from a video of a mortar shelling in Kachin State. Source: Author from the China border in Dec 2016

Figure 5.2 Chinese tourists watching the war from Wanding. Source: Author, December 2016

Equipped with brand-new binoculars (at least one with night vision) and phone cameras (See Figure 5.2) the assembled tourists started to point at the frightened people crossing over to China. Those who crossed over were strictly instructed by the guards to not open their mouths or speak to journalists, but they too stopped to watch themselves being watched, appearing tired, yet bemused at the Chinese citizens gazing at them.

The colourful winter clothes of the Chinese tourists were a stark contrast to the dishevelled and faded look of the clothing on the tired and weary crossers, a sign that they fled in a hurry. Many of them had travelled long distances afoot, often taking circuitous routes as needed to avoid the conflict. Once they crossed over the border, they would be separated into two groups, those with their red or blue cards, and those without documents. Each group was assembled into lines by the Chinese police and escorted to dedicated camps that were off-limits to civilians and reporters (we will hear more on this in 5.2.4). Xiao Han (the jade contractor who had loaned me his binoculars), his entourage, tens of Chinese tourists, and my student companions watched as people walked in a long line, heads down, periodically disciplined by Chinese SWAT teams and local Jingpo police teams. Phones were confiscated (although some succeeded in keeping extra phones with Chinese sim cards among their things). From interviews, I learned that Chinese teams were peopled by mostly Jingpo^[2] staff, so that communications could be in local Kachin dialect and a pretence of ethnic care could be maintained. Although I did not see him there at the time, one of the crossers was U Seng, a migrant worker in Ruili, husband of Ma La Seng, a banana farmer and a close contact with whom I had spent time on the Kachin border. I knew the family well. U Seng was one of the people who managed to keep a cell phone (we will hear more from him from inside the camp in below).

China’s refugee policies are opaque and unclear (I explore more below). Unlike the tourists, who, by their own accounts, made the trip with their families for war gazing, the graduate students with me had been incredulous that there were any refugees who crossed the China border in a regular fashion at all. This was not taught in their border geography class, even though, during the break of the 2011 ceasefire, mortars and bombs reached the China border. Although going into the camps was off limits, one could glimpse their blue roofed buildings from the road, further surprising the students. On our way to the border at Wanding, we passed through Dàlǐ 大理, a scenic lakeside town an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of the border, whose residents, when asked, said they had not even heard of refugees. One of the graduate students is originally from Dali, remarked upon seeing the refugees, ‘I have lived in Dali (only 100 km away) all my life, and I never knew this was so close.’

As we stood near the border gate where this theatre of war unfolded, Xiao Han watched intently. I was told that tourists like to time their visits to the Burma Road with ‘war season.’ Xiao Han showed me all the feeds he was getting on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat, a flood of online material. There were even informal guided maps on Weibo comments, telling social media users where the next bombing might be, and where the next ‘nànmín难民 (refugee) ‘sightings’ could be observed. Xiao Han’s party excitedly watched bomb explosions and refugees scrambling for shelter just across the border.

Unlike other well researched and documented borderlands^[3], the China border provides no accessibility to foreign media and development organizations to see refugees. Many who tried to cover the war, or crossed illegally to do so, were reportedly arrested. Such as it is, the content of media from these regions is entirely for China’s purpose, which is why Chinese WeChat services have tens of dedicated services showcasing war and conflict news in lurid detail.

This was an example of the Chinese using the conflict to create an exotified tourism spectacle that reinforces the commodification of wilderness borders against modernity. This also is in addition to the same Chinese gaze of minorities that we explored in Chapter 4. There I met Chang Li, the tour guide, his tour groups, and the tens of other tour groups who came to witness the spectacle of war by exotic others, much like the ‘war tourists’ in this group. It seemed ironic to me that Xiao Han, a man who built his wealth on jade money wrought out of the Hpakant mines in Kachin state^[4], could watch Kachin refugees from the IDP camps, many of whom worked on the jade mining frontiers as pickers and wage labourers, come through the border and have no difficulty seeing himself as completely divorced from it.

^[1] Of course, this is not the first time that the exotic ‘minority’ has been spectacularized in this border, but is in fact in line with the historical exoticization of the xiao shu minzu (小數民族) body, as we saw in the previous chapter.

^[2] ‘Jingpo,’ as we saw in Chapter 4, is the legal term in China for the Kachins as one of the 55 recognized Chinese ethnic minorities.

^[3] For example, the Thai-Myanmar border has the city of Maesot. This has a bustling town of serious and itinerant ‘development stint’ workers and academics, particularly from Western countries, Australia and to some degree Singapore. The draw of Maesot is that it is the site of another ethnic struggle against the Burmese government involving the Karen National Union.

^[4] Located in Kachin 100 km west of Myitkyina and 154 km from the nearest China border, Hpakant (ဖားကန့်,) is infamous because it is one of the most dangerous places of jade mining anywhere in the world (Nang and Paddock 2020). The word ‘Hpakant’ in Shan means ‘the falling of rocks,’ ironically suggestive of the crumbliness of its geography. It is also one of the only places the most preferred, exclusive and expensive ‘imperial green jade’ is sourced (Chang 2006), supplying about 70% of the world’s jade (Egreteau 2011). Thousands of poor workers (who have not had opportunities elsewhere due to belated industrialisation in Myanmar or are displaced from their farmlands) end up in the dangerous mines in hopes for a good life (as we heard Gum Sha say in the beginning of this thesis). Many of the men in IDP camps were said to be missing from the camps because they went to work as pickers and miners in Hpakant or as migrant workers in China. In Chapter 0, we will hear more about the KIA’s involvement in these mines, many of which were conceded to the Burmese government after the 1992 ceasefire, when large scale mining operations began, accompanied by the intensification of crony capitalism and massive abuse of human labour (Global Witness 2015, Woods 2011). Small importers like Xiao Han have been involved in this business since before the ceasefire, but truly began to make big money after the extractive economy moved from the KIA to government-linked industrial-scale mining.