Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma
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.
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Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma
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.
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Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma
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.
Wen-Chin Chang is Associate Research Fellow, Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, RCHSS, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She is the coeditor of Burmese Lives: Ordinary Life Stories under the Burmese Regime and Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia.
Table of Contents
IntroductionPart I. Migration History1. The Days in Burma: Zhang Dage2. Entangled Love: Ae Maew3. Pursuit of Ambition: Father and Son4. Islamic Transnationalism: Yunnanese MuslimsPart II. (Transnational) Trade5. Venturing into "Barbarous" Regions: Yunnanese Caravan Traders6. Transcending Gendered Geographies: Yunnanese Women Traders7. Circulations of the Jade Trade: The Duans and the PengsEpilogue: From Mules to VehiclesGlossaryReferencesIndex
What People are Saying About This
Mandy Sadan
In Wen-Chin Chang's discussion of caravan trading, gendered trading lives, and the jade trade she combines the life story approach with pertinent and interesting theoretical analysis. This is a valuable addition to our understanding of the diverse life histories of people of Chinese origin in Burma, in which the author brings both humanity and insight to her subject.
James C. Scott
The best way to convey the color and tumult of a borderland diaspora is with vivid personal narratives. In Beyond Borders, the chaotic postwar experience of wars, the drug trade, regime change, and economic turmoil along the Yunnan-Burma frontier bursts to life as an all-too-human experience. Far more rewarding than any six-foot shelf of statistics and demography. An achievement.
Jacques P. Leider
Wen-Chin Chang's Beyond Borders is a masterpiece. It is both deeply human and superbly academic. It plunges the readers into the complex life-worlds of Yunnanese Chinese migrating through Burma, Thailand, and beyond, yet combines meticulous ethnographic scholarship with a careful and rigorous self-reflective approach. Beyond the rich descriptions of individual destinies, this book is also a fascinating guide to the political history and the challenging environments on the Southeast Asian margins.