Human Stories From Myanmar's Cold War Frontier

The Irrawaddy

Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands: Untold Stories of Overland Chinese Migrants During the Cold War 

by Wen-Chin Chang, Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London, 2025, US$51.78

It is not often a study of cross-border relations between two countries focuses on the life stories of individuals living in a conflict-ridden frontier area, but “Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands” is one such rare exception. Wen-Chin Chang, a research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, follows the fate of Yunnanese migrants who were involved in clandestine cross-border trade—some who sought traditional Chinese education in Burma (Myanmar) when that was not possible in Communist-ruled China, some who fought alongside the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), and others who served as agents for Taiwan’s secret services throughout the Cold War.

According to Chang: “Having fled persecution in China, Yunnanese migrants who arrived in Burma after 1949 predominantly supported the Chinese Nationalists”—and many sent their children to Chinese schools in Myitkyina, Kachin State, before those were turned into Burmese schools by the government in Rangoon (Yangon). One of the pupils, whose fate is well documented in Chang’s book, was a man he calls “Yang dage” (“elder brother Yang”). The son of Yang Yijun, the principal of the town’s Chinese school, he was born in Myitkyina in 1954, and, at the age of 17, was sent for further education in Taiwan, where some of his siblings already lived. Chang interviewed Yang dage in Taipei, where he still lived and vividly remembers his childhood in Myitkyina. Principal Yang, who was born in 1915, had actually been a high-ranking officer in the Nationalist army in China during World War II and later escaped to Burma where, in addition to being an educator, he served as an intelligence agent for the Republic of China (Taiwan).

In 1978, Principal Yang was abducted from his home in Myitkyina, and so was the principal of the Chinese school in Bhamo, who had also served with the Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang (KMT). They were sent across the border to China, where they later died in prison in Kunming. Chang writes that a relative went to see Kachin rebels on the border with China after Principal Yang had been kidnapped, and “an officer brought him to a warehouse full of arms… the officer said they had been provided by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] in exchange for seizing Principal Yang and simply told him to go home.” Interestingly, that is also what I heard when I was in areas controlled by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) for 10 months in 1986. A KIA officer told me that the Chinese had given them the names of two former KMT officers—the other must have been the Bhamo Principal—and that they felt bad about it. But promises of guns weighed heavier than any guilt for abducting the principals of two schools in Kachin State. Principal Yang died in 1987 and much later, when it became possible to travel between China and Taiwan, relatives brought the urn with his ashes to Taiwan.

Chang states that the KMT “used Myitkyina as a vital node for its espionage network” and has a fascinating account of how it operated. Taiwan’s Intelligence Bureau oversaw the Myitkyina-based espionage network as well as the military operations of the KMT guerrilla forces that were active in Burma’s Shan State. They worked together primarily with Li Wenhuan’s 3rd KMT, which was based at Tam Ngob across the border in Thailand. Another KMT unit led by Ma Junguo “moved back and forth between the Wa Hills in the Shan State of Burma and northern Thailand to carry out missions entrusted to it as well as trade in drugs… Yunnanese youths, promised a chance to go to Taiwan for further education, were a major part of his force. It was a false undertaking, and many of them died while carrying out incursions into the frontiers of Yunnan. Ma also commanded a group of KMT troops who were active along the border in northern Laos. After the CPB took over the Wa Hills in the early 1970s, KMT troops and intelligence agents “entrenched in this area had to abandon their bases. Since then, intelligence bases were primarily deployed in major cities and towns in Shan and Kachin State, but not in CPB-occupied areas.”

And then there were the Communists. According to Chang, “between the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 3,000 to 4,000 Chinese went to Burma to join the CPB… in addition the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China dispatched ‘military advisory teams’ and two infantry companies, totaling nearly 300 in all, to the CPB in 1968.” More than a thousand of the irregulars “were educated youths from urban areas. Most of them embarked on this military journey to escape because they were deemed to belong to one of the five “disgraced classes… landlords, rich farmers, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists. People in these categories were considered enemies of the people.” That is an interesting observation, but those claims should not be taken at face value. In testimonies in China today, it seems that everyone was a victim during the Cultural Revolution and no one wants to admit that he or she belonged to the Red Guards. It is beyond doubt that the vast majority of the Chinese “volunteers” who went to fight alongside the CPB were Red Guards, and they went to Burma because they were sent there by the PLA. They did not join the CPB’s army to escape persecution at home.

Most of the Red Guard “volunteers” were withdrawn when the pragmatist Deng Xiaoping rose to power in the late 1970s and China no longer sought to export revolution. But some of those “volunteers” remained even after the 1989 mutiny among the rank-and-file of the CPB and achieved high positions in the armies that emerged from the collapse of the communist insurgency, among them Li Ziru from Baoshan, who became vice chairman of the United Wa State Party, as well as Zhang Zhi Ming (a.k.a. Kyi Myint) from Wanding and his companion Lin Mingxian (a.k.a. Sai Leun), the leaders of the National Democratic Alliance Army-Eastern Shan State, which is usually referred to as the Möng La Group.

Chang also interviewed “Wang dage” (elder brother Wang), who was born in Yunnan in 1950 and joined a Chinese artillery regiment in 1967. It was during the Cultural Revolution, and Wang asserted that he was a victim—a claim many former Red Guards have made to escape responsibility for their actions. That was why, he said, he went across the border to join the CPB. Whatever the case, Wang dage later wrote books in Chinese about “the living conditions, battles, CPB’s internal division and corruption.” In the interview with Chang, Wang dage also mentioned a book written by Shi Lei (a pen name), another Yunnanese who had served not only with the CPB but also at the UWSP headquarters after the 1989 mutiny.

Chang refers to several meetings in Yunnan with “women warriors”, young females who joined the CPB. One of them, Pan Dajie from Tengchong, also wrote a book about her experiences. According to Chang, this was “a documentary novel…[and] being a woman myself, I was keen to learn about the lives of female [cadres] in the CPB and their self-perception of gender differences…like their male counterparts, they had survived an unimaginable harsh life in the jungle…after their return to China, they had struggled to readapt to Chinese society, which had rapidly changed” in their absence. It is a pity for non-Chinese speakers that all those previous books are available only in Chinese, so Chang’s excellent account of life along the frontier—which also includes interviews with non-political muleteers who participated in various aspects of the cross-border trade—is an unparalleled contribution to the understanding of events and developments in the area, especially during the Cold War. Chang’s use of real people and their tales makes her accounts all the more appealing.