Spaces and territorialities on the Sino–Burmese boundary: China, Burma and the Kachin

Abstract

Abstract The discordance between the conceptual de jure delimitation of the world space and the lived territorialities at the sites of the international boundaries is widely accepted in political geography. However, viewing the de facto phenomena as challenging, defying and ignoring the boundaries, or vice versa, is trapped in the modernist dualism. The paper follows Soja's call for expanding the scope of geographical imagination into three interdependent and interreactive moments of space – conceived, perceived and lived – and through this tri-cameral lens examines the little known spaces on the Sino–Burmese boundary and the territorialities of the Kachin nation delimited into Burma and China. The paper accounts how the power of the ‘conceptual’ controls the perceived moment of space – explicit in the creative adjustments to the boundary by the local actors – while many Kachin spatial practices continue unchanged in the alternative lived space.