The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance by Bertil Lintner

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance by Bertil Lintner Jane M. Ferguson Bertil Lintner. 2021. The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance. Chiang Mai: Silkworm. 272 pages. ISBN 9786162151705 This slim, but richly detailed, volume represents a recent installment in veteran journalist and prolific author Bertil Lintner's foundational contributions to our understanding of the complex dynamics of Myanmar's politics, and especially those of its peripheries. The areas brought to focus here are the bordering highlands of Northern Shan State and the Southwest of China's Yunnan province, territories long off-limits to other empire-building projects. These edgy zones set the context for the travails of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), the most sizable and best-equipped non-state military in Asia today. The UWSA boasts commanding around twenty to thirty thousand troops, and including weaponry has more firepower than the Communist Party of Burma ever had in the region. [End Page 138] Lintner draws upon extensive experience and direct contacts, including having visited and interviewed Wa soldiers when they were part of the Communist Party of Burma during the late 1980s, and spent months in Wa areas getting to know commanders and villagers who communicated with him in the Shan language. Lintner has returned to the area more recently, at the UWSA's northern capital of Pangkham, the headquarters and boomtown for the Wa state, now an autonomous region at the Shan State–Yunnan border. Lintner carefully traces how ongoing wars, battles for economic access, and political sovereignty have embroiled these areas of Shan State for over seven decades. The book looks outward to how this particular situation has implications for Myanmar–China relationships, past and present, but also how their development and expansion have been intertwined with the Chinese government's changing ideological and economic orientations toward its Southeast Asian neighbors. The book itself consists of six chapters detailing the social and political terrain of the Wa, from mythical histories, colonial noninterference, the Communist Party of Burma, the mutiny against the latter and subsequent foundation of the UWSA, the UWSA's relationship to narcotics and changing global economies, and finally their relationship with contemporary politics and the changing geostrategic agenda of China. One section at the back, "Dramatis Personae" is useful to refer to while reading the body chapters of the book; quite a bewildering number of players are involved. Lintner discusses the history of the Wa area as a zone off-limits to state incorporation until only very recently; part and parcel to this, the Wa were frequently described as wild, even savage. Their headhunting practices perpetuated this stereotype, though it has been argued that [End Page 139] this was more a ritual of war trophies, not making the Wa intrinsically—let alone by "nature"—more brutal or violent than their lowland counterparts who engaged in fatal warfare themselves. Lintner's examination of the historical relationship between Wa communities and Cold War geopolitics is essential background for the current situation; the Wa people themselves were not committed to the ideologies of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB). In reality, the CPB had done little for the ethnic Wa troops and communities who had hardly any interest in the Party's ostensible ideological goals nor its inadequately configured agricultural plans for the area, and lack of concrete efforts to develop the region. In a tinge of irony, or perhaps as evidence that CPB ideology should not frame economic expectations, the years of the Burmese Socialist Program Party in Burma saw an increasing ramping-up of the black market in the periphery and a thriving economy for free trade in these CPB controlled areas (p. 102). From the late 1980s, Lintner saw the writing on the wall that the Wa troops themselves saw little to gain by working with the CPB, and following their 1989 mutiny, sought the relative benefits of working with the Chinese as well as establishing an autonomous region through a cease-fire agreement with the (then) Rangoon government. Through the buildup of weaponry and territory (especially following the vacuum left behind by Khun Sa's surrender of the Möng Tai...