Yunnan: Province of the Burma Road

Abstract

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor when she had been more generally expected to strike at the Burma Road, either across Burma itself or by way of Yunnan, China's southernmost province. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek stated publicly that such an attack was to be expected. The fact that Japan plunged into a headlong assault against China's unofficial allies, Great Britain and America, does not mean that the attack upon the Burma supply route has been abandoned. Japan may consider the longest way round the shortest way home. If the time becomes ripe, she will undoubtedly strike at what we thought would be her first objective and attempt to dominate the province of Yunnan itself. In the meantime, however, this strategically important province has become an Allied base for supporting the defense of Singapore and Burma, and possibly for a counteroffensive against Japanese forces in Thailand and Indo-China. It is ironical that Yunnan, which in 1937 was perhaps the most completely autonomous and most isolated of the eighteen provinces, should become a front line of defense for nationalist China. Under the Empire it was for long periods a semi-independent kingdom, occasionally ruled as a kind of colony by the Imperial Government, but never entirely amalgamated with the rest of the country. Though it has played its part in the history of the Republic (helping, for example, to prevent the reestablishment of the Empire in 1915), it has been essentially on the periphery of China's economic, political and social development. In area, Yunnan ranks third among the eighteen provinces, after Szechwan and Kansu. It borders, in the south, on French Indo-China and British Burma, which separate it from Thailand, while its other frontiers face the Chinese provinces of Hsikang, Szechwan, Kweichow and Kwangsi. Topographically, it is for the most part a great plateau, rough and broken in surface, with many precipitous mountains as well as canyon-like valleys, which contain the important population centers. Though western Yunnan resembles the rugged heights of Tibet, the tropical hill and valley country in the south has close links, both economic and cultural, with the countries of southeast Asia. A number of its rivers, including the Mekong and Salween, drain southward and eastward. The climate is temperate on the high plains and semi-tropical in the lowlands. There is a dry season from early November until the latter part of April and a summer monsoon season with frequent rains, sometimes torrential, from June until September. In 1932 Yunnan's population was estimated at 11,795,000 out of a total of slightly more than 438,000,000 for all China. Its people are highly diversified; according to a semi-official estimate nearly three-fourths of them do not speak Chinese.1 This is a larger non-Chinese group than any other province contains, and constitutes almost one-third of the nonChinese-speaking population of all China. Yunnan is said to include over two hundred tribal peoples? Mosos, Lolos, Shans, etc.?each with its own language or dialect.