Beyond Borders

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.

Beyond Borders is a tremendous work which details—with considerable intimacy and reflection—the lives of both Yunnanese Chinese in Burma as well as those who later migrated from Burma to Thailand, Taiwan, and Mainland China. Its nuanced attention to the historical relationship between the Kuomintang, civilian traders, the Shan insurgencies, and the Burmese government is compelling, especially since the information deals with firsthand accounts. Although the author could very easily bog the reader down with acronyms, dates, and events in military or political history, the priority placed on the subjects' lives allows the reader to assimilate the context inductively rather than with a preemptive road map of sorts., If you enjoy a good gossip, nicely told and full of human interest, Beyond Borders will be of interest. For those with an interest in migration and human mobility, the volume provides a number of personal insights., Rather than focusing on social structures and globalization processes, Chang explicitly concentrates on individuals and biographies.... [W]e can certainly claim that a person-centered approach shakes up anthropological categories just as the lives of these individuals shake up political categories., The strength of this book is the space the author gives to personal narratives. In this refreshing ethnography, Chang demonstrates how the vivid descriptions of life trajectories and intimate relationships of ordinary people, supported by clear explanations on the chaotic historical political circumstances in which they are grounded, can be more revealing than reconstituted realities inspired by scarce documentation available to foreign observers.... Besides the fascinating stories that nourish this account of a largely ignored Chinese diaspora, and the rigorous historical approach to their contemporary situation, this book is also a real pleasure to read., Undergraduate and graduate students will benefit from this text. Chang shows how ethnographers build rapport with informants, let them speak for themselves, and preserve the 'thicknesses' of their stories using first-person narratives.... this book is an eye-opening addition to the literature on borderland diasporas in Southeast Asia.

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.