Understanding Myanmar in mainland China (or the lack of it): recent reflections from the field

Type

Single Panel

Schedule

Session 4
Thu 09:00-10:30 Room 3.07

Convener

Yi Li Aberystwyth University

Discussant

Yi Li Aberystwyth University

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Papers

A Constructed Understanding of Covid-Control in China-Myanmar Borderland Xu Peng School of Oriental and African Studies
In response to the outbreak of COVID-19, the Chinese government has restricted the border trade and begun building a 2000-kilometre barbed wire along the China-Myanmar borderland. The fence is designed to prevent the importation of COVID cases from Myanmar. I was unable to enter Myanmar due to security concerns, after starting the fieldwork for my PhD in October 2021; thus, I decided to observe my research targets from the Chinese side. I spent nearly four months in ten different counties (for the local archive) along the borderlands. Nevertheless, during this fieldwork, it has been accidentally discovered that a complex social network has developed due to the covid-control of the borderlands. In the natural sense, a border is a line that divides different states, whereas, in the conceptual sense, it is a constructed or imagined boundary. Recent scholarship on borderland studies argues for decentralizing and depoliticizing state-centred narratives, as well as for including local actors, such as borderlanders and border communities, in border management and governance. (Hlovor, 2020). Alternatively, local actors may contribute to shaping the landscape of the borderlands. By adopting the term Embedded Borderland, I will discuss the latter understanding of borderlands that is constructed. The purpose of this short essay is to illustrate the current situation of pandemic control on the China-Myanmar border and then to discuss the mechanisms of cooperation that are used to implement the policy, as well as its impacts. It is possible that this essay could challenge the use of the term borderland
A Stone Buddha Misunderstood: Interweaving Multiple Epistemologies in the Study of Buddhist Material Transactions from Myanmar (Burma) to China Beiyin Deng Arizona State University
This paper focuses on the (mis)understandings of the material of a famous Buddha image in Shanghai, which was conveyed from Myanmar (Burma) to China by a Chinese monk named Huigen in the late 1890s, to interrogate the different epistemologies that the transactions of Buddhist images from Myanmar (Burma) to China straddles. It first delineates the biography of the Buddha image enshrined in the Yufo Temple in Shanghai and introduces a Burmese scholar’s misunderstandings of its material after his temple visit, especially after reading the temple brochure in English. By tracing the generation of such misunderstandings, this paper highlights the conceptual slippage (sakyin kyauk – marble – yu/baiyu – jade – jadeite/feicui) in multi-lingual settings, which is not only widely seen in the literal translation of materials but also constantly encountered by the author in her research. This paper shows that the act of naming materials in transcultural settings is a fertile ground where different epistemologies intersect, interact, and give rise to obscurity. While people can strategically maneuver this obsurity in practice, this paper argues that this obscurity should be taken seriously, and its contextualization in historical, cultural, and religious dynamics between Myanmar and China is necessary for scholars to avoid anachronisms and misconnections.
Research Methods and Beyond A Small-N Study of Insurgent Performance in Burma/Myanmar Lei Tong Northern Illinois University
The debate revolving around what are the standards of effective/appropriate research methods has been so extensive that the pros and cons of the quantitative and qualitative methods as well as attempts to merge them have been examined in breadth and depth. Following the tradition of comparative history analysis, I combine rigorous qualitative comparisons and cross-temporal comparisons to study how ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) of Burma/Myanmar survive and remain operationally functional under state oppression, or say, insurgent resiliency. Such a small-n analytical approach has gained viability as a middle ground between case studies and statistical studies and demonstrated sheer strengths in acquiring inferences with middle-range abstraction. Still, I am struggling with two concerns. First, distinguishing systematic and unsystematic elements—the essential goal of inferences for both quantitative and small-n methods—is not consistently feasible due to mixed empirical observations, case incomparability, and/or the clandestine nature of illicit economies—one of my independent variables. Second, political ideologies continue to impede the accomplish of an epistemological goal essential to all research methods—learning dynamics in contextual elements and the energy exchange between independent variables and the environmental contexts shaping them. As a result, knowledge cumulation, both theoretically and practically, is restricted to certain single, static dimensions. I will look at these caveats from the perspective of a China-raised but US-trained scholar of political science and public administration.
The Mutual Stereotypes on China (Tayoke) and Myanmar (Miandian) Chenxue You National University of Singapore
The history between Myanmar and China is concealed by the Pauk-Phaw rhetoric. This paper talks about the mutual stereotypes between the people of Myanmar and people of China about each other, chronologically, mostly from reading and my field work. I find that most Chinese people are not interested in Myanmar, and Chinese people’s stereotypical perceptions about Myanmar (Miandian, ??) are “poverty,” “war,” “drugs,” and “jade.” The Myanmar people’s perceptions of China and its related people and things (?????-X and ?????-X, or things Tayoke) are mainly shaped by three images: (1) soldiers and invaders, mainly based on (a) the history on China’s conquests of Miandian in the Yuan, Ming and Qing period, (b) the entry and battles of the Kuomintang Army into Burma, on the side of the Allies, during the WWII, (c) the invasion of the remnant Kuomintang army right after Burma’s independence in 1948, (d) the participation of the Tayoke (Chinese) soldiers in the Communist Party of Burma; (2) selfish merchants, who have been plundering Myanmar’s resources; (3) bad guys/sinners in Burma’s politics, at least half Chinese-blood, including Ne Win, Khun Sa, etc.

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Abstract

This panel shares recent experiences of several China-born, Western-educated early career scholars on Myanmar, who have conducted fieldwork and archival research in Myanmar, China and Thailand, and disseminated academic findings across the world over the past decade. These accounts provide a vivid picture of the volatile social environment of Myanmar from the pre-2011 dictatorship, to the post-2011 transition to democracy; and most recently, the global pandemic and the ongoing repercussion from the 2021 coup. Being active practitioners in humanities across disciplines, presenters also reflect upon channels, or the lack of them, to share findings among audience in and outside of their home institutes, as well as in Myanmar and China, with curious mixture of opportunities and challenges from the academic colleagues, the authorities, the civil society, and the public.

Bearing the long-term conflicts of Myanmar in mind, this panel adopts open and up-to-date dialogues for nuanced, subtle, and sensible approaches in narratives, methodology and practice. Furthermore, by sharing unique experience through non White and non-Burmese eyes, it engages with the current debate on decolonising the Burma Studies (Charney 2021, Chu May Paing and Than Toe Aung 2021) by offering a diverse and non-binary dimension.

Beiyin Deng, in her anthropological work, explores the misunderstandings surrounding a well-revered Buddha statue, originally from Myanmar and is now located in Shanghai. Xu Peng discusses her archival research to examine formation and varied degrees of success of ethnic militias along the Sino Myanmar border. Annie Tong addresses her effort in balancing the quantitative and qualitative approaches when conducting her research of political science regarding the association between the survival and operation of the ethnic armed organizations/EAOs and the illicit economies on which these groups rely. Chenxue You traces the historical development of often misleading, sometimes damaging, mutual stereotypes (such as Tayoke) in Myanmar and China.

As professionals trained under Western disciplinary traditions yet individuals born and bred in mainland China in the Open Door era, we walk a fine line, often with conflict and confusion, between ‘a counterweight to prevalent Euro- and US centrism’ (Xie 2021) and a ‘Southeast Asianist’ (Heryanto, 2002) outside of Southeast Asia– but close in geography and in subject matters.