The Wa of Myanmar and China’s Quest for Global Dominance<
Bertil Lintner
Silkworm Books: 2021
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Arunothai, located along Thailand’s border with Myanmar, is a dusty town that looks like the setting of a contemporary spaghetti Western. Its low concrete buildings sit in a valley between jagged, alligator-teeth hills and the surrounding agricultural lands extend beyond the unmarked and invisible national border. While wandering the town’s outskirts this past January, Google Maps told me I was actually standing on Burmese soil. There was neither gate nor border guard, simply an open dirt track leading into a country currently wracked by civil war. As with most of Myanmar’s borders, the question was: Which armed group actually controlled this territory? Was it Myanmar’s central government, or one of the major ethnic armed organisations which have been entrenched for decades along Myanmar’s fringe?

Later that afternoon, a lone dirt biker, the only other outsider I encountered during my three days in that sunbaked town, informed me that the area—technically, the Langkho District in Myanmar’s southern Shan State—was under the control of the United Wa State Army (UWSA). Were I to follow the dirt road I’d found, I’d likely have run, after two or three kilometres, into a checkpoint of Wa soldiers armed with Chinese automatic rifles.

• Tags: Bertil Lintner, David Frazier, Issue 36, Myanmar