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Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma
Wen-Chin Chang
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Description for Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma
Paperback. Num Pages: 296 pages, 16, 13 black & white halftones, 3 maps. BIC Classification: 1FMB; 1FPC; JFFN; JHMC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 231 x 153 x 25. Weight in Grams: 470.
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 ... Read moremoved 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.
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Product Details
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
About Wen-Chin Chang
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.
Reviews for Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma
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 ... Read morewith 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.
Jane M. Ferguson
Pacific Affairs Journal
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.
Robert H. Taylor
Asian Affairs
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.
Jack David Eller
Anthropology Review Database
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.
Caroline Grillot
Southeast Asian Studies
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.
Hiu Ling Chan
International Migration Review
Wen-Chin Chang's Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma provides a rich personal history of Yunnanese Chinese migrants in South-East and East Asia.... The significance of the book is in having recorded the voices of the voiceless. It successfully avoids analysing case studies through the lens of ethnicity theories.... All in all, this individual-centred ethnography, backed by its narrative power, provides a rich comprehension of people’s lives across borders.
Tadayuki Kubo
International Journal of Asian Studies
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