• DOI:10.1355/sj32-1j
• Corpus ID: 151466918

Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma by Wen-Chin Chang (review)

@article{YewFoong2017BeyondBS,
  title={Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma by Wen-Chin Chang (review)},
  author={Hui Yew-Foong},
  journal={Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia},
  year={2017},
  volume={32},
  pages={182 - 184}
}

• Hui Yew-Foong
• Published 6 May 2017
• History
• Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia

Studies of borderlands have, in recent decades, de-centred our understanding of a world dominated by nation-states. They highlight the flows of people, capital, commodities, information and ideas in spaces that may be off the beaten path, but not necessarily peripheral to the political and economic life of countries. Through oral history accounts and ethnographic snippets collected over the course of more than a decade, from the 1990s to the late 2000s, Beyond Borders presents Yunnanese Chinese as mobile subjects that are integral to the economic dynamism of a Burma or Myanmar that has been isolated for decades. It offers a rare glimpse into the border regions of Yunnan, Burma and Thailand, where smuggling and political insurgency have been part of everyday life for decades, and it traces the lives of Yunnanese subjects that stretch from these border regions to Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Taiwan. The book is divided into two parts, dealing with migratory history and transnational trade respectively. By applying a personal narrative approach, the author seeks to outline the contours of these themes through the life stories of key informants. One of them is Zhang Dage (Chapter 1), who was born in the restive Shan State of Burma into the family of a Kuomintang (KMT) soldier who had retreated from Communist China. Zhang Dage completed his junior high school education in Northern Thailand, went to medical college and became a physician in Taiwan, where he settled down and had a family. This