Remarkable for their military prowess, their receptivity to Christianity, and their intricate all-embracing kinship network, the Kachins are a hardy mountain people living in the remote hills of northern Burma (Myanmar), and on the peripheries of China and India.During the Second World War they strongly sided with the Allies in defending Burma against the imperialist designs of the Japanese military, earning themselves sobriquets such as “amiable assassins” and “Gurkhas of Southeas...

In 1988 Burma (now Myanmar) exploded. People rose up against their government in a massive and nationwide expression of outrage at the regime's ruinous economic policies and repressive politics. The protests were suppressed by violence on a scale even more brutal than the Chinese suppression of the demonstrations in and around Tiananmen Square the following year.Outrage is the result of many visits to Burma and its border areas, interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors of the mas...

Since the 1950s, China and India have been locked in a monumental battle for geopolitical supremacy. Chinese interest in the ethnic insurgencies in northeastern India, the still unresolved issue of the McMahon Line, the border established by the British imperial government, and competition for strategic access to the Indian Ocean have given rise to tense gamesmanship, political intrigue, and rivalry between the two Asian giants. Former Far Eastern Economic Review correspondent Ber...

Myanmar’s generals didn’t expect the nation to rise up against the coup they staged in February 2021. But after decades of stifling, direct military rule, the Burmese people had become used to another way of life during the relative openness of 2011–21. The army has been unable to suppress anti-coup protests as it did in 1962 and 1988; and, three years after sending tanks into Yangon, Naypyitaw and other cities, the army has yet to establish a functioning administration.For the fir...

This book explains how Burma's booming drug production, insurgency, and counter-insurgency interrelate—and why the country has been unable to shake off thirty years of military rule and build a modern, democratic society.

For decades, Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle—where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Burma intersect—has been infamous for its opium and heroin production. But then, in the 1990s, the drug gangs in the Golden Triangle began to produce methamphetamine, a synthetic drug that does not depend on any unreliable crop such as the opium poppy. In Thailand the drug has become known as yaba, “madness drug” or “madness medicine.” Unlike heroin, which is a “downer,” yaba—or speed—i...

One of Asia’s longest running communist insurrections ended on the night of April 16, 1989. Its cessation was not the outcome of a successful government offensive or of a generous amnesty policy, but of an all-out mutiny within the rank-and-file of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB). That night, thousands of mutineers stormed the CPB’s headquarters at Panghsang, a small town near the Chinese frontier in the Wa Hills of Burma’s northeastern Shan State. The rebellious troops seized the well-...

When Myanmar emerged from colonial rule, it promised a united federal future. Instead, the country spiraled into dictatorship, ethnic conflict, and shattered dreams. Young Tigers unravels this gripping history through the life of Chao Tzang Yawnghwe—son of Burma’s first president and last Saohpa (prince) of Yawnghwe—who transformed from privileged aristocrat to guerrilla fighter, exiled intellectual, and visionary political thinker.His story is one of pers...

All over Asia bankers, gangsters, government officials and intelligence agents interact while organised crime networks threaten the rest of the world.Chinese gangs run Chinatowns all over the United States and Europe; Vietnamese mobsters have taken over the heroin trade to Australia; Russian gangsters thrive in cities througout America and the Japanese yakuza not only influence government and business at home, but chase the yen through Southeast Asia and Hawaii to Australi...

The Indian Ocean's strategic importance to China cannot be underestimated, given the oil, African minerals and container traffic that pass through it. Not since Admiral Zheng He sailed his fleet through these waters in the fifteenth century -- exploring and mapping them in a bid to extend the Celestial Empire's trading and tributary system -- has China been present here. Beijing's re-entry into the Indian Ocean after 600 years is part of its Belt and Road megaproject, in which it is invest...

The Sino-Indian War of 1962 delivered a crushing defeat to India: not only did the country suffer a loss of lives and a heavy blow to its pride, the world began to see India as the provocateur of the war, with China ‘merely defending’ its territory. This perception that China was largely the innocent victim of Nehru’s hostile policies was put forth by journalist Neville Maxwell in his book India’s China War, which found readers in many opinion makers, including Henry Kissinger and Richard ...

In 1948, Burma was a promising young democracy with a bustling free market economy and a standard of living that surpassed nearly all of its other Asian neighbours. Fifty years later, Burma is one of the poorest nations in the world, with a military dictatorship in Rangoon and 50,000 armed rebels from a myriad of ethnic insurgency groups. In this well documented and detailed account, well-known Burma journalist Bertil Lintner explains the nexus between Burma’s booming drug production and i...