Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (21 page)

Mosuo society is matrilineal and women have traditionally enjoyed a strong, perhaps even dominant place. The Mosuo live with their extended families, with many generations cohabiting in a single house and often in a single large room. Older girls and young women, however, may have their own private ‘bedrooms’ and if a woman is interested in a man, she may invite him to come and sleep with her–it’s a private affair, conducted after dark.

The woman is free to change lovers whenever and as often as she likes, but in general relationships are monogamous and long-lasting; each partner stays with his or her own family and there is no economic side to the relationship, no claim on each other’s money or property. It’s known as
zouhun
or a ‘walking marriage’. If a child is born, the father, if he is known, will normally have little or no responsibility for the child’s upbringing. The child belongs to the mother’s family and she and her relatives, including her brothers and other male relatives, bring up the boy or girl.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Mosuo were pressured to give up their ‘walking marriages’ and marry ‘normally’ instead. Many did, but they have since returned to their traditional ways.

Though the Han Chinese are strictly patrilineal themselves, accounts of these Mosuo ways are to them probably not very surprising, as they fit in well with traditional descriptions of the southwest barbarian. In the early fourteenth century, Li Jing, who was then an imperial official, Deputy Pacification Commissioner and Bearer of the Tiger Tablet, wrote down some first-hand observations. He remarked that in an area south of Lijiang, the women ‘plucked their eyebrows and eyelashes and wove their hair into two coils’ and that they, rather than the local men, did most of the work. Virginity was not prized, he said, and the local women were free to have sex with men as they wished. Virginity was even a disadvantage for a woman looking for marriage. They were ‘as profligate as dogs and swine’ and if a woman died before marriage, all the men who had had sexual relations with her held up a banner at her funeral. If the banners numbered a hundred or more, the woman was considered especially beautiful. Her parents would lament: ‘How could we have known that our daughter who is loved by so many men would have died so young?’

A hundred years earlier, Marco Polo had written about sexual relations in the kingdom of Caindu, also in Yunnan:

I must tell you of a custom they have in this country regarding their women. No man considers himself wronged if a foreigner, or any other man, dishonours his wife, or daughter, or sister, or any woman of his family, but on the contrary he deems such intercourses a piece of good fortune.

Today, Yunnan tourism officials are happy to exploit this reputation of promiscuity. The posters on the shores of Lugu Lake, the heart of the Mosuo region, proclaim in English: ‘The Kingdom of Women’. In Chinese, too, the billboards had once read ‘Nu Guo’ or ‘The Women’s Kingdom’ but perhaps this was seen as not tempting enough and so officials changed the name to ‘Nuer Guo’ or ‘The Girls’ Kingdom’.

One evening at the Rembrandt Café in Lijiang I met a few Chinese men, young men visiting as tourists, who told me about the draw of Lugo Lake, the promise of exotic women and free sex. ‘They have walking marriages there,’ said one. ‘I’m really hoping to have a walking marriage.’ Some were less optimistic but all believed that the minority women in Yunnan were different from Chinese women. ‘We will go and have a look tomorrow. Maybe we will be lucky in the kingdom of the girls.’

More than a year before I was in Yunnan, widespread protests had broken out in Tibet against Beijing’s rule. They began on 10 March 2008, with hundreds of Buddhist monks in Lhasa calling for the release of other monks who were already in detention; they grew quickly and then turned violent, with Tibetans attacking Han Chinese property and people. To the astonishment of the authorities, the protests spread beyond Lhasa and what the Chinese government has demarcated as the Tibetan Autonomous Region, into the much wider Tibetan-speaking area. There was bloody unrest in parts of Gansu province, near Mongolia, and along the old Silk Road, as well as further south in Sichuan, very close to Yunnan, where Tibetan monks clashed with police. The outcome of these skirmishes was never in doubt and a wave of arrests and incarceration soon followed.

Tibet has had a complex relationship with successive Beijing-based dynasties over the centuries. Until medieval times, Tibet was either a single independent empire in its own right, or a medley of smaller but still independent states. During the period of Mongol domination over nearly all Eurasia, Tibet came under indirect Mongol rule, accepting Mongol suzerainty, but was never directly administered by the Mongols as was, say, China or Russia. It was an intimate relationship nonetheless, with many in the Mongol leadership eventually converting to Tibetan Buddhism. Today Mongolians who profess any religion are nearly all Buddhists of the Tibetan school.

It was only in modern times, under the Manchu or Qing dynasty, that Beijing began to exert real sovereignty over the Tibetans, partly out of a desire to keep the British, then just over the Himalayas in India, at bay. The Manchus were Tibetan Buddhists as well and held Tibetan culture in the highest regard. Then, in the early twentieth century, with China in chaos, Tibetan areas in the east came under the control of different, often non-Tibetan, warlords, while on the Tibetan plateau itself a Lhasa-based regime declared itself independent of any outside power.

This period of modern independence did not last long. In October 1950, only a year after the communist take-over of China, soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army marched into Tibet, quickly overwhelming the small Tibetan army. The Chinese then tried to win over the Tibetans, treating locals well, improving infrastructure and distributing money and goods, maintaining the Dalai Lama in his position and even welcoming him to Beijing. This was very much in line with Chinese policy in Yunnan and other non-Han regions at the time. In 1951, Tibetan and Chinese representatives signed a seventeen-point agreement that allowed the Chinese to enter Lhasa peacefully whilst respecting local autonomy.

The agreement was valid only for the area viewed as Tibet proper. In the eastern Tibetan areas like Kham and Amdo no such autonomy was even discussed, and early attempts at integration were met by stubborn local resistance. Brutal reprisals followed. Tibetan fighters in Kham soon solicited and received covert help from the CIA, which was then arming remnant Chinese Nationalist forces along the Burma–China border, and was looking for any opportunity to destabilize America’s new Cold War foe. In 1959, the unrest finally spread to Lhasa, leading to open revolt, and the deaths of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people. The Dalai Lama himself escaped to India where he has lived in exile ever since.

The past fifty years have been the first time in history that Beijing has administered Tibet directly. From a Han Chinese and communist perspective, direct rule has brought many advantages, with new roads and schools and hospitals and all the other benefits of modernity. The grip of parasitical landowners has been removed and other ‘feudal elements’ smashed, and a theocracy has been turned into a ‘people’s democracy’ with greater equality and an opportunity for Tibetans to participate as citizens of the world’s emerging superpower.

Many Tibetans, however, see the story very differently. The flight of the Dalai Lama was followed by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, in which Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, some with priceless collections of art and manuscripts, were destroyed, monks were defrocked, and Tibetan culture in general ‘struggled against’ as worse than useless. No one knows precisely how many people were killed. And even though recent economic development has brought higher living standards to many, it is seen as the progress of an alien power, one whose values and world view are entirely different from those of the still ardently Buddhist Tibetan people.

July 2009 saw another round of ethnic protests in China, this time by the Uighur people in the far western territory of Xinjiang. The Uighurs are a Turkish-speaking people who migrated to what is now Xinjiang in early medieval times. Today, the Uighurs remain distinct from the Han Chinese not only in language and religion, but also in racial appearance; many could easily be mistaken for their distant Turkish cousins in Anatolia and by blood are likely linked to the ancient Indo-European peoples who inhabited the region before them. They were once devout Buddhists, and at one time their khanate stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria; they were major participants in the great networks of Buddhist art and scholarship that then existed along the old Silk Road. Some later become Manicheans, before the vast majority converted in late medieval times to Islam. A proud tradition of Muslim scholarship followed. Like the Tibetans, the Uighurs eventually fell under the thumb of the Manchus in Beijing.

And also like the Tibetans, when the Manchu dynasty was over thrown and China plunged into anarchy, the Uighurs attempted to reassert their independence, their leaders in 1933 even proclaiming an ‘East Turkistan Republic’ based in their western-most town of Kashgar. But this was short-lived. Just as the Soviet Union saw itself as the rightful heir of the Tsarist Empire, the People’s Republic of China was determined to exert its control over all parts of the former Manchu Empire’s far-flung domains. The Uighur region is rich in oil and gas and other mineral wealth and Han Chinese migrants by the million have been encouraged to move to Xinjiang (‘The New Frontier’). What had been an ethnic Chinese presence of around 7 per cent in 1949 is 40 per cent today. The Uighurs will soon be a minority in their ancient homeland.

The latest round of violence actually started in southeastern China, near Hong Kong, where fights had broken out earlier in 2009 between Uighurs at a toy factory and their Chinese co-workers. News of the fighting then spread back home, where ethnic tensions had long been simmering, setting off days of first peaceful protests and then rioting in the local capital Urumqi (which is about half Uighur, half Chinese). Chinese civilians and property were violently attacked. Nearly 200 people died and well over a thousand were injured in the fighting and crackdown that followed. It was another jolt to the system, as there could be no greater nightmare for Beijing’s party bosses than a China that goes the way of the Soviet Union, splintering along ethnic lines.

Will Yunnan suffer the kind of ethnic violence recently seen in Tibet and Xinjiang? It seems unlikely.

In Yunnan the minority nationalities are much more jumbled together. In Tibet, nearly the entire population are either Tibetan or recent Chinese immigrants. In Xinjiang, nearly all are either Uighurs or Han Chinese. In Yunnan there are dozens of different minority nationalities interspersed across the province. There might be Yi, Bai, Hani and other villages all within a few miles of one another. In addition, their identities are sometimes blurred, and some of the groups–like the Yi–are actually composed of many sub-groups, including sub-groups that might not see themselves as Yi at all. Many who are classified as non-Han, like the Zhuang for example, are also much more assimilated into mainstream Chinese culture than the Tibetans and Uighurs, the ethnic frontier in Yunnan being centuries older than the frontier further west, towards Lhasa and Kashgar. Muslims, who led the last great revolts during the nineteenth century, are today far fewer in number and there has been no known resistance to Beijing’s rule in this area for at least a quarter of a century.

Beijing is keenly focused on keeping Yunnan’s minorities happy. Billions of yuan have been spent on new infrastructure, incomes are rising and poverty rates falling. Minority cultures are no longer under attack and there is far more cultural freedom than in the recent past. Local officials are drawn from the ranks of local communities. And, whereas in China proper a strict one-child-per-family policy has been rigorously enforced for decades, minority nationalities in Yunnan are free to have as many children as they like.

It was certainly hard to conceive of trouble in Lijiang, awash with tourists and new money, and next to impossible to imagine that the little Naxi kingdom would one day again be independent.

But history seldom moves in a straight line and stranger things have happened. Who would have thought as late as the 1980s that the small countries in the Caucasus like Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan would break away from Moscow, then face rebellions from even smaller nationalities within, prompting European and United Nations mediators and peacekeepers to intervene? Stability in China has been based first and foremost on the phenomenal economic growth of recent times, and no one can say for certain what might happen if that economic growth suddenly came to a halt.

Closer to the Burma border, very different realities are merging into one another–one war-torn, military-dominated, ethnically fractured and the other under the single control of the Chinese Communist Party, newly capitalist, and in the process of being reshaped by consumerism and tourism. Sometime after this trip, I spoke to a friend who was Shan and a long-time supporter of self-determination for ethnic minority peoples in Burma. I asked him how he thought Shan people in Burma felt, seeing the rapid improvements in living standards enjoyed by their cousins on the other side. ‘They are increasingly attracted to what is happening in China, and say that in Yunnan there is at least development, perhaps a better model.’ A better model? The pull of Chinese culture has always been strong and the pull of China was now supercharged.

But war and conflict have their own pull as well. And the situation in Burma was reaching new levels of complexity. In 2010, events along the border, close to the crossing at Ruili, would shock Beijing.

From Lijiang I backtracked to Dali and then took a bus down the old Burma Road, now National Highway 65. For centuries this area had marked the very limits of Chinese imperial administration and it was easy to see why. We crossed one mountain range after another, some with peaks over 15,000 feet high, the valleys as far as 9,000 feet below, snaking around the mountain bases or going by tunnels that cut right through. Occasionally it was possible to see into the distance, the rest of the highway down below looking like a long and jagged wound, exposing the grey rock beneath the otherwise lush and forested hillsides. Other times, we were right in between the mountains and all we could see were walls of green on either side. Tiny makeshift houses made of stone or brick were occasionally perched on steep slopes. There were two drivers. One was a chubby middle-aged man who drove fast and eagerly overtook the vehicles, mainly heavily loaded lorries, that lumbered ahead. The other was a determined-looking young woman, expressionless, who drove more cautiously. When the man was driving, Chinese pop music blared from the loudspeakers up front. When the woman was driving, a movie played on the television screen overhead, the sound turned off.

About midway, we crossed two of the world’s longest rivers, the Mekong and the Salween, within a couple of hours of each other. We then began our descent, 5,000 feet altogether, moving from an alpine to a subtropical landscape. There were innumerable fields of rice, some terraced along the hillsides, like enormous emerald-coloured stairs. The air became moist and along the roadside were clumps of banana trees and bamboo. The houses were no longer of stone but of wood and bamboo. Late at night, we arrived at the town of Ruili (population 140,000). Burma was a few miles away.

I had been to Ruili once before, in 1991, on my way to the Kachin Hills. The town had just been opened to foreign tourists and was my last stop before sneaking over the border into insurgent-held Burma. The single guest-house that allowed foreigners was spartan, each room like a cell with a cot-like bed and a small plastic-top table with a thermos of hot water.

Nothing I remember from that trip seemed still to exist. Ruili was then a poor and backward place, with a couple of streets of shops selling very little except Burmese jade and other contraband. The town was in the grip of an HIV epidemic, partly the result of prostitution, but more the result of widespread heroin addiction. Addicts were everywhere, stick-thin men and women in rags, filthy, lying on the pavement or propped up against a wall.

There were also many hair salons. The enforced uniformity of the Mao years was then still very recent, and though Shanghai and other big cities were becoming more fashion-conscious by the day, in Ruili the desire to catch up with their more trendy cousins to the east had not yet been matched by any home-grown talent, either for hair-cutting or for fixing the permanent waves that had become very popular. Across the border ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’ had never been particularly constraining on women’s hairstyles and a small corps of Burmese stylists had made their way to Ruili and were running profitable little businesses.

I have no recollection of where that guest-house or the Burmese hair salons were, but I doubt they still exist. Nothing looked the same. Twenty-first-century Ruili had overwhelmed its earlier incarnation and was now a town of wide palm-tree-lined boulevards and glass-fronted shops selling Armani clothes and Rolex watches. Futuristic-looking hotels, some more than twenty storeys high, overlooked the blue-green Shan hills to the south. At about $50 a night, mine was considered one of the best in town. Out front was a long black stretch limousine, the longest limousine I’ve seen anywhere in the world.

The receptionists were clearly not used to foreigners, as no one spoke English. But they were polite and friendly, gesturing and speaking slowly in Mandarin, and I had no problem checking in. On the wall behind them was a line of clocks set to London, Rangoon, Tokyo, Beijing and New York time. To one side was a vast lobby, with marble floors, and sets of black sofas and glass tables. Sitting at one set of sofas were men in short sleeves, smoking, drinking whisky, and speaking a language I didn’t recognize but which I thought might be Jingpo (one of the main languages in the area, the same as Kachin in Burmese).

A bellhop in a red uniform showed me upstairs. My room was cold (literally) and impersonal, the way most people in Asia like their hotel rooms to be. After the bellhop left I studied the hotel brochure and saw that in addition to the basic singles and doubles (I had taken a single, called a ‘Deluxe’), there were various classes of suites. The most expensive was called ‘The Administrator’s Suite’. The pictures showed a wood and leather swivel chair and a big wooden desk, at the back of which were book cases with a few scattered books. The brand-new television showed only Chinese channels. Downstairs, there was not only a massage parlour, as in every Chinese hotel, but an entire massage floor.

Ruili is the biggest crossing between Burma and China. It sits along a muddy river of the same name that marks the frontier in this area. The entire Sino-Burmese frontier is long, about a third of the length of the US–Canadian border (excluding Alaska) or about two-thirds the US–Mexican border, and almost entirely mountainous, the Ruili plain being an exception. There are several legal crossings now, and many more illegal ones. No government really controls the border, and the Burmese and Chinese governments share authority with the various militias and ex-insurgent outfits on the Burmese side, as well as with their own sometimes unruly, almost always difficult to supervise, local soldiers and officials.

Though the Ruili River marks most of the border in this area, there is a slice of land on the other side that is still part of China, connected by a long bridge to Ruili proper. I learned that it was called Jiegao, or ‘old town’, though there didn’t seem to be anything old about it. Instead, it was more or less a big outdoor mall, with a central square and several blocks of shops, restaurants and offices on every side. Many of the shops were Burmese, much more prosperous-looking than anything I had seen in Burma. Some sold jade or precious stones, but almost everything seemed available, from washing machines to photocopiers to children’s toys. I was there on a weekday afternoon and the square was very crowded. Some people were in Burmese dress, in
longyis
, but I also heard Burmese spoken by many in Western clothes. Chinese tourists posed for photographs in the middle of the square, with the big sign saying ‘Welcome to Myanmar’ in the background. More than two-thirds of Yunnan’s international trade passes through Ruili. It is where Yunnan makes money.

A group of Burmese transvestites, tall and glamorously dressed, in tight blouses, mini-skirts and high heels, were milling around. In Mongla there had been a well-known cabaret of Burmese ‘lady boys’ and I wondered if, after the recent casino crack downs in Mongla, some of the transvestites had drifted north to Ruili looking for new work. Many billboards advertised KTV which I later found out stood for Karaoke TV. Taxis and handsome saloons and four-wheel drives competed for space with giant air-conditioned coaches in the main car park. Here and there I saw ragged-looking Burmese, in worn
longyis
, looking lost. For some it was their first time outside the country and China must have seemed like a vision of the future.

At first glance, Ruili seemed to be solidly part of the new, affluent China. Property prices here were said to be equal to those of Shanghai or Beijing. But the town was still fairly compact and after about an hour of walking I felt I had covered nearly the entire downtown area. There were smiling kids bicycling around in their school uniforms, navy and white with red scarves tied around their necks, and on the side streets old men and women were playing mah-jong. People seemed relaxed, drinking green tea and eating sunflower seeds. Under a warm tropical sun, Ruili appeared prosperous and sedate.

There were also many Burmese, less relaxed. Some were easy to spot, poor dishevelled Burmese who seemed uncomfortable and misplaced. That first day, I saw two men at a road junction, carrying their clothes in rubbish bags, looking at a little piece of paper, scratching their heads, and wondering which way to turn. There were Burmese ruffians, with sunburnt faces, looking wild and uncertain. One evening, under a bright street light, waiting to cross the street, I found myself next to a young couple, in Burmese village clothes, arguing loudly about what to do next, whether to return to the house they were at or find a new contact. Other Burmese seemed more well-to-do, strolling around, happily searching for a DVD player or a new set of golf clubs.

Some Burmese were hard to detect. Walking amongst what I thought was a Chinese crowd down a Ruili street, I was often astonished to discover, after overhearing their conversations, that the men in front and behind me were actually Burmese. It was as if they were in disguise, making themselves indistinguishable from the locals, wearing trousers and shoes and polo shirts. But then, I suppose, so was I.

Others from Burma were of an Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi appearance. In the early 1990s, harsh repression had driven hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people, Muslims in western Burma of primarily Bengali descent, into Bangladesh. A few hundred trekked in the opposite direction and wound up in Ruili where they have stayed ever since, even establishing their own mosque. Others were simply Burmese of south Asian ancestry, perhaps from Rangoon or Mandalay, who had come to make money, like everyone else. On my second afternoon, I was eating at a halal restaurant, and spoke to the man at the next table, who told me his family were Punjabis (from what is now Pakistan) but that he had been born in Mandalay. He had a narrow face and longish hair and was working through a big plate of kebabs. He told me that he was here for just a couple of days, to buy a motorcycle and visit some friends.

I was trained as a zoologist, can you believe it? But what am I supposed to do with a zoology degree? My family owns some businesses, small businesses, you know. We work with the Chinese, importing things, and we’ve managed to get by. I was the one who thought of trying to make connections here, inside China. This time, though, it’s really just the motorcycle, then I go back.

I asked him what he thought of Ruili and China in general:

I guess it’s more developed and all that. But it’s boring too. I prefer Mandalay. I wish Mandalay were just a little better off. For me, it would be great if there were also a zoo as well. Or if my family could set up one of those safari parks I’ve read about, the ones where all the animals can wander around and we could charge for people to drive their car right through.

He finished his last kebab and motioned to the waiter for more tea. ‘That’s my dream.’

Ruili was once infamous for drugs and prostitution. Though opium had been grown nearby for decades, up until the 1990s, the opium had to be transported all the way down to the Thai border, to be made into heroin, and then shipped out to Western markets via Bangkok. From the early 1990s, however, Burmese militia groups just on the other side of the border started manufacturing heroin themselves, cutting out the Thai middlemen, and taking advantage of China’s growing links with the rest of the world. Ruili became a key hub. The penalty for drug-running in China is death but this did not deter Burmese drug runners who could earn two years’ wages over just a few days for carrying the contra band to Kunming. And with heroin and hookers came AIDS. Some time in the thirteenth century, Mongol horsemen had carried the Black Death from the Burma–Yunnan frontier (where it had been endemic for centuries) to cities in the interior of China, from which it spread, first across the steppe, and then to Europe, where it would kill tens of millions. And in the 1990s, it was this same region, and Ruili in particular, that became the source of the HIV/AIDS problem in China. The disease had entered from Burma, where infection rates were already climbing steadily. In 1989 local officials discovered that 150 heroin users here were HIV-positive. They were the first confirmed cases in China.

For a while, Ruili had a deservedly wild and dangerous image, but there was little sign of this when I was there, even at night. A couple of years earlier, a nationwide crackdown on casinos had led police to shut down a lot of the town’s nightlife. And other crackdowns, on prostitution and drugs, together with the town’s rising wealth from other licit and illicit trade–jade, timber–gave Ruili a more respectable veneer. The sale of jade alone, the ‘imperial jade’ found only in Burma and much sought after in Chinese markets, is worth well over a billion US dollars a year. Heroin production has gone down and addicts no longer openly shoot up in the middle of town. On the wall of one building was a huge poster advertising the Cutie Club and showing a bikini-clad woman with a snake wrapped around her. Next door, a big building that looked like it could have been a nightclub–perhaps the Cutie Club–was being torn down.

Ruili itself had become fairly well-off, but the countryside nearby was still far from prosperous. Though Yunnan’s per capita income was now at least twice as high as Burma’s, it was still one of the poorest provinces in all of China, and islands of development, like the centre of Ruili, were surrounded by impoverished rural areas. Walk less than an hour out of town and the fall-off in living standards is apparent, as the big houses and walled compounds, some with badminton courts and all with expensive-looking cars out front, quickly give way to hamlets, where water is in short supply and where the farmers seem little better off than in Burma.