Fleeing One Homeland and Adopting Another
The Construction of State Identity in a Northern Thailand Village
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- Research Origin and Determining the Research Object
- Research Purpose
- Definition of Some Important Concepts
- History of and Facts about Cross-Border Migration Between China and Southeast Asia, and Identity Issues of Immigrants
- The Research Framework and Main Ideas of This Book
- My Experience of and Reflections on the Fieldwork
- Chapter One Meilianghe Village amid Remote Mountains and Dense Forests
- Village Space and Ethnic Distribution
- Religious Life in the Community
- Infrastructure and Public Service Agencies in the Community
- The Livelihood and Living Standards of the Villagers
- Chapter Two Displaced Peoples
- The Yunnanese Displaced from Home
- The Lahu in Search of the Golden Arrow
- Chapter Three From Myanmar to Thailand
- The Predicament of the Remnant KMT Troops
- The Founding of Meilianghe Village
- Escaping from Wars, Military Service, and Epidemics
- Economic Benefits Hard to Secure and Property Unprotected
- The Evils of Illicit Drugs
- The Escape Route
- Escape—Option for Survival
- Chapter Four From Problematic Hill Tribes to Royal Subjects
- Issues related to Hill Peoples in the Eyes of the Thai Government
- Meilianghe Village in the Early Days of its Establishment
- Royal Favors
- Chapter Five Granted Citizenship
- Gaining Thai Citizenship at the Cost of One’s Life
- Good Tidings for the Hill Peoples
- Applying for Citizenship Certificates is an Arduous Process
- Laws and Procedures Concerning Applying for Citizenship Certificates
- Corruption During the Citizenship Application Process
- Various Means of Obtaining Citizenship Certificates
- Citizenship Certificates—Wings of Freedom
- Citizenship Certificates—Social Benefits and Security
- Chapter Six I Am Thai
- Thailand in the Eyes of the Villagers
- National Education in Thailand—A Platform for Cultural Integration
- Serving in the Military—Fulfilling Civic Duties
- Life’s New Choices—Adapting to Thai Culture
- Political Involvement—Awakening the Citizenship Consciousness
- Chapter Seven Adherence to the Chinese Culture
- The Elderly Man Who Refuses to Abandon His Chinese Identity
- Establishing the Chinese Language School
- Traditional Chinese Religion
- Cultural Identity and the Creation of the Ethnic Yunnanese People in Northern Thailand
- Conclusion
- The State, Government, and People
- “State,” “Government,” and “Hometown” in the Minds of Cross-Border Migrants
- From Thai Citizenship to State Identity
- Reflections on State Identity
Introduction
As a frontier minority area, Yunnan features diverse ethnic cultural resources as well as unique geopolitics and cross-border economic and cultural exchanges and interactions. To study the frontier and minority issues in Yunnan, a scholar must take into account the relationship between Yunnan and Southeast Asia, without which a full understanding of the particularity, complexity, and evolution involved would be difficult.
Humans, as social animals, have constructed many complex social relationships through collective activities, which have in turn evolved into various inter-communal relationships. As the relationship between Yunnan and Southeast Asia evolved, the peoples in these two regions have jointly painted a vivid historical and cultural picture through their long-term exchanges and interactions. In remote antiquity, the early humans living in the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau and Southeast Asia could migrate and live freely in the vast virgin forests, mountains, rivers, and valleys in the region. However, as modern nation-states gradually came into existence, the original geographic wholeness was broken by political communities with tangible objects such as boundary lines and markers erected in between, giving rise to a range of cross-border issues, including cross-border migration and interaction, cross-border and stateless ethnic tribes, and refugees, among others.
The research object of this book is a group of people that can be described as follows: They were once Chinese people, comprising both Han Chinese and ethnic minorities of Yunnan origin. They had left Yunnan for various reasons and migrated to Myanmar. When they moved on to northern Thailand, they were once treated as refugees and referred to as “problematic hill people.” It was only after they were incorporated into the Thai naturalization system and became Thai citizens that their life as itinerants ceased. Not only were they able to secure a peaceful life in remote northern Thailand, but their descendants were also able to leave the deep mountains for the outside world in pursuit of modernization.
1. Research Origin and Determining the Research Object
As part of Yunnan University’s Phase III construction of Project 211, He Ming, head of the key discipline of ethnology and director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies, Yunnan University, ambitiously decided to launch a series of ethnographic research findings on cross-border ethnic tribes living in Yunnan and Southeast Asian countries. In Yunnan, numerous ethnic minorities live in compact communities, giving the province diverse ethnic cultural resources and making it ideal for anthropological and ethnological fieldwork. As domestic scholars, the ethnic minorities living in Yunnan used to be our primary academic focus. With extraordinary academic vision, Director He Ming proposed a new and exciting research direction —to regard Yunnan and Southeast Asia as geographically and culturally connected so that the ethnic and interactive relationships between the ethnic tribes in these two regions can be examined from a new perspective. Since my main research focus has been the cultural evolution of a cross-border ethnic tribe —the Lahu —in recent years, I became a member of the Southeast Asian Ethnography project team and decided that the Lahu people in northern Thailand should be my research object.
In late 2009, I joined an ethnographic investigation team led by Director He Ming to Thailand to select the site for our fieldwork. Dr. Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, director of the Regional Center for Social Sciences and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University, and his colleagues not only recommended a village that met our requirements but also took us there. While investigating a Lahu village chosen by our Thai colleagues in Amphoe Mae Sruay, Chiang Rai Province, a few kilometers away from the Myanmar–Thailand border, I noticed a number of Han Chinese living in this village of fewer than forty households and was told that they were remnant Kuomintang (KMT) troops. In August 2010, half a month before our Thailand Action Team1 was about to officially move into the field site in Thailand, Chiang Mai University informed us that the originally selected Lahu village did not want to be studied by any foreigner. Hence, they selected another field site for us —a Lahu village in southwest Chiang Rai.
When I arrived at the newly selected field site with my assistant Zheng Yongjie, we were surprised to find that this village actually has a Chinese name —Meilianghe. It is a multi- ethnic village inhabited by Han Chinese (mainly the remnant KMT troops and their family members) as well as hill tribes such as the Lahu, Akha (a branch of the Hani people), and Akhe (a branch of Hani people). This village was established by the remnant KMT troops and is still dominated by them and their families; it is, therefore, also referred to as a “refugee village.” The Lahu, Akha, and other hill tribes came later. Among them, the Lahu have settled in this village largely because of the remnant KMT troops. As our investigation deepened, we became increasingly aware of a fact: Although the Lahu, as a cross-border tribe, have retained their unique ethnic traditions, history, and culture in their migration from China to Southeast Asia, their large-scale migration in the 1940s and 50s was closely related to the KMT troops who had retreated to Myanmar. Even for the Lahu who migrated from China for other reasons before and after the 1940s and 50s, many have long depended on Han Chinese caravans and KMT troops for survival. This explains why many Lahu villages in Thailand are located in the vicinity of “refugee villages.”
Details
- Pages
- L, 216
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433178337
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433178344
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781433178351
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433177200
- DOI
- 10.3726/b16641
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (October)
- Keywords
- ethnographic study Northern Thailand cross-border ethnic tribes Yunnan state identity Myanmar citizenship Chinese culture
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2023. L, 216 pp., 22 b/w ill.
