Locating Chinese Agribusiness Investments in 'Armed Sovereignties'

Territory, Politics, Governance

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Rubber out of the ashes: locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands

Kevin Woods

To cite this article: Kevin Woods (2018): Rubber out of the ashes: locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands, Territory, Politics, Governance, DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2018.1460276 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2018.1460276

Published online: 07 May 2018.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtep20 TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2018.1460276

Rubber out of the ashes: locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar– China borderlands Kevin Woods

ABSTRACT China’s contemporary cross-border investments in northern Myanmar have been confronted by, and in turn have re-animated, the region’s post-Cold War geographies and associated illicit drug economy. Since the mid- 2000s, mainland Chinese companies have invested in large-scale agribusiness concessions in northern Myanmar under China’s liberalized opium substitution programme. Chinese companies have partnered with local armed ‘strongmen’–many of whom were or still are involved in the illicit drug trade – where they exercise armed authority within a wider landscape of ‘armed sovereignties’. Field case study data demonstrate how China’s contemporary cross-border investments have extended Myanmar’s national political authority within the arc of armed sovereignties. Chinese-backed agricultural estates, whether awarded to paramilitary militias or rebel leaders under ceaseﬁres, acted as state territorial interventions and led to incremental Myanmar state-building outcomes. The state-building effects from contemporary Chinese investments are in contrast to the Cold War period in which China sought to destabilize non- aligned nation-states by supporting armed communist revolutions. The study traces how China’s current land-based investments have reawakened the borderland’s legacy of political violence and reconﬁgured armed sovereignties closer towards Myanmar’s military state. KEYWORDS agribusiness; territory; Myanmar; China; state-building; drugs

HISTORY Received 19 December 2016; in revised form 21 March 2018

INTRODUCTION: POST-COLD WAR CHINESE ENGAGEMENTS IN MYANMAR’S BORDERLANDS

While drinking instant coffee on a patch of crumbling cement overlooking a rice field, an ethnic minority elder from Shan state in northern Myanmar scoffed at the worrying trend of expanding opium fields in his home state. ‘Opium didn’t destroy local farmers … rubber has; rubber has taken everything from my people.’1 Expanding rubber concessions in northern Myanmar has fenced in farmers’ fields and beefed up militia leaders’ hold over land, people and the local economy. But one notable aspect overlooked during that sunset conversation is that the spread of rubber has little to do with rubber per se. It has much more to do with Chinese cross-border investments and the recent commercialization of agricultural production and territorial claims-making in Myanmar. What did not need to be mentioned in conversation with my long-time friend – who is from

CONTACT [email protected] East–West Center, Honolulu, HI, USA.(Corresponding author)

© 2018 Regional Studies Association 2 Kevin Woods an area of Myanmar that since his childhood has been controlled by tens of armed militias, many of whom are involved in the opium economy – is that paramilitary leaders are now also rubber barons. The spread of rubber in the uplands of northern Myanmar must be situated within debates on how large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs), which I will also refer here to as ‘land grabs’ or ‘land deals’, rearticulate new governance norms with associated political and extra-territorial effects (Cotlua, 2013; White, Borras, Hall, Scoones, & Wolford, 2012). Breidenbach and Nyiri (2010) argue that China’s current land acquisitions in Southeast Asia represent a historical lineage from colonial resource-extraction concessions, which established forms of extra-territoriality. But a global study revealed that LSLAs are often conducted by national elites who partner up with foreign investors (Cotula & Vermeulen, 2009), a situation I demonstrate for the case of northern Myanmar. This paper engages in these debates by showcasing the role of domestic armed actors, under various political arrangements with Myanmar’s military state, in facilitating land grabs. It focuses on domestic armed political elites in northern Myanmar and the role they have played in bringing Myanmar’s military state into the upland ethnic minority-populated borderlands by way of Chinese-financed rubber concessions. These state-making qualities argue against land grabs as a ‘foreignisation of space’ (Pineiro, 2012; Zoomers, 2011), even when financed by foreign investment as is the case for this study. The paper explores how the demarcation of agribusiness concessions by military and state authorities in northern Myanmar’s armed conflict zones engage in state territorial processes (Peluso & Vandergeest, 1995) that work to bolster political authority (Lund, 2016). Land deals are viewed as a significant reordering of the political landscape towards military state institutions and rule of law. I argue that land deals – with the subsequent land governance and administrative changes – have incrementally produced more legible state landscapes within these conflict zones that in effect do the work of the domestic military state in state-building. However, in order to understand the precise nature of state-building in the Sino-Myanmar borderlands, we must turn to the agents and conduits of state-making. Chinese-financed land concessions have been awarded to a panoply of armed ‘strongmen’ in northern Myanmar whose current territorial power and authority has emanated from their historical relationship with the military state.2 The strongmen include narco-paramilitary organizations as well as ex-rebel groups who have signed ceasefires with the national armed forces (known as the Tatmadaw in Burmese). Paramilitary groups arose out of the Tatmadaw’s Cold War counterinsurgency strategies, and still today play a similar state-proxy role in conducting counterinsurgency against existing rebel groups. In the absence of a strong state presence, provincial strongmen configure ‘state-like’ authority (Lund, 2006) in these out-of-the-way places. Those ex-rebel groups who are under ceasefire arrangements with the national military are politically positioned as much less favourable to the military state, but nonetheless also engage in state-making endeavours (if inadvertently) through land deals, as the case studies presented in this paper demonstrate. Various paramilitary outfits have traditionally been the spearhead of the military state in these armed conflict territories by being called upon at times to lead counterinsurgency efforts against ethno-nationalist rebel groups (Buchanan, 2016; Smith, 1999). Since the 1950s, many armed organizations operating in northern Myanmar, especially in Shan state, have also been involved in the illicit drug economy (Meehan, 2011). But since the mid-2000s, armed strongmen and Bur- mese national crony companies3 who are tied to the military began to diversify their economic portfolio by partnering with mainland Chinese agricultural investors (Woods, 2011a). National cronies and provincial strongmen showcased in northern Myanmar have played this intermediary ‘fixing’ role for Chinese investors in other countries in Southeast Asia (Percival, 2007) and in other regions, too (for Africa, see Rupp, 2008). The empirical and analytical focus on these armed political elites enable a wider view beyond the perceptions of Myanmar and China as monoscaled and monolithic states. These tendencies are especially problematic with respect to China ‘going out’,

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE Locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands 3 where China is oftentimes characterized as steamrolling into and over a place beyond its borders and ‘consuming’ its transboundary locality. The uplands of northern Myanmar are populated by ethnic minority communities who predominately rely on customary norms rather than state institutions and statutory laws. Traditional headmen and customary laws operate within the same landscape as state authorities and administrative structures, however. A mosaic of overlapping political authority thereby defines northern Myanmar’s territorial, administrative and governance arrangements (Grundy-Warr & Dean, 2011). A legacy of war and (counter)insurgency produced a spectrum of strongmen who have cooperated to varying degrees with the Myanmar military state to control territories, valuable resources and cross-border trade routes. Territories under the authority of militias and ceasefire groups are administered vis-à-vis the military state, whereas rebel groups who continue their armed struggle autonomously govern their territory and the populations who inhabit those areas. The multiple-layered territorial patchwork of authority does not, therefore, neatly overlay with the sovereign extent of the nation-state (Agnew, 2005). Competing armed authorities, whose political affiliations with the state stretch across the spectrum, have produced a highly fractured territorial complex which I call ‘armed sovereignties’. I heavily lean on Christian Lund’s ‘fragmented sovereignties’ (Lund, 2011), but my conceptualization of armed sovereignties adds the element of armed groups to the mix of institutions and types of authority figures who exhibit these state (or state-like) qualities. Specifically, armed sovereignties emphasize the element of violent force in the making and maintenance of that territorial assemblage. The empirical field data and analysis presented in this paper showcase how large-scale agricultural production schemes have become entangled in, and Chinese investors muddled through, these armed sovereignties. Local strongmen who obtained agribusiness concessions appropriated land and resource-control mechanisms (Hall, Hirsch, & Li, 2011). The allocation of concessions and its spatial location have served to authorize a strongman’s political and territorial authority, or in the words of Sikor and Lund (2009) ‘authorise the authorisers’, in that particular locale. This in turn has further buttressed the state-like authorities’ control over territories and populations, as well as state administration and control by way of their association with the state and applying statutory land laws.4 This theoretical approach to territory and authority help explain how state-like authority figures have inadvertently performed as inchoate state-builders (Ahram & King, 2012) within Myanmar’s arc of armed sovereignties. In this sense, ‘mafia-like’ strongmen and their authority over land and populations bleed out from war and into a post-war development period of state-building (Tilly, 1985). Land grabs that set into motion the making of more state-regulated territory have also facilitated the spatial reordering of an already historically differentiated population in the image of the military state. The making of state territory by carving out private land concessions does not, therefore, only lead to the demarcation and policing of a land parcel, but also de- and re-populat- ing the wider landscape. Carving out new regulated and policed state territory with resulting population changes on who is allowed to ‘belong’ within these state spaces mirror similar goals of military-led counterinsurgency. Ethnic minority populations sympathetic to rebel political aspirations are forcibly removed from these rebel-controlled frontier forest landscapes, and at times put into what could be called ‘strategic hamlets’ along state infrastructure routes that are also nearby to military outposts. Oftentimes ethnic minority villagers, many of whom are Christian, are then replaced by ethnic majority Burman5 who profess the state’s religion of Buddhism. These agricultural migrant wage labourers live in and work on the private agricultural estates. These population dynamics also represent an outcome of state territorial processes that contribute to counterinsurgent state-building objectives. The amalgam of forces that define the relationships among the Myanmar military and state with various types of armed groups is a complex and constantly shifting affair. The spatial mosaic of contested political armed authority has implications for how the state fills out into the landscape

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE 4 Kevin Woods of armed sovereignties (Jessop, Brenner, & Jones, 2008). Strongmen operating as state-builders make compromises with the state. Several field case studies presented here show how degrees of state-making outcomes have resulted under a range of political geographies and strongmen allegiances to the Myanmar state. The constant push–pull between the centre and periphery with military state officials and different non-state armed groups does not directly lead to conventional forms of state-making in any straightforward manner. But incremental steps are made nonetheless. The field case studies presented in this paper depict the ways in which state-sanctioned, Chi- nese-financed land concessions bolster the military state’s political and security domains. National and regional military and government authorities granted agribusiness concessions to paramilitary leaders in areas where armed groups under a tentative ceasefire arrangement also claim territorial authority. This territorial intervention cast as a pro-poor agricultural investment leverages the political (and economic) position of the militia strongman at the expense of the ceasefire group who holds the state at a greater political distance. In other cases, military and government officials awarded land concessions to local bosses and national crony companies in forested areas under the territorial control of rebel groups still at war against the national military. Strongmen and cronies built roads and clear-cut forests inside and nearby their concession. The forest conversion led the rebel groups’ guerrilla hideouts in some cases to be replaced with Myanmar army battalions. Resource rents from timber extraction and agricultural production have also been diverted away from rebel checkpoints and towards those manned by military and government officials and militia groups. In addition, ethnic minority populations who inhabit these rebel areas and practise traditional upland cultivation practices have been forcibly evicted from these land concessions, only to be replaced by ethnic majority Burman plantation wage labourers who hold greater state allegiances. The paper offers insight on the reworking of political economies in the places ‘China’ and Chi- nese investment ‘go out’ (Woods, 2016a), showcased here as specifically back to a place where the Beijing government previously meddled in foreign revolutionary affairs (for Laos, see Dwyer, 2014). China’s Cold War engagements in northern Myanmar, much like the rest of the region, were meant to support a wider communist and anti-imperialist revolution. Some of the same leadership and their extended families that rose in prominence from China’s Cold War involvement in northern Myanmar are now backed by Myanmar’s military state as counterinsurgent agents. These paramilitary forces are now responsible for facilitating private Chinese investments that bring the Myanmar military and government into these armed sovereign spaces. The counter to the Cold War has been pitched as liberal investment under democratic rule; but field data demonstrate how violence and dispossession towards the same population segments continue una- bated, or even accelerated, under the military government’s ‘development for peace’.6 These spatial processes, now led by Chinese cross-border finance, have bound the Mekong region in novel ways that hold serious implications for local political economies and wider geopolitics of the region (Glassman, 2010). Analysis of post-war geographies where China is once again becoming a global paragon in development affairs under China’s ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ (Dittmer & Yu, 2010) would benefit from being located within deeper historical reference points to previous Chinese engagements (Strauss, 2009) and to situated particularities (Percival, 2007). The political landscape in which I and my research assistants and informants navigated demanded particular attentiveness to people and power given working on such a research topic and ourselves operating in armed sovereignties. Although much more of the available field research data and field case studies do not appear in this paper, the analysis and framing are shaped by years of interviews and time spent in these borderlands. This has not been conducted as any sort of conventional ethnography, however, as I was forced to work within the political constraints of field sites and my research topic. For security reasons, I could only visit a handful of land deals, which were along roadsides not too far from provincial towns in which I was based (with a few

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE Locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands 5 exceptions). Therefore, I relied heavily on research assistants and informants who were from provincial towns and village tracts whose communities had been impacted by the land deals and state militarization. In particular, they helped me to ‘locate’ the particular land grab in its local context. I linked up with these civil society leaders who resided in or nearby impacted villages by enlisting the help of community-based organizations who operated in the region and who I had gotten to know over the years by collaborating on similar research and advocacy engagements. In general, active civil society leaders based in provincial towns welcomed chatting over Chi- nese tea in private. But it took several more years to build up trust with respected community elders, those closer to the making of land deals, and those who were better informed about the nature of armed conflicts. But eventually, after I became better known by civil society leaders in these places, there were plenty of informative people who were willing to meet over the years. While I have interviewed rebel leaders (those with ceasefires and without), I did not, however, have the opportunity to meet and interview the strongmen I write about, with one notable excep- tion. The political and economic aspirations of militia strongmen, and their viewpoints on the role of land deals in shaping armed sovereignties, remain, therefore, left to informed speculation. In a place fractured by armed sovereignties and filled with mistrust, where mafia-like individ- uals and organizations are beyond reach to most, rumours quickly became well-known ‘fact’ despite substantiated empirical evidence. Data were triangulated in interviews, and, when possible, photographs were taken of government agribusiness concession signs with militia insignias. But given my inability to visit many of the land deals, I needed to rely heavily on villager testimonies collected by village research assistants without my presence (but under my guidance). Despite the limits of my data-collection methods and findings due to this challenging political environment, part of the value of the data is civil society’s belief in their validity as their social reality, regardless of their empirical validity. Civil societies’ discursive framing of Chinese agribusiness engagements acts as the ‘truth’ precisely because it has the power to manifest new political mobilization and state–society formations – which therein lies closer to the centre of the enterprise of state-building.

FROM INSURGENCY TO BUSINESS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF SINO- MYANMAR BORDER ENGAGEMENTS

While for this paper it is not possible to attend in detail to ‘history at one point in time’, this sec- tion provides a brief background of the violent political history that has come to define armed conflict dynamics and investment in northern Myanmar. Chinese-financed land grabs emerged out of a legacy of armed rebellion and military-led counterinsurgency in the Sino-Myanmar borderlands. Figure 1 shows northern Myanmar and the field sites that informed case study material for this paper. The Burman Buddhist nationhood, upheld by the Burman-centric Tatmadaw (Callahan, 2005), has defined the contours of state-making since independence from the British in 1948. In response to political grievances and socio-cultural exclusions from the making of the post-independence Union, ethnic-based insurgencies quickly spread across Myanmar’s borderlands and continued throughout the Cold War era (Smith, 1999). Northern Myanmar was particularly over- come by ethnic-based insurgencies, both foreign and domestic. The Kuomintang (KMT) retreated from China’s communist state to set up their territorial front along the Yunnan border in north-eastern Shan state, and over time were increasingly financed by the illicit drug economy (Gibson & Chen, 2011). Meanwhile, a breakaway armed faction of the country’s communist party (the Communist Party of Burma – CPB) went underground in the Wa hills on the China border in north-eastern Shan state not far from KMT holdouts (Lintner, 1990). Much like the KMT, the Burmese communists also became involved in the opium economy as a revenue-generating strategy, especially as their own funds from the Chinese started to dry up in the early 1980s. Many

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE 6 Kevin Woods

Figure 1. Kachin state and northern Shan state, northern Myanmar. ethnic-based rebel organizations in Myanmar loosely joined the CPB as a tactical alliance against the state.7 A foreign armed occupying force, a domestic Chinese-funded armed communist alliance and ethnic-based insurgent organizations scattered around the geographical periphery of the country prompted the Tatmadaw to devise a series of counterinsurgency campaigns (Buchanan, 2016). The Tatmadaw’s top authorities hand-selected ethnic elite strongmen, who themselves were oftentimes previously insurgent leaders (but perhaps with less ardent political ideology) to engage in counterinsurgency on behalf of the nation’s Tatmadaw forces. The provincial strongmen were called upon to help fight the remaining rebel groups who occupied nearby or overlapping territories.8 In exchange for arrangements with ‘people’s militias’ (or pyithusit in Burmese), the military permitted them to use their territories of influence for income-generating activities in order to be more self-sufficient. In northern Myanmar, this normally meant taxing opium caravans, which included using government-controlled roads and towns for trafficking purposes (Lintner, 1999). Armed organizations also often had gentlemen agreements with state agents on the other side of the border in Yunnan (as well as Thailand), who purchased the opium in exchange for more arms (Chin & Zhang, 2007). One of the most prominent strongman arising from these counterinsurgency programmes was Lo Hsing Han (in Chinese pinyin, Luo Xinghan), the infamous Kokang ‘kingpin of opium’ in the golden triangle (McCoy, 1973) (see the case study below for the role of Kokang in Chinese agribusiness investments).9 As Deng Xiaopeng’s proposed economic reforms gained headway in the 1980s, China reor- iented its foreign policy away from supporting armed rebellions as the bulwark against US imperi- alism. Without China’s financial and ideological base, ethnic-based insurgent groups in northern Myanmar subsequently splintered off and signed ceasefires with the Myanmar military government (Smith, 1999). The Tatmadaw applied the same strategy to these break-away ex-rebel

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE Locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands 7 groups operating under ceasefires as it had to the ex-rebel strongmen of decades past. Rebel groups stopped openly fighting against the Myanmar military in exchange for the right to engage in a range of state-protected economic pursuits in lieu of political ambitions. Ex-rebels also retained their territories, troops and arms (and even got supplied additional weapons by the military in some cases). As their former brothers-in-arms who proceeded them, these new ex-rebel strongmen leaders also began to extract and tax various valuable resources more aggressively, especially poppy (Meehan, 2011). Meanwhile, in government-controlled territories, buttressed by the ceasefire agreements, the Myanmar regional military commanders granted resource concessions to their own business partners, sometimes in partnership with the north’s paramilitary strongmen leaders as awards for their allegiance to the state (Jones, 2014). After the end of the Cold War, the arrival of private Chinese cross-border investments reani- mated legacies of counterinsurgency. The same authorities who became militia leaders during the Cold War and immediately afterwards (and who in many cases ran illegal drug operations) facilitated Chinese agricultural investments. Strongmen once again became the vanguard of sorts for the military state. The paper next turns to how contemporary cross-border Chinese engagements gave new life to the haunted past.

SEDIMENTED POLITICAL HISTORIES AND CONTEMPORARY CHINESE AGRICULTURAL INVESTMENTS

After the end of the communist insurgency and the subsequent ceasefires with rebel groups who splintered off from the communist alliance, ex-rebel strongmen and ceasefire groups turned their full attention to natural resource extraction. This created new conditions for political violence which I have described elsewhere as ‘ceasefire capitalism’ (Woods, 2011a). Instead of outright war- fare, the military’s token phrase of ‘development for peace’, imagined as a type of post-conflict development period, began to shape governance regimes over land, resources and populations. Union army and government officials, together with paramilitary strongmen and ceasefire rebel leaders, granted logging concessions (Woods, 2011b) and mining permits (KDNG, 2007a)to Chinese companies. Bilateral large-scale Chinese hydropower schemes were also proposed and a few developed (KDNG, 2007b). Just after cross-border timber trade was temporarily shut down because of international con- demnation and heightened domestic scrutiny (Global Witness, 2005), local farmers started to complain about being pushed off their farms to make way for Chinese large-scale agribusiness estates (Kramer & Woods, 2012). The main thrust behind the surge in industrial agricultural concessions can be pinned on China’s national opium substitution programme. This programme provided financial subsidies and tariff-free import quotas to mainland Chinese companies who invested in agricultural production in northern Myanmar (and Laos) (Guo, 2007;Lu,2017). But how is it that opium substitution measures to stem the trafficking of heroin across Yunnan’s border led to agribusiness land grabs by narco-militia strongmen in northern Myanmar? Previous to the 2000s, the Beijing national government had been engaged in bilateral opium- substitution projects with the Myanmar government’s drug agency and border security forces, but with very limited spatial coverage and to little effect. More in line with the country’s economic reforms, in 2006 China’s State Council created the Opium Replacement Special Fund, placed under Yunnan’s provincial government’s Ministry of Commerce. This move in effect liberalized the programme; financial incentives were provided to Chinese businesses to engage in private agribusiness schemes in northern Myanmar (and Laos) (Shi, 2008).10 Chinese companies needed to work with local authorities on the other side of the border to make the deal, compared with previous bilateral state projects that only went through central military government officials. Local authorities who have held territorial authority in these places were militia strongmen and ceasefire

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE 8 Kevin Woods group leaders. The number of Chinese companies involved and the number of agribusiness concessions awarded since the mid-2000s have since sharply risen (Woods, 2013). A notable aspect of China’s land-based investment model in northern Myanmar is its mode of production. Chinese companies have invested exclusively in large-scale private agricultural estates, not in smallholder production schemes (MSU & MDRI, 2013). Agricultural concessions have been allocated in designated ‘wastelands’ and ‘vacant lands’ according to the 1991 Wastelands Law, which was then updated by the 2012 Vacant, Fallow, and Virgin Land Law (Oberndorf, 2012). These lands, however, are oftentimes under customary use and ownership by ethnic minority farming households. Families who suddenly found themselves within the new concession boundaries subsequently were evicted as ‘squatters’, in some instances being sued by the new con- cessionaire. Despite the rhetoric as a pro-poor development intervention to offer (ex-)poppy farmers with a legal economic alternative, the investments have directly led to forced evictions and loss of farmland access and use by local households who had previously farmed the concession area under customary norms.11 In some cases, Myanmar military agencies resettled villagers (those who favoured rebel governance) into new villages under state surveillance near to a Tatmadaw unit.12 Villagers who either lived in the vicinity of agricultural concessions or were directly displaced by them had little interest in becoming plantation wage labour. Their refusal to sell their labour can be partly explained by their history of non-monetized labour practices, but also because of their contempt for the owner of the concession who had displaced them and his military patron ties. Migrant landless labourers, predominately Burman (but also Chinese citizens if near the China border), would nearly always take the limited seasonal plantation jobs. These agricultural labourers sometimes had to live and work in fenced-in company estates, a sort of privatized state space. As ethnic minorities living in northern Myanmar tend to associate those who identify as Burman with trying to take over their territory and customs, and attribute Chinese as taking their resources, migrants only worsened socio-cultural tensions. Moreover, as Burman migrants are the dominant ethnicity of the military (and government), the changed population demo- graphics in these locales could change political outcomes (and to some degree already have), especially with state-level elections.13 Legal agricultural investments have offered strongmen new opportunities for accumulating capital. Yet this reason alone is not satisfactory to explain the rush to rubber given the rubber price crash earlier this decade and their involvement in the very lucrative illicit economy. I argue that the private agricultural estates have been less about legal revenue generation and more about further consolidating territorial power over strategic roadside areas en-route to China. Whereas modes of armed governance and the illicit drug economy could be under threat following a possible change in political winds, legally obtaining high-value and strategically located private estates has offered a chance to mark their territorial authority and economic power further. The patron–client ties that guide the implementation of China’s opium replacement programme is visually demonstrated from official green government signposts inscribed with the respective militia flags marking their private agribusiness estate. One particular well-known paramilitary group is Mang Ban, which split from the infamous drug lord Khun Sa (Chinese name, Zhang Qifu) and his rebel group, the Mong Tai Army (MTA), after he was arrested by Tatmadaw authorities (Buchanan, 2016). The Mang Ban militia leaders maintain an ethnic Chinese identity and prefer doing business with mainland Chinese companies. One of the Mang Ban militia leader’s companies, Nyein Aye Myae (or ‘Peaceful Land’), has signed agribusiness ventures with mainland Chinese businesses in the past decade. For example, they operate three different rubber plantations (which I visited) located around a village under their territory of influence just north of Lashio, the commercial hub of northern Shan state. Despite Mang Ban’s agribusiness ventures in

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE Locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands 9 this area, during this same time poppy cultivation had increased in territories under their influence, reportedly under the protection of Myanmar’s north-eastern military commander. The Kutkai militia is another paramilitary outfit whose leaders act as state-like strongmen and are involved in agribusiness land grabs. The militia’s territory of influence in northern Shan state surrounds the town of its namesake, nestled in the mountains – the same place that is the cultural and political stronghold that birthed the Kachin insurgency in the early 1960s. The town is located along the only paved road to China in these parts, just a few hours’ drive north of Lashio and a similar distance south of the Yunnan border. A Kachin man named T Khun Myat was the Kutkai militia leader from 1990 to 2010, but he stepped down earlier this decade after becoming an elected member of Myanmar’s national parliament for the Union military’s political party (the USDP) and tasked with assisting in Union law-making (Buchanan, 2016). Shwe Gonmyin (or ‘Golden Hill’), a company registered under the Kutkai militia, received rubber concessions in this area in the late 2000s. Since the time of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) ceasefire annulment in 2011, the Kutkai militia has occasionally been summoned by the Tatmadaw to fight against the KIO. Since the Kutkai militia’s territorial extent overlays with that of the KIO as well as Kachin populations who curry political favour with the KIO, the large-scale Chinese concessions awarded in these areas to the Kutkai militia are particularly politically loaded.14 The roadside rubber concessions awarded to the Kutkai militia leadership and the surrounding area effectively reinforce the area as their territory, legitimated by the township state land administrators who provided land titles for the rubber concessions to Kutkai militia leaders and marked them on state land maps. And what is considered solidified territory under the Kutkai militia cannot, by definition, be that of the KIO. Strongmen incentives for land deals are not the same as for government officials, however. The Beijing government’s stated goals are to decrease drug production and trade and enhance political and social stability along their shared border (what falls under ‘non-traditional security’ concerns), to import cheap agricultural commodities, and provide a growing resource revenue base for the Yunnan government and Yunnanese companies (Su, 2015). However, the Myan- mar government’s overarching strategy appears to be, according to analysis from civil society leaders and my own field experience, to strengthen military state presence, instil nationalism and quell ethnic armed political unrest, all the while profiting from the investment deals. Yet the means to achieve these governments’ very different goals have coalesced around the allocation of private agricultural estates to armed strongmen in areas wrestling with simmering ethnic- based political conflict.

Intersections of poppy and rubber The same year that the Chinese government started its liberalized approach to opium substitution in the mid-2000s, opium cultivation in Kachin and Shan states increased for the first time in over a decade. Poppy cultivation acreage and tonnes of opium collected have increased every year since then (UNODC, 2015). A litany of factors explains this correlational trend between China’s commercialized drug-substitution programme and a spike in illicit drug production. For one, the programme provides new capital-accumulation opportunities to strongmen, many of whom are suspected to be directly involved in the narcotics trade. Their dividends can further finance their semi-autonomous territories and troops – ingredients needed to continue to orchestrate a narco-economy. Second, some smallholder farming households who cultivated small-scale legal agricultural crops, especially upland rice for household consumption, have been forcibly evicted from their farming plots – marked ‘wastelands’ on government land- use maps – to make way for these agribusiness estates. In some reported cases, these farmers who became landless from agribusiness land grabs fell back on the opium economy as one of the few profitable livelihood mechanisms available to them. Closer relations among some narco-militias and favourable regional Tatmadaw officials – reflective of the degrees of

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE 10 Kevin Woods military–state-building accomplished – have also encouraged lenience in poppy cultivation and associated tax and trade (Meehan, 2011; SHAN, 2011). While Chinese agribusiness investments in northern Myanmar have provided new capital accumulation opportunities for narco-militia strongmen, this does not appear to translate into weaning off the production, tax and trade of narcotics. In fact, the potential income from rubber latex, especially since the rubber price crashed earlier this decade, pales in comparison with drug money. Other tactics must be at play to explain strongmen interest in obtaining rubber concessions. Related to the drug business, rubber estates could have perhaps offered money-laundering opportunities, although this seems rather limited. Instead, another explanation appears more likely. The future mode of governance in these areas where militias openly exert state-like authority is uncertain, including the continued prevalence of the illegal drug economy, especially as Myanmar undergoes national political and economic reforms this decade. In anticipation of threats to their continued armed rule and illicit business, militia leaders have positioned themselves instead as the landed elite along strategic infrastructure routes to China. Drug lords turning into rubber barons have positioned themselves to entrench their state-backed political and economic power further, this time ofﬁciated through land trans- actions along roadsides in China’s backyard.

Militias and rubber expansion as a spearhead of political power ‘Kokang’ from the Kokang Self-Administration Zone (Figure 1) in the north-eastern corner of Shan state are an official ‘nationality race’ and a government-recognized territory. Kokang, who are ethnic Chinese, speak a Chinese dialect and look to Yunnan rather than central Myanmar for familial trade ties and socio-cultural traditions (Yang, 1997). Kokang periodically migrated further into Shan state from their self-administration zone when armed battles made life too inse- cure. Several decades of migration further into Shan state by Kokang, along with ex-KMT families and Yunnanese Chinese civilians, made Lashio (northern Shan state’s capital city) into a commercial trade hub between the two countries, where up to half the town’s population is estimated to be composed of Sino-Burmese residents (Le Bail & Tournier, 2010). Kokang have cultivated socioeconomic patronages with Chinese and Burmese government officials, national military and militia personnel, and businessmen on both sides of the border. Their long-established cross-border trade networks capitalized mostly on the drug economy since the middle of the Cold War. A few prominent Kokang emerged as leaders in the ‘Golden Triangle’s’ drug trade, the most well-known among them being Lo Hsing Han.15 According to field research, some Kokang strongmen who had positioned themselves to facilitate the drug trade in Shan state have more recently used their political position and patronage trade networks to obtain Chinese-backed agribusiness estates. Kokang strongmen, relying on their ties to regional Myanmar military officials and state administrators, were able to secure land and plantation labour, as well as to provide protection, for Chinese agro-investment. Myin Lwin (Chinese name, Wang Guo Da), an ethnic Chinese businessman who ident- ifies as Kokang, is based in Ta Moe Nye village near Kokang Self-Administration territory. He is the current leader of the Ta Moe Nye militia. In addition to foot soldiers and com- manding over territory, he runs his own company under the same name as his militia, with an office even in one of Yangon’s pricey neighbourhoods just outside of downtown. Commu- nity leaders in Lashio believe he is the one who first introduced Senior General Than Shwe (former head of the Burmese armed forces and a previous top military state ruler) in the 1970s to Chinese businessmen interested in resource-extraction projects when Than Shwe was briefly based in Ta Moe Nye. Many community leaders and a few ex-government officials and ex- rebels familiar with the Ta Moe Nye militia I interviewed claimed that Myin Lwin has been involved in resource extraction in northern and north-eastern Shan state for the past two decades. He has often facilitated business contracts with Chinese companies, including currently

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE Locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands 11 for agribusiness, because of his good relations with the regional and national-level Myanmar military.16 The brick walls and barbed wire fences squaring off former swidden ﬁelds to mark the private property belonging to the militia leaders’ companies further authorize these state-like armed actors as the rulers of the land. The green government signs that mark the concession boundaries sym- bolize the arrival of the state – and its statutory laws, political administration, and the police and army who enforce state order – into this indigenous rebel frontier. The political relations between paramilitaries and the state structure the ways in which rubber expansion becomes tooled as a spearhead of state political power and authority in these zones of armed sovereignties. The discursive and material politics of these territorial interventions reﬂect state–political relations with pub- lic authority governing these territories.

STATE-MAKING IN REBEL FORESTS

The following field case study illustrates how Chinese agro-investments can instigate military state-building even within territories controlled by ex-rebel ceasefire organizations, who then turned back to war partly as a result of these outcomes. The case study material is from community leaders in the capital of Kachin state who I interviewed several times, from data collected by research assistants in and around the town of Laiza where the KIO’s headquarters is located, and from my own visit to the concession boundary and interviews in Laiza with KIO officials. The analysis is my own, but one on which I sought feedback on from my research team and those interviewed. The KIO, with its armed wing the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), is one of the country’s largest and best-known ethno-nationalist political armed opposition groups, and is the main rebel group representing the Kachin ethnic minority group. After being one of the last major rebel groups to sign a ceasefire with the Tatmadaw in 1994 after the fall of the country’s communist insurgency, the KIO continued to maintain semi-autonomous territory in Kachin state and northern Shan state.17 An ethnic Chinese businesswoman born in Kachin state nicknamed Ali Jie developed good relations with high-level KIO and KIA officials, as well as the rotating Burmese northern military commanders in Kachin state. Her political connections to both high-level Kachin rebel leaders and Myanmar military officials in Kachin state during the heyday of logging in the early 2000s earned her numerous lucrative logging concessions (EIA, 2015). After China’s liberalized opium-substitution programme came online, my field research demonstrated how she switched from logging to making agribusiness deals in KIO-controlled territory. She first joined together with an astute Kachin businessman and a mainland Chinese partner who could access the subsidies under China’s programme. The Kachin business pair’s new company, Northern Royal Jade (NRJ), now backed by their Chinese agro-investor, obtained a 30,000-acre rubber (and banana) concession surrounding the KIO’s capital town of Laiza located right on the Yunnan border. According to government maps,18 the concession is located in a Myanmar government-protected forest reserve, but which has not actually been managed as such since it fell outside de jure state sovereignty. The KIO was the only political authority here, whose troops found the forest cover suitable for sporadic guerrilla fighting against the Tatmadaw, as well as using it to generate limited logging revenue. Field researchers visiting the concession several times, as well as the concession map, evidenced that a road was built after the concession was awarded, which stretched from the largest nearby government-run town tens of miles away to a village under KIO authority located within the concession. The infrastructure was built by the well-known Kachin businessman Yup Zau Hkawng’s Jadeland Company, which had good connections with KIO leaders, and who the Kachin partner in the NRJ was formerly associated with. The bulldozed road passed

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE 12 Kevin Woods through the forest reserve along its route. Trees in a wide path of the dirt roads were subsequently cleared and hauled away to generate company revenue, with various taxes levied at multiple points: military battalion posts, KIO checkpoints, the military’s timber association and the government’s Forest Department. A new Tatmadaw battalion was established in the agribusiness concession zone, forming a triangle with two other Tatmadaw battalions located outside the concession. Together they pushed up against the KIO’s headquarters that butted up against one side of the concession. According to field research, company managers brought in Burman wage labourers from the country’s heartland, who themselves were earlier dispossessed by farming-related debt, as well as Chinese citizens from across China’s border just a few miles away. Once the crops were ready for harvest in 2010, Burmese military officials blocked the export route overland to China via the KIO’s headquarters to prevent KIO officials from taxing the agricultural trade, as told to me by the KIO’s head of the agricultural department. The boxed bananas marked ‘made in China’ instead had to be trucked along government-controlled roads and through a much further away cross-border check point managed by the government (rather than the KIO), with tax revenue and unofficial bribes doled out to Myanmar military and government officials along the way. This manoeuvre cost the KIO cross-border tax revenue. According to Kachin workers involved with the NRJ, allegedly one of the trucks transporting boxes of bananas from this concession was seized by the Chinese border police for concealed heroin. Since that time workers involved in the concession believe the Chinese NRJ business partner from Yunnan has been on the run as a wanted fugitive. After the KIO refused the new Myanmar government’s offer in 2011 to join state forces under the Tatmadaw, fighting between the two forces subsequently resumed soon thereafter. Field research demonstrated how Chinese agro-investment became entangled in the resumption of war since their business deals crisscrossed the mosaic of armed sovereignties where state and rebel authorities were again at war with each other. The road leading from the nearest large government-controlled town to the agribusiness concession ended up as the supply route for the Tat- madaw to reinforce their troops stationed inside the concession. Since the concession forms a half circle around the KIO’s headquarters, the area’s largest agribusiness estate wedged between state and rebel territories at times amounted to a battlefield. The concession area came under the nom- inal control of the Tatmadaw, but then at other times the KIO was able to launch ground attacks against the Tatmadaw from within the concession, according to eye witnesses who I interviewed. Consequently, the concession has reportedly become heavily mined by both sides to curtail respective troop movements. At the time of writing, the war in the northern borderlands continues without the prospect for peace. The political and biophysical landscape changes that occurred in and around the agribusiness concession area described here have provided a good proxy for how Chinese investments have mixed with latent and active political violence. The demarcated state forest reserve, which in effect acted as a guerrilla forest buffer around the KIO’s headquarters, was logged and transformed into a monoculture estate to cash in on the neither-war-nor-peace sta- lemate. The forest-turned-logged agribusiness concession located in a territory that then turned back into a war zone represented a collusion of vested business interests with investors across national border and enemy lines, all set in motion by China’s opium-substitution programme. Even though informants did not narrate the series of events and outcomes in the language of territorial conquest or state-building, the material politics speak for itself. Since the concession became the launch pad for armed battles against the KIA, the head of the KIO’s agricultural department declined to comment further on the political potency of transforming the landscape surrounding their headquarters into a deforested clearing of rubber and banana. The political and securitization ramifications of the concession became undeniable, if yet unspoken, to the rebel colonel.

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE Locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands 13

CONCLUSIONS: STATE-BUILDING IN ARMED SOVEREIGNTIES

The research findings presented here demonstrate how Chinese investments align with the cur- rents of the localized political economy of violence in which they operate. The findings showed how Cold War legacies have structured the ways in which political power and territorial authority get reinforced in contemporary cross-border Chinese engagements. Chinese investors and their finance capital became entangled in Myanmar’s armed sovereignties and helped to reanimate political violence associated with state-making. The Sino-Myanmar borderlands have provided a backdrop to China’s changing cross-border engagements since the Cold War: funding insurgencies to spread communist and anti-imperialist revolutions to now instigating private business partnerships with state-like (narco-)militias. Chi- na’s opium-substitution programme carried out by Chinese private companies has provided new opportunities for armed strongmen to accumulate more capital, expand and further cement their territories of influence, and claim private property. Armed strongmen leaders in northern Myan- mar who were at one time associated with Myanmar’s armed communist umbrella (and supported by China) are now situated to benefit from their cross-border political and economic ties. Burma’s legacy of strongmen as state-like rulers is brought into the present by revealing how strongmen, by ‘fixing’ Chinese capital as rubber estates, have brought the Burmese military state further into these contested territories. Rather than any sort of ‘foreignization of space’, Chinese cross-border capital has enabled the state and its strongmen to gain more power and control over land, resources, territory and populations. Chinese capital changed the configuration of Myan- mar’s northern armed sovereignties, such that state agencies and officials wield more power – and thereby statutory law and regulations granted more legitimacy – in spatial proximity to agribusiness concessions. The messy patchwork of armed sovereignties prevents any one entity from monopolizing power and violence over the region and its inhabitants, however. ‘China’ does not steamroll over northern Myanmar to create some sort of feared Chinese sub-state. Nor has the Myanmar government been able fully to create neat, legible landscapes and state-taxed-complacent subjects. Paramilitaries, ceasefire groups and rebels alike have not yet been able to funnel enough – or better quality – Chinese investments into their territories of influence to realize fully their respective desires, wherever they may lie on the political and economic spectrum. The return to war for the KIA is reflective of these unfulfilled investment outcomes and military state-making implications. The KIO/KIA took stock of the material and political benefits from ceasefire capitalism, particularly from natural resource concessions (Sadan, 2016; Woods, 2016b): widespread environmental destruction from logging, mining, dams and agribusiness, national militarization, a heroin and HIV+/AIDS epidemic, and an influx of landless Burmese migrants into KIO areas. Moreover, the resource concessions further brought paramilitaries, national crony companies, and military state officials and administration into KIO territory. The environmental destruction, lack of economic benefits to the local population and forms of contentious military state-building (rather than its absence) influenced the KIO’s decision to refuse to accept the military’s ultimatum (Brenner, 2015). Together with several other armed groups in the north, the KIA has since been back at war with the Burmese military, where land and resources have once again been redefined by political violence. What Chinese agribusiness deals may not have delivered in a hopeful windfall of profits to strongmen and rebel leaders, especially since the rubber price plummeted, have been made up for in territorial gains. The LSLAs to paramilitary leaders and ceasefire groups have re-territoria- lized the mosaic of armed sovereignties in such a way that has incrementally led to state-building effects, as the cases presented here demonstrate. The more ‘stately’ territory in and around Chi- nese-financed agribusiness concessions has in some cases even proven to be a strategic base

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE 14 Kevin Woods from which to launch attacks against old battlefield enemies, not unlike by militia proxy during and since the Cold War era. The KIO’s return to war is thereby seen as a violent push back against these state-building effects. My findings therefore reveal a starkly different terrain than one simply being ‘consumed’ by China. State officials awarding rubber concessions to strongmen, yet financed by China’s state-supported private sector, have produced more legible state-regulated landscapes and populations out of the ashes of war.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author foremost thanks the many anonymous informants and research assistants over the years who made this research topic possible to study, despite all the obstacles. So many Kachin community leaders gave their time again and again to explain the historical backdrop and the cur- rents of political patronage that helped to situate these land dynamics. In special memory to my ﬁrst Kachin ﬁeld researcher on this project, who passed away when very young from an unrelated health problem not long after he helped me get my boots muddy.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.

FUNDING

The research that led to this paper was made possible in part by support from the Social Science Research Council, International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Further ﬁnancial support was provided by University of Califor- nia – Berkeley for dissertation ﬁeld research.

Notes

1. Interview in Chiang Mai, Thailand, July 2010. 2. In the sense that the strongmen in northern Myanmar emerged out of the structuration of the military state, John Sidel’s(1999) conceptualization of strongmen in the Philippines – or bossism – more accurately captures the strongmen of northern Myanmar rather than Joel Midgal’s ‘strongmen’ (Midgal, 1988). On examples of types of ‘gangsters’ in Southeast Asia, see Trocki (1998). 3. ‘Crony companies’, as they are often called in Myanmar, are military-backed companies that emerged in the early 1990s as effectively the private domestic arm of the military. 4. For a case on the Indonesian frontier, see Eilenberg (2014). 5. Burmans (Bama or Bamar in Burmese) represent the country’s ethnic majority, and are the ethnicity associated with the military and state. 6. The Myanmar military government has routinely touted the phrase ‘development for peace’ to convince ethnic armed groups and civilians to work with the state to bring prosperity to their war-torn communities. In practice, this has amounted to large-scale hydropower dams, extensive logging and mining, land grabs, and militarization (Woods, 2011a). 7. Although since many of the rebel groups were staunchly Christian and predominately anti-communist organizations made the temporary coalition a matter of political and ﬁnancial convenience. 8. The military initiated the Ka Kwe Ye (KKY) programme (literally, ‘people’s defence’) in 1963 just after General Ne Win’s military coup, and later the Pyithusit (‘people’s militia’) less than a decade later (Buchanan, 2016). 9. His company, Asia World (and then run by his son, the late Steven Law), is one of Myanmar’s most prominent enterprises involved in construction, logging, mining and hydropower, especially in northern Myanmar.

TERRITORY, POLITICS, GOVERNANCE Locating Chinese agribusiness investments in ‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China borderlands 15

10. This included favourable Chinese bank loans, lowered bureaucratic hurdles for investment and, most impor- tantly, state-provided quotas for tax-free agricultural crop imports. 11. In contrast, the same Chinese-backed agricultural outreach programme in northern Laos was spearheaded by smallholder production schemes (Shi, 2008), giving further evidence about how the political terrain shapes production modes and outcomes. 12. These outcomes are similar to the counterinsurgent strategies deployed by Southeast Asian governments during the Cold War, where smallholders became the spearhead of the state in communist frontier zones (De Koninck, 2006). 13. I have documented one such case where a former regional military commander was elected into office in a Kachin state township following an influx of Burman migrants to work goldmines and an agribusiness concession. 14. This is the case even more so since active fighting against the KIA has resumed since 2011. 15. The widely held perception among Shan state residents, and indeed most Burmese in the whole of Myanmar, is that Kokang are directly or indirectly involved in the narcotics business, including even those who are not part of a militia, as repeatedly told to me in interviews. 16. U Myin Lwin ran in the national elections on the military’s political party (USDP) for Kutkai township in northern Shan state where he is very popular with Chinese residents. However, he lost nonetheless to a non-Chi- nese USDP candidate. 17. The KIO-controlled territory mostly outside the valleys and infrastructure routes as lowland areas mostly came under military state control after their ceasefire. 18. The maps are on file with the author.

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