THE SINO-BURMESE BORDER NEGOTIATIONS, 1956-1961

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to re-examine attempts by Burma and China to establish states along their adjoining borderlands between 1886 and 1989. British Burma and Qing China made the first effort to negotiate a boundary in this opium-producing area. While Britain’s early twentieth-century plan for a railway project linking Yunnan and Burma was eventually abandoned, China, based on earlier British field surveys, did construct a road and an incomplete railway during World War II as supply routes to the outside world. As a result, the border region became a point of contention during wartime. Independent Burma and the People’s Republic of China were next troubled by three waves of rebellion: the remnants of the Kuomintang army, the ethno-nationalist armed groups in the Shan and Kachin States and the Communist Party of Burma. They were operating from various rationales, but all of them used the opium trade as their major source of funding at one time or another.