ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Chinese Nationalist soldiers from Yunnan Province in southwest China who settled in the Golden Triangle of northern Thailand after 1949. The study of Yunnan Chinese in northern Thailand provides a useful comparative case that will be illustrative of issues related to Chinese immigration to Thailand, especially the trade-offs involved in converting ethnicity to Thai middle-class status, and their emerging transnational orientations. Furthermore, in this project, we see how the Chinese cultural networks are formed, deployed, and capitalized in the current increasingly competitive global community. My presentation includes the following sections. First, I will provide a brief history of the Yunnanese Nationalists and their settlement in northern Thailand. This is followed by a discussion of the theoretical significance of changing ethnicity among Chinese immigrant groups in Thailand, its relevance for the Yunnanese, and the research methodologies used. I then describe the general conditions of Banmai Nongbua village, where we conducted our fieldwork, including the new ethnic mosaic that encompasses the Yunnanese. The last section discusses the Nationalists’ changing political allegiance due to changing local and global conditions which the Yunnanese must adjust to, and the changing ethnic identity of their offspring, in this new host society-the Thai nation-state.
