ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a discussion of the transnational nature of the Yunnan borderlands where China’s southwest merges with mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia (see Figure 7.1). I especially focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when border communities in Yunnan experienced the expansion and competition of Burma and Siam (Giersch 2006, 117–120), the European encroachment on China and mainland Southeast Asia, and the making and redefining of states and regional power-relations (Scott 2009, 10–13). These border communities were comprised not only of indigenous people but also of migrants including the Chinese, and existed across China’s nominal, fuzzy boundary with mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. As people “in-between,” the loyalties and alliances of the residents of border communities shifted between multiple overlords, which included imperial China, the new European colonial powers, and the protectorates of these two, who likewise shifted between regional dominant powers (Lockhard 2009, 102; Winichakul 1994, 84–87).
