ABSTRACT
The previous chapter has explained how apprehensions of an increasing regional threat from communist China encouraged American officials to develop a far-reaching programme of economic and military assistance for the states of Southeast Asia, including Burma. In developing their aid plans, US foreign service officers hoped to strengthen the Burmese government, increase its legitimacy in the eyes of the Burmese people and tie it more closely to the West. At the same time, however, Burma’s position on the borders of China made the country strategically valuable to American planners seeking to strike at the new regime in Beijing. In the later stages of the Chinese civil war, remnants of the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) armies in southern China had fled across the border into north-eastern Burma. These forces, US planners believed, constituted an important military and political asset, and a covert network was established to support them with arms and personnel ferried out of Japan and Taiwan. The corrosive effects of the KMT occupation of Burma were felt both
locally and internationally. Locally, the KMT’s presence exemplified and exacerbated the Burmese government’s crisis of control. As a military actor, the KMT participated in the country’s rebellions, trading arms, briefly allying with the Karen, and forcing the government to deploy such a large portion of its scarce military resources that, by the spring of 1953, serious operations against the country’s other insurgent groups had become virtually impossible.1
As a political actor, the KMT displaced what local authority and prestige the government and its agents possessed by setting up a de facto administration, levying ‘taxes’, preying on local communities for recruits and supplies and exposing the government to debilitating attack from its domestic opponents in Rangoon. As a criminal actor, the KMT was heavily involved in Burma’s opium trade, where its access to weapons and transport into northern Thailand transformed what had been a relatively minor opium-producing region at the end of the Second World War into one of the world’s major sources of the drug.2
