Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (16 page)

In the thirteenth century Marco Polo visited the area around Kunming and understood that he was in a place outside Chinese civilization, with strong links to other parts of Asia. He described the main city in the region, which he called Karajang, and wrote that it was ‘a great and noble city, in which are numerous merchants and craftsmen. The people are of sundry kinds, for there are not only Saracens and Idolaters, but also Nestorian Christians.’ Nestorian Christianity was then widespread in Central Asia and was the state religion of the Khitans, a Turkish people to China’s west whose king, Yelu Dashi, was the inspiration for the legend of Prester John, the Christian king of the Orient who would one day vanquish Islam. Marco Polo explained that the people of Karajang ‘ride long like Frenchmen’ and that they didn’t eat ‘wheaten bread’ like the Chinese, but ‘rice they eat and they make of it sundry messes’.

Marco Polo had come to Yunnan in the train of Mongol conquerors. The Mongols had crushed Yunnan’s rulers and incorporated the entire region around Kunming into their vast Eurasian empire, stretching then from Poland to the Sea of Japan. A good portion of Yunnan’s ruling class would become Mongol and Turkish by descent. When the Mongols were replaced a hundred years later by the new Ming dynasty in China, Yunnan as well fell under Ming control. It was then, in the early fifteenth century, that Kunming was founded as the main garrison town and local capital. This was the beginning of real Chinese rule in Yunnan.

It was the start of Chinese rule, but over a region that was not yet Chinese. The Han Chinese population in Yunnan was tiny, but would increase quickly, not just here but throughout what is today the ‘the southwest’. A frontier was created, not unlike the American frontier a few centuries later, where military garrisons and expanding settler towns grew up amongst native and tribal communities.

The Yao were one of these native communities. They had once lived just south of the Yangtze River, in what is now the middle of China. In the twelfth century, however, this area (modern Hunan province) was still the frontier and the Yao were being pushed south by growing numbers of Han Chinese, themselves often refugees fleeing Mongol incursions. There was frequent violence between the Yao and Chinese newcomers, who were cutting down once dense forests to make room for intensive rice cultivation and shipping out the timber. Wild elephants, once plentiful, died out or retreated southwest. Some Yao rulers were co-opted by the Chinese and recognized as
tusi
, the Chinese term for a native chief. On paper, the Ming Chinese empire now seemed to extend all the way from the Yangtze River to Burma, but all along the way imperial control was often limited to fortified stockades, with large areas still governed by
tusi
or home to ‘uncooked’ barbarians.

This would gradually change. In the decades just before the Europeans first began their colonization of America, the Chinese were intensifying their colonization of the southwest. The Yao made their last stand at the Great Vine Gorge, in what is now the Guangxi Autonomous Region. Later Chinese chronicles state that in 1450–6, Yao forces under a chief known as Big Dog Hou ‘attacked and ruined prefectures and countries, appearing and then disappearing again among the mountains and valleys’. Offers of reward for his capture proved useless and the president of the ministry of war, Wang Hong, observed that dealing with Big Dog was ‘like dealing with a spoiled child: the more indulgence was shown to him, the more he would howl. If he were not flogged until the blood flowed, he would not stop howling.’ No fewer than 160,000 soldiers were directed at Big Dog’s headquarters. The Chinese emerged victorious. Sixteen hundred prisoners were taken alive, more than 7,300 others killed and decapitated.

Under the later Manchu or Qing dynasty, the southwest was further consolidated. Emperor Yongzheng’s policy was to ‘bring the chieftains into the system’, a massive and brutal integration of non-Han areas. There were to be no more places where the state’s ‘whip, although long, could not strike’. Native
tusi
alliances were partly abolished and their territory incorporated as new prefectures. Autonomous Yao militias were forcefully disbanded.

Another native people were the Miao. In 1726 at the Battle of Mount Leigong, more than 10,000 Miao were said to have had their heads chopped off and more than 400,000 starved to death. In 1797, yet another people, known as the Buyu, attempted to throw off the Chinese yoke, leading to thousands being either burned to death or beheaded. In 1855, the same year Chief Billy Bowlegs was leading the last stand of the Seminole people against the US Army in Florida, Zhang Xiumei, a Miao, led a massive uprising that temporarily controlled all of eastern and southern Guizhou. When he was eventually defeated in 1872, count less numbers of his people were massacred. These revolts would continue well into the twentieth century. There are still more than ten million Miao people and four million Yao people in China today, roughly as many as there are Swedes in Sweden and Danes in Denmark, but almost insignificant in number compared to the huge Han Chinese population, and virtually invisible from the outside.

By the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Han settlers were pushing further southwest to Yunnan as well. Many of these settlers were from the cold and arid north and brought with them the northern Chinese dialect that is today the basis for Mandarin. Today, the Chinese dialects spoken along the southeast coast–like Cantonese and Hokkien–are entirely unintelligible to Mandarin speakers, a sign of their ancient divergence. But the difference today between the Chinese spoken in Beijing and the Chinese spoken in Yunnan is slight, a matter of accent more than anything else, comparable to the difference between the English of London and New York.

It was a new frontier and a frontier that was moving. In Yunnan too there would be rebellions and uprisings by native peoples. Yunnan became a sort of Chinese Siberia, a place of settlement and economic opportunity, but also of exile for political troublemakers. One was Yang Shen, a prominent Ming dynasty scholar and poet. He was involved in the Great Rites Controversy of 1524 (involving the succession of the new Jiajing emperor) and was banished to Yunnan where he spent the next thirty years. There he was welcomed by the local literati and wrote at length about his new home. He is particularly remembered for his essay ‘Roaming Atop Diancang Mountain’, in which he embraced the idea of the Yunnan frontier. He wrote:

The Chinese are a truly cosmopolitan people, the heirs of all mankind, of the entire world. The Han are just one of the ethnic groups in the empire, and we include many different types of people. In Yunnan alone there are over twenty other non-Han native peoples. So long as they accept the emperor’s rule, they are Chinese.

There was a time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when India was expanding towards China and not the other way around. It was, of course, an India that was under British rule, but there was an Indian component nonetheless. Burma was then firmly part of the Indian Empire and British Indian troops–Dogras from the Jammu Hills, Jats and Sikhs from the Punjab, and Gurkhas from Nepal–manned outposts on the edge of Yunnan. From their bases in Rangoon and Calcutta, networks of Indian merchants, Gujaratis, Tamils and Marwaris, explored trade links into China. British India saw Tibet as part of its ‘sphere of influence’ and western Yunnan as well was seen as part of its expanding backyard. Beijing was then barely in control of most of Yunnan and over long periods lost control completely to local hereditary rulers and warlords.

The most important of these warlords was Long Yun, who dominated the province from 1927 to 1945. China was then in anarchy, the country divided between the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, the Communists under Mao Zedong and a host of provincial armies. It was the age of the warlords. Elsewhere in China there was the ‘Dogmeat General’, Zhang Zongchang, who ruled Shandong province, nicknamed ‘Dogmeat’ after his favourite summer dish, a giant well over six feet tall who kept a harem of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French and Russian concubines, and even, according to a contemporary journalist, ‘one bedraggled female who said she was an American’. Manchuria was the personal fief of the ‘Young Marshal’ (son of ‘the Old Marshal’) and morphine addict Zhang Xueliang. He would become famous for the ‘Xian Incident’, in which he kidnapped Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in a botched attempt to force Chiang into a united front with Mao Zedong and the communists, against the Japanese. He was arrested and would spend the next half century of his life in detention, before moving to Hawaii and dying there in 2001, aged 100. There were many others equally colourful, like the ‘Philosopher Warlord’, Wu Peifu, in Hubei, so-called because he had received a classical education, and the Methodist ‘Christian General’ Feng Yuxiang, who fancied himself the Oliver Cromwell of China.

Long Yun himself, the warlord of Yunnan, was a one-eyed, bespectacled, thin-faced autocrat whose name meant ‘Dragon Cloud’. He was not a Han Chinese but a member of an aristocratic Black Yi family, the Black Yi being one of the more prominent minority peoples in Yunnan, heirs of a long tradition that went back to the medieval Nanzhao kingdom. He would rule Yunnan from 1927 until he was finally ousted by Chiang Kai-shek in late 1945. He had his own army of over 100,000 men and even his own currency and allowed American aid meant for the war effort to pass through his territory, though redirecting a not insignificant amount into his private coffers. He also controlled the biggest opium crop in the world.

Long Yun brooked little dissent but nevertheless permitted the many academics who flocked to Kunming considerable intellectual freedom. In 1939 he even responded positively to a plan to resettle 100,000 European Jews in Yunnan, a plan that never materialized, its backers in Germany seeing it as worthy but ‘too visionary’.

He would be overthrown in 1949 and exiled to Hong Kong, only to return to China after the communist take-over and be awarded high office in the People’s Consultative Conference. His two sons migrated to the US where for years they ran a restaurant business in Washington DC and Cambridge, Massachusetts. By this time, the People’s Liberation Army was steamrollering over the final areas of Nationalist and warlord resistance. Over the coming years Beijing’s control would finally run along the entire Burma–Yunnan frontier, for the first time in history. On the other side of the frontier was no longer the British Indian Empire, but a newly independent Burma, soon to drift into civil war.

The Han Chinese have traditionally viewed the indigenous people of the region in a less than flattering light: ‘Their written language, resembling worms tied in knots, makes no sense at all,’ remarked one nineteenth-century observer. ‘They reek with unbelievable stench’ and ‘like wolves, they dine on raw meat, and are fierce in nature’, said another. But the communists had to think a little differently. In the mid-1930s, Mao Zedong had led his embattled communist party fighters on their ‘Long March’, walking hundreds of miles from the coast, where they were being wiped out, deep into the interior, hounded every step by the then superior Nationalist armies and barely surviving as a coherent force. Their retreat took them to Yunnan and to many other areas where the Han Chinese were either a minority or were nowhere to be seen. They needed the help of these non-Chinese peoples, and came to see them as ‘little brothers’ who could be enlisted to the revolutionary cause. Later, once the revolution was won, they turned to Stalinist ideas about nationality, and embarked on a ‘nationality classification project’ to place the various non-Chinese peoples into a single all-encompassing scheme. In theory they were regarded as different nationalities, with rights to varying degrees of self-governance. In practice, few had any choice but to accept the new order and a degree of control from Beijing that was unprecedented.

For a while, there was a softly-softly approach to dealing with minorities, in Yunnan and elsewhere. Much of the province was incredibly remote from the centres of Chinese power. In 1950 it still took a month to travel from Kunming to the Burmese border, malaria was rampant, and much of western Yunnan home to only a negligible Han Chinese population. ‘Autonomous zones’ were set up as well as local border militias, and communist party workers set about distributing seeds and agricultural tools and improving markets and roads, hoping to win over minority support. A Minority Nationalities Institute was established in 1951 to train ethnic minority cadres, but, as late as 1953,
tusi
were still presented with seals of office, as in the old days of the Ming and the Manchus. In the hills there was resistance, often fierce resistance, as People’s Liberation Army units moved into areas that had never before come under Beijing’s sway.

Direct rule intensified. In 1957 there was a left-wing turn and the native chiefs were stripped of all their remaining privileges. Minority peoples in general were told they were to receive no special treatment, no special autonomy. ‘All must travel the socialist road together.’ Land reform began on a large scale and people throughout Yunnan were told to join new cooperatives. This was the same time as the Great Leap Forward in the rest of China, an attempt to jump-start industrial production and collectivize agriculture. It would lead to economic chaos, famine, and millions, possibly tens of millions, of deaths nationwide. Yunnan suffered terribly. Many native rulers fled to Burma, then a beacon of openness and relative modernity.

The Cultural Revolution came next. In the mid-1960s there were attacks on ‘Little Nation Chauvinism’. Anyone in traditional clothes was fined. Ethnic festivals were banned or transformed into political rallies. The Raoshanling festival of the indigenous Bai people, for example, which is a three-day event honouring their deities, was made into the Festival of the Three Constantly Read Articles, with each day devoted to mass recitals of one of Mao’s essays. All around the country, hundreds of thousands died during these years. An estimated 500,000 people were detained in Yunnan alone and nearly 7,000 became the victims of ‘enforced suicide’.