Echo chamber: My book review - Taipei Times

On April 2, Taipei Times contributing reporter David Frazier published his review of my recent book Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands: Untold Stories of Overland Chinese Migrants During the Cold War ("Echoes from a fractured frontier," April 2, page 11).

The primary part of his review is a summary of the life stories told in the book. His criticisms appear in two short paragraphs at the end.

First, he summarily dismisses the accounts in the book as "rambling" and "disorganized" and considers the analysis "naive" and "overgeneral," without providing any arguments to substantiate his views. It is rather unfortunate that he seems to have no appreciation for the genre of personal narrative based on extensive fieldwork and textual research that is the essence of my work. I have an obligation to respond, as his comments could cause a misperception of the book among readers.

Second, Frazier contends that the book, with its Han Chinese bias, "fails to distinguish between Hui Muslim caravan traders, who historically dominated regional trade routes, and regular Yunnanese." Undoubtedly, Yunnanese Muslims, or Yunnanese Hui, played a significant role in the engagement. To maintain that this group dominated all routes throughout history is incorrect and constitutes a stereotypical perception. I have discussed the issue in a chapter on Yunnanese Muslims' transnationalism in my previous book, Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Migrants of Burma. Several scholars have also challenged the view of Hui predominance in long-distance trade between Yunnan and its neighboring areas. For examples, see C. Patterson Giersch's Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier; Ann Maxwell Hill's Merchants and Migrants: Ethnicity and Trade among Yunnanese Chinese in Southeast Asia; and Sun Laichen's doctoral dissertation, "Ming-Southeast Asian Overland Interactions, 1368-1644."

Grounded in my fieldwork in Burma, Thailand and Yunnan, I maintain that in the period related to my study there were far more Yunnanese Han who participated in the mule caravan trade — both as traders and muleteers — or mule transport commissioned by the Burmese authorities than Yunnanese Hui. Furthermore, I do not fail to distinguish between Hui and Han. Both groups are allochthonous in Yunnan vis-a-vis other autochthonous groups. When addressed together, Han and Hui are normally referred to as Yunnanese Chinese in academia. In this book, I refer to Yunnanese Muslims in Chapter 3 when I examine the impact of Hui identity on the life and work of a covert intelligence agent. I also discuss a Hui family's trading activities in the Wa Hills in Chapter 9.

Third, I would like to respond to his comment about my failure to address the opium trade. I have quoted many academic works that have examined the issue in my book. Moreover, in Chapters 7 and 8, I covered aspects of the opium trade that have been understudied — how and why people grew opium, opium fairs organized in periodic markets and deals made through middlemen.

My interest as an anthropologist is in the lives of ordinary people affected by the volatile situation on the frontiers. Their reactions and the ways in which survivors have sought to remember and tell their stories are crucially important to me. This differs from conventional Cold War history, which focuses on geopolitics, central states' foreign policies, regional security and ideological confrontation.

Chang Wen-chin is a research fellow at the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies in the Academia Sinica Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (RCHSS).