After 17 years of ceasefire between the Kachin and the Myanmar government, fighting resumed in June 2011. Refugees swarmed into Dehong prefecture, the border between the PRC and Myanmar. In August of 2012, based on its non-interference policy in the internal affairs of foreign countries, the PRC repatriated the refugees. This led to protests that included Chinese Jingpo. In the interactions between the Kachin, Myanmar, and the PRC at this delicate time, the increase in tension between flexible “citizenship” as an on-the-ground reality of the shared borderland versus citizenship as defined by international law was obvious.
Since the renewal of Jingpo manau and its festival in the PRC in 1980, regardless of the political and economic differences between the PRC Jingpo and the Burmese Kachin, the linguistic, cultural and social mutuality between them has always played an indispensable role in their histories. This paper describes the mutually inflected histories of the manau festival. There are two general conclusions: (1) the writing of alternative histories of manau festival is important for comprehending this borderland for the period running from 1980 until the present; (2) Chinese Jingpo dancing diplomacy at the manau as a recent version of people’s diplomacy in PRC is relevant for understanding PRC efforts at mediation of the tensions between the Kachin and Myanmar.
陶曉萱
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