“...China in Burma,” both discursively and materially, is a complicated dynamic affair. The diplomatic, political and economic relations between the two countries have been continually refitted as the two countries have gone through their own separate and shared events. In particular, Burma’s postindependence ethnic armed movements, underground communist insurgency, and the Burmese military’s counterinsurgency strategies against them along China’s shared border continue to provide historical weight to Burma’s regional and national-scale political economies. Since the mid-1960s ethnic strongmen have dominated the political and economic sphere in northern Burma, in this case mostly with the illegal drugs economy, which was, and still is, woven into cross-border business networks with Yunnan Province and beyond...."