MCLC: GMD legacy in remote Thai villages

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MCLC LIST
GMD legacy in remote Thai villages
Source: NYT (1/14/15)
In Remote Thai Villages, Legacy of China’s Lost Army Endures
By AMY QIN
A hillside resort near the village of Ban Rak Thai, Thailand, which was settled by members of China’s Kuomintang Nationalist Army. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
BAN RAK THAI, Thailand — At night, traditional Chinese red lanterns illuminate the hotels, shop fronts and Yunnanese-style restaurants lining the main road in this highland village of just over 1,000 people. On one recent evening, as the mist rose off a nearby reservoir, the mellifluous voice of the popular Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng could be heard wafting out from one of the village’s several tea shops.
But this sleepy Chinese village is nestled in the lush backcountry of northwestern Thailand, one of several dozen such outposts, a quirk of the region’s tumultuous human and political history.
“I may have a Thai ID, but I’m Chinese,” said Liang Zhengde, 47, a manager for his family’s fruit farms. “My family is Chinese, and no matter where we go, we’re still Chinese.”
The Liangs, like some 200 other families here, are the veterans or descendants of what is known as China’s Lost Army, a unit of the Kuomintang’s Nationalist Army, which lost to the Red Army of Mao Zedong in 1949. As most Nationalist soldiers fled east to Taiwan in the face of Communist advances, the Kuomintang’s 93rd Division retreated west from the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan into Myanmar, then known as Burma.
Huang Zhengshun, 84, left, a Kuomintang veteran, and his wife in their home there. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
Mr. Liang’s father, Liang Zhongxia, 84, a former Kuomintang commander, is among the 93rd Division’s last surviving veterans.
History was not finished with these lost Chinese soldiers. Against the background of shifting Cold War dynamics, some of those who stayed in the region fought against the Burmese government and ethnic militias and, with the help of Taiwan and the United States, continued to stage forays intoChina.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Kuomintang veterans became players in the illicit drug trade that for decades roiled this area, part of the infamous Golden Triangle. They later struck a deal with the Thai government allowing them to stay in the northern Thai borderlands in exchange for help fighting the Thai Communists.
In the mid-1980s, with the Communist threat essentially extinguished, the Kuomintang soldiers agreed to put down their arms and take up farming. In exchange, the Thai government began to grant them and their families Thai citizenship.
Today, 64 of these so-called Kuomintang villages, including Ban Rak Thai — or Mae Aw, as locals call it — remain in northern Thailand, according to statistics published by the Taiwan government last year.
Assimilation is a work in progress. In Ban Rak Thai, many villagers still prefer to converse in Chinese, though many of the younger generation can speak at least a little Thai.
Traditional red banners printed with gold-lettered Chinese couplets glint in the sun in the doorways of many village homes, and beside them, in many cases, villagers have hung portraits of the Thai king, Bhumibol Adulyadej.
The villages’ Chinese heritage has been played up in recent years as locals seek to cater to a small but growing number of tourists, mostly Thai, who come seeking cool weather, Chinese food and locally grown oolong tea.
Huang Jiada, who joined the Kuomintang during the Cold War after his family had fled to Myanmar, has been leading the effort to preserve Ban Rak Thai’s unique history.
On a recent crisp afternoon, Mr. Huang, 53, hopped on his motorbike and sped up a bumpy dirt path to the top of a hill. At the peak was a sparse, one-room museum that he built with funds from the Thai government to commemorate the Kuomintang Army.
Inside, recent photos of elderly veterans wearing oversize military fatigues were displayed alongside hand-drawn maps of battle routes and older photos that showed young, gun-wielding soldiers marching under the army’s red, white and blue flag.
Mr. Huang pointed to a portrait of a heavyset man wearing rumpled clothes and an orange beanie. “This is the man who conscripted me into the army in Myanmar when I was 11,” Mr. Huang said, speaking in southern-inflected Mandarin. “He couldn’t read or write, but he could certainly fight and kill.”
Mr. Huang was inspired to build the museum after seeing the impressive Kuomintang history museum in Santikhiri, in Chiang Rai Province, the country’s most prominent Kuomintang village.
“We can’t forget the history,” he said. “We can’t throw our forebears away. Regardless of what happens with China and Taiwan in the future, we are all Chinese people. We can’t forget our Chinese roots.”
A Thai solder at the border with Myanmar. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
It is a sentiment shared by much of the older generation in Ban Rak Thai, who still speak of the past in terms of the traditional minguo calendar, which takes 1912 — the year the Republic of China was founded — as year one.
But to focus exclusively on Ban Rak Thai’s “Chineseness,” said Carl Grundy-Warr, a specialist in Southeast Asia border politics at the National University of Singapore, is to overlook the complexity of the history and geopolitical landscape that has shaped the cultural identities of many of the residents in this village.
“The people in Mae Aw have intermingled and intermarried so much with so many different ethnic groups in the mountains of northeast Burma and northern Thailand that actually there is no one pure history there,” he said.
He described the cultural landscape that spreads across Yunnan, Myanmar, Laos and the Thai borderlands as a “gigantic kaleidoscope” of multiethnic interaction.
Still, for the former Kuomintang soldiers, the ties to China are powerful, despite the decades that have intervened.
Liang Zhongxia follows the news in mainland China and Taiwan every day. In 2013, his wife and son returned to Yunnan for the first time to sweep the family’s ancestral tombs. But Mr. Liang stayed behind.
After more than a half-century in exile, he was reluctant to go home.
“I don’t want to go back anymore,” he said.
Too much time had passed, he said, and he quoted a verse from an ancient Chinese poem: “My arms have outgrown my sleeves.”
by denton.2 at osu.edu on January 16, 2015
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