Word: yunnan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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General Li Mi, 50, is the handsome, scarfaced Nationalist who controls the Chinese Nationalist guerrillas entrenched in the chasmed wilderness that is Burma's border with China. His troops, who style themselves the Yunnan Anti-Communist and National Salvation Army, retreated into Burma after the Nationalist collapse of 1949; they claim to be preparing for a reinvasion of their homeland, and the destruction of the Communist regime...
...National Salvation Army's activities begins in spring 1950, when he salvaged some 2,000 stragglers from the wreck of the Nationalist Thirteenth Army Group and withdrew his demoralized troops to the Shan mountains on the Burma side of the border. In May 1951 Li attacked Red Yunnan with several thousand recruits gleaned from the borderlands, occupied eight hsien (Chinese counties), and appealed for volunteers. "Every able-bodied man in the district" stepped forward, he says; the National Salvation Army increased...
Most of Li's men live in mud and straw huts, raise rice and vegetables on tiny hillside farms. Some have settled down with Burmese girls but most still yearn for their families in Yunnan, and some secretly visit their kinfolk from time to time. A bold attempt last year to move large numbers of their dependents from Red Yunnan ended in bloody failure: the Communists seized 800 oldsters and children, and none has been heard of since...
...pressured into a phony "peace" pact whereby Communist guerrillas in Burma would cease their depredations in exchange for a Burmese offensive against the Nationalist redoubt. Since then, says Li Mi, the Nationalist Salvation Army has been attacked on all sides by 1) Red Chinese regulars, infiltrating from Yunnan, 2) Burmese Communist guerrillas, 3) the Burmese army. In one incident, he says, the Burmans rounded up 100 of his men and turned 40 over to Chinese Communists, who drenched them in kerosene and burned them to death...
There are White Thais (whose women wear mostly white), Black Thais (who wear black), and, more recently, Red Thais (from the political colors they wear), who have their own autonomous administration in southern Yunnan (Red China). But Thais, of one color or another, inhabit Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Siam and northern Burma. In Laos the Communists have already set up their own puppet government (see above), but Communist propaganda speaks of "liberating" the Thai people as a whole and establishing among them a "Free Asian Republic...