The Sino-Burmese community in post-war Myanmar

This seminar examines the post-war Sino-Burmese community through their Chinese-language writings.

After the independence of Myanmar in 1948, a group of Sino-Burmese ‘men of letters’ collectively sought to document and reflect upon their shared past during a period marked by the regional Cold War, national reconstruction, and social realignment in early post-war Myanmar. Growing up in trilingual (Chinese, English and Burmese) pre-war Burma, and often of mixed ancestry, they were self-tasked to rebuild their war-torn community through their writings.

In particular, it focuses on two distinct sets of work produced by these communal cultural initiatives. The first is a series of newspaper columns published in the Chinese-medium Xin Yangguang Bao (the New Yangon Daily) throughout 1962. Titled Daguangcheng Yehua (Night Talks of the Dagon [Yangon] City), they were written by a Rangoon-born Cantonese journalist, aiming to establish a communal history from within. The second are the self-funded anthologies of the Zhubo Poetry Society, spanning half a century from 1948 to 1998. In contrast to the newspaper columns, Zhubo was dedicated to Classical Chinese poetry – a genre requires special training in Classical Chinese to compose and appreciate, which was increasingly rare among post-war Southeast Asian Chinese.

Reading these columns and poems in the context of their authors’ communal aspirations and personal trajectories, I hope to investigate post-war Sino-Burmese cultural dynamics and collective identities, both in and beyond Myanmar. With hindsight, it is evident that this community was acutely aware of its precarious position in a country that categorically prioritised its dominant (Bamar) ethnicity. This cultural endeavour coincided with the 1962 military coup and the anti-Chinese riot of June 1967, the latter of which abruptly yet effectively ended these communal efforts on the ground.

Photo by Nyi Wai Yan on Unsplash