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4 SMALL BORDER CHIEFS AND RESOURCE CONTROL, 1910 TO 1997 I’m oª to collect taxes! AKHEU, in military garb, as he waved his rifle from his truck (Mengsong, China) I could move to Burma and become Khun Sa II. LAWJAW (Akhapu, Thailand) THE NARRATIVES BELOW TRACE THE HISTORY OF VILLAGE HEADS IN Mengsong and Akhapu from the early twentieth century through 1997, when my field research ended. Many of these village heads and other influential ethnic minority persons on the China and Thailand borders made use of the events and processes coalescing in their locales to position themselves as regionally important people and controllers of local resource access. The most detailed stories concern Akheu and Lawjaw, the most recent village heads in Mengsong and Akhapu settlement respectively.1 The accounts reveal the similarities in their operating modes as well as the marked diªerences in context between China and Thailand. Both men were born into a leading clan in a village an hour’s walk from the Burma border . Both also took advantage of policy changes, development opportunities , and the appearance of new kinds of actors in the regional and local milieus to turn themselves into patrons with resources at their command and favors to dispense. And both also drew on the reworked patronage relations that emerged in Burma in the 1950s and 1960s and spilled across the border. New opportunities allowed these two men to enhance their con- trol over local resource access and to increase their own coªers, much as princes had done in the past. Through multiple connections on both sides of the border and shrewd maneuvering among available opportunities, both village heads managed to constitute the border as well as to enable transgressions across it. SMALL BORDER CHIEFS AND THE CONTROL OF RESOURCE ACCESS IN CHINA Akheu, the current administrative village head, rented me a room when I moved to Mengsong. This was one among four available small rooms, each with a wooden bed and a small table, where government o‹cials and tea traders stayed during their visits. He later moved me to his daughter’s room while she was at boarding school in Damenglong. The daughter’s room was a floor above the others, with a bank of windows overlooking the Mengsong plain. The daughter had an elaborate sound system for karaoke which I used to listen to music tapes. I was the first foreigner allowed to stay in Mengsong to do field research. Akheu could claim me as a favorable and (perhaps) highly ranked client, one who occasionally returned with tribute in foreign liquor. He had mediated this chance for villagers to tell their stories. Village Heads in Mengsong under a Small Border Principality, circa 1910 to 1950 Based on the genealogies of the two clans who arrived first, the earliest Akha settled in Mengsong about 250 years ago. Over the centuries these clans had intermarried and their descendants were still dominant in the leadership of thearea.OldervillagersknewthatAkhausedtopayheadtaxesandowecorvée labor to the Tai principality in Jinghong, which ruled Sipsongpanna (later called Xishuangbanna) from 1183 until 1949. Villagers said that the Tai had a military force and their own tax collectors, who came up for taxes three times a year. Households had to pay one, two, or three coins each time. The value of the coins is not specified, but reference to them shows that taxation per head was consistent and regular. None of the older informants thought the taxes had been exorbitant. Akha in Mengsong also owed corvée labor, which amounted to opening and repairing a road from the valley of Sipsongpanna through the mountains to the Shan States, with which the Tai polity was closely linked. This road had been a major route in the drug trade. Early in the twentieth century, Tai o‹cials from Jinghong started BORDER CHIEFS AND RESOURCE CONTROL 81 appointing the local headman in Mengsong, a process linked to Han promotion of the tea trade in Sipsongpanna (see Hill 1998). Older villagers think that Sadyeu, the Akha head in Mengsong from circa 1910 until his death in 1930, was the first to be called by a Tai title and to wear the red hat anointing him with the lowest rank in Tai administration. The Tai selected Sadyeu because he could speak their language—a multilingual local figure. Since the 1949 revolution, Chinese schools in Yunnan have taught that Akha and other hill groups were slaves of the Tai until Liberation, as...

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