Quest to Transform Southeast Asia } 209
1961, Burma’s government secretly approved PLA incursions into north-
ern Burma to degrade Nationalist forces still operating in that region.^22 In
1960, Burma and the PRC signed a boundary treaty ending a long-running
territorial dispute. There were frequent high-level exchanges between
Chinese and Burmese leaders. To all appearances, Sino-Burma relations
were close and cordial. And yet in August 1962 the CCP began giving
robust assistance to a revolutionary drive led by the Burma Communist
Party (BCP).^23
The BCP had launched armed struggle against the Rangoon government
in 1948, and top leaders of the BCP had been given refuge in the PRC in the
early 1950s. Neutralist Burma’s non-aligned foreign policies played a signifi-
cant role in the PRC’s efforts to foil US containment, however, and Beijing’s
courtship of Rangoon limited CCP support for the BCP—until 1962. In that
year, a military coup ousting a civilian government led Beijing to conclude
that conditions were now ripe for revolution, and the CCP threw its support
behind that revolutionary effort even though Burma’s new military rulers
continued the neutralist, non-aligned foreign policies of previous govern-
ments. This suggests that it was internal revolutionary transformation, not
merely benign neighbors, that Beijing sought.
In August 1962, a new BCP leadership group to direct the armed struggle
was set up in Beijing. The BCP was allowed to begin printing in Beijing revo-
lutionary propaganda for distribution inside Burma. The CCP also recruited
several hundred Kachin ex-insurgents to serve as a core of hardened and ex-
perienced fighters for the BCP. These men had been involved in the ethnic
insurgencies of the late 1940s and early 1950s in Burma, had subsequently
sought refuge in China, and had been assigned land to farm in China’s
Guizhou province. Circa 1962, these men were mobilized, armed, retrained,
given political education by BCP cadre, and stationed in southwest Yunnan
along the border with Burma. Inside Burma, small cells of ethnic Chinese
communists were put in touch with the BCP for the first time, further
expanding the BCP’s base. Routes for motor roads along the Yunnan-Burma
border were surveyed, and construction of roads pushed forward. In 1967,
Chinese support increased further when PLA advisors were assigned as “vol-
unteers” to all BCP military units. Additional manpower was provided by
several thousand PRC Red Guard youth recruited and assigned to BCP units.
By early 1968, preparations were complete, and a powerful BCP-PLA force
pushed into northeast Burma with the objective of seizing Mandalay to serve
as the capital of a liberated area. This BCP-PLA force was a conventional force
with artillery, anti-aircraft guns, trucks, field communications, and medical
support. Burmese armed forces were hard pressed, but eventually contained
the communist advance within a 20,000 square-kilometer base area along
the border with China. Fighting, often heavy, continued through the 1970s
and into the 1980s. Eventually (in the late 1980s), conflicts between the BCP’s