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Burma (CPB) army since 1968, shut down the CPB radio station that had been
broadcasting since 1971, and moved the entire CPB leadership from Beijing,
where they had lived since the early 1960s, to a village just inside Burma on
the Yunnan border. Three years later, Beijing would offer a modest pension,
a house, and a plot of land in China for any veteran CPB cadre who wished
to retire. The CPB insurgency continued for a few more years, but so too did
Beijing’s efforts to end it. In 1986, Beijing revoked the de facto monopoly on
cross-border trade between Burma and Yunnan that the CPB had enjoyed
since the early 1960s. This very significantly reduced the CCP subsidy to the
CPB. Then, in March 1989, ethnic Wa soldiers constituting a majority of the
CPB’s remaining soldiers revolted against their ethnic Chinese leaders. Those
leaders, now mostly elderly, fled to China.^57 By mid-1989, the CPB insurgency,
the longest communist-led insurgency in history and one supported through-
out by the CCP, was over. Just as China under Mao had helped sustain that
insurrection, China under Deng helped shut it down.
The economic logic of improving relations with Burma was strong. If the
poor provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou were to successfully open to the world,
that would be most conveniently done with and through Burma (renamed
Myanmar in 1989). By 1985, while China’s east coast provinces were emulating
Shenzhen in attracting FDI, Yunnan province was lobbying openly for the
construction of an “Irrawaddy corridor” linking Yunnan with Burmese ports
on the Bay of Bengal and thence the world. Kunming would eventually suc-
ceed in this lobbying effort, but only in the 1990s, after Myanmar abandoned
economic isolationism and embraced the world economy.^58
China’s draw back from revolution also meant the end of China’s special,
ideologically based relation with Albania. In July 1978, the PRC Ministry
of Foreign Affairs delivered a note to the Albanian embassy in Beijing stat-
ing that China was stopping economic and military aid to Albania and
withdrawing 513 Chinese experts and engineers working on economic and
military projects in Albania. Albanian students and trainers who had been
working in Beijing were also being sent back to Albania. The reason for these
moves was Albania’s “slander” of China and its “sabotage of economic and
military cooperation ... in a planned and systematic way.”^59 Albania, it will
be recalled, was the CCP’s close ideological supporter during Mao’s anti-
revisionist struggles of the 1950s–1970s. As such, it was a major recipient of
Chinese economic and military assistance during those years. Albanian dic-
tator Enver Hoxha was an ardent supporter of the Cultural Revolution and
China’s Maoist radicals, and had been dismayed ever since the early 1970s by
the moderate, development-oriented policies of Zhou Enlai, Hua Guofeng,
and Deng Xiaoping. Albania’s media carried criticisms of China’s domestic
and foreign policies. Chinese personnel working in Albania took objection
to this criticism, and this created “difficulties.” By late 1977, shortly after
Deng’s full rehabilitation, Beijing indicated to Albania, according to Hoxha’s