While civil war rages across many parts of Myanmar, there is one corner of the country which seems largely unaffected by the tragic developments following the 2021 military coup: the Wa Hills of northeastern Shan State. Andrew Ong’s excellent study of the Wa is therefore appropriately titled “Stalemate”, a word that could also be used to characterize the situation that has prevailed in that remote part of Myanmar since the military and the local, ethnic army entered into a ceasefire agreement in 1989. The United Wa State Party (UWSP) and its United Wa State Army (UWSA) have often been dismissed as narcotraffickers, and while that is not entirely inaccurate, they have also managed to build up a 20,000-sq-km de facto autonomous zone between Myanmar and China. The total population of the area is about 450,000, mostly Wa but also other nationalities such as Shan, Lahu, Akha and Chinese.

The Wa, a Mon-Khmer speaking people, have their own administration, which oversees courts, hospitals, schools, law enforcement agencies, trading companies—and, as scholar Magnus Fiskesjö writes in an endorsement, “Asia’s largest and most powerful ethnonationalist insurgent army.” The actual strength of the UWSA is a closely guarded secret, but independent observers believe it has between 20,000 and 30,000 heavily armed men under its command. Its arsenal consists of modern automatic rifles, machine-guns of all calibers, mortars, MANPADS or man-portable air-defense systems, artillery, military trucks, armored vehicles and even weaponized drones. Evidently, the UWSP/UWSA is a force that cannot be overlooked by having its role in local and regional geopolitics reduced to that of a criminal band or a bunch of outlaws.

The Treasury Department in Washington has blacklisted the top leaders of the UWSA for their alleged involvement in the Golden Triangle drug trade along with promises of million-dollar rewards to anyone who could bring them to trial, presumably in the United States. Ong argues that the UWSA is one of the most poorly understood armed groups in Southeast Asia. It is undeniable that the UWSA built its present strength mainly on proceeds from the drug trade, first in opium and heroin and later in ya ba, or methamphetamine. But it is also important to understand and analyze what got the Wa into that situation, and how they now, at least in the areas they control along the Chinese border (the situation is different along the border with Thailand, where the UWSA also has a string of bases and newly established civilian settlements) have substituted income from the drug trade with that from tin and rare earth mining and the cultivation of tea and rubber. There has also been significant Chinese investment in construction activities, real estate and the cross-border trade in all kinds of consumer goods destined for government-controlled areas in central Myanmar and as far as northern Thailand.