You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book explains how Burma's booming drug production, insurgency, and counter-insurgency interrelate—and why the country has been unable to shake off thirty years of military rule and build a modern, democratic society.
Since the 1950s, China and India have been locked in a monumental battle for geopolitical supremacy. Chinese interest in the ethnic insurgencies in northeastern India, the still unresolved issue of the McMahon Line, the border established by the British imperial government, and competition for strategic access to the Indian Ocean have given rise to tense gamesmanship, political intrigue, and rivalry between the two Asian giants. FormerFar Eastern Economic Review correspondent Bertil Lintner has drawn from his extensive personal interviews with insurgency leaders and civilians in remote tribal areas in northeastern India, newly declassified intelligence reports, and his many years of firsthand experience in Asia to chronicle this ongoing struggle. His history of the “Great Game East” is the first significant account of a regional conflict which has led to open warfare on several occasions, most notably the Sino-India border war of 1962, and will have a major impact on global affairs in the decades ahead.
After being absent for 600 years, China is re-entering the Indian Ocean with its ""Belt and Road"" mega- project. This book shows how China is in the Indian Ocean for the long haul and what that means for regional and international power struggles.
The Sino-Indian War of 1962 delivered a crushing defeat to India: not only did the country suffer a loss of lives and a heavy blow to its pride, the world began to see India as the provocateur of the war, with China ‘merely defending’ its territory. This perception that China was largely the innocent victim of Nehru’s hostile policies was put forth by journalist Neville Maxwell in his book India’s China War, which found readers in many opinion makers, including Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. For far too long, Maxwell’s narrative, which sees India as the aggressor and China as the victim, has held court. Nearly 50 years after Maxwell’s book, Bertil Lintner’s China’s India War puts the ‘border dispute’ into its rightful perspective. Lintner argues that China began planning the war as early as 1959 and proposes that it was merely a small move in the larger strategic game that China was playing to become a world player—one that it continues to play even today.
The United Wa State Army (UWSA) is a nonstate armed group that administers an autonomous zone in the difficult-to-reach Wa Hills of eastern Myanmar. As China expands its geopolitical interests across Asia through the Belt and Road Initiative, the Wa have come to play a pivotal role in Beijing's efforts to extend its influence in Myanmar. In a book relevant to current debates about geopolitics in Asia, the illicit drug trade, Myanmar's decades-long civil wars, and ongoing efforts to negotiate a settlement, Bertil Lintner, the only foreign journalist to visit the Wa areas when they were controlled by the Communist Party of Burma, traces the history of the Wa Hills and the struggles of its people, providing a rare look at the UWSA.
A well-documented and extremely engaging account of the Burmese Communist Party that details the development of the Party and the events and forces that led to the 1989 Mutiny and subsequent fall of the CPB. This study explores the ethnic tensions that influenced the attitudes of the rank-and-file members, the support and influence of the Chinese Communist Party, the Party's involvement in the drug trade, and the complex, antagonistic relationship between the CPB and the military regime of Burma.
From pirates singing Ricky Martin to mob hits carried out with samurai swords, Bertil Lintner offers a fascinating look at organized crime in the Asia Pacific. Both Western and Asian pundits assert that shady deals are an Asian way of life. Some argue that corruption and illicit business ventures - gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking, gun running, oil smuggling - are entrenched parts of the Asian value system. Yet many Asian leaders maintain that their cities are safer than Sydney, Amsterdam, New York, and Los Angeles. Making use of expertise gained from twenty years of living in Asia, Lintner exposes the role crime plays in the countries of the Far East. In Blood Brothers , he takes you inside the criminal fraternities of Asia, examining these networks and their past histories in order to answer one question: How are civil societies all over the world to be protected from the worst excesses of increasingly globalised mobsters?
Remarkable for their military prowess, their receptivity to Christianity, and their intricate all-embracing kinship network, the Kachins are a hardy mountain people living in the remote hills of northern Burma and on the peripheries of Indian and China. During the Second World War they strongly aided the Allies in defending Burma against the imperialist designs of the Japanese, earning themselves sorbriquets such as 'amiable assassins' and 'Ghurkas of Southeast Asia.' After Burma's independence in 1948, the Kachins were given their own state, but in the early 1960s they went to war again, this time fighting for autonomy for their homeland. For over thirty years, funded largely by the world-renowned jade mines they control, they maintained their armed insurgency, playing a key role in Burma's internecine struggles. In 1994 the Kachins signed a cease-fire agreement which they hope marks the start of an era of peace.