Rural resistance under a golden dictatorship, part 1: the Myitsone villages

Few village-born social movements have influenced international relations as much as the campaign against Myitsone Dam in Burma (Myanmar). This village-born resistance led in 2011 to the suspension of a major Burmese and Chinese infrastructure project. This suspension became a symbol of democratization in Burma and a much-discussed setback of Chinese development-investment abroad. However, research literature on the Myitsone Dam has tended to conflate the local rural resistance with the broader ethnic Kachin and Burmese anti-dam movements. In contrast, this study focuses specifically on the local villages directly affected by the project, exploring their diverse stories and responses to the mega-project. Combining diverse published sources with ethnographic fieldwork and interviews done since 2010, it tells a story of repression, resistance, social divisions, and complex relations with outsiders. This is a two-part article series. This article here – Part 1 – examines what occurred before the mega-project’s suspension. It tells the Myitsone Dam’s rural story from its earliest days until the mega-project’s fall: from 2002 to 2011. This story begins with the unexpected arrival of Japanese visitors and traces the village struggles up to the project’s dramatic downfall.