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This chapter opens with a description of the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s major opium-cultivation and heroin-producing areas, covering a 150,000-square-mile, mountainous area located where the borders of Burma (or Myanmar), Laos, and Thailand meet. It goes on to describe China’s booming drug trafficking business. It then sets out the main theoretical interest of this study, which was geared mostly toward understanding how individuals find one another in their social networks to gain entry into the drug trade, manage law enforcement risks and logistical obstacles inherent in the business, and collectively and individually move toward the common goal of making money. The remainder of the chapter discusses the research methods applied in the study, the limitations of the study, and the generalizability of study findings.

This chapter focuses on the issue of narcotics control. Cheap narcotics began to reach American troops in Vietnam; American cities were overwhelmed with a flood of drugs; and President Nixon declared his War on Drugs in 1971. The drugs were coming from the Golden Triangle, a region that encompassed parts of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. Control of narcotics thus became the major American policy concern in Burma, and remained until the Burmese revolution of 1988. The United States provided modest assistance programs and continued its support of Burma's antinarcotics program. However, the antinarcotics program was controversial. The newly founded human rights organization, Project Maje, and its activist leader, Edith T. Mirante, conducted a protest against the use of herbicides in Burma, claiming that the chemicals were being used to wage a campaign of chemical terror against the Shans and other minorities.

In the former opium-growing region of the Golden Triangle a road inaugurated in April 2008 that cuts directly through the formerly isolated high mountain areas of the region is bound to change the social, economic and environmental fabric of the region forever. It is also is the site of competing development regimes. Shifting cultivation in the region shaped the landscape, land cover, and land use across this transect in similar ways up through the end of World War II, and most of the corridor's inhabitants were identified as ethnic “minorities.” Over the past five decades, however, these countries have been under vastly different economic and political regimes influencing land use and land cover in the region today. This chapter examines narratives and policy frameworks from Xishuangbanna Prefecture, the most southern prefecture in Yunnan Province, Northern Laos, and Northern Thailand on how different issues ranging from forest classification, opium eradication, stabilizing shifting cultivators, to promoting trade, and developing infrastructure and markets affected land use and land cover in different ways in each of the three countries where varying policy approaches to land use tenurial regimes and regional projects have profoundly affected the vegetational/institutional structures in a significant biodiversity hotspot.

Chapter 4 analyzes the legacy of the KMT in the borderland area, after its defeat in the Chinese Civil War, in terms of its impact on state building in the three countries. It analyzes how the KMT incursion in Burma played a sizable role in the fragmentation of Burma in the peripheries and also indirectly set in motion the militarized confrontation between the Burmese army and many of the estranged ethnic groups. In Thailand’s case, KMT remnant troops proved instrumental in Thai counter-insurgency campaigns within the context of its broader security relations with the United States during the Cold War. For China, the communist government carried out ruthless counterinsurgencies against the KMT remnants as well as other ethnic and local rebellions in mountainous areas that resisted the communist regime’s consolidation of power. Campaigns were also carried out to subdue the population in the name of suppressing counter-revolutionaries.

The region including China's Yunnan Province, northern Laos, and northern Thailand, best known as the Golden Triangle, has been globalized for a long time. This chapter focuses on constructing narratives of the different actors in one sector's rural economy—tea cultivation and processing—to examine how they are making decisions to securing and improve their livelihoods in response to the changing economic, political, and social dynamics of globalization. Although “official landscapes” comprise extensive tracts of intensively cultivated monocultures of tea, significant areas have a diverse patchwork of crops, including gardens of old, scattered tea trees grown for generations, primarily by ethnic minority communities. As demand for rare teas has soared, “forest tea” growers are challenging established categories of modern” and “advanced” in the discourse of development in China, showing themselves to be far more attuned to the subtleties of global marketing than official planners and development agencies. Entry into the world market has transformed “backward minorities” of the Six Ancient Tree Mountains into entrepreneurs defining the cutting edge of green marketing. This chapter explores how a land use formerly ignored or dismissed as backward has been recast as a sustainable, indigenous technology for the production of a marketable niche product.

This chapter examines the intentions and expectations motivating the state's promotion of red tourism and speculates on the degree to which red tourists come to accept these intentions and expectations. It first offers some background on the history of revolutionary tourism and the more recent state promotion of red tourism. It then looks at three sites, all key destinations in the revolutionary tourism circuit: Jinggangshan, the Hunan “Golden Triangle,” and Xibaipo. It hones in on some of the particular historical resonances and unique character of red tourism at each site. Through these examples, the chapter attempts to highlight the more important dimensions of red tourism on a national scale and their implications for the politics of historical memory in postsocialist China.