2 - Narrate the Sino-Burmese communal history in post-war Myanmar's Chinese-medium newspapers

Presentation Abstract
This paper investigates the post-war Sino-Burmese community through their own writings. After the independence of Myanmar in 1948, a group of Sino-Burmese ‘men of letters’ made collective effort to write their community’s history at the time of national reconstruction and social realignment in early post-war Myanmar. Growing up in trilingual (Chinese, English and Burmese) pre-war Burma, often of mixed ancestry, they were self-tasked to rebuild their war-torn community through pens by establishing a communal past. In particular, the paper traces a series of feature articles published in the Xin Yangguang Bao, a Chinese-medium newspaper based in Yangon Chinatown, during the early 1960s by a Sino-Burmese journalist, who collected stories from within the community. Yet, this community was instantly aware of its marginal position in a country that emphasised its main ethnicity. Their cultural endeavour coincided with the 1962 military coup and the anti-Chinese riot in June 1967, the latter of which effectively terminated this communal initiative on the ground. Reading through newspaper columns, a number of questions are raised, such as, what motivated this group to articulate a collective past in an increasingly hostile present? How did the awkward experience of being the ‘foreign-born’ Chinese and the ‘local-born’ foreigners inform their identity amid the regional decolonisation? And how did they relate to other contemporary Chinese communal writings in Southeast Asia? By exploring them, it hopes to disentangle the post-war Chinese cultural dynamics in and beyond Myanmar.