The Secret Army Chiang Kai-shek and the Drug Warlords of the Golden Triangle

Driven from Yunnan at the close of China#x19;s civil war, Chiang Kai-shek#x19;s Nationalist Chinese armies forcibly occupied much of northeastern Burma in early 1950.#xA0; With support from the American CIA and Thailand#x19;s military government, General Li Mi led those armies into Yunnan the next year.#xA0; They were pushed back into Burma.#xA0; Thereafter, Li Mi built a major base and settled in Burma#x19;s Shan State.#xA0; His meddling in Burma#x19;s ethnic insurgencies destabilized that new nation.#xA0; Moreover, recruiting unsavory armed border groups, Li Mi#x19;s army, known as the Kuomintang, or KMT, soon dominated the Golden Triangle opium trade.#xA0; Only when pressured by Washington and the United Nations did Taipei remove several thousand of its troops in 1953-54.#xA0; Several thousand chose to remain. In the late 1950s, amidst popular discontent on the Mainland, reinforcements from Taiwan prepared its army in Burma for another invasion of Yunnan.#xA0; That plan was derailed in late 1960 when, at Rangoon#x19;s invitation, the PLA entered Burma and drove the KMT into Thailand and Laos.#xA0; An international outcry over Taiwan#x19;s no-longer-secret army and intense US pressure forced Chiang to remove all but 3,000-4,000 troops.#xA0; Several hundred remained to fight as mercenaries for the Lao government but most that did not evacuate continued their drug trafficking from bases on the Thai-Burma border Separately, Taiwan#x19;s Intelligence Bureau of the Ministry of National Defense (IBMND) built a large intelligence-gathering and paramilitary force in Northeast Burma.#xA0; Allied with anti-Rangoon insurgent drug trafficking groups, the IBMND fought both the Burmese government and Burma#x19;s communist insurgents while launching ineffectual forays into Yunnan.#xA0; Mostly, however, it trafficked in drugs. Beginning in the 1970s, aging KMT units helped the Thai defeat communist guerrillas in North Thailand.#xA0; In return, most of the Nationalist Chinese remnants were given right of residence and, eventually, citizenship.#xA0; With international assistance, Thailand#x19;s new residents and their children prospered, largely weaning themselves from the narcotics trade in favor of agriculture and other lawful livelihoods.#xA0; Today#x19;s KMT villages in North Thailand are prosperous settlements with little of the drug trafficking for which their inhabitants were once notorious.

Richard M. Gibson earned a BS in 1965 and in 1966 an MA in history at San Jose State College, San Jose, California. As a Naval officer from 1966-71, he served aboard ships in the Gulf of Tonkin and taught history at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD.
In 1971, Gibson joined the US Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer. His postings included Martinique, French West Indies, Burma and Japan. He speaks French, Thai, and Japanese fluently, and received the Department of States meritorious and superior honor awards.

Wen-hua Chen earned a BA in Chinese literature from Tunghai University, Taiwan and an MA in oriental history at Hiroshima University, Japan. Chen also studied at Taiwan’s prestigious Academia Sinica. In 1975, he began a career with the United Nations as a Chinese translator, working in both Bangkok, Thailand, and at UN Headquarters in New York. He retired in 2000 and has been pursuing various writing projects, publishing several works in Chinese language periodicals in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.