The Kokang Chinese ( or 果敢族 (''Guǒgǎn zú''); my, ကိုးကန့်လူမျိုး) are

Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...

-speaking Han Chinese living in Kokang,

Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John C. Wells, Joh ...

, administered as the Kokang Self-Administered Zone.

Etymology

The name Kokang derives from the Burmese ကိုးကန့်, which itself derives from the Shan ၵဝ်ႈ (kāo, "nine") + ၵူၼ်း (kúun, "family") or ၵၢင် (kǎang, "guard").

Distribution

In 1997, it was estimated that the Kokang Chinese, together with more recently immigrated Han Chinese from Yunnan,

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, constituted 30 to 40 percent of Myanmar's ethnic Chinese population. They constitute around 0.1% of Myanmar's population.

History

Most Kokang are descendants of Chinese speakers who migrated to what is now Shan State, Myanmar in the 18th century. In the mid-17th century, the Yang clan, a Chinese military house that fled alongside

Ming loyalists The Southern Ming (), also known as the Later Ming (), officially the Great Ming (), was an imperial dynasty of China and a series of rump states of the Ming dynasty that came into existence following the Jiashen Incident of 1644. Shun forces ...

from Nanjing to Yunnan, and later migrated to the Shan States in eastern Myanmar, formed a feudal state called Kokang. From the 1960s to 1989, the area was ruled by the Communist Party of Burma, and after the dissolution of that party in 1989 it became a special region of Myanmar. The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) is a Kokang insurgent group. In August 2009 they clashed with Tatmadaw soldiers in a conflict fanned by controversial interests known as the

2009 Kokang incident The Kokang incident was a violent series of skirmishes that broke out in August 2009 in Kokang in Myanmar's northern Shan State. Several clashes between the Burmese military junta forces (including the Myanmar Armed Forces, also known as Tatma ...

,Chinese Dam Builders Fan Conflict in Burma
/ref> followed by further skirmishes during the

2015 Kokang offensive The 2015 Kokang offensive was a series of military operations launched by the Myanmar Army in 2015 in Kokang in northern Shan State, Myanmar (Burma). Several clashes between the Myanmar Army and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army had take ...

Notable Kokang

* Lo Hsing Han *

Olive Yang Olive Yang (; also known as Yang Kyin Hsiu, nicknamed Miss Hairy Legs) was a prominent opium warlord and the sister of Sao Edward Yang Kyein Tsai, the saopha (chief) of Kokang, a state in post-independent Burma from 1949 to 1959. Biography Olive Y ...

Sao Edward Yang Kyein Tsai Sao Edward Yang Kyein Sai (, my, စောယန်းကျိန်စိုင်း, 1918–1971) was the last traditional ruler (''saopha'') of the Chiefdom of Kokang from 1949, at the death of his father, saopha Sao Yang Wen Pin, until he ...

References

Kokang {{Asia-ethno-group-stub

Etymology

Distribution

History

Notable Kokang

See also

References