What about the Chinese immigrants caught in Myanmar’s crossfire?

Huang Yanling’s grandparents had thought they could never return home to China when they sought asylum in Myanmar almost six decades ago.

The pair from Tengchong, in Yunnan ( 雲南 ) province, were driven out of the country along with countless others when a nationwide famine hit as a result of Mao Zedong’s ( 毛澤東 ) Great Leap Forward in 1959.

Little did they know that more than 50 years later their future granddaughter Huang, would have returned to Yunnan as an immigrant to run the family’s jade merchant business, or that in a reversal of their own misfortune, many Myanmese would one day be making the opposite journey, seeking safety on the Chinese side of the border.

Huang, 24, plies her trade in the bustling Chinese border town of Ruili City – just a stone’s throw over the river that separates it from the Myanmese town of Muse, where Huang’s grandparents found safety all those years ago and where she herself grew up.

Thousands of other Myanmese – many from Muse and neighbouring towns – have fled across the border and into Ruili to escape the latest outbreak of fighting between ethnic rebel groups and government forces.

The fighting has heaped uncertainty on the fragile peace process and dealt a blow to the de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s efforts to reach a nationwide ceasefire and establish a “just peace” with rebels to end the ethnic violence that has plagued Myanmar on and off since Huang’s grandparents’ escaped Mao’s China.