Guest contributor
Seán Barry
Burmese nationalism, Shan resistance, opium cultivation, foreign interference; context is king in the Lintners’ new book. It’s an ambitious blend of storytelling approaches, thick with complex and multi-layered narratives, and foregrounded by the stories of two characters symbolic of a tension between nihilism and ideas.
Imagine yourself on a veranda somewhere on Thailand’s northwestern border with Myanmar as monsoon rain crashes down outside. Across a table scattered with puzzle pieces sit husband and wife Bertil and Hseng Noung Lintner.
As evening turns to night they move fragments and snapshots around, placing them into some kind of order, and as a picture starts to form they pause for questions, anecdotes, or to explain the significance of a particular piece. Some pieces refuse to sit neatly, others seem to belong to more than one section at once.
Their new book Young Tigers: Chao Tzang Yawnghwe and the Shan Rebellion in Myanmar unfolds in much the same way, without the mosquitos.
Lintner has long been a familiar name to anyone trying to understand Myanmar beyond the headlines. Land of Jade (1990) vividly recounts the Lintners’ intrepid journey from India to China through Myanmar’s northern resistance territory on foot with their newborn baby.
Outrage (1989) showcases a relentless appetite for context and re-enactment, built methodically on creatively sourced interviews. Those are just two of many truly seminal works.
In Young Tigers, the reporter, the sourcer, and the gonzo explorer are all present as the book dances between characters, time periods, and political terrain. Few writers can merge originally sourced narrative history with genuinely relevant personal reportage like this.
Lintner describes Myanmar as a mosaic of resistance forces, uneasy alliances, and competing visions. Shan State is that mosaic on caffeine.
Appropriately, Young Tigers is itself a mosaic of eras, actors, and storytelling techniques, assembled patiently through a series of reflections and turning points that mirror past and present. Names and places that feel familiar for their modern significance jump out as playing similar roles generations ago.
Chiang Mai appears as a long-standing meeting place where editors, exiles, and ethnic resistance figures have crossed paths for decades. Roads, rivers, and towns that mattered during the Second World War and the 1960s surface again later on, reinforcing the sense that very little in this landscape is ever entirely unprecedented.
Rangoon University, Mogok, Myawaddy–Mae Sot, the Salween River, and jungles as refuge and rebellion for students fleeing the city all recur.
Yet, it feels like a book that could only be written at this stage of the Lintners’ lives. The daring stories of Lintner’s earlier reporting, the almost obsessive archival work that followed, and the long view that comes from having watched patterns repeat for decades are all here, underpinned by the authority that comes from co-author Hseng Noung Lintner’s experience as a Shan former resistance fighter.
Lintner notes that his early fascination with Shan State was shaped in part by films about the opium trade, including those by filmmaker Adrian Cowell, who once wrote that “the cause of democracy fell under the spell of the moonflower, the Yunnan poppy”, and that dependence on narcotics haunted Shan State “like a curse in a Nordic saga”.
Lintner’s tone is cooler and more academic, but the conclusion is similar. He writes that the opium trade became a “curse” that “caused splits within the resistance, thus weakening it”.
What emerges is a sustained tension between armed nihilism – marketed as a fight for freedom – and concrete political ideas around federal democracy. This is embodied in the contrast between Khun Sa and Chao Tzang Yawnghwe.
Khun Sa, with his well-armed army of self-styled freedom fighters, represents the hollowing out of a struggle into control, profit, and constant hedging. Chao Tzang provides the counterpoint. He pushed back against portrayals of Shan resistance as little more than banditry or narco-politics, insisting instead on federalism and political legitimacy.
As Lintner notes, the conflict was not about rivalries between opium warlords, nor about “an opportunistic gang of small-scale smugglers and bandits”, but about a sustained attempt to erase Shan identity and autonomy.
The book shows how the corrosive effects of the opium trade spread far beyond any single army. Lintner traces similar dynamics in the collapse of the Communist Party of Burma, whose mutiny he describes as driven not by ideology but by profit. “Business interests, not Marxist ideology, were what motivated them”, he writes. They were “not interested in fighting a war whose ultimate aim was to seize power in Rangoon”.
The fragmentation that followed, including the rise of Wa and Kokang forces, still shapes Shan State today. Groups whose influence was built through narcotics and arms production continue to exert power, while their shifting alignments, including recent pressure that has restricted weapons flows to resistance forces, shape today’s battlefield.
Recent reports of opium cultivation and production reaching record levels, much of it originating in Shan State, underline how unresolved these dynamics remain.
Young Tigers makes a concerted effort to highlight turning points and forks in the road of Myanmar’s recent history. There are repeated references to moments that would later change the course of events and the direction of Shan resistance.
Often these hinge on details that feel almost incidental. Nothing in Young Tigers happens without context, and the book shows how the political architecture of present-day Myanmar was assembled piece by piece.
It is at its strongest when it commits fully to narrative history. The account of a military raid on a Shan family home in Rangoon during the 1962 military coup is rendered with a level of detail and immediacy that places the reader in the moment, as bullet holes tear through mosquito nets and family members shelter behind stacks of Buddhist scriptures.
Before that immediacy runs away, the book pulls back again. More impatient readers may find themselves distracted during the slower sections, and those well versed in Lintner’s earlier work may skip past well-trodden moments such as the 1962 coup or the 1988 uprising.
As a non-scholar reader, my one criticism is that momentum and narrative often give way to education. But that density reflects the book’s intention.
Foreign involvement circles the story like a merry-go-round. The United States and the Drug Enforcement Administration appear and reappear, driven by shifting priorities, political needs at home, and partial understanding.
Their presence is significant but their impact often limited, and sometimes embarrassing, in the case of former aide to President Jimmy Carter, Peter Bourne, whom Lintner pulls no punches for.
Young Tigers does not offer solutions or prescriptions – which you might say is a rarity in writing about Myanmar. Instead, it seeks to add context and understanding to a complex issue, patiently.
It is demanding and occasionally frustrating in its refusal to narrow its scope. But as a careful accounting of how Shan resistance was shaped, derailed, and repeatedly redefined, it stands as one of Lintner’s most accomplished works.
Seán Barry is a Chiang Mai-based freelance journalist and audio producer, with a focus on authoritarianism, human rights, and humanitarian aid. He first visited Myanmar in 2015.
