Volume 4,Issue 3
Growing Old Together: Transformation and Community Building in Taiwan’s Yunnan-Burmese Villages
In 1961, a group of immigrants from Yunnan province of China, Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos were resettled in China’s Taiwan region. This article takes immigrants from the Yunnan Myanmar community located in Kaohsiung City and Pingtung County as the survey objects, presenting their changes over the past 60 years, and explaining how villagers can use community building and the existing population structure to enable declining and aging villages to demonstrate the existing momentum of the Yunnan Myanmar community through community participation.
[1] Lee MH 2005, A Study of Communities of Veterans of the Guolei Maneuvers in Burma. Kaohsiung: Shu-Te University, 2-45.
[2] Sung KY, n.d., Cingjing and Jiyang: A Survey Report on the Settlements of Loyalists from the Yunnan-Burmese Border Regions to Taiwan. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology Academia Sinica, 53(4): 791.
[3] Lin YC, 2011, “Rurality, Multifunctionality, and the Planning and Reshaping of Taiwan’s Rural Cultural Landscapes.” In Triadic Reflections on Social Research in Southern Taiwan: Regional Studies, Social Issues, and Civil Society, edited by Wu Gen-ming and Tseng Kuang-cheng, 161. Pingtung: National Pingtung University of Education. Quoted from Lin PL, 2007, The Lament of Farmland, http://www.wretch.cc/blog/wjj6387/62948882007.
[4] Lee MH, 2005, A Study of Communities of Veterans of the Guolei Maneuvers in Burma. Kaohsiung: Shu-Te University, 2-22.
[5] Data Source: Ligang Township Household Registration Office (as of March 7, 2019) and Meinong District Household Registration Office (as of August 12, 2019). Note: As one male resident from Xinguo Village and one from Dingyuan Village passed away in April and July respectively, two individuals have been deducted from the original data provided by the registration offices.
[6] Okamura Y, 2016, Presentation at a Side Event to the High Level Political Forum “Mainstreaming Gender and Aging in the SDGs”, 13 July 2016, The Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations. visited on January 20, 2026, https://www.un.emb-japan.go.jp/statements/okamura071316.html.