It’s time for me to write about the Hong Kong protest movement, currently into its third week – not directly related to Myanmar, but with clear parallels. I want to start by reaching back to a Facebook exchange initiated by my friend and HKU colleague Joseph Chan. Joseph has long been a leading political activist and commentator in Hong Kong, and his page is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary events. On October 2, he posted a simple statement: “This is umbrella resistance, not umbrella revolution.” Many have since acknowledged this as a critical distinction, for it sends a very different signal to Beijing and the wider world – not that Hong Kong people wish to overthrow their government, but rather that they wish to defy the entirely objectionable reading of democracy being offered to them by it. My own contribution to Joseph’s page made the small point that resistance is indeed an ideal term because of the overlapping scientific meaning. This is the version provided by Dictionary.com: “In electricity, a measurement of the difficulty encountered by a power source in forcing electric current through an electrical circuit.” That’s a pretty neat analogy for what’s going on in Hong Kong right now. Although umbrella revolution continues to dominate Twitter hashtags and other social media, it’s important to disseminate Joseph’s alternative term – umbrella resistance.

Knowledge and the city is an important theme in Hong Kong at the moment, focused on the city as a space for learning and innovation. Over the next few weeks, two separate corporate events will chew over the concepts of the Smart City and the WiseCity. Then, of course, there is the ongoing Occupy movement, which is certainly reshaping learning and innovation throughout the territory. Informing the more formal parts of this activity is a Living Archives project at Malmö University funded by the Swedish Research Council (and brought to my attention by Waltraut Ritter at Knowledge Dialogues). The aim is to find new digital ways of recording what goes on in today’s cities. “The project aims to open the process of archiving to embrace contemporary practices associated with open data, mobile media, storytelling, gaming, and performance.” I’ve argued before for reaching back into Myanmar’s recent past and documenting what went on under a series of authoritarian regimes. But it’s also important to build a living archive of what’s happening in the current transitional period. At a time when Myanmar is going digital at a rapid rate, it would be great if a knowledge and the city initiative could be launched to capture the many different dimensions of its changing urban environments.

At the British Museum until January 11 is the exhibition “Pilgrims, healers and wizards: Buddhism and religious practices in Burma and Thailand”. Curated by my friend and former HKU colleague Alexandra Green, the show surveys the wide variety of religious observance found in these neighbouring Southeast Asian countries from the eighteenth century down to the present day. At the Burma Studies Conference in Singapore at the start of August, Alex gave a great talk on the research that went into this exhibition. I’d love to see it, and I’m sure that for anyone living in or passing through London it’s well worth making a trip to Great Russell Street.

Sadan quite properly closes by thinking through ways to address the issues Kachin people, and by extension other minority nationalities, confront as citizens of a centralizing Myanmar state. She begins by making the important point that Kachin identity is evolving, not static, and reaches beyond politics into a series of social worlds. Ethnicity is malleable and fluid, and the Kachin people themselves are participants in their own unfolding story, not mere observers.

Ruptures have been registered along the way, with globalization in the late eighteenth century and militant ethno-nationalism in the late twentieth being just as important as imperialism in the late nineteenth. The colonial experience was therefore not determining, though it did open up the contest to define Kachin modernity.

Any project to build a nation in Myanmar must be based on understanding, respect and sensitivity. As Sadan notes, however, these are qualities that no national political party has ever displayed. “It seems that the centre still does not know enough about its peripheries, while the peripheries feel they know more than enough about the centre” (468).

Thus, the state has to construct pathways for minority peoples to help build an inclusive nationalism. Indeed, in such a complex environment it has no choice but to do so. Yet there is still so much to be done. “To make the current conflicts the final manifestation of violence will require a mammoth effort of listening and engagement of the kind that the Burmese centre has yet to experience. It will require Burmese national politicians with the intellectual and ideological capacity and willingness to occupy a space in Burmese political life that no Burmese politician has yet occupied” (468-9).

The link between Christianity and the Kachin people is now well established. Mostly the religion is thought to have built its strength in the colonial period, when foreign missionaries were active. Sadan’s argument is, though, that implantation of the faith in those years was sporadic, passing through peaks and troughs and resulting in only limited conversion. The real gains came after independence.

Then, in a context of generalized desire to express opposition to Burmese rule through distinctive religious beliefs, the spread of Christianity was facilitated by several structural factors. One was General Ne Win’s expulsion of foreign missionaries in 1966, which generated an indigenized and powerful Kachin Christian mission. Another was the consequent rise of local theological colleges, which worked vigorously to spread the faith. Yet another was a broad unity of interest between the KIA, not itself a missionary movement, and Christian organizations.

In 1977, jubilee celebrations were held in Myitkyina to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the presentation of the Bible in Jinghpaw by Ola Hanson, as well as the centennial of the Kachin Baptist mission. From those celebrations, Sadan reproduces a terrific photo of a reported 6213 people participating in a mass baptism on the banks of the Irrawaddy River (383).

In Kachin State, it was “during the period of post-colonial conflict rather than before it that Christianity became embedded ideologically” (368).

Each year, on February 12, Myanmar celebrates Union Day. A few months ago, I chose that date to launch this blog. Until I read Sadan, though, I hadn’t realized that it was only five years after independence, in 1953, that the anniversary was raised to the status of national holiday. At the same time, the Panglong Agreement, signed on February 12, 1947 and celebrated through Union Day, began to be consciously and publicly identified with the notion of Panglong Spirit. Sadan argues that the intention was to promulgate an official understanding of ethnic and cultural politics in a complex state. Panglong Spirit thereby emerged to fill one of the ideological gaps of a multiethnic nation.

From the start there was a problem, however, which Sadan identifies as the artificial, inorganic nature of the new ideology. “The ‘Spirit’ posited ahistorical notions of harmonic pasts that never existed and in which no one believed… The notion of Panglong Spirit represented all that was failing in the new state and the centre’s capacity to engage meaningfully with its multiple peripheries. It gave no sense of whether the Union should be premised upon assimilation, incorporation or progressive convergence. It was void of political direction, detail or accountability other than that everyone should somehow ‘get on'” (304).

She draws contrasts with Burma’s two large multiethnic neighbours. “While the Indian and Chinese states acknowledged the importance of developing ideological visions of the nation and how it should relate to its diverse range of communities, in Burma there was little time or scope for developing complex realignments of ideologies of nationhood. The dominating public idiom was of an increasingly militarised Burmese nationalism apparently opposed to the political structures that supported the federal Union” (302).

Broadly this is the heritage that has come down to today, the political worldview of contemporary elites based chiefly in Naypyitaw and Yangon. That worldview remains artificial, inorganic and void of political direction – signaling just how much work still needs to be done to build a truly multiethnic nation.

Reaching back to the Second World War, Sadan writes that “The experience of war redefined Burmese nationalism” (270). Basic concepts such as dominion, federation and union all had to be given a fresh focus and new precision. Across the country, established elites were challenged by youth groups moulded by fighting. Underground movements began to develop as distinctive encounters with warfare pointed to divergent postwar futures.

The first Panglong conference, held in March 1946, exposed a lack of trust between national and ethnic leaders. Aung San, initially not invited, subsequently declined to attend. The second and more famous Panglong conference, held in February 1947, was in essence a response to British insistence that Aung San prove his ability to rule the entire nation. It therefore sought “primarily to speed up the process of independence rather than attempt to determine all details with absolute clarity beforehand” (272).

The resultant agreement was widely believed to be but one stage in a long negotiation process. Many of the people covered by it had never before been governed by Burmans. The distance between leaders of the majority community and leaders of the many minorities was in some cases so great as to count as “almost total separation” (275). Thakin Nu was a particularly divisive figure.

Small wonder, then, that today’s ethnic minority leaders, conscious of the rapid collapse of dialogue once ink on the Panglong Agreement was dry, are often circumspect in engaging with the peace process.

On journeys during the summer, I worked my way through Mandy Sadan’s magnum opus – Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma. It’s a terrific achievement, providing insights into not only the Kachin people, but also the country in which they currently find themselves. Anyone with an interest in modern Burma and contemporary Myanmar will want to read it – and also to take a look at some of the source materials on the accompanying website.

Now standing at some distance from the book and thinking about how to convey some of its many themes, I figure there’s no need to file a full review – that’s already been very ably done by Magnus Fiskesjö at New Mandala. Rather, I plan over five successive days to pick up very briefly on parts of the analysis that particularly interest me. All come from the past 70 years or so, opening with warfare, imperial collapse and independence, and moving forward from there. All have contemporary relevance. None is entirely unknown to historians.

I begin today with being and becoming Kachin – the core theme announced in the book’s title. The full process stretches across more than two hundred years from the late eighteenth century down to today. It ranges across both internal and external borders, and is embedded in national, regional and global histories. A particularly important phase dates to the early 1960s, however, and especially to the emergence in 1961 of the Kachin Independence Army as a standard bearer for militarized ethno-nationalism.

Sadan argues that the development of a military-administrative infrastructure, a legacy partly of the colonial period and partly of the Second World War, triggered significant social change in Kachin State. For instance, the residual social powers of local chiefs disrupted the operational logistics of the insurgency. “It was early on decided, therefore, that chiefly powers had to be abolished” (333). Cultural practices were also standardized, and a degree of conceptual order was generated through articulation of an “ideological definition of being and becoming Kachin” (337). Underpinned by “an organisational structure designed for conflict, not local development” (334), a potent militarized ethnic cause was established.

It is this ethnic identity, added to many layers of historical development but given a forceful twist by the rise of the KIA little more than 50 years ago, that has come down to today. It is with this identity that anyone promoting projects of national reconciliation and peace building must contend.

One further thought about higher education reform in Myanmar. There’s considerable international engagement with the University of Yangon and, to a lesser extent, Mandalay University. When Aung San Suu Kyi chairs a parliamentary committee devoted to UY revitalization, and MU is the mirroring lead institution in Upper Myanmar, that’s hardly surprising. In time, both universities will become significant global players, and Myanmar’s tertiary sector will gain appropriate leadership and visibility. Overwhelmingly, however, actual higher education takes place elsewhere. Let’s say a ballpark figure of 1 million university students in Myanmar is broadly accurate. At present, the total number of undergraduates enrolled at UY and MU is below 2000, though in the years ahead it will grow as fresh cohorts gain admission and, conceivably, programmes and quotas expand. Additionally, of course, both institutions have masters and doctoral students. Would they take the combined current total over 10,000? I don’t know, but I doubt it. By contrast, Dagon University has 20,000 students on regular programmes, and 35,000 students enrolled for distance education. Yes, it’s the country’s largest university measured both by student population and by land area. But other campuses also register students in the tens of thousands. If a core aim is to rebuild mass higher education in Myanmar, which I think it should be, then significant international attention needs to be paid to universities beyond the charmed circle of UY and MU. They are where the real action is.

Thinking about student-centred teaching and learning, I’m reminded of the concept of the ideal graduate. When I was at City University of Hong Kong in the early 2000s, the institution had an ideal graduate statement. The notion is still in use there today – for instance in promotion of the discovery-enriched curriculum. “The University believes that the DEC will nurture the creativity of our students and enable them to acquire the attributes of ideal CityU graduates.” It’s also employed elsewhere. Top of a Hong Kong Google search is Lingnan University, which has quite detailed ideal graduate statements, adopted in May 2009, for undergraduates, taught postgraduates and research postgraduates. I beg to dissent. If student-centred teaching and learning has any meaning, then alumni will develop substantially different attributes. True, some core abilities will be acquired by all of them. But they will still differ in significant ways. And that’s OK. There is, then, no place for detailed prescription – and no such thing as the ideal graduate.