Aliens at home: Myanmar wives and the exercise of border biopolitics in Yunnan, China

Chinese border villages adjacent to Myanmar’s Shan and Kachin states are home to thousands of Myanmar wives. Although these women are not illegal border-crossers, they occupy an ambiguous position within China’s legal and administrative systems of population management. This paper examines how they are subjected to multidirectional forms of biopolitical control. It identifies three key techniques: political power exercised by the Chinese state, discursive power produced by international NGOs, and mundane power embedded in everyday interactions within local communities. At the same time, the paper highlights how these women actively negotiate and live with such forms of control. Their agency is manifested through cross-border mobility that sustains social and economic ties, their pursuit of civil recognition and rights within border villages, and their deployment of sociocultural capital. By foregrounding these dynamics, the paper unravels the complex relationship between the exercise of biopower and sociospatial exclusion at the border. It shows how multidirectional forces produce populations that are socially necessary yet politically precarious—subjects who are framed as needing to be “protected” or “governed,” often in ways that do not align with their own interests or lived realities.