SPECIAL REPORT →
ON A BUSY STRIP IN EASTERN MYANMAR, restaurants with bomb shelters serve sizzling plates of beef washed down with Belgian beer and French wine. Teenagers mingle in snooker halls, women relax in beauty salons and revolutionaries get inked in tattoo parlours. From dawn, steaming bowls of noodle soup are devoured in teashops and, come dusk, shaky bass echoes from a karaoke club. But unlike the country’s heartland, this settlement has one notable absence: military rule.
The Myanmar junta, which seized power in a February 2021 coup, has lost most of Kayah state and some of the southern area of Shan state to an anti-coup resistance. Kayah, the country’s smallest state, which runs along the border with Thailand, is covered with verdant hillsides, lush forests and thick jungle, split by the Salween River.
No clear line marks where military rule begins, but the regime still dominates the major cities and a vast area, covering the coastline to the central plains. Though struggling with the hardships of war, residents of Kayah state are freed from soldiers lurking in the streets or raiding their homes at night. Business is better in the liberated area, says Hla Win, 31, who moved her pharmacy to the state’s Demoso township, which lies just over 200km by road from the junta’s power centre in the capital Naypyidaw.
“It was just one or two shops, not what you see today,” she says, nodding towards a two-storey cafe and dozens of shops selling tech accessories, solar panels, toys and Tupperware.
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