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Only a security guard and two bored female sales attendants remain.

 

Today’s economic reality in Mong La must confound Lin Ming Xian (aka Sai Lin), who heads the 2,000-strong National Democracy Alliance Army that rules Special Region 4 in northeast Shan State.

 

The former Chinese Red Guard who originally came into Burma from Yunnan in the late 1960’s to help strengthen the Communist Party of Burma, has until now enjoyed considerable economic success in Mong La.

 

Based in zone 815—present day Mong La—Sai Lin established a splinter faction in 1989 which, after heavy fighting against Burmese troops, quickly signed a ceasefire with Rangoon, allowing the former communist the opportunity to create his own fiefdom centered first on the opium trade and then gambling as Special Region 4 became “opium free” in 1997.

 

Sai Lin and the NDAA oversaw a hugely ambitious development program that used gambling profits during the city’s heyday to fund road construction, public buildings and other infrastructure projects that Kengtung—a town under Burmese control just a few hours away—could only dream of. The city has been wired to China’s mobile phone, landline, internet and electricity networks for years. It remains one of the few places in Burma where access to normally censored online content—such as The Irrawaddy—has not been restricted.

 

Mong La’s rapid modernization led former prime minister Gen Khin Nyunt to pronounce the city as developed as Rangoon during a visit in 2001. In truth, the city was—and still is—developmentally superior to the capital.

 

Reports suggest Mong La—the capital of an area that is home to less than 80,000 people—has generated up to $5 billion in total gambling revenues since casinos were first authorized in August 1998. That figure represents an average of nearly $10,400 per capita annually from gambling profits generated in Mong La alone, up to the end of 2004, when business at the casinos ground to a halt.

 

By contrast, the average Burmese citizen living in areas controlled by the Burmese regime was estimated to have made just $1,800 in 2005. Like the Burmese government, the NDAA offered its citizens little in the way of financial returns, and many remain poor. Sai Lin did, however, waive all taxes in Special Region 4 in 2001, according to a report in the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend.

 

Mong La residents did profit handsomely from the nearly 1,000 mainland Chinese who once poured over the border every day. That economic wellspring has now been choked off, says Sai Sam, sales manager of Shwe Lin Star Tourism Company, a Sai Lin-owned business.

 

“The number of tourists has decreased, and the economy has dropped off,” he says. “Business is not so good.”

 

Many of the city’s casinos defied China’s crackdown on gambling and continued to attracted patrons secretly. In a town where the ceiling on bets at the most exclusive tables once reached RMB100,000 ($12,300), gamblers now have only one option to try their luck—a makeshift casino in which locals play a variation of craps staking between RMB1 ($0.12) and RMB10 ($1.20) a throw.