Myanmar is the world’s largest producer of jadeite, accounting for 90% of global jadeite extraction (2019)[1]. Most of Myanmar’s jade mines are located at the border between Shan State in the north and Kachin State, in the Uyu River basin and the Kandi River basin. The most famous jade mine in the world—Pagang—is in this area.
Besides workers employed by mining companies, there are nearly 300,000 individual miners. Since the mines have long been contracted out to capitalists, these individual miners are only allowed to search for jade during the lunch break, after work, or during the rainy season when the mines are “sealed.” However, this mining area experiences frequent mudslides, collapses, and other accidents every year, causing many individual miners to lose their lives here.
In the past five years alone, 427 miners have been reported to have died in accidents. This year’s mudslide even destroyed two blocks of Saimu Village in Pagang Town, washing away at least 50 houses. Faced with such frequent mining disasters, what compensation measures have the Myanmar authorities taken? In 2020, the Myanmar government paid only 500,000 kyats (equivalent to about 2,500 RMB) in compensation to each victim. Yet, a pig in Myanmar costs 600,000 kyats—human lives, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie government, are worth less than a pig!
Why do mining accidents stain this area with the blood of miners and residents yet remain unresolved? How exactly do these accidents happen? From a natural perspective, after a century of mining, the Pagang jade deposit has been devastated. Tailings piles form small hills, and abandoned mines are visible everywhere. During the rainy season, these pits fill with water, and the tailings become muddy. When the pits breach, tailings and water rush down, causing mudslides every year. However, the persistent problem of mining disasters is maintained by a parasitic bourgeoisie that sustains this situation! Jade only contains sodium aluminum silicate (NaAlSi2O6), but in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, jade’s beauty and high value make it a symbol of wealth and luxury adornment.
The bourgeoisie in China, through fascist dictatorship, suppresses workers’ wages to the minimum, extracting more surplus value and purchasing more luxury goods. These people have turned China into the world’s largest consumer of luxury goods, while large quantities of jade mined in Myanmar flow into China.
The scarcity of jade has become a condition for their monopoly industry and profit. Foreign capitalists see the lucrative jade industry and want a share; but Myanmar’s local warlords also attempt to profit massively from jade mines. Over the past decade, the central government, Kachin local warlords, and foreign bourgeoisie have been fighting over the profits from jade mines. The Myanmar central government aims to control the mining rights through taxation and land rent, enacting laws like the Myanmar State-Owned Economic Enterprises Law and the Myanmar Mining Law, which prohibit foreign companies from mining and exploring jade. The Kachin warlords, who truly control the jade mines, oppose central government interference, extracting rent, shares, and bribes from mining companies, while also limiting mining license durations to seize more profits. Meanwhile, foreign bourgeoisie disguise themselves as local Myanmar companies to bypass laws banning foreign exploitation, making data on Chinese capital involvement in jade mining difficult to obtain.
However, before these laws were implemented in 2015, jade mining in Myanmar was concentrated in the hands of ten giant mining companies, mostly controlled by Chinese joint ventures. These companies, with substantial capital, could afford heavy machinery beyond the reach of Myanmar’s national bourgeoisie, and they bribed warlords to secure more lenient mining conditions. Due to their extreme greed, these colonialists could level a mine within two or three weeks, exposing the pits on the surface like scars. During Myanmar’s rainy season, these pits fill with water, eventually triggering mudslides and causing annual disasters.
Around 2000, Chinese mining enterprises invested heavily in Pagang, leading to the destruction of what was once a village, farmland, and forest—Pagang Town was swallowed by mining zones.
Many bankrupt farmers had to leave their land and become individual miners. They use steel picks and shovels to extract jade rough stones from tailings and pits, but most of the time, they find nothing. Even when they do find jade, most of these miners come from impoverished families, living in remote Pagang Town, unaware of jade market prices. When selling jade to buyers, they are often heavily scammed. Traders buy rough stones from individual miners for 30,000 RMB, then auction them in China with starting prices reaching 330 million RMB[2].
Some workers, driven by survival, face starvation if they cannot find jade, and have family members to support. To extend their working hours, they even resort to drug use, leading to rampant drug trade locally—one dollar can buy a dose of heroin. These individual miners risk their lives searching for jade during the rainy season, ultimately dying in mudslides.
In 2015, Myanmar’s jade industry generated about 31 billion USD in profit, nearly half of Myanmar’s GDP. Yet, these miners living in the mountains hardly earn anything, struggling just to survive. Myanmar’s semi-colonial mining industry, like China’s old mining industry, is not owned by the Myanmar people but is controlled by colonizers. Chinese capitalists exploit surplus value extracted from Chinese workers to buy “blood jade”—jade soaked in the blood of Myanmar workers, controlled by Chinese capitalists. Only through workers’ unity across China and Myanmar to oppose bourgeois exploitation can the “blood jade” become history and end the decade-long mining disasters in Pagang.