Salai Cross Thang walked off his government job as a school headmaster in Myanmar’s western Chin State two years ago, days after the military seized power from the civilian government. He was one of hundreds of thousands of government workers who joined a civil disobedience movement, going on strike amid mass protests against military rule. Then, he couldn’t imagine that he would return to work months later—under the administration and protection of an armed resistance group.
Within a few months of the coup, lethal military crackdowns against demonstrators had provoked armed revolution. New resistance forces went to battle against the military, and some ethnic armed organizations in the country’s border areas—which had fought for political autonomy since long before the coup—joined the broader pro-democracy movement as well. They now challenge a military that continues to receive Chinese and Russian weapons and that has turned its firepower against communities harboring armed resistance.
Since the coup on Feb. 1, 2021, more than a million people in Myanmar have fled their homes amid aerial and ground assaults while the military has also targeted displacement camps and cut off food and supply routes. Beginning in September 2021, it turned its wrath on Thantlang township, where Salai Cross Thang lives. After intense battles that culminated in resistance forces taking over a strategic military camp near the border with India, the military began a yearlong arson campaign that destroyed more than 1,200 of the main town’s buildings and left it uninhabitable.
Salai Cross Thang walked off his government job as a school headmaster in Myanmar’s western Chin State two years ago, days after the military seized power from the civilian government. He was one of hundreds of thousands of government workers who joined a civil disobedience movement, going on strike amid mass protests against military rule. Then, he couldn’t imagine that he would return to work months later—under the administration and protection of an armed resistance group.
Within a few months of the coup, lethal military crackdowns against demonstrators had provoked armed revolution. New resistance forces went to battle against the military, and some ethnic armed organizations in the country’s border areas—which had fought for political autonomy since long before the coup—joined the broader pro-democracy movement as well. They now challenge a military that continues to receive Chinese and Russian weapons and that has turned its firepower against communities harboring armed resistance.
Since the coup on Feb. 1, 2021, more than a million people in Myanmar have fled their homes amid aerial and ground assaults while the military has also targeted displacement camps and cut off food and supply routes. Beginning in September 2021, it turned its wrath on Thantlang township, where Salai Cross Thang lives. After intense battles that culminated in resistance forces taking over a strategic military camp near the border with India, the military began a yearlong arson campaign that destroyed more than 1,200 of the main town’s buildings and left it uninhabitable.
In the wake of these losses, a local resistance group—part of a coalition known as the Chinland Defense Force (CDF), which was formed in April 2021—managed to claim control over much of the remote, mountainous township. It also began to govern. By November 2021, the CDF announced it had liberated 51 of the township’s 88 villages from military control and would establish a public administration. It has since set up health care, education, police, and criminal justice services. In doing so, resistance forces are not only filling critical gaps but also putting a vision of decentralized governance into practice in Myanmar.
With Thantlang’s public administration established, Salai Cross Thang returned to work at his former school and became head of the education department. Two months later, he had reopened schools in all 51 villages and recruited 700 teachers, most of whom he trained from scratch. “Most of the houses have been burned down by the military coup. That is our sacrifice. So it is our responsibility to struggle in building our nation [and] our Thantlang area,” he said. “With one hand, we must fight the military regime; we must do revolutionary actions. With the other hand, we must rebuild a nation.”
Thantlang’s trajectory reflects a transformation across much of Myanmar, as resistance forces manage to drive the military out of rural areas—despite weapons and funding shortages—and replace its administration with their own. In a paper published last June, independent researchers Naw Show Ei Ei Tun and Kim Jolliffe found that the military had “lost effective control of most of the country” and that resistance groups were able to take responsibility for critical governance functions even in areas where they hadn’t achieved decisive battlefield victory.
In some cases, ethnic armed organizations are expanding public services they already offered in their territories. In others, resistance groups are establishing services from the ground up, with varying degrees of support from the anti-coup National Unity Government, made up of ousted lawmakers, other leaders, and activists. These resistance-led administrations often function in areas of mass displacement and humanitarian need amid ongoing risks of military attacks. Their locally led design carries political significance: Replacing Myanmar’s centralized governance system with a federal model has become a rallying cry for the pro-democracy movement.
For decades, ethnic armed organizations have fought for the right to make decisions regarding land and resource governance, education, and other domains reserved to the central government, dominated by the ethnic Bamar majority. When former leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party was elected in 2015, it pledged to prioritize making peace with ethnic armed organizations and to advance a federal system. In practice, it upheld the status quo. Although dissatisfaction simmered in Myanmar’s border areas, the urban majority remained loyal to Aung San Suu Kyi and largely indifferent to ethnic minorities’ plight.
The military’s indiscriminate use of violence against civilians in the wake of the coup sparked an awakening among the Bamar majority to the experiences of ethnic minorities in Myanmar. Expressions of solidarity have become common, and some NLD politicians now serving in the National Unity Government have issued public apologies for past behaviors or inaction. At the same time, the contributions of ethnic armed organizations to the pro-democracy movement shifted the groups’ popular image from one of rebel insurgents to one of revolutionaries fighting against an occupying force.
The direction the pro-democracy movement has taken reflects this shift. In March 2021, a group of elected lawmakers ousted in the coup abolished Myanmar’s military-drafted 2008 constitution and announced an interim federal democracy charter in its place. Diverse stakeholders—including civil society organizations, ethnic armed organizations, ethnic representative committees, and elected members of parliament—are now coming together to negotiate the details of the charter, intended to serve as a precursor to a constitution based on federalism.
Meanwhile, resistance-led administrations are already practicing decentralized governance on the ground. In Chin State, they are operating autonomously at the township level. Interviews with more than a dozen members of the CDF-led public administration in Thantlang township last year reveal how autonomy has enabled people to create an urgent, local response to community needs amid mass displacement. “I realized that things couldn’t keep going the way they were and that we had to handle the administration well in all the villages,” said Thang Thang, who now leads the administration across a 10-village mountain range. (He asked to be called by his nickname out of concern for his safety.)
Given, who leads the Thantlang administration’s judicial department, said he was motivated to establish law and order amid an influx of displaced people. “We are making a revolution, but we can’t neglect the needs of the people,” he said. (He also asked to be called by his nickname due to safety concerns.)
The administration in Thantlang faced the daunting task of restarting services in disarray. To do so, leaders incorporated elements of different systems according to local context. For example, the education department introduced lessons in Chin language and history while the judicial department refers to both Myanmar’s penal code and Chin customary law. Mountain ranges demarcated by the British serve as administrative units while traditional village leaders liaise between the administration and the people. Many of these leaders served as local administrators under the former civilian government but refused to work under the military. “Under the CDF, what is different is that we feel content in our hearts and we can work with peace of mind,” said Thang Hre, a village leader.
People have come together to fund the resistance-led administration, which is operating in one of Myanmar’s least-developed states. Diaspora communities are its largest source of funding; they have raised millions of dollars for Chin resistance groups and humanitarian causes, largely through church networks. The Thantlang administration’s commerce department is also running some small businesses, according to Ngun Khar, its head. But for the time being, funding gaps mean the hundreds of people serving in the administration do so as volunteers. They are fed and housed by villagers, with many communities collecting 1,000 kyats (around 50 cents) from each household per month to support operations.
In return, the volunteers are working hard to meet community needs. Five young health care workers have seen nearly 3,000 patients since reopening a government hospital in September 2021, conducting amputations, cesarean sections, and appendectomies. A community police force of more than 70 people is responding to criminal complaints without weapons or formal authority. Many people in the public administration serve in roles beyond their formal training or experience. Given and the five judges under his supervision were all young lawyers before the coup, he said.
Still, those working in the administration expressed a commitment to their communities and to the nation-building process. “I am happy to have the chance to work for my country and state,” said Thang Thang, who has decorated his office in an abandoned fire station with maps of the state and a Chin national flag. “During the [former] government time … there was a democracy but not a full democracy or a federal democracy. Now, we are going the federal way.”
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