The Hmong — Political Economy of an Illegal Crop

Abstract

Numbering nearly six million, the Hmong people who inhabit the rugged highlands of southwestern China and the northern parts of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, descend from a people who once vied with the Chinese for supremacy over the lower banks of the Yangtze River. Known to some as aboriginal Chinese because they retain in their customs and social organization so many traces of an archaic Chinese civilization, their culture has developed over the ages slowly and organically to the point where now it stands at the crossroads between violent change and total destruction….