Stalemate: Autonomy and Insurgency on the China‐Myanmar Border. Andrew Ong. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, USA and London, UK, 2023, pp. xxii + 253. <scp>ISBN</scp> 978‐1‐501‐77071‐5 (pbk).

‘When I retire I will go back to China. I'm tired of bowing my head all the time’. These are the words of Chen, a Chinese businessmen and official in a Wa government ministry, as recounted in Andrew Ong's powerful ethnography. Chen, one of the many fascinating characters that Ong's writing brings to life in this volume, was born some 55-years before in Hopang, a border town between what are today known as the Wa and Kokang regions, in Myanmar, and Yunnan's Province in China. His story resonates with that of many borderland subjects that populate Ong's volume. Chen's father moved away from China at around the time of the communist takeover, in 1949, and worked with the legendary warlord and opium trader Olive Yang. Now, Chen owns businesses in the Wa region, ruled by Myanmar's most powerful ethnic army, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), since 1989. Chen was also working for the Wa government, and as he spoke both Chinese and Burmese was often put in charge of hospitality work. As Ong argues in the book, hospitality is central in the Wa hills: it is a tool of brokerage and governance that requires careful manoeuvring. It is also something laborious, and at times tedious. Something that, as Chen puts it, made him tired of bowing his head all the time. Wa region consists of two areas located on the borders with China and Thailand and is home to around half a million people of diverse ethnicities, many of whom speak Chinese and use Chinese currency in daily life. Wa region is formally part of Myanmar, but it is de facto ruled by an insurgent group, the UWSA. In 1989, ethnic Wa commanders and troops mutinated against the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), which since 1968 has been controlling those borderlands with ample Chinese support. The newly formed UWSA signed a ceasefire with the Myanmar government, and established Wa Region as autonomous territory. Since then, the Wa establishment retained much of the paraphernalia, nomenclature, and governing mechanisms set up by the CPB, while developing an economy initially based on opium, then rubber, casinos, and resource mining. In over thirty years, this remote corner of the country became one of Myanmar's most developed region, its capital Pangkham resembling a mid-sized city in nearby Yunnan. While Wa leaders accumulated wealth and resources, and the UWSA grew to become the most powerful among Myanmar's many Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAO), most Wa people remain poor and uneducated. Andrew Ong himself entered Wa Region as the head of the World Food Programme suboffice—a position that afforded him access to Wa officials. The result of Ong's long-term fieldwork in the area is a detailed ethnography of Wa autonomy, of how relations within and outside the region are maintained, and how governance is performed and understood. As such, this is a work of political anthropology at its finest: a meticulous account of what ‘autonomy’ means on Wa terms, and a critical appreciation of how it is practised in its everyday context. The book is centred around the notion of ‘relational autonomy’. Much more than ‘sovereignty’, Ong convincingly argues, it is autonomy that has been central to the Wa project of both authority and governance. Yet this autonomy needs to be understood, Ong argues, as a social value expressed through relations of generosity and patronage. Hosting and bowing—what Chen became tired of—are critical features of this mode of governance, and constitute the relational components of Wa authority. Ong's book is rich with examples of how such relational autonomy unfolds, and how it takes place in seemingly endless dinner parties, wedding celebrations, and official meetings. If the notion of relational autonomy scaffolds the entire volume, its various chapters offer numerous arguments that enrich our understanding of insurgent life in the borderlands of Southeast Asia. Chapter 1, for instance, deconstructs the myth of Wa Region as an isolated polity, rather showing its cosmopolitan nature, and the highly mobile and shifting lives of many of its inhabitants. Chapter 3, on the other hand, lingers on the often neglected CPB history in the area, and how this continues to shape borderland governance, and Wa relations with both China and Myanmar, today. Chapter 4 focuses on the particular modes of accumulation that the Wa form of peripheral governance affords, and the characters and investments it attracts. The result is a clear-cut understanding of some of the structures underlying the apparent deadlock existing between the UWSA and Myanmar. Ong calls this ‘tactical dissonance’, encapsulating how an element of tension and disorder is key to the stability that has for the most part characterized Wa Region in the past thirty years. Tactical dissonance operates through both oscillation in political ties and allegiances, and a fundamental incongruity between how Wa and Myanmar leaders understand autonomy and sovereignty. It is in this tension, and the ongoing and continuous arbitrage that it entails, that stability can be found. This argument is valuable well beyond the borderlands of China and Myanmar, rather calling to a re-calibration of some of the key categories through which power and its enactments are usually understood, such as the dichotomy between disorder and stability. One, in the Wa case, is functional—and not opposite—to the other. Andrew Ong's book is a tour de force, refreshing and rich in stories and details. Vividly written and carefully argued, Stalemate should be mandatory reading for anthropologists, human geographers, sociologists and political scientists working on borderlands, and particularly on issues of sovereignty and insurgency.