It took an alliance of multi-ethnic guerrillas just over two months to take the town of Laukkai on the Chinese border on January 5, after the surrender of several thousand soldiers and officers of the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s armed forces.

It was a significant setback for Myanmar’s military junta, which has ruled the country since its coup on February 1, 2021, and faces a coalition of "revolutionary forces" on a growing number of fronts. The defeat is accompanied by the surrender of 2,389 military personnel, including six brigadier generals. This is "the biggest surrender in the history of Myanmar’s army," military expert Ye Myo Hein wrote in a January 6 post shared on the social media platform X.

Laukkai is the capital of a 150,000-inhabitant enclave called Kokang (in northern Shan State), whose Chinese-speaking population has long resisted central government control, as have the rest of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities. It was conquered in 2009 without a fight by the current head of the Myanmarese junta, Min Aung Hlaing, who held the rank of regional commander at the time. Having become the commander’s stronghold and a probable source of illicit funding, Laukkai flourished as a sophisticated base for cybercrime operations targeting China, under Hlaing’s reign as the army’s highest-ranking official from 2010 then as chief coup leader for the past three years.

The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the historic Kokang guerrillas who launched a surprise offensive against army positions on October 27, 2023, captured Laukkai without a real fight: the surrender was negotiated and the personnel transferred with their families, thousands of them, to the town of Lashio, where the Myanmarese army’s regional command center for northern Shan State is located.

The six generals were transported on January 7 to Myanmar’s capital, Naypyidaw, and are being held by their superiors for an investigation in accordance with current military procedures. In photos posted on social media by the Kokang guerrillas, several were shown on the day they surrendered, smiling as they toasted with members of the MNDAA. Laukkai is the first of the Tatmadaw’s six "regional operation centers" to fall.

"If the MNDAA had wanted to capture the soldiers, it would have had to wage a costly battle to take the military base which, in addition to the air strikes, could have led to the destruction of the town," explained Richard Horsey, Myanmar expert at the NGO International Crisis Group. The specialist believes "China would not tolerate such instability on its border." The fall of Laukkai is in any case, he added, "of symbolic importance, as it exposes the weakness of the Myanmarese army and emboldens anti-junta forces throughout the country."

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