This paper uses Bruno Latour's political ecology theory to investigate the impact of Chinese businessmen's informal investment in gold mining in Tachilek, at the Myanmar-Thailand border, over the past decade. Based on 16 months of fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019, and follow-up interviews, the study examines how and why the highland areas of Myanmar are becoming "scarred landscapes" and "resource frontiers." Using a multi-scale approach, the paper analyzes the gathering, entanglement, territorialization, and deterritorialization processes of human and non-human elements, such as land, ideas, capital, technology, groups, and individuals, in this mining assemblage. Amid globalization and uneven development, polluting methods of gold mining have flowed into the border regions of Myanmar's highland. The mountains act as an agency, impacting capital flows and human societies in different dimensions. The fold geography of Myanmar's highlands, the complexity of state-border relationship, and the form of local borderland society all serve as different elements that act as a gateway for “informal cross-border capital” to enter in border zone of Myanmar. Myanmar’s highland border region is treated as a “resource” that has been continuously yet indeterminately involved in the global economic system. The flow of foreign capital has been generating and strengthening the particularity of its local borderland society. In this complex process, the mountainous landscape has been gradually and unevenly transforming.
