Building a New Chinland: How the CPU Fights for the Future

Troops of the Chin Defense Force–Matupi under the Chin People's Union (CPU) / CDF-Matupi 

In May 2021, peaceful protests in Chin State against the Feb. 1 military coup were met with arrests, and a military convoy was deployed to further crack down on the population. Men from my town of Mindat went out and faced the convoy with hunting rifles, machetes and slingshots. The ensuing battle lasted three days, but in the end we took the military trucks and everything in them. The junta came back with helicopters loaded with reinforcements and new convoys. They arrested people from the town, made them walk in front of their columns as human shields, and bombed us incessantly from the air. By the end of the month, more than 20,000 people had left Mindat for nearby villages and the forest.

Before that May, I was not a freedom fighter. I have a master’s degree in education and spent years developing curricula for teacher education and providing my expertise to UNESCO in Yangon for educational reforms in Myanmar. But after the coup I went out on the streets and joined the peaceful protests, and when the military began killing protesters and burning villages, I quit my job, came back to my hometown, and turned to other means to overthrow the junta. Hundreds of others did the same, and the Chinland Defense Force (CDF)–Mindat was born.

We began with strong motivation to defend our land against the Myanmar military but no clear direction. It was enough to start, but nowhere near enough to run an armed resistance: those first months were chaotic, with no command structure and little discipline. Thousands of volunteers came forward, but by the end of 2021 only a few hundred remained. Everyone knew we had to reform or we would fall apart, but it took time to commit to do that work, which was both difficult and dangerous. We stripped the CDF-Mindat’s structure back and started over with basic training and a proper chain of command, relying heavily on instruction from allies who had fought far longer than we had. We stopped fighting like a mob and started fighting like an army.

The results came slowly, then all at once. We drove the military back at Kyaukhtu airfield. The Kyindwe operation cost us five months and dozens of our own men, but we took it. By December 2024, we had chased the military out of Mindat, Matupi and Kanpetlet. Our energized units then turned to Falam. We sent reinforcements three times and helped liberate Chin State’s second-largest town.

But by early 2025, forces from Mindat, Matupi, Kanpetlet and Paletwa were each struggling to defend their land on their own. So on Nov. 15, 2025, we merged into the Chin People’s Army (CPA) under the civilian-led Chin People’s Union (CPU). Given the difficulties of alliance-building in other parts of the resistance, I expected it to be a long, difficult process that would involve sharp disagreements, especially since Chin State is fragmented by tribal and township loyalties. I was pleasantly surprised. We drafted our guiding principles together and argued very little. The four defense forces under the CPA recognized that we needed each other and shared a common purpose—our other differences were minor by comparison.

Meanwhile, with political and military backing from China, Russia, and India, and driven by existential desperation, the junta stabilized. This April, leading up to the rebranded regime leader’s visit to our neighbor India, the military deployed thousands of troops to Chin State, re-occupying Falam and Tonzang before setting their sights on Mindat and Kanpetlet. The CPA, buttressed by the Arakan Army, the Yaw Defense Force, and the Yaw Army along with other allies, awaited them in the southern Chin theater. Ever since, wave after wave of regime forces has broken apart against our defenses and withdrawn in disorder, leaving behind weapons, drones, their dead, and their injured.

Unable to progress on the ground, the military now strikes us from the air. In the past few months, it has flown more than 600 airstrikes over the territory we administer, bombing towns, villages, churches, schools, and hospitals. Roughly 800 houses in Mindat have been destroyed in the regime’s campaign. In July, a regime column kidnapped two elderly farmers from the Yaw region and forced them to serve as human shields. Our allies saved one of them and returned him to his family. The other did not survive. To outsiders who only see war, the Myanmar military and resistance forces can look much the same. In reality, the differences in our mission and our methods are vast.

Fighting to defend our land and our community, however, is only part of our mission. We know that if we expel the Myanmar military from Chinland but the people remain poor, traumatized, without schools for their children or hospitals for their infirm, we will have failed.

That is why, even as the bombs fell, the CPU built governance systems of civil administration and service delivery that aim to meet the urgent needs of our embattled community. In the midst of violent conflict, we’ve tried to remain true to our principles of civilian supremacy and democratic ideals.

For example, in Mindat Township, every household across our 197 villages holds one vote. Ten households elect a leader; those leaders and the village head elect a village tract leader; and 45 village tract leaders, nine administrative unit heads, and 12 department heads convene a township conference that elects the administrator who runs the township.

We have established departments for education, health, agriculture, forestry, media, justice, law enforcement, audit, land management, animal husbandry, humanitarian relief, and support for the Civil Disobedience Movement. Defense is managed by the CPA and its allies. The CPA is administered by the CPU, a political body with representatives from Mindat, Kanpetlet, Matupi, and the Daai region in Paletwa. This structure emerged not for its own sake but to solve specific problems, and it operates on the ground alongside the communities we serve.

This way we have run vaccination campaigns through five years of war, built many bridges, and repaired roads that were abandoned decades ago. We levy taxes. We welcome any way people can contribute to liberating and defending our land—whether that means cooking for the frontlines, cutting timber, hauling fuel, or donating blood—and try to administer it wisely.

Unlike the Myanmar military, which kills its captives, we hold hundreds of prisoners of war. We do not chain senior POWs or force them to work; but lower-ranked prisoners who can work help build roads and repair plumbing lines. Soldiers who defect to us are housed, and we arrange for their safe return home. Kanpetlet, Matupi and the Daai region run similar systems of their own.

We do this because we are driven by the belief that hollow statements are not productive politics. We are problem-solvers, and the main problem our communities face is safety. Our goal is to improve the welfare of the people we serve and show them the material benefit of the sacrifices they are making for our collective struggle. For us, political agreements, statements, or conferences are useful only if they serve this end.

This is the path of development for the CPU. I cannot tell you what the next phase will be, but I know that holding on to our land takes strong partnership and coordination with our partners, including the Chin Brotherhood and the Spring Revolution Alliance. It also requires the support of our people. An army that loses public support is finished, no matter its capacity. That is why the Myanmar military will lose—and why the CPU has to be a civilian body that answers to Chin communities.

Political progress is growing more important all the time. Because regardless of what happens in Naypyitaw, Chin State will emerge from this war poor, traumatized, heavily armed, and with its churches, schools, hospitals, and markets in ruins. We will get our land back, but that is not the same as having a better future. Our people have been governed for generations by a system built to exclude them. If we fail to replace it with one that can deliver, it would be its own kind of defeat, and the families who lost sons defending Mindat deserve better.

This is where we need to grow; I would rather say so plainly. We have learned how to hold a line against an army 10 times our strength, but we are still learning how to run a school system, provide healthcare, develop basic infrastructure, collect taxes fairly, and deliver justice amidst violent conflict.

We were told that people like us, who come from small towns in the south, without money or influential names, could nver do this. We have spent nearly six years proving otherwise. But what we build over the next six will matter more. The path forward is uncertain but the goal is clear: we will know we have achieved it when the people who left Chin State start coming back, as we know they are dreaming and longing to do. We will know we have succeeded when Chin diaspora families around the world decide there is enough here to return to, take up their land again, and be united with their kinfolk in a peaceful and prosperous society.

Yaw Mang is an educational consultant who worked in Myanmar educational reform under the civilian government and currently serves as general secretary of Chin People’s Union/Chin People’s Army.