About

Join us for a fascinating talk given by Patrick Winn where he talks all things CIA and drug cartels!

The jagged mountains dividing China and Burma belong to the Wa, an indigenous group who have outwitted the CIA to create the world's mightiest narco-state, controlling more territory than Israel and with more troops than Sweden. Are they crime lords? Or visionaries?

Wa State has become a real nation with its own highways, anthems, schools and flags. Its leaders promise freedom, using profits from trafficking heroin and meth to attain what China's other frontier peoples, Tibetans and Uyghurs, can only dream of: a state of their own. Patrick Winn embarks on a risky journey of discovery, chasing clues about the forbidden republic from Thailand to Burma to the secretive Wa State itself.

About Patrick Winn:

Patrick Winn is an award-winning investigative journalist. He mostly covers rebellion and black markets in Southeast Asia.

Winn is the author of two narrative non-fiction books:

Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA (PublicAffairs / Icon Books)

Hello, Shadowlands: Inside the Meth Fiefdoms, Rebel Hideouts and Bomb-Scarred Party Towns of Southeast Asia (Icon Books)

Winn is currently the Asia correspondent for The World, a radio program broadcast on more than 300 NPR stations across America. His writing and short documentaries have appeared in/on The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the BBC, The Atlantic and many other outlets. He has received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award (also known as the 'poor man's Pulitzer') and a National Press Club award. He's also a three-time winner of Amnesty International's Human Rights Press Awards among other prizes.

About Paul French:

Historian Paul French lives in Shanghai, where he is a business adviser and analyst. He frequently comments on China for the English-speaking press around the world. He studied history, economics, and Mandarin at university and has an MPhil in economics from the University of Glasgow. He is the author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award–winning Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, and Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.