MYITKYINA, Myanmar — At 16, the gem trader’s son set out for the jade mines to seek his fortune in the precious stone that China craves. But a month in, the teenager, Sang Aung Bau Hkum, was feeding his own addiction: heroin, the drug of choice among the men who work the bleak terrain of gouged earthen pits, shared needles and dwindling hope here in the jungles of northern Myanmar.
Three years later he finally found what he had come for — a jade rock “as green as a summer leaf.” He spent some of the $6,000 that a Chinese trader paid him on a motorcycle, a cellphone and gambling.
“The rest disappeared into my veins,” he said, tapping the crook in his left arm as dozens of other gaunt miners in varying states of withdrawal passed the time at a rudimentary rehabilitation clinic here. “The Chinese bosses know we’re addicted to heroin, but they don’t care. Their minds are filled with jade.”
Mr. Sang Aung Bau Hkum, now 24, is just one face of a trade — like blood diamonds in Africa — that is turning good fortune into misery.
Driven by an insatiable demand from the growing Chinese middle class, Myanmar’s jade industry is booming and should be showering the nation, one of the world’s poorest, with unprecedented prosperity. Instead, much of the wealth it generates remains in control of elite members of the military, the rebel leaders fighting them for greater autonomy and the Chinese financiers with whom both sides collude to smuggle billions of dollars’ worth of the gem into China, according to jade miners, mining companies and international human rights groups.
Such rampant corruption has not only robbed the government of billions in tax revenue for rebuilding after decades of military rule, it has also helped finance a bloody ethnic conflict and unleashed an epidemic of heroin use and H.I.V. infection among the Kachin minority who work the mines.
The drug and jade trades have become a toxic mix, with heroin — made from opium poppies that long ago turned Myanmar into a top producer of illicit drugs — keeping a pliant work force toiling in harsh conditions as the Burmese authorities and Chinese business people turn a blind eye.
At a time when Myanmar is experimenting with democratic governance after nearly 50 years of military dictatorship, its handling of the jade industry has become a test of the new civilian leaders and their commitment to supporting human rights and rooting out corruption, as well as an early check on whether they will reject the former junta’s kleptocratic dealings with China.
So far, experts say, they have failed.
Washington is worried enough about the link between jade and violence — and the effect on democratic change — that it kept in place a ban on the gem from Myanmar, also known as Burma, even after it suspended almost every other sanction against the country since the civilian government came to power in 2011. But critics say the sanctions are useless because China attaches no such conditions.
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