In the misty mountains that loom over the rivers of northern Kachin State, village administrator Dawng Hkawng recalls the day in 2007 when he was ordered to leave his home to make way for a Chinese-backed hydropower dam. He was told the 3,400-megawatt Chipwi hydropower project would provide electricity to the area for the first time.

Dawng Hkawng and the other 130 residents of Mandung village in Chipwi Township were promised compensation from Myanmar conglomerate Asia World and China’s state-owned State Power Investment Corporation to enable them to build new homes, improve their standard of living and finally join the modern world. In Myanmar villages more than half of households are yet to be connected to the national grid.

"We couldn’t object because they are more powerful than us. If we opposed the project we would have been in trouble because it was the time of the military regime.” Dawng Hkawng, displaced villager

Fighting broke out in Dawng Hkawng’s township in 2012, a year after the collapse of a 1994 bilateral ceasefire agreement between an ethnic armed group, the Kachin Independence Army – which now controls the project area – and Myanmar’s military. The villagers fled and the companies abandoned the site. Today it is a ruin, reclaimed by jungle.

Since then, Dawng Hkawng has been living in a camp for internally displaced people in Chipwi town. He never got the compensation he was promised. With no home, and no electricity, he is struggling to support himself and his family.

“We just want to return to our homes, but we can’t go there because of the land mines." Dawng Hkawng, displaced villager

Representatives of SPIC and Asia World declined to comment.

Dawng Hkawng is one of an unknown number of people in Myanmar who are living in limbo. Their communities are caught up in a struggle between powerful forces: the Myanmar military and paramilitary groups that are loyal to it, ethnic armed groups, and Chinese companies, some of them state owned.