When Myanmar received its independence from Great Britain at 4:20 in the morning of 4 January 1948, Ne Win, as commander of the Northern region, was responsible for defending the country's borders with India, China, French Indochina, and Thailand. India was convulsed with the consequences of the partition from Pakistan and China was in the final throes of the civil war between Mao Tse-tung's Red Army and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT). Laos, as a French colony was relatively peaceful and Thailand was just two months back under the military rule of Marshall Pibul Songram. None of these at that time appeared to pose a threat to the territorial integrity or the sovereignty of Myanmar but with Chinese Communist victory apparently imminent, and Thailand having only recently given up administrative control of the cis-Salween (Thanlwin) Shan State of Kengtung which had been given by Japan, the future appeared ominous.

Moreover, both putative Chinese governments maintained claims to territory bequeathed by Britain to Burma to a line deep into Ne Win's command, roughly from Myitkyina west to the Indian border. In January 1948, it was fortunate that no neighbouring government either wished, or was in a position, to challenge Burma's borders. The northern command had neither the troops nor the equipment to move up to the borders and defend them. During the sixty-two years that Britain had controlled this vast territory, little had been done to develop the roads and railways of the region. Being a rough mountainous country with few obvious economic assets, most of the border areas remained largely undisturbed except for the many Western and Karen missionaries who were converting the peoples of the area who were non-Buddhists, particularly the Kachin, to one or another variety of Christianity. Like the Bamar, however, the Shan remained overwhelming followers of Theravada Buddhism.