…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…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…[L]ack of access adds to the mysteries of the jade industry, whose inner workings are deliberately obscured. Even the simplest information is not publicly available — including which companies operate the mines and how many are Chinese-run or financed despite laws banning foreign ownership…