The size of informal organizations and the extent of their activities varied as well, depending on the connections of their leading members and their ambitions. Some organizations confined their membership to a small number of trusted people (five to eight) and dissolved whenever members became too busy to take an active part. This usually happened when members of small student study groups graduated. Some ambitious informal organizations, however, managed to establish networks with other informal groups in various parts of the country. Christina Fink summarizes the way such study groups functioned .
Members of a discussion group were usually unacquainted with members of other groups, even if they belonged to the same network. In such a network, only representatives of the groups met occasionally and exchanged information about one another’s activities (interviews, 2002). Study groups that belonged to the same network usually read the same books, however, printed the same kind of antigovernment brochures and pamphlets, and shouted the same antigovernment slogans whenever they engaged in protests. Thus whenever a member of a discussion group came across another group’s antigovernment activities, he or she had to check the pamphlets they distributed and the slogans they shouted before getting involved. If their pamphlets and slogans were similar to those of his or her own group, it could safely be assumed that they were a “brother group” and therefore acceptable. In this way, one did not have to worry about getting tricked into sham antigovernment activities orchestrated by government agents.
Many ambitious informal organizations were loosely connected to illegal political groups, especially the Burma Communist Party (BCP). Some political activists, however, created informal organizations independently but later tried to contact either the BCP or right-wing political masterminds in search of leaders who could give them guidelines for their activities. Some of these groups became affiliates of illegal political organizations, while others simply remained sympathizers. The informal affiliates functioned according to the instructions received from their illegal political organization (interview, former SMO leader, September 2002).Thesympathizer groups did not always follow instructions, however, although they did occasionally sound out advice on organizing certain activities. There is no way of knowing the exact number of affiliated informal groups or independent informal groups, but the independents appear to have outnumbered the groups that were connected to illegal political groups. Of the forty-two informal groups I was able to identify, only five were directly linked to the BCP, fifteen were sympathizer groups, and twenty-two were independent. Independent groups were generally smaller in size than the groups directly or indirectly connected to illegal political organizations.