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2 China no sure bet on
Myanmar By Bertil Lintner
BANGKOK - United Nations special envoy
Ibrahim Gambari's latest trip to Myanmar wholly
failed to yield any results in pushing the ruling
junta towards conciliation with the country's
democratic opposition. With the UN's impotence,
the international community will now look even
more towards China to nudge the ruling State Peace
and Development Council (SPDC) towards democratic
change.
There is a widespread perception
that only China has the diplomatic leverage over
Myanmar's generals to force them to the
negotiating table to discuss
the future of the country with the political
opposition. Yet it is still implausible that
authoritarian China, despite its recent moves in
places like Africa to improve its standing as a
responsible global power, will any time soon
champion democracy in a neighboring country of
such strategic import.
China is playing
several different games in Myanmar, but following
the West's desired policies of encouraging more
democracy is not one of them. The two countries
share a long history of strained relations,
memories of which have been slow to fade, even
with their rapprochement in more recent years. For
historical reasons China is not fully trusted by
the generals in Naypyitaw, and even if Beijing
applied more pressure on the regime to change its
repressive ways, it's not clear the junta would
oblige.
At the same time, Myanmar is of
vital strategic and economic importance to China
and it clearly does not want to jeopardize its
still delicate relationship with the junta by
joining Western boycotts, condemnations and calls
for the emergence of more democracy. Some academic
observers even argue that Beijing's influence over
the SPDC has been exaggerated.
In a recent
paper published by Griffith University in
Australia, Myanmar scholar Andrew Selth argues
that "[Myanmar] has always been very suspicious of
China, and only turned to Beijing in 1989 out of
dire necessity after it was ostracized by the West
and made to suffer a range of sanctions". China,
the argument goes, "has not been as successful in
winning [Myanmar's] confidence as is often
reported".
Proof of this is the fact that
although China has provided Myanmar with between
US$1.4 and $1.6 billion worth of military hardware
since 1989, the regime has in more recent years
turned to Russia, the Ukraine and even North Korea
to diversify its arms procurement program and
lessen its dependence on Chinese suppliers.
China's success in persuading North Korea
to return to the six-party talks about dismantling
the country's nuclear program is often quoted as a
possible model for a similar Chinese intervention
in the Myanmar crisis. Yet it's not clear that
Beijing has the same sort of powers of persuasion
in Naypyitaw that it does in Pyongyang. One
crucial difference is that China and North Korea
have been allies for decades and fought together
against the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s.
Later China helped the newly established
Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the
1950-53 Korean War, where hundreds of thousands of
Chinese "volunteers" fought alongside their Korean
comrades and among the many casualties was even
Chinese communist chairman Mao Zedong's eldest
son, Mao Anying.
Historical
antagonisms By stark contrast, bilateral
relations between Myanmar and China have not
always been smooth. From the establishment of the
People's Republic of China in 1949 until 1962,
Beijing maintained a cautiously cordial but
basically friendly relationship with the
non-aligned democratic government of prime
minister U Nu. Myanmar, then known as Burma was,
in fact, the first country outside the communist
bloc to recognize the new regime in Beijing.
In 1954, Myanmar (then Burma) and China
for the first time signed a bilateral trade
agreement and two months later Chinese premier
Zhou Enlai visited Yangon to hold talks with U Nu.
In 1956, U Nu paid a return visit to China and the
basic principles for a definitive demarcation of
the 2,171-kilometer common border were agreed on.
A border agreement was signed in 1960 and the
situation was peaceful, although trade between the
two countries then was negligible.
After
General Ne Win staged a coup d'etat in 1962, the
Chinese, long wary of the ambitious and sometimes
unpredictable general, began to prepare for
all-out support for the outlawed Communist Party
of Burma (CPB). The CPB had in the years
immediately following independence been strong,
but in the 1950s the insurgent group was pushed
back to footholds in central Myanmar, notably the
Pegu Yoma mountain range north of Yangon.
Meanwhile, 143 Myanmar communists had also managed
to escape to China - and, in the mid-1960s, they
were sent down to the Myanmar border to survey
possible infiltration routes.
Anti-Chinese
riots in Yangon - orchestrated by the military
authorities to deflect public anger at a rapidly
deteriorating economy - in 1967 provided a
convenient excuse for the Chinese to intervene
directly in Myanmar's internal affairs. On New
Year's Day 1968, the first armed CPB units entered
northeastern Myanmar from China's southwestern
Yunnan province. They never managed to reach the
old units in the Pegu Yoma, but they built up a
20,000 square kilometer base area along the
Chinese frontier.
During the decade
spanning 1968-78, China poured more aid into the
CPB effort than any other communist movement
outside of Indochina. Assault rifles,
machine-guns, rocket launchers, anti-aircraft
guns, radio equipment, jeeps, trucks, petrol, maps
of the area, and even rice, other foodstuff,
cooking oil and kitchen utensils were sent across
the frontier into the CPB's new revolutionary base
area.
The Chinese also built hydroelectric
power stations inside the area, and a clandestine
radio station, the People's Voice of Burma, began
transmitting from the Yunnan side of the frontier
in 1971. Thousands of Chinese "volunteers" also
streamed across the border to provide additional
support to the CPB. Mao's death in 1976, and more
importantly, the return to power of the pragmatist
Deng Xiaoping a year later, marked the beginning
of the end of massive Chinese aid to the CPB.
It was no longer seen to be in Beijing's
interest to support revolutionary movements in the
region, but neither could the
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