BOOK
REVIEW A
one-sided history Modern
China-Myanmar Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual
Dependence by David I Steinberg
and Hongwei Fan Reviewed by Bertil Lintner
CHIANG MAI, Thailand - Myanmar's ongoing
charm offensive with the West, and the West's warm
response to the overtures, is without doubt being
driven more by China than by a sudden democratic
awakening among the country's ruling military
elite. Nor are Western powers, despite their
rhetoric and posturing,
placing progress on democracy
and human rights at the top of their policy
priorities. There is hypocrisy on both sides.
Years ago Myanmar's generals came to the
realization that they were losing their economic
and political independence to China and therefore
had to "normalize" relations with the West. But
they also realized that a rapprochement with the
United States and the European Union, both of
which maintained strict sanctions against the
regime, would not be viable as long as the country
was still ruled by a repressive military junta. To
make the break, the junta would have to be
replaced by some kind of constitutional government
that allowed for more freedoms and civil
liberties.
While
paying lip service to democracy and human rights,
the West has welcomed the "new Myanmar" with open
arms, especially after President Thein Sein
announced on September 30 last year that his
government had suspended a US$3.6 billion
joint-venture dam project with China that
threatened environmental damage in the country's
northern region. Two months later, Hillary Rodham
Clinton paid a high-profile visit to Myanmar, the
first by a US secretary of state in more than 50
years.
With all of the vaunted rhetoric of
new beginnings and friendships, it is hardly
surprising that erstwhile Myanmar ally China is
now earnestly searching for ways to salvage the
relationship. Academic-style journals in China
have run several articles analyzing what went
wrong with Beijing's Myanmar policy and what could
and should be done to rectify it. One proposed
measure was to launch a public relations campaign
inside Myanmar aimed at overhauling China's
current negative image in the country.
Against this shifting backdrop, a serious
study of the ups and downs of China-Myanmar
relations since the late 1940s - when Myanmar
became independent from colonial Britain and
communists took over China - would be most timely.
US Myanmar scholar David Steinberg and Chinese
academic Hongwei Fan attempt to examine that issue
in their new volume, but fall short in presenting
a credible portrait of the true nature of the
often troubled relationship between the two
neighbors.
Drawing heavily from official
Chinese sources, Modern China-Myanmar
Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual Independence
contains useful trade statistics and information
about China's economic expansion into Myanmar, as
well as the rest of the region. While those
materials present a new and original contribution
to research on China's relations with its southern
neighbors, over-reliance on those data is also the
book's main weakness.
China does not have
a freedom-of-information act that allows
journalists and academics to access previously
confidential official materials as in the United
States. Nor does it have the equivalent of a Right
to Information Act, which Asia's other giant,
India, introduced in 2005. Official Chinese
statements and documents do not reveal what
actually happened or was said behind closed doors
in Beijing's corridors of power or outlying
provincial capitals. As cloak-and-dagger
operations have for decades been the hallmark of
China's Myanmar policy, official documents tell
only a small part of what is a highly complex
story.
For instance, Steinberg's and Fan's
book perpetuates the myth that China's massive
support for the insurgent Communist Party of Burma
(which the authors erroneously refer to as "the
Burma Communist Party") was prompted by June 1967
riots in the former capital Yangon's Chinatown
caused by economic hardships that were blamed on
the Sino-Myanmar business community. On January 1,
1968, CPB cadres, supported by Chinese
"volunteers", entered northeastern Myanmar and aid
started to pour into the Communists' new
"liberated area" along the Sino-Myanmar border.
However, it would have been impossible to
execute such a grand plan after only half a year
of preparation. In reality, San Thu, one of the
CPB's leaders in exile in China, began surveying
the border for infiltration routes as early as
1963 - a year after an unpredictable general, Ne
Win, had seized power and ousted the neutralist U
Nu government, with which China maintained good
relations. That same year, CPB exiles were
introduced to a group of ethnic-Kachin fighters
who had retreated from northern Myanmar into China
in 1950.
They came to make up the bulk of
the CPB's fighting force when it went into
insurgent action five years later. Peace talks in
Yangon in 1963 gave one of the main CPB leaders in
exile in China, Thakin Ba Thein Tin, an
opportunity to return to Myanmar and bring with
him sophisticated radio transmitters which he
secretly handed over to the comrades in the
country. When the talks, as expected, broke down,
Ba Thein Tin returned to China with the new
benefit of direct radio contact between CPB forces
at home and exiles based in Beijing.
Economics over rebellions None
of this had anything to do with the 1967
anti-Chinese riots in Yangon; those events merely
provided China with a pretext for what was already
long planned. In the 1960s and well into the
1970s, China's policy was to lend various kinds of
support to communist revolutionary movements in
the region, including in Myanmar, Indochina,
Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. That policy
lasted until Deng Xiaoping returned to power in
Beijing a few years after the death of
revolutionary leader Mao Zedong in 1976. With that
leadership transition, China began to promote
trade and economic expansion rather than vicious
and futile communist rebellions in Southeast Asia.
The CPB collapsed after mutiny among the
hilltribe rank and file in 1989 and the aging
Myanmar leadership of the party fled to China. The
CPB then split up into several ethnic resistance
armies, of which the United Wa State Army is by a
wide margin the strongest. The UWSA,
world-renowned for its narcotics trafficking,
still maintains strong ties with China and has
procured most of its weaponry, including automatic
rifles, machine-guns, rocket launchers and even
anti-aircraft guns, from across the border. While
courting diplomatic relations with Myanmar's
military rulers, China has never confined itself
to playing only one card in the ethnically
stratified country.
Considering the UWSA's
crucial historical and contemporary role, it is
curious that the border-straddling militia fails
even to make mention in Steinberg's and Fan's
book. The volume's trade-based thesis notes only
that "in 1989, the collapse of the Burma Communist
Party [sic], which had occupied a strategic area
in the Wa State on the Chinese border since the
1970s, opened up new portals for Sino-Burmese
trade."
There is, of course, no "Wa State"
in Myanmar. It is a designation that the UWSA has
long fought for but never achieved. The authors
also fail to mention that the goods passing
through those "new portals" in the Wa area have
been mainly narcotics in one direction and guns in
the other. China's erstwhile support for the CPB,
and later its unorthodox relations with a
drug-running outfit like the UWSA, is a main
reason Myanmar's military establishment continued
to perceive China as a threat to national security
despite the development of stronger economic ties.
The ruling generals established close ties with
Beijing only as a last resort after Western-led
sanctions economically isolated the already
impoverished country.
China provided
Myanmar with US$1.4 million worth of military
hardware throughout the 1990s - after the West
slapped arms embargoes on Myanmar - in exchange
for concessions to strip the country of timber and
other natural resources. This crucial dynamic is
hardly mentioned in the book, although it clearly
stirred widespread resentment, even within ruling
military circles. The uneasy relationship between
China and Myanmar lasted for more than 20 years,
dating from the military's massacre of
pro-democracy protesters in 1988 until its
overtures to the West in 2011. In retrospect, it
was clearly an unsustainable and exploitative
arrangement.
Steinberg's and Fan's new
book is a worthwhile read for those interested in
cross-border trade, however incomplete and highly
dubious the official statistics cited. It also
coherently outlines China's economic aspirations
in Myanmar in a way that makes the volume unique.
But the book also studiously steers clear of
critically analyzing several important underlying
issues, including Beijing's support of ethnic
insurgencies, the cross-border narcotics trade,
and massive illegal Chinese migration into
Myanmar.
Those and other issues must be
addressed if Myanmar's sudden shift in policy and
the West's enthusiastic blind embrace of those
changes are to be fully and rightly understood in
the broadest context of China's and Myanmar's
long-troubled relations.
Modern
China-Myanmar Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual
Dependence by David I Steinberg and Hongwei
Fan. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press,
Copenhagen (2012). ISBN-10: 8776940969. US$32, 480
pages.
Bertil Lintner is a
former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review and author of several books on
Burma/Myanmar, including Burma in Revolt:
Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 and Aung
San Suu Kyi and Burma's Struggle for Democracy
(2011). He is currently a writer with Asia Pacific
Media Services.
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While
paying lip service to democracy and human rights,
the West has welcomed the "new Myanmar" with open
arms, especially after President Thein Sein
announced on September 30 last year that his
government had suspended a US$3.6 billion
joint-venture dam project with China that
threatened environmental damage in the country's
northern region. Two months later, Hillary Rodham
Clinton paid a high-profile visit to Myanmar, the
first by a US secretary of state in more than 50
years. 
