Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (15 page)

Over the past twenty years, China has emerged as the Burmese government’s top foreign friend and supporter. China has provided hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military hardware, including planes and tanks, as well as crucial diplomatic protection at the United Nations and elsewhere. Trade has risen to all-time highs with official figures now placing bilateral trade at over $2 billion a year; the real figure, including contraband, is doubtless far greater. Together with a growing array of investments, the Burmese economy is today tied more closely to China’s than at any other time in modern history. High-ranking Chinese party leaders, generals, ministers and provincial officials routinely visit Burma, and Burmese military brass are often seen in the official media touring Chinese cities.

China’s policy is about as different from the American and European policy of economic sanctions and diplomatic condemnation as possible, and this difference is not too surprising. It’s hard to see how promoting democracy would ever be very high priority for Beijing. It’s also worth remembering that during much of the Cold War, roles had been reversed. In those days, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was Washington that was the Burmese military government’s best friend abroad, providing military training and welcoming its then dictator General Ne Win to Washington (he made a quick visit to Lyndon Johnson’s White House before a week in Maui playing golf). China for its part was denouncing Burma’s generals as ‘fascists’ and actively plotting the regime’s overthrow, not only through sanctions and rhetoric, but through all-out backing for the communist insurgency. This was at a time when China was providing help for communist movements throughout southeast Asia. Only with the consolidation in power of Deng Xiaoping and like-minded reformers did the focus turn solidly to economic development at home, not to revolution abroad. Export of Maoism ended and the search for markets began. Human rights were never on the agenda.

As China’s industrial revolution gained pace, so did its hunger for the natural resources necessary to fuel its continued growth. The countries of the developed world have been the big buyers of new Chinese goods, but it has mainly been poorer countries (and a few well-endowed rich ones like Australia) that have been the focus of Beijing’s desire to lock in its energy and mineral needs for the future. In many parts of Africa, places that had long been the preserve of former colonial powers, Chinese firms are buying mines, building roads, and in general spending billions of dollars, without so much as a peep about ‘good governance’, gender equality, or other issues often linked to Western aid.

Burma, though, is not just another foreign country. Unlike other new-found trading partners, it occupies a critical space on China’s southwestern flank, right next to its densest concentration of ethnic minorities. Borders easily become blurred. For Beijing’s leaders, securing markets near and far has been of crucial importance. But of even greater importance has been ensuring internal stability, including and especially in ethnic minority areas.

The Chinese view Western policy towards Burma as hypocritical and self-defeating. Hypocritical because they see Western governments, when it suits their interests, propping up regimes elsewhere which are just as tyrannical, if not more so, and self-defeating because Western sanctions and boycotts have only removed what leverage they would otherwise have. But this does not mean that Beijing will push for a change in the American or European approach. At one level, they would like to see Western sanctions lifted, believing that a more prosperous Burma, connected to international markets, will help ensure stability and that this will be good in the long run for China as well. But they also clearly see the huge advantage that sanctions (and related boycott campaigns) have given to their own business interests by removing economic rivals from the scene. Why work to bring in their competitors?

Behind these practical considerations, however, is a more philosophical position. In the West, even after recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is still a strong feeling that problems elsewhere–civil wars, repressive governments–can be fixed with the right dose of international help. The Chinese have little experience meddling far away, and are much less certain of the efficacy of what they would term foreign interference. ‘The Burmese have their problems, but we’ve all had our problems and we’ve had to find our own way out. It’s better to leave them alone. Look at where China was not long ago. It wouldn’t have helped at all if foreign governments tried to tell us what to do,’ I was told by a Chinese analyst. This was a firmly held conviction that dovetailed well with less altruistic motives.

At times I sensed that at least some in Chinese officialdom were no longer sure of this approach, and veered towards a more paternalistic attitude. Perhaps the Burmese are different? Perhaps they do need some help? In 2007, when monk-led demonstrations in Rangoon dominated international news for a couple of weeks, the Chinese were nervous. ‘Our leaders want to find a solution to this Burma issue once and for all,’ a Chinese journalist said to me at the time. But then the story faded from the TV screens and it was back to business as usual.

Meanwhile, business as usual was acquiring a new dimension. China by 2009 was not the China that had first reached out to Burma in the late 1980s. The recent global financial crisis had severely weakened Western economies, but China was emerging relatively unscathed and more confident than ever. It had lots of money in the bank and was on a frenetic shopping spree for raw materials. Economic relations with Burma were moved into high gear.

By early 2010 construction had begun on the oil and gas pipelines that would connect China’s southwest across Burma to the Bay of Bengal. They would run from Mandalay past Ruili, first to Yunnan and then onwards to the Guangxi Autonomous Region and to the mega-city of Chongqing. All three were places targeted in the ‘Western Development Strategy’. Like the huge hydro electric projects on the Irrawaddy and Salween that were also moving forward, the pipelines from Burma would ensure the energy needed for ever faster industrialization. The pipelines had a strategic dimension as well, and were a part of resolving what President Hu Jintao in 2003 called ‘The Malacca Dilemma’. China’s oil needs are growing by the day, and imports of oil, from Africa and the Middle East, are all currently shipped via the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. Chinese strategists were worried about pirate attacks along the Straits, but were even more worried that, in the event of a future conflict with the United States or India, a few enemy warships could easily block essential oil supplies. A conduit through Burma was a way out of the dilemma.

The trouble for China was that the situation in Burma was not quite stable. A new constitution, one that included regular elections, was about to be implemented, yet overall political reconciliation seemed far away. And the Chinese, especially the Chinese security establishment, knew better than anyone else that much of the north and east of the country lay in the hands of armed groups other than the Burmese army. In 2009, much to the chagrin of Beijing, the junta had launched a lightning attack on one of these groups, sending tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese fleeing across the border. Was China really going to place so much strategic weight, not to mention international prestige, on a country whose future remained uncertain? Some Chinese analysts were unconcerned. ‘If we were going to be worried about any neighbouring country, it would be Pakistan, not Burma,’ one told me. ‘Burma’s in a far better situation.’

In general it seems that a mix of pragmatic considerations is shaping China’s Burma policy. There were the internal challenges for which Burma as a bridge to the sea was at least part of the answer, as well as the desire, in some quarters of Beijing at least, to exploit the withdrawal of the West from Burma and in the process gain influence on India’s flank. But there was a deeper history as well, that seems to have been entirely overlooked: the history of China’s southwestern frontier.

One way of seeing China is not so much as a rising superpower but a re-emerging one. The country was, for centuries until the 1800s, the biggest economy in the world (with the possible exception of Mughal India) and arguably the most technologically advanced. From this viewpoint, what is happening now is simply a return to an ancient status quo. The Chinese often view themselves as heirs to a unique and unbroken tradition stretching back thousands of years to the earliest Bronze-Age dynasties, a leading world civilization, perhaps the leading world civilization, whose pre-eminence was only on occasion interrupted by barbarian invasions and by the more recent and shameful period of Western domination, but which is now on the road to recovering its rightful position.

But China is actually not a fixed geographical entity. And we need to remember that the China of today, and the borders of the People’s Republic, are very much a creation of the twentieth century and do not necessarily correspond to the China of previous eras. There is a frontier history, often sidelined, that is perhaps becoming important again.

Chinese civilization started along the Yellow River, not far from present-day Beijing and the open plains of what is now Mongolia. Millet was first domesticated there, perhaps 10,000 years ago, and it was in that arid and windswept land that the first Chinese writing appeared, written on oracle bones, heated and cracked turtle bones used to divine the future. When the ‘First Emperor’ Shi Huang Ti–a successor of King Hui Wen of Qin–unified the Chinese world in the third century
BC
, it was still a relatively small world, one that had expanded beyond its Yellow River base, but was only a small portion of China today, maybe a quarter.

No one understands exactly how the Chinese language and Chinese culture then spread from this core around the Yellow River. Superior agricultural technology is likely to have been an important factor. Advanced farming meant more people, and, perhaps, a steady stream of Chinese speakers migrating south ward, from the cold and dry north, first towards the Yangtze River valley, and then further, into the steamy jungles of what is now southern China. The earlier peoples of these new regions spoke entirely different languages, including ones ancestral (or closely related) to modern Thai, Cambodian and Vietnamese. The people of the Wu kingdom, for example, around present-day Shanghai, likely spoke a language akin to modern Thai and the Shan dialects of Burma. And the people of the kingdom of Yue, based near present-day Hong Kong, spoke an Austro-Asiatic language, similar to Vietnamese. In their trading emporiums by the South China Sea the Yue dealt in imported ivory from as far away as Africa and frankincense from Arabia. The Chinese saw the Yue as outlandish foreigners, eating on banana leaves and living amidst malarial swamps.

At its height, ancient Chinese imperial control extended across much of the present eastern half of the country, including the long coastline. This was roughly during the time of the Roman Empire, during the first centuries
AD
. Gradually, local kings and courts and tribal peoples were incorporated politically and integrated culturally and linguistically. What had been the kingdom of Yue, for example, would remain part of every successive Chinese dynasty, its people eventually losing their distinct identity. Their original languages gradually disappeared and were replaced by Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Hokkien, dialects that were influenced by long contact with the now extinct aboriginal tongues. Only the southernmost Han imperial possession, Vietnam, would regain its independence (after a thousand years of Chinese rule) and the Vietnamese have fiercely guarded this independence ever since.

To the southwest, towards Burma and Tibet, is a different frontier history. The valley of the Yangtze River snakes hundreds of miles, from near Shanghai on the coast, to the great gorges beyond Yichang. Further on is the Sichuan basin, once the land of Shu, today home to over eighty million Chinese people. Since the building of the Stone Cattle Road, immigrants have streamed in from the harsher climates of the Yellow and Wei River valleys to this new Chinese province, which would become famous for its linens and mines of copper, iron ore and salt, and which has been part of every Chinese empire ever since.

Beyond Sichuan, though, were ever-higher mountains and upland valleys, ending finally in Tibet and Burma. As in south China, there was a moving frontier. But it is a much more recent frontier. Whereas Sichuan and south China were more or less fully incorporated into China by medieval times, large parts of the southwest, an area three times the size of France, were still outside any real Chinese control well into the twentieth century. For much of the southwest, the history of the past hundred years has been not only the history of war and communist rule, but also the history of its integration with ‘China proper’.

Along the Burmese borderlands, one could say that it is a process that is still continuing. In Burma, the picture has been of China as a juggernaut, rolling in and intent on supremacy. And from further away, China’s ties with the junta have been lumped together with its relations with other ‘rogue’ states like North Korea and Sudan, sinister and inscrutable, or set within an emerging ‘Great Game’ with India. The domestic considerations are little understood, nor the actual dynamics motivating Sino-Burmese ties. And entirely ignored is China’s frontier history and the situation in Yunnan.

From Beijing, Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, is a three-hour flight away, across the Chinese hinterland and over increasingly high mountain terrain. It is the province next to Burma, almost equal in size and population, and the engine of China’s drive towards the Bay of Bengal. I knew Yunnan a little from a trip there in the early 1990s. I also knew Yunnan as a place where independent kingdoms and upland chiefs had long resisted Beijing’s control. What role did Yunnan now play in China’s policy towards Burma and the region? I wanted to put the pieces together.

Yunnan for centuries was China’s wild southwest. It was a land of outlaws and miscreants and exotic religious sects, a place where musket-slinging Han settlers battled bow and arrow-wielding tribesmen and aliens from beyond the pale. Its jungle-clad mountains teemed with fearsome animals and its torrential rivers, thousand-foot cliffs and deadly miasmas deterred all but the hardiest of frontiersmen. The Chinese made a distinction between the barbarians who were ‘cooked’ and those who were ‘uncooked’. The cooked ones had come to accept the superiority of Chinese ways, learned the Chinese language and were well on their way to being Han Chinese themselves. Well into modern times, however, Yunnan was still full of the rawest barbarians possible, people with bizarre sexual mores, hostile to any imperial authority. Beyond them were the even stranger kingdoms of the Mien or Burmese, and on the other side of the Mien, the western sea.

Today, Yunnan, which means ‘South of the Clouds’, is a province of the People’s Republic, about 152,000 square miles in size (a little bigger than Germany) and with a population approaching fifty million. It’s an area rich in natural resources, relatively under-populated, and home to the largest concentration of minority peoples anywhere in the country. Nearly 40 per cent of Yunnan’s people are today classed as non-Han. The Irrawaddy, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the Pearl Rivers all descend from the Tibetan plateau through Yunnan, and the province’s hydroelectric potential, now quickly and controversially being realized, is enormous. Yunnan is also China’s biggest producer of tobacco and flowers, as well as aluminium, lead, zinc and tin. Marco Polo, who visited in the late thirteenth century, commented on Yunnan’s great salt mines, for which the area was famous, together with its silver and, later, its opium. It has long been renowned as well for its tea, and more recently for its coffee, first introduced a hundred years ago by a French priest from Vietnam. Nestlé and Maxwell House have started to buy coffee here for export and Starbucks has even introduced a new ‘South of the Clouds’ blend at its more than 500 outlets around China. The dark forests that had frightened early Han settlers have now largely been cut down, but Yunnan is still a place of great natural beauty, with rolling hills in the east and mountain valleys, turquoise-blue lakes and snow-covered peaks to the west, on the approaches to Tibet and at the edge of the Himalayas.

Kunming is the capital of Yunnan province and had been my introduction to China. This was in 1991, when I was on my way to the insurgent-held areas of Burma’s Kachin Hills. It was winter, and though the temperature in this ‘City of Eternal Spring’ was mild, it was also grey and cloudy, a morning mist obscuring the big construction sites and new skyscrapers that were set at long intervals along broad and half-deserted avenues. I was coming from steamy and frenetic Bangkok and Kunming at the time seemed neat and clean and nondescript, a city of cyclists in black cloth shoes, old men and women chatting away on park benches, and pavements lined with small, evenly spaced and carefully tended trees. There were almost no Westerners and I don’t remember coming across anyone who spoke English.

It was a city with a rich and colourful past. In the early twentieth century, when European influence in Asia was at its peak, the British and the French had vied for access and influence, and the French had built a train line, connecting Kunming with their port of Haiphong, near Hanoi. And when the Japanese invaded China in the 1930s, thousands of refugees from the coast, many of them well-to-do professionals and businessmen, flooded into this distant corner of the country, some bringing with them whole factories that had been dismantled and were to be reassembled beyond the range of Japanese bombers. Entire universities were even evacuated as well to Kunming, and this one-time frontier town began to take on a cosmopolitan air. The Burma Road carried supplies from Rangoon and Calcutta, as well as war-profiteers and spies. There were American military men too, airmen who flew missions against the Japanese and special operations agents from Detachment 101 of the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor of the CIA) who trekked from Kunming to the Vietnamese highlands to make contact with the anti-Japanese Viet Minh guerrillas under Ho Chi Minh. It was only in 1949, under China’s new communist rulers, that all ties with the outside were severed, ushering in a period of isolation that would last more than a quarter of a century.

The traces of the earlier city are now more or less gone. There are a few temples, churches and mosques, but nearly everything else has been razed to the ground in a headlong rush for modernization. Some old neighbourhoods were still intact when I visited in 1991, but by the mid-1990s the speed of development had quickened. The old commercial street called Wuchenglu, with its rows of wooden shop-houses, was demolished, and soon after the wonderful assortment of early twentieth-century buildings along Jinbilu, many in the languid French Indochina style, were torn down as well, developers sparing only the old Roman Catholic cathedral, the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

And when I went back in 2009, Kunming, like the rest of China, had changed beyond recognition. It was now crowded and noisy, a bustling city of apartment blocks and shopping malls and traffic jams, with sometimes surprisingly modish people, the women in mini-skirts and knee-length boots, the men in dark Western suits or black leather jackets.

My hotel was at a busy street corner, not far from an expansive central plaza around which were half a dozen shopping malls. And my room, on the eighteenth floor and with a big window looking out onto the neon lights below, was like a hotel room anywhere, except for the thermos of hot water (people in China like to sip hot water) and a television that had only Chinese-language channels. Unlike in Burma, English-language satellite news channels like CNN are not available in most Chinese provincial hotels, and for a few minutes I watched part of a Chinese game show, which seemed to involve women and children rushing around a supermarket, finding and piling goods into their shopping cart as quickly as possible.

All the nearby rooms were occupied by what I assumed was a big extended family. They kept their doors wide open, talking loudly to each other across the hallway; I thought at first that they were about to check out and were yelling because they were late for a flight or a train. But soon I realized that they had turned my section of the floor into a multi-roomed family unit, walking up and down and across the corridor as if it were home, their yelling part of normal conversation. On my way to the lift, I peeked into the rooms and saw people of all ages, the men in their underwear, sitting on the bed or on the sofa, slurping noodles and watching TV. Over the coming weeks, this would become a familiar sight in many of the places I stayed.

In the morning there was a big breakfast buffet on the ground floor. There were dozens of men, very few women (I was later told most of the hotel guests were businessmen from other parts of Yunnan), wolfing down steaming hot bowls of soup, together with little white pork-filled buns and hard-boiled eggs. Some poured sugar into glasses of hot milk. The brightly lit and windowless room had a sort of neoclassical design with mock-Corinthian columns, and ‘Amazing Grace’ played quietly in the background. The hotel gift shop sold jade that I knew had come from Burma.

On the street outside, older women matter-of-factly handed out cards with the telephone numbers of prostitutes. And in this tobacco capital of China, everyone smoked. People smoked every where in the hotel, even in the lift. And walking on the pavement were groups of men, all puffing away with little clouds of smoke rising above them. Cigarettes were often set in little plastic filters, and some held them like opium pipes, not between two fingers but grasped in the palms of their hands.

There were shops and shopping everywhere and shopping centres lined the main avenues.
Transformers 2
was playing at one of the main cinemas and a block-long construction site nearby was shielded by a sign promising a new ‘mega complex’ with condos and an ‘IMAX Theatre Multiplex’. The sign had a picture of George Soros and the slogan in bold letters: ‘More Detail Reflect Global Business Style’.

Not far away, along a boulevard of tall buildings, was a stone house. It was here that the American General Stilwell had met with Chiang Kai-shek during the Japanese war. It was simply called ‘The Stone House’ and the downstairs was now a restaurant, with a notice in English next to the entrance: ‘Known for its good food’. There was a garden to the side with a little pond, and around the pond about a dozen old men and women, sitting on benches, silent, enjoying the afternoon sun. Most looked like they were at least seventy, old enough to have seen the stone house in its heyday, perhaps even to have caught a glimpse of Stilwell and the generalissimo through the window. The house had been the centre of government in the 1940s, even in the early years after the communist take-over, at a time when Kunming was still a collection of dirt roads. Now there was a shopping mall next door, glass and steel, with Zegna, Ralph Lauren and Mont Blanc stores downstairs and large billboards outside for Elizabeth Arden and Dior.

A friend who was visiting from Hong Kong told me over drinks that evening at the hotel:

We have to remember how traumatic life was for so many until just thirty years ago, the war, the Cultural Revolution. The old want to forget the past, and the young know nothing else but the stability and progress you see today. I wonder if it’s a little like the West in the 1960s, a quarter-century after World War Two, with a younger generation that have no sense of how bad things can be.

There were few obvious signs of anyone other than Han Chinese. Yunnan once had a large Muslim population, but the only ‘mosque’ I came across was on the top floor of a building which also housed a ‘Disney Mickey-Mouse’ store selling toys and clothes for kids. There were some Muslim men in skullcaps, and occasionally on the streets I could see the aquiline faces of Turkish Central Asia. I was told there were other mosques, including a restored mosque first constructed in the time of the Mongols, but that most were on the outskirts of town.

Many people wore quite creatively put together outfits, like a mix of clothes from vintage shops. There was hardly anyone in the once ubiquitous Mao jacket. Some were in leather cowboy hats, which seemed all the rage. Men also wore old, worn, European-style suits like tramps from the 1930s. An old man, selling apples on the pavement, was in a faded but still elegant navy suit, his hair slicked back like a movie star from another time. Less elegantly dressed was a group whom I suspected from their dark skin and curly hair might be Wa tribesmen from the hills near Burma. They looked wild on the streets of Kunming, like Native Americans visiting Dodge City.

Here and there were little hints of a different past. There were giant bronze statues on the way from the airport, statues of strangely clad people that mimicked an earlier tradition, and a tourist display board on one street with pictures of women wearing sarongs as in Burma and Thailand. And in my hotel lobby there was a huge mural featuring black-skinned natives in feathered headdresses playing primitive-looking drums. Bare-breasted women danced in the background and both the men and women were portrayed as robust and muscular. They were not meant to be pointers to a separate political history, but a suggestion to visitors that this was a picturesque and excitingly unfamiliar part of China. They were like the leis offered to tourists when arriving in Hawaii, telling visitors they were somewhere exotic, but still safely within their own country.

Two thousand years ago, when Chinese imperial forces first began venturing in this direction, Yunnan was
terra incognita
. There were strong contacts between Yunnan and the pre-Chinese cultures of Sichuan and quite possibly with the pastoral peoples further north as well, along the Ordos Loop of the Yellow River and even the Turkish and Scythian grasslands beyond. But there were important ties as well in the other direction, to what are now Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. In the late centuries
BC
, a flourishing Bronze-Age civilization existed along the shores of Lake Dian, not far from modern Kunming, and very similar bronze artefacts, including magnificent bronze ceremonial drums, have been found in Yunnan, as they have been in many areas of mainland south east Asia. Men of distinction were buried with containers filled with cowry shells, an important currency across much of Asia before the use of silver for money, the cowries having come all the way from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, via Burma and the Bay of Bengal.

Early trade between the Chinese and the people of Yunnan included trade in barbarian slaves and in the little horses for which Yunnan was prized, and these were exchanged for iron tools and weapons made in Chinese Sichuan. In the Chinese classical book
Account of the Southwest Barbarians
, the people living in the Kunming area were described as a component of a broader confederacy, called Mimo, a confederacy that extended over a thousand miles, all the way to what is now the Indian border. The people of Mimo were said to dress their hair in a bun-shaped topknot (like Burmese men until the late nineteenth century). It was a military society, very hierarchical, the elites connected in a still poorly understood way to other equestrian elites from the steppe worlds of inner Asia.

During the height of the Han dynasty, the Chinese, based far to the north, were able to co-opt or overwhelm rulers in the area, establishing military outposts or what they called ‘commanderies’ right up to the Burma border. It wasn’t a complete conquest but a scattering of authority in a sea of native rulers. A road linking their domains was first called The Five Foot Road and then (after some improvements) the slightly grander and more sinister-sounding Southwest Barbarian Way. This was around the same time that the Romans ruled Britain. And like the Romans in Britain, the Chinese in Yunnan doubtless made an impact on local people, awing them with their superior technologies, martial prowess and lavish lifestyle. But when their empire collapsed in the third century, the Chinese withdrew completely, setting the stage for the rise of new and entirely independent, non-Chinese states. About a hundred years after the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were first established in Britain, a new kingdom was founded in Yunnan, known to the Chinese as Nanzhao, a kingdom that by the ninth century would grow into an empire, one of the most powerful in the medieval world.