There is a fundamental difference between Western and Chinese peacemaking efforts in Myanmar. Western governments, NGOs, and think-tanks produce lengthy, well-crafted reports, and some even organize workshops and study trips for what they call “stakeholders.” The Chinese, on the other hand, have an extensive intelligence network throughout Myanmar, and they are a major supplier of military hardware to the Myanmar military, while several resistance forces are equipped with Chinese-made guns obtained through the United Wa State Army (UWSA). In that way, China has leverage over the Myanmar military as well as ethnic armed organizations. And the Chinese are not involved in Myanmar’s internal affairs for entirely altruistic reasons. They want to secure their geostrategic interests in the region, the main one being access to the Indian Ocean.
At the same time, Myanmar has become a playground for well-paid Western peacemakers and analysts who seem to believe that they are in a position to “engage” the military as well as the opposition, armed or otherwise, with the aim of holding talks so that all the parties involved in the conflicts can meet and sort out their differences “peacefully”. The Indians, Myanmar’s second largest neighbors next to the Chinese, have a far more realistic approach to the issues. Like the Chinese, they are also motivated by geostrategic concerns. They realize what the Chinese, their main regional adversaries, are up to in Myanmar and are countering this by following a similar course of action: friendly relations with Naypyitaw – and informal contacts with the opposition. But India has nowhere near the same level of influence – or muscle – inside Myanmar as China, and its efforts have yielded few positive results.
Myanmar’s importance to China as an outlet to the region is not new; it is China’s foreign-policy priorities that have changed since the time of the old chairman, Mao Zedong. In the past, when China wanted to export revolution, Myanmar was the main springboard from which Maoist-style rebellion would spread to Southeast Asia and the region. Today, Beijing wants to export consumer goods and import oil and gas, and, once again, Myanmar serves as its most coveted entranceway to the world beyond China’s southern borders.
China first became involved in Myanmar’s internal conflicts when Naw Seng, a Kachin rebel, crossed into Yunnan with 500 of his men in 1950. They were given shelter in Guizhou province, but not allowed to engage in political activities. A few years later, another group of rebels, this time from the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), trekked into China, and were allowed to settle in Sichuan, where they received political training. But, like Naw Seng’s Kachins, they were told to refrain from Myanmar-related political activities. At that time, the Chinese had good relations with Myanmar, but they also had a major security concern: thousands of Nationalist Chinese, Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers had, after their defeat in the Chinese civil war, set up bases in eastern and northeastern Shan State, from where they launched cross-border raids into Yunnan.
In a tacit agreement with the then U Nu government, a total of 20,000 soldiers from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the border between Sipsongpanna in southern Yunnan and Kengtung state in January 1961. In human waves, they swept down across the hills surrounding Möng Yang, Möng Wa and Möng Yawng. The campaign, codenamed the “Mekong River Operation,” broke the back of the KMT in northeastern Myanmar. Beaten Nationalist Chinese forces retreated towards Möng Pa Liao on the Mekong River, where 5,000 Myanmar soldiers launched an attack. The KMT’s base was captured without much resistance – but when the Myanmar troops marched in, they found large quantities of US-made arms and ammunition. When the news hit the newspapers in Yangon, rowdy demonstrations were held outside the US embassy, then on Merchant Street. Neither the Myanmar government nor the Chinese, however, have ever acknowledged that the PLA formed the core of the force that drove the KMT out of the eastern border areas.
Myanmar’s cordial relations with China came to an end when Gen. Ne Win staged a coup to oust the elected U Nu government on March 2, 1962. The Chinese, long wary of the ambitious and unpredictable general, for the first time allowed the CPB exiles to print and publish propaganda material. They were mostly urban intellectuals without military backgrounds, so the Chinese brought them together with Naw Seng’s warriors, and the nucleus of a new CPB army was formed. Teams were sent to the Myanmar border to identify possible infiltration routes, and, inadvertently, Ne Win’s junta provided the Chinese with an opportunity to connect the exiles in China with the remnants of the poorly equipped CPB forces which at that time were holding out in old strongholds like the Pegu Yoma mountains north of Yangon. In July 1963, the junta invited all rebel groups in the country to a “peace parley” in Yangon, and promised them safe passage to and from the meetings regardless of the outcome. Twenty-nine of the exiles in China also flowed in on special planes from Beijing, ostensibly to take part in the talks.
Predictably, the talks broke down in November because the junta offered no more than “rehabilitation” if the rebels, communists and ethnic fighters surrendered. But only two of the “Beijing returnees,” as they were called, went back to China; the rest joined the forces in the Pegu Yoma and assumed de facto leadership of the party at home. They had brought with them radio equipment from China, and a direct link was established between the exiles in Sichuan and the Pegu Yoma. Anti-Chinese riots in Yangon in June and July 1967 provided the Chinese with the pretext they needed to launch their push across the border. That happened on January 1, 1968, and the CPB established a new base area in the northeast. In the beginning, most of the forces consisted of Chinese volunteers and it was only when the Wa Hills were occupied in the early 1970s that the CPB gained a truly indigenous fighting force. Many ethnic resistance armies, eager to benefit from the supply of Chinese weapons, forged alliances with the CPB. But whatever guns they received had to be provided by the CPB; nothing came directly from China.
The CPB collapsed when ethnic Wa soldiers rose in mutiny in 1989 – and China had adopted a new foreign policy. The UWSA, which emerged from the ashes of the CPB, maintains a close relationship with China’s security services and is better armed and equipped with weapons obtained from China than the CPB ever was. And, again, other ethnic resistance armies have also benefited from the supply of Chinese weaponry but, as before, the guns have come from China’s main ally inside Myanmar, now the UWSA. A strong UWSA provides China with a strategic advantage and is also a bargaining chip in negotiations with Naypyitaw.
Significantly, when then President’s Office Minister U Aung Min visited Monywa in November 2012 to meet local people protesting a controversial Chinese-backed copper mining project, he openly admitted: “We are afraid of China … we don’t dare to have a row with [them]. If they feel annoyed with the shutdown of their projects and resume their support to the communists, the economy in border areas would backslide.” By “the communists” he clearly meant the UWSA and its allies, among them the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in Kokang, another former CPB force. The MNDAA returned to armed struggle in February 2015 after having entered into a ceasefire agreement with the Myanmar military in 1989, and has now assumed a leading role in ongoing battles in northern Shan State. China, predictably, has denied any involvement in that conflict, but the fact remains that most of the MNDAA’s weaponry – and that of its allies, among them the Ta’ang National Liberation Army – have been supplied by the UWSA. At the same time, the Myanmar Army is using its Chinese-supplied weapons to fight the resistance. The UWSA, however, does not send soldiers to take part in the current battles.
China appears to believe that its interests are best served by playing both sides in Myanmar’s internal conflicts. But it is not in China’s interest to see the emergence of a strong, peaceful, democratic and federal Myanmar. As long as Myanmar is weak, China can play official games of being a “friendly neighbor” as well as “peacemaker” and use a carrot-and-stick approach with whatever government is in power: trade coupled with investment on the one hand and indirect support for the ethnic armies on the other. If Myanmar ever became exactly that – strong, peaceful, democratic and federal – China would be the first to lose. The leverage China has today inside Myanmar would be gone. But then China does not want to see the situation get totally out of hand either, because that would mean serious instability in the frontier areas and, most likely, a flood of refugees across the border. Typical examples of China’s unique role in the conflicts occurred in late June and early July, when former President Thein Sein was invited to Beijing. Ironically, Thein Sein’s trip was planned to coincide with the 70th anniversary of “The Declaration of the Five Principles of Co-Existence” which was worked out by China – and India, then friends – in 1954. One of those is non-interference, but no country has interfered more blatantly in Myanmar’s internal affairs than China. Thein Sein met foreign minister Wang Yi and, reportedly, urged China to help bring peace to Myanmar, knowing full well that China is the only outside country that has any clout over the ethnic armies. It was noteworthy that the Chinese invited Thein Sein, a less controversial personality than the hugely unpopular junta-boss, Sn. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. Had he been invited, it would most probably have caused an anti-Chinese backlash in Myanmar. But then, on July 6, Min Aung Hlaing’s deputy, Gen. Soe Win, went to China, not to Beijing but to Qingdao in Shandong Province to attend “the Green Development Forum” of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and he was met at the airport by a local representative of the Communist Party of China. China had taken a cautious step forward towards establishing full relations with the junta, and then on a less informal party level.
Myanmar’s future depends on what China will do next – and if India will assume a more pro-active role. Squeezed between the two giants of Asia, which are also bitter enemies, Myanmar’s troublesome geographic location has now become a bigger problem than it ever was. Seen in that context, Western peacemakers are irrelevant sideshow artists. Finnish, Swiss, Norwegian and Australian organizations and an obscure outfit called the Joint Peace Fund are once again quietly sniffing around Myanmar’s ethnic armed organizations, hoping to “engage” them and reactivate the idea of talks with the military. But all they can hope to achieve is to persuade various UN agencies to issue statements condemning the atrocities perpetrated by the present junta and call for peace. But the UN is as impotent as the West when it comes to influencing the Myanmar military. Since the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, dozens of rapporteurs and special envoys have come and gone, and the military has always ignored their often critical reports. The UN’s current secretary general, António Guterres, pledged at a news conference on February 5, 2021 – only four days after the coup – that “the United Nations will do everything it can to unite the international community and create conditions for the military coup in Myanmar to be reversed.” But the only actions Guterres has taken since then are a series of statements urging the military to refrain from using violence against civilians. And UN agencies continue to cooperate with military authorities in Naypyitaw while whatever humanitarian aid they have provided has been channeled through junta-controlled entities.
