In March 1989, a few months after the Myanmar military had crushed a pro-democracy uprising and killed thousands of people, Burton Levin, the then U.S. ambassador to Burma, told Keith Richburg of the Washington Post: “Since there are no U.S. bases and very little strategic interest, Burma is one place where the United States has the luxury of living up to its principles.”
Senators, congressmen as well as the U.S. government began to issue statement after statement condemning the massacres and calling for a more democratic order. The Chinese, meanwhile, had decided to move closer to the powerholders in Yangon. The first border trade agreement between China and Myanmar was signed on Aug. 6, 1988—and that at a time when Myanmar was in turmoil and almost the entire border was controlled by various rebel groups. Evidently, the Chinese did not believe in democratic change and were convinced that military-dominated governments would remain in power for the foreseeable future.
If Washington had any interests in Myanmar other than human rights, it would have been the Golden Triangle drug trade and some concern over the junta’s closer economic and political cooperation with China. But then, in November 2008, Myanmar signed a supposedly secret military cooperation pact with North Korea—and that caused alarm bells to ring in Washington. Security planners began to question the policy of condemnations, sanctions, and boycotts. arguing that a certain degree of engagement with Myanmar’s ruling generals would be necessary to discourage them from resorting to such extreme measures to break their international isolation.
Some tentative steps were taken to improve relations, but by and large Myanmar has never figured particularly high on Washington’s list of strategic and geopolitical priorities. It did, to some extent, in the 1950s when the CIA, Taiwan, and Thailand supported Chinese nationalist Kuomintang forces, which had retreated into northeastern Myanmar after being defeated by Mao Zedong’s communists in the Chinese civil war and tried, in vain, to reenter China from those cross-border sanctuaries.
In 1957, the commander of the Myanmar Army, General Ne Win, sent his favorite intelligence officer, Tin Oo, to attend a CIA training program on the U.S.-held Pacific island of Saipan. But that was also during the Cold War, and, as Levin said about the general situation before the 1988 uprising: “We had no meaningful contact with any element of the Burmese government. They had a designated group of Foreign Ministry types who would come to our dinners and talk about golf and tennis, the weather, and what fruits were in season…during my first three months in Burma, my backhand improved immensely, and I even took up the game of golf, which I had thought was just a waste of time. But I had time to waste.”
As an immediate neighbor, China naturally sees its relations with Myanmar in a completely different context. Beijing’s security planners have always looked at Myanmar as a link between China and South and Southeast Asia as well as the only country that can provide China with safe and relatively easy access to the Indian Ocean and beyond—and that policy predates cross-border trade and the current China-Myanmar Economic Corridor.
The only change since 1988 is that China now exports consumer goods, not revolution. After the death of Mao in September 1976 and the rise to power of the reformist Deng Xiaoping, China went through an extraordinary transformation, from being stifled by a strictly state-controlled socialist system to becoming a market-oriented, international trading power, and that was also reflected in its foreign policy.
Today, China never misses an opportunity to issue fulsome statements claiming that relations with Myanmar have always been based on mutual respect, love, and understanding. When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with former military strongman Than Shwe in Naypyitaw in August last year, the embassy, still in the old capital Yangon, said the “China-Myanmar pauk-phaw [kinship] friendship has withstood the test of the evolving international landscape and grown stronger with time…China has always placed the development of China-Myanmar relations at an important position in its neighborhood diplomacy [and] China will uphold the spirit of sharing weal and woe and helping each other, and be a true and good friend that the Myanmar government and people can trust and rely on.”
The only truth in that statement is that China has always placed a lot of importance on its relations with Myanmar—but never for especially altruistic reasons. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Beijing and Yangon maintained a cordial and correct relationship. But China did provide shelter for 143 leading members of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), who had trekked over the border mountains in the early 1950s. They were housed in Chengdu, Sichuan, where they attended communist party schools. In an unrelated development, Naw Seng, a non-communist, Kachin World War II hero, had taken up arms against the central government and, unable to withstand attacks from government forces, he and several hundred Kachin fighters had crossed into China in 1950. They were resettled in a people’s commune in Guizhou province.
But no military support for either the Sichuan laobings (veterans) or the Guizhou laobings was forthcoming until Ne Win staged a coup in 1962. Long wary of the unpredictable general, China decided to support a renewed communist rebellion in Myanmar. Anti-Chinese riots in Yangon in 1967 provided the perfect pretext for the push into Myanmar, which the CPB and the Chinese began planning for shortly after 1962 coup by sending down teams to identify possible infiltration routes from Yunnan. The Sichuan laobings were mostly ethnic Burman intellectuals who lacked combat experience, so the battle-hardened Guizhou laobings were enlisted as the core of the fighting force the Chinese were going to send across the border. That happened on New Year’s Day 1968.
China poured more military aid into the CPB effort than any other Asian communist movement outside Indochina. Thousands of Chinese “volunteers,” mostly young Red Guards, also streamed across the border to fight alongside their Myanmar “comrades.” Following several years of fierce fighting, the CPB wrested control of a 20,000-sq. km area along Myanmar’s northeastern Chinese frontier. What is not commonly known is that the headquarters at Panghsang, right on the Chinese border, also became a base for other Southeast Asian communists.
During the Indochina Wars in the 1960s and 1970s, the Americans talked much about their domino theory: if the communists were not stopped in Vietnam, communist insurrections and possible seizures of power would spread to the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps even beyond. That theory may have been correct, but for Mao’s chief strategist Kang Sheng, the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi and the National Liberation Front in the south were too close to China’s then-rival communist power, the Soviet Union, to be trusted. Kang’s plan was to spread revolution to the region through the staunchly Maoist CPB and then down to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where likeminded Maoist parties were active: the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), and Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI). Absurd as it may seem, the plan also included the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), a tiny group of pro-Beijing radicals.
CPB Chairman Thakin Ba Thein Tin told me, when I met him during my stay in Panghsang in 1986-1987, that he and the CPA (ML) chairman, a Melbourne lawyer called Edward Fowler Hill, were together in Beijing and wrote appeals against “the Soviet revisionists” and for world revolution. At that time the CPM chairman, Chin Peng, was living in exile in Kunming, where he met regularly with leaders and cadres from the CPB.
More significantly, a group of PKI activists were sent in the 1970s to the CPB’s base area to learn guerrilla warfare. Among them were two daughters of the PKI chairman Dipa Nusantara Adit, who had been killed in action in central Java in 1965. The CPT also had a contingent of cadres at Panghsang where they had separate living quarters whose walls were covered with graphic photographs of the killings of students at Bangkok’s Thammasat University by police and paramilitary personnel in October 1976. When I arrived at Panghsang in December 1986, they were gone, but I visited their old barracks and saw a well with Thai writing engraved into the concrete.
The last batch of Thais had trekked back through Myanmar’s Shan State to Thailand in early 1982 to attend the CPT’s fourth—and last—congress, which is believed to have been held somewhere in Thailand’s Mae Hong Son Province. The PKI activists also left eventually, but through China and to destinations in the West. Mao’s and Kang’s plan to set Southeast Asia ablaze through Myanmar failed miserably.
In March-April 1989, less than a year after China and Myanmar had signed a border-trade agreement—and hardly by coincidence—even the CPB collapsed as a communist force. Its mainly ethnic Wa and other hill-tribe rank-and-file rose in mutiny and forced the old leadership into exile in China. The CPB had become an anachronistic remnant of China’s Cultural Revolution, and it is widely believed that the Chinese had a hand in the 1989 mutiny. An entirely new China was emerging from the ashes of decades of brutal—and economically disastrous—rule by Mao and his henchmen.
But China’s support for the CPB is still fresh in the memory of many Myanmar army veterans, and it is no secret that the military feels uncomfortable with the close relationship that Myanmar has had with Beijing since the late 1980s. It has certainly not been forgotten that thousands of Myanmar soldiers died from bullets provided by China. “It’s like a scar in their hearts,” said a local analyst with insights into the Myanmar military’s mindset. The Chinese are hardly the kind of “friendly neighbors” Myanmar can “trust and rely on.”
Nevertheless, the Myanmar military had no choice but to turn to China when the West imposed punitive measures after the 1988 massacres. In the early 1990s, the Chinese erected a giant monument at Jiegao, then a small village on the Myanmar-China border west of the point where the CPB came across from Yunnan in 1968. It shows four figures wheeling a circular object between them, their determined faces pointing directly south, and the Chinese characters at the base of the monument spell out the phrase: “Unite! Blaze Paths! Forge Ahead,” or, in mundane terms, “Southeast Asia here we come!”
Since then, Jiegao has turned into a bustling metropole for cross-border trade. All kinds of goods, not guns as in the past, flow across the border, and there are plans to upgrade Myanmar’s roads, waterways, and railways to further connect China with South and Southeast Asia. The China-Myanmar Revolutionary Corridor may have given way to the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, but Myanmar remains the main conduit for the spread of Chinese influence in the region.
Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, the U.S. and other Western powers continued to condemn the junta for its human-rights abuses but did nothing constructive to counter China’s increasingly firm grip on Myanmar. Instead, it was the generals who took the initiative to lessen dependence on Beijing. After a fraudulent election in 2010, Myanmar got a new quasi-civilian government led by a former general, Thein Sein, political prisoners were released, parties were allowed to operate openly, and press freedom was introduced. Certain concessions had to be made to improve relations with the West: that was all.
It worked. Thein Sein, a former general who was appointed president in 2011, was hailed as “Myanmar’s Gorbachev,” and Myanmar turned from being an international pariah to the darling of the West. But he actually did nothing more than implement a plan drawn up by the military high command. A constitution, which was compiled by an assembly handpicked by the generals and came into force after a fraudulent referendum two years before elections were held, guaranteed the supreme power of the military. No chances were taken, even if the 2010 election was considered rigged in favor of the military’s own party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).
But then the military made the mistake of allowing free and fair elections to take place in 2015. It probably thought Thein Sein and the USDP had become popular because of all the new initiatives that had been taken and did not expect that the National League for Democracy (NLD) to win. But it did, and by a landslide. Grudgingly, the military had to accept the outcome, and an NLD-led government with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as State Counselor, or de facto prime minister, took over.
But when the NLD scored another landslide victory in 2020, the generals had enough. In February 2021, they stepped in to reassert their grip on power, and since neither the pro-democracy forces nor the ethnic rebels want to see a return to direct military rule, the outcome became a nationwide civil war. What many had seen as the beginning of something new turned out to have been a brief but different interlude in the country’s long history of direct and indirect military rule.
The West condemned the takeover, sanctions were reimposed—and China was back as the main supporter of the Myanmar military. China also became a main source of military hardware for the opposition. During the heyday of the CPB in the 1970s, its ethnic rebel allies also benefited from the supply of weapons from China. But no Chinese guns were given directly to those groups; it was all done through the CPB. A similar Chinese policy prevails today. Ethnic armies such as the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the Arakan Army (AA), which are fighting against the junta, are getting their Chinese-made weapons from the United Wa State Army (UWSA). A close Chinese ally, the UWSA was set up after the 1989 CPB mutiny and has inherited its former relations with China. In that way, China can, as it did in the 1970s, control the flow of weapons into Myanmar.
The UWSA too has its headquarters at Panghsang (now renamed Pangkham) and controls the main part of the former CPB’s base area. In other words, China has leverage over the Myanmar military as well as ethnic armed organizations in a way that nobody else can compete with. Swiss and Norwegian peaceniks, ASEAN, the United States, Australia, and the EU are in no position to influence the course of the civil wars.
Myanmar’s western neighbours India and Bangladesh, whose policies are not confined by ASEAN’s “consensus” and “non-interference” principles—and who are closer to the action than Western actors—could play roles, but only if they had clearer strategies when it comes to dealing with the geopolitical consequences of the wars in Myanmar. The Bangladeshis, naturally, are concerned about the now more than 1 million Rohingya Muslim refugees languishing in camps in their country and what would happen if the rebel Arakan Army took over all of Rakhine State. Bangladesh shares a porous 271 km border with Myanmar’s Rakhine and Chin states, and developments there have a direct impact on its national security.
India’s interests in Myanmar appear to be motivated by four major concerns. The first is the future of New Delhi’s “Act East” policy. Myanmar is the obvious link between India and lucrative markets in Southeast Asia. India’s security planners also want to ensure that ethnic Assamese, Manipuri, and Naga rebels are deprived of cross-border sanctuaries in the remote hills of northwestern Myanmar, from where they can launch raids into India and smuggle guns into India’s volatile northeastern region. Already unrest in Sagaing Region and Chin State has spilled over into Manipur.
Thirdly, India’s rapidly expanding economy needs energy, and India has shown interest in importing oil, gas, and perhaps also hydroelectric power from Myanmar. But that is not possible as long as wars are raging across the common border. Lastly, India more than any other neighboring country, wants to keep China’s influence in Myanmar at acceptable levels.
What we are seeing today is not a “China-versus-the-West-scenario” in Myanmar, as some analysts have claimed. Statements condemning military rule, and some humanitarian aid to communities affected by the civil wars, have never had any impact on internal developments in Myanmar. China is back with a vengeance to protect what has always been a strategically important corridor, and the stark reality is that the West plays virtually no role in Myanmar’s internal conflicts—even less so after newly elected President Donald Trump suspended nearly all foreign aid programs, including those to civil society groups and the media in Myanmar. Only China—and Myanmar’s western neighbors—matter in the context of the civil wars and what future direction the country may take.
