Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (10 page)

Hsipaw seemed a tranquil place, barely touched by the violence and turmoil of the twentieth century, but appearances were deceiving. Japanese, Chinese, British, and even American soldiers had marched through this area during the Second World War. And since the early 1960s this entire part of the country had been engulfed in a complex web of armed conflicts, setting the Burmese army against local Shan armies, fighting for autonomy or independence, and communist rebels, fighting for a ‘People’s Republic of Burma’. The backwardness of the town had a reason: decades of war. Within a day’s walk were villages still under the control of insurgent militias. Ceasefires were in place and Hsipaw and its environs were now peaceful enough for the odd tourist to visit and see the sights. The war was likely entering its final chapter. But it wasn’t yet finished. Would China and growing Chinese influence play a role in ending the war? Or fuelling a new round of violence? The war was linked to rival notions of ethnic identity and nationalism. They also had roots in Burma’s colonial past.

The British ruled Burma in two very different ways. In the lowlands of ‘Burma Proper’–the Irrawaddy valley and the adjacent coastal areas–the British had imposed direct rule, abolishing the monarchy and replacing the aristocracy and local elite families with British civil servants and local clerks. From the 1920s in this ‘Burma Proper’, the British also began to introduce representative government. Political parties flourished and regular elections were held (with a very limited franchise). For a while parliament had only very limited powers, but under a constitution approved in 1935, the people of ‘Burma Proper’ were allowed to form a government that had authority over considerable areas of domestic policy. This followed the pace of reforms in India. By independence lowland Burma had considerable experience of often raucous party and parliamentary politics.

The highlands were treated very differently. Here the British kept the hereditary chiefs in power, doing away with some (those who had resisted colonial rule) whilst strengthening the power of others. As everywhere in the Empire, British political officers rationalized and systematized what had been a somewhat messy set of local chiefs and office-holders. By the early twentieth century, the Shan principalities were organized under thirty-four
sawbwas
in a strict ‘Order of Precedence’. In the mountains were the lesser chiefs, of remote tribal peoples such as the Wa in the east, the Kachin in the north. The British supported their authority (in return for loyalty and a share of revenue) and many found that they could carry on much as before. Over time, Christian missionaries established schools and converted nearly all the various tribal people–not the Shan, who were devout Buddhists like the Burmese, but the mountain people, who had been animists. There was very little economic development. Almost no roads were built and only a single railway line from Mandalay to Lashio. But whereas lowland Burma became a cauldron of left-wing and nationalist politics, the hills were almost entirely peaceful. The British tended to trust these highland and now predominantly Christian people and recruited them into the Indian army and police, whilst excluding the ethnic Burmese. The various peoples of Burma thus went through very different experiences of colonial rule. At independence there would be intense mutual suspicion, followed by civil war.

The British first appeared in Hsipaw in early 1886. Mandalay had just fallen and British political officers were eager to secure the allegiance of the Shan rulers. The
sawbwa
of Hsipaw at the time was a man named Sao Hkun Hseng. A few years before he had fled to Siam, and then to Rangoon, trying to escape the political chaos and heavy tax demands from Mandalay that marked the final years before the British conquest. But he understood which way the wind was blowing and returned just in time to retake his home town and offer his submission to the new colonial masters, becoming the first
sawbwa
to do so. The British were then battling an unexpectedly tough guerrilla resistance (led by Burmese princes and pretenders) and were grateful to find new allies wherever they could. The British rewarded Sao Hkun Hseng by extending his authority over three little statelets nearby. Soon he was invited to London to visit the Queen.

He was succeeded by his son, Sao Hke. Sao Hke had been educated at the palace in Mandalay but was later sent to England to study as well, and on his return became a man of two worlds, no longer very happy to be confined to his little town. He told visiting Europeans and Americans that he was miserable, living in a place where almost no one else spoke English and where he was forced to live on ‘an income insufficient for an English shopkeeper’. He wore Shan clothes–a turban and a tight jacket with baggy trousers–but replaced the traditional velvet slippers with English brogues. In 1905 he had a visitor in Herbert Hoover, who was there on a business trip for a mining company, hoping for the
sawbwa
’s help in exploiting the nearby silver mines. Hoover described Sao Hke’s residence as a sort of ‘frame building’ with motifs ‘reminiscent of Long Island’ and saw the young prince as a tragic figure, caught between East and West, delighted only to be able to converse in English with outsiders who were not his British overlords. Sao Hke would later be knighted for his services.

After Sao Hke died in 1928, he was replaced by his son, Sao Ohn Kya, who had been educated at Rugby and Brasenose College, Oxford. By this time nearly all the major Shan chiefs were British-trained and were the only real aristocracy left in the country. They intermarried and several would become prominent diplomats and scholars after independence. The British superintendents who supervised them were universally charmed by them and their families, and by the Shan states in general, which they deemed the ‘Switzerland of the East’, with their rolling hills and temperate weather, an ‘Asian Arcady’.

Just across the border, however, China was in the midst of war and communist revolution. Millions would die, millions more would be displaced. China was at a watershed. And, as has happened so often in history, monumental change in China would transform Burma as well.

When the British left Burma in 1948, they left the country in the hands of the men who had been on the extreme fringes of the student nationalist movement just a decade before. They were almost all Buddhists (by background if not practice) and ethnic Burmans. Before the Japanese invasion, they were not particularly important, but the war had radicalized society and they had seized the opportunity, first to collaborate with the Japanese and then to turn against them, in March 1945, just in time to avoid being arrested and hanged as Quislings. They included men like Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi. They were immensely popular and even though they were still in their late twenties and early thirties stood head and shoulders above the older politicians, who were tarred as not having been daring enough. Aung San and many of his colleagues were then gunned down in 1947 in a still puzzling assassination plot, but others from the pool of ex-student radicals formed the first independent government. They would take Burma out of the British Commonwealth and launch the country down what was to be a not very happy path through the rest of the twentieth century.

Some on the British side had been worried about the fate of the Shan and other ethnic minorities in an independent Burma and suggested detaching the upland areas and keeping them as a British crown colony. British frontier officials were particularly fond of the hill peoples, such as the Karen along the Thai border, who had fought consistently and often very courageously against the Japanese. A commission was established to make recommendations on the future of the non-Burman regions in 1946. They asked representatives of the ‘wild Wa’, a particularly in accessible tribal people in the mountains along the China border, for their views. The official report records this exchange:

‘Do you want any association with other people?’

‘We do not want to join anybody because in the past we have been very independent.’

‘What do you want the future to be of the Wa States?’

‘We have not thought about that because we are wild people. We never thought of the administrative future. We only think about ourselves.’

‘Don’t you want education, clothing, good food, good houses, hospitals, etc?’

‘We are very wild people and we do not appreciate all these things.’

Other minorities, like the Shan, had far more sophisticated representation, and in talks between them and the up-and-coming political class in Rangoon, a deal was hammered out, through which a degree of autonomy was granted to the highlands as well as representation at the centre. There were promises of equality and an inclusive democracy.

But the country was soon wracked by civil war. Armed unrest started more or less as soon as the British left and was at first not an inter-ethnic conflict, but a fight between the Burmese army, dominated by ex-student politicians, and the Burmese communist party, led by a rival group of former student radicals. Before long, however, the civil war involved a dizzying array of factions, insurgencies and militias–from ethnic Karen soldiers once loyal to the British, to Islamic
mujahedeen
fighters demanding a separate state along what was then the East Pakistan border. By early 1949, just twelve months after independence from Britain, the new Burmese government seemed on the brink of collapse, barely in control of Rangoon itself, leaving the rest of the Irrawaddy valley a patchwork of insurgent armies and local militias.

The Shan states were at first blissfully uninvolved. Then, as has happened so many times in the past, upheaval in China washed across the border. By the end of 1949, Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were in full retreat from Mao Zedong’s communist juggernaut. Some made it across the straits to Taiwan, while others, cut off from the coast, marched southwest to Yunnan and then over the hills into Burma. It was a time-honoured strategy. In 1661, when the Manchus overran China, remnants of the Ming dynasty, led by the prince of Gui, had sought refuge at the then capital of Ava. For a while this was granted, but when a great Chinese army appeared under their formidable general, Wu Sangui, the Burmese king was quick to change his mind. The prince of Gui was handed over and then garrotted with a bow string by Wu Sangui himself.

This time the retreating forces neither asked nor received permission to enter Burma. Instead they stayed close up to the Chinese frontier and were backed, covertly, by both the US Central Intelligence Agency and the (right-wing anti-communist) government of Thailand. Chiang Kai-shek and his allies in Washington were hoping for nothing less than the recapture of China, and believed that bases in Burma could be crucial for success. Soon, a vast tract of land, complete with its own airstrips for flying men and cargo to and from Taiwan, was in Chinese Nationalist hands. The Burmese were outraged. They turned to the UN but to no avail. The Burmese army was sent on the offensive. The eastern Shan states became a battlefield.

It would stay a battlefield for decades. CIA and Thai military support for the Chinese continued through the 1960s. By then these old fighters had become part of the scenery. Some eventually moved to Taiwan but many others married Shan or other local women and stayed. And those who stayed became central to an ever-expanding network of opium and heroin cartels. Over the late 1960s and 1970s warlords like Khun Sa, half Chinese and half Shan, and Lo Hsing-han, from the Chinese border enclave of Kokang, emerged as internationally wanted drug kingpins, battling the Burmese army as well as each other for control over what became known as ‘The Golden Triangle’.

By then the Shans themselves had also joined the ranks of the insurgency. Before independence, the Shan
sawbwas
had agreed to join the new ‘Union of Burma’, provided they were allowed a degree of autonomy and, critically, an option to secede in ten years’ time. This worked for a while. The Shan elite were very much part of the Rangoon scene, as members of parliament and government ministers and as highly respected scholars and professionals. The
sawbwa
of Yawnghwe served as the first (largely ceremonial) president of Burma, and for many years another Shan prince served as the country’s foreign minister. But problems at home were growing. The fight against the Chinese Nationalists had militarized the Shan Hills, leading to army abuses against civilians. And new leftist political forces had sprung up to challenge the authority of the old aristocracy. Then came the military take-over in 1962. The
sawbwas
were arrested. The young US-educated
sawbwa
of Hsipaw at the time, Sao Kya Hseng, was never seen again. Some Shan aristocrats left the country (they have lived in exile ever since). Others joined the leader ship of new Shan insurgencies. Local militias proliferated, with constantly shifting allegiances, all fuelled by the Vietnam War-era drug trade to America.

By the 1970s, Beijing was directly involved in the fighting, with its open and enthusiastic backing for the newly revived Burmese communist insurgency. The ‘liberated zone’ was right up against the border and China provided arms and ammunition, as well as ‘volunteer’ fighters and all manner of logistical support. To help stem the communist onslaught, Washington quietly scaled up aid, supplying dozens of helicopters and transport planes, and training Burmese military and intelligence officers in America. The combat was at times intense. Tens of thousands of civilians were displaced and their homes destroyed. In 1979–80, in operation ‘King Conqueror’, Burmese army battalions crossed the Salween River in an attempt to crush the insurgency but met ferocious resistance in the high frost-covered mountains, suffering as many as 5,000 casualties. Communist forces, numbering over 15,000, counter-attacked, taking the Shan towns of Muse and Mong Yawng. China was then trying to patch up relations with Rangoon but claimed its ‘state-to-state friendship’ was separate from its ‘party-to-party support’ for the Burmese rebels. Military expenditures were by then taking up over a third of the Burmese government’s budget and were eating away at the country’s very limited foreign exchange reserves.