Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (11 page)

The Burmese army eventually gained the upper hand. By the late 1980s, after a series of bloody campaigns, Burmese government forces managed to overwhelm the key remaining rebel strongholds and reach the Chinese border. This was when reform in China, under Deng Xiaoping, was already well under way, with party officials and a nascent business community in Yunnan eyeing the Burmese market. Hundreds of factories soon sprang up just across the frontier, producing goods developed specifically for Burmese consumers. Until then, most consumer products in Rangoon and Mandalay were smuggled in from Thailand. This would now change, with the Chinese besting foreign and local competitors alike.

In March 1989, the Burma Communist Party itself collapsed. Half a century of armed struggle was over. The end had begun with the mutiny of units from the town of Kokang, led by their ethnic Chinese commander Peng Jiasheng. Peng was heavily involved in the narcotics trade and more mercenary than Marxist. Within days the mutiny spread and by mid-April Peng and his co-conspirators had captured the communist headquarters and radio station. The erstwhile communist army then splintered into four smaller but still sizeable militias. The Burmese army reacted with speed. The regime’s intelligence chief, General Khin Nyunt, enlisted both long-time opium warlord Lo Hsing-han and the bisexual war-lady Olive Yang, both ethnic Chinese from the borderlands. Through Lo’s and Yang’s help, ceasefire deals were soon struck between the Burmese army and all the ex-communist militia. This was all happening as the Berlin Wall was coming down and the Soviet Union collapsing. Few noticed internationally. But it heralded the end of what was arguably the longest-running war in the world. By the mid-1990s these ceasefires had been extended to nearly all the various ethnic insurgent groups around the country.

There was no more war, but nothing like peace. In offering the ceasefires Burma’s military leaders had also promised development in the hills. Tighter Western sanctions and the cutting-off of United Nations and World Bank aid made it hard for them to keep their promise. It was this landscape that Chinese traders, businessmen and engineers began to roll into.

Just a little out of town is the beautiful Sakandar palace, a cream-coloured villa built by the Hsipaw prince in the 1910s, now forlorn, the gardens hopelessly overgrown. Closer to the middle of town, a newer palace, really just a grand British-style house, is still there, slightly better maintained, with a locked gate and few signs of any inhabitants. Until recently, a relative of the last
sawbwa
had welcomed tourists to the house, but he was arrested during a general crackdown on Shan dissidents in 2006.

Hsipaw had been a hub of Shan royal culture for generations, and under British rule had preserved many old traditions and rituals of the extinct Burmese court. But there was little obvious trace left of Shan culture in Hsipaw. The signs were all in Burmese, and unaccented Burmese was spoken by nearly everyone I met. Everyone was also wearing a Burmese
longyi
, or Chinese-made Western clothes. The baggy navy blue or brown cotton trousers traditionally worn by Shan men were nowhere to be seen.

There is an ancient Bawgyo pagoda on the outskirts of town. And at a festival in March every year the four sacred Buddha images enshrined in the pagoda are brought out to be venerated and re-gilded by large crowds. But it is no longer the more general celebration of Shan culture and patriotism that it was in the days of the
sawbwas
. Elsewhere the story is the same. In the early 1990s in Keng Tung, the main town of what had been a much larger Shan principality, the old palace was razed to the ground, in what can only be described as a gratuitous act of cultural destruction.

For the ruling junta the ceasefires meant that an all-out military solution was not an option, at least over the short term. But the ceasefires certainly didn’t mean an end to their long-held ambition of a united Burma. Far from it. The idea of a federal system of government in which ethnic minority areas would enjoy autonomy as part of a loosely integrated union was anathema to top army officers. They had been trained to think that the disintegration of Burma along ethnic lines was both a real threat and the worst possible nightmare. It would invite foreign intervention and a return of colonial rule. Federalism–any compromise with demands for local autonomy–was the first step down that slippery slope. The ceasefires were a tactical retreat, nothing more.

And they saw an opportunity to push the boundaries of the Burmese state as far as possible, tie the local economies with the centre, and further the reach of the majority Burmese culture. All were viewed as related. Build more roads, encourage trade, and slowly other ethnic identities would dissipate. Through ‘Burmanization’ they would build a secure state.

There was a long history to this. Over centuries the Burmese language had expanded from its core areas along the middle Irrawaddy, together with a Burmese school of Buddhism derived from the ultra-conservative Theravada Buddhism of Ceylon. Peoples like the Kanyan, Pyu and Thet, mentioned in the old chronicles, no longer exist, absorbed into an evolving Burman tradition. In the eighteenth century, Burmese kings had annexed the ancient Mon-speaking kingdom around Rangoon, and the Mon became an ever-shrinking minority. There was a Burmese cultural frontier, and the hope of the military state was to expand this frontier to the very edge of the country.

Except now there was China on the other side. Though new roads were facilitating Burmese military and economic control of these hills, they were also opening the floodgates to power, money and influence from another direction. One frontier was collapsing into another.

The guest-house where I stayed was owned by a Chinese man from the border area of Kokang. Kokang is on the Burmese side, but its people are descended from Chinese migrants who settled in that mountainous region centuries ago. For generations they had been caravan muleteers. Now they ran car and lorry companies, plying the road from Mandalay to China. The guest-house was part of his mini-empire and he had done well, adding new structures to what had grown into a fairly large establishment, which catered to Western backpacker demands for clean rooms, energizing breakfasts, a ready supply of cold beer, and practical help in finding interesting places to see.

On my last day, I talked to a man I had met at the hotel, a small fair-complexioned man in his late thirties, who wore a baseball cap and leather jacket. He had been born in Hsipaw to a mixed Shan–Kachin family. He said his father was a businessman who had worked with Chinese traders and made sure that in addition to Burmese and Shan, his son learned Mandarin from an early age. After school he had won a scholarship to further his studies in Yunnan, the Chinese province next door, working there for a while before returning to Burma. He now owned a thriving shop in Mandalay and travelled regularly to China to buy the electronic goods that he would resell. He was successful. For him China was not a problem or a threat but an opportunity. And he had, in a way, become partly Chinese. He spoke fluent Chinese with the accent of Yunnan, and said he could cross over the border and travel easily in China without official documents. He had even taken a Chinese name, in addition to his Burmese and Shan names. ‘In Mandalay I wear a
longyi
, listen to Burmese music, eat Burmese food and feel at home. Here in Hsipaw I see my old Shan friends and speak in Shan. In China, the Chinese think of me as purely Chinese.’

Along these frontier lands were people and peoples adept at navigating the multifaceted ethnic landscape and adopting different identities as it suited them. Whereas the Burmese tended to see the Chinese as resolutely alien, there were others, like the Shan, who had a much longer history of accommodation. From far away, Burma seemed a relatively minor missing link between China and India. Closer up, it was obvious that the fears and desires of the Burmese themselves and their military rulers, fears and desires rooted in old as well as recent history, were clearly important. And now there was this additional complexity, for the Burmese were not the only people in between, but part of a much greater ethnic mix, with other local peoples, shaping and adapting to the changing environment in their own ways. With the ceasefires and the new border openings, a very strange landscape was developing, of overlapping ethnicities, new politics, new warlords, and, perhaps, clues to Asia’s future.

To the north of Hsipaw, extending almost 500 miles to the edges of Tibet, were the Kachin Hills. I had been there once before, to the areas run by the Kachin Independence Army or KIA. This was around Christmas in 1991 and the war between the Burmese army and the KIA was still in full swing. I had gone there, secretly and not quite legally, from China in the back of a covered lorry. I was then twenty-five and a graduate student at university. And in travelling to KIA-held areas I took risks that I doubt very much I would take today. I gave over my passport, credit cards, and every piece of identification to my Kachin facilitators, and watched as they casually locked them away in a house I knew I could never find on my own, not in a million years.

At the time, much of China was still closed to tourists and I had to travel through a couple of these ‘off-limits’ areas. If caught at a checkpoint, I was told I should say that I was a Burmese merchant, in China for just a few days. A local ID card had been made for me. And, after a few anxious days on the road, I arrived at Pajau, then the Kachin insurgent headquarters, a rambling settlement of little bamboo huts and wooden houses set over a series of hilltops, China on the one side, Burma on the other.

The Kachins were devout Christians, mainly Baptists and Roman Catholics, and over the coming week I joined in their Christmas celebrations, listening to their carols, and watching a nativity play, alongside the hardened jungle fighters in green fatigues, their wives and children. The officers I met talked about their desire not for an independent state, but for an end to discrimination and some level of local autonomy. They spoke emotionally of the lives that had been lost in their struggle but were unclear what their next move should be. They were well aware of the changes already occurring in China.

I walked with my Kachin hosts into the surrounding hills. Everywhere the scenery was spectacular, lush valleys and crystal-clear streams, surrounded on every side by towering mountains. It was also freezing cold, especially at night, my warm clothes from England having been swapped for the KIA uniform and Chinese army coat that (my hosts said) allowed me to travel incognito despite the spies who lurked all around. From one hill, I could see Myitkyina, the largest town in the region and the Burmese army’s local base. In the distance, I could also see where the N’Mai Hka and Mali Hka rivers flowed together to form the broad headwaters of the Irrawaddy. Later during my three-week stay, I travelled on a pony down towards Bhamo, an ancient border crossing with China. Further to the west, the Kachin controlled the famed jade mines at Hpakant, their major source of income, and I was shown big boulders that had been cut open to value the jade inside.

The territory controlled by the KIA was extensive, but I was told that there were places, hundreds of miles further to the north, that were so remote that they were beyond the reach of either the Burmese army or the Kachin insurgency. Sitting in my hut at Pajau, already feeling like I was at the very edge of the world, I thought often of these even more far-off tracts, at the edge of the Himalayas, whose people existed outside the pale of any government. They included small tribal communities, like the Rawang, crossbow hunters who speak a language more akin to Tibetan than Burmese. For the Rawang, who live in great poverty, even salt is a treasured commodity, and for salt they will hunt the few tigers left in the valleys and sell the skins and body parts to the few unscrupulous Chinese traders who make it over the icy passes.

The far northern regions are also home to the Tarons. They are the remnant of the only known pygmy race in mainland Asia. The men average about 4 ft 11 in (1.5 m) and the women are a few inches shorter. The British botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward met Taron villagers during his search for orchids in 1934 and referred to them ungraciously as ‘one of nature’s less successful experiments’. Today there are said to be only a few dozen left in Burma, perhaps only half a dozen of ‘pure blood’.

Not long after I left, in 1993, the Kachin Independence Army, with its several thousand fighters, agreed to a ceasefire with the government army. Soon after, their leadership moved down from the mountainside and established a new headquarters at Laiza, a little village that quickly became a bustling border town. The KIA were allowed to keep their arms, and since then the territory they control has been in a sort of limbo; efforts at a permanent peace deal have so far been unsuccessful. The Burmese army is not far away and there are Burmese battalions here and there, interspersed with battalions of the Kachin army. But political limbo has not precluded business, especially cross-border business with China, and over the following years jade mines, toll roads and relentless logging have kept powerful men of every faction equally comfortable. A new political economy has emerged, with both sides–Burmese and Kachin–tied to China’s increasing presence.

This time, rather than heading north to the Kachin Hills, I went east, further along the Burma Road. It was an area that had been at the epicentre of the civil war for over a quarter of a century, from the 1960s to the ceasefires of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the rebel militias were led by Shan nationalists, fighting for a separate homeland. Others were led by opium warlords. Others were a mix. There were pro-government militias and anti-government ones and some swapped sides depending on what suited their wallets the best at any given time. And there was the army of the Burma Communist Party, with its bases pressed up against the Chinese border. As in the Kachin Hills, the fighting in this region–the northern and eastern Shan states–had halted as well. And here too there was no stability, only a more complicated array of armed battalions.

Lashio was the main town in the area, about a hundred miles from the China border, a town much bigger than Hsipaw, and the terminus of the old British Burma Railways line. Lashio had figured prominently as a stopover on the old Burma Road, and had even featured in the John Wayne epic
Flying Tigers
, a not-quite-accurate account of American derring-do in the fight against the Japanese.

When I was a teenager and visiting Mandalay, I often thought about going to Lashio–we were said to have distant relatives there–but I never did. It was then the back of beyond. The train took forever and few other than army officers and drug lords travelled there by car. Communist insurgents controlled the hills around and beyond Lashio, together with an assortment of other rebel groups like the Shan State Army and opium-trafficking militias. A Burmese army garrison was quartered in town, but the writ of the regional commander barely extended a few miles into the lush and green countryside.

I travelled from Hsipaw to Lashio in a ‘shared taxi’ together with a Chinese family, speeding along a well-paved road, me in the front seat, a middle-aged woman and her two young children sitting in the back. They were returning from a three-day trip to Mandalay and were going home to Lashio. The woman, neat and fair-complexioned, spoke some Burmese, haltingly and heavily accented. She spoke politely to the taxi driver in Shan and he joked with them and teased the children. She said she had been visiting relatives in Mandalay and doing some shopping. I remembered the mall and the supermarket and imagined her browsing the aisles. I had squeezed my small bag in the boot, next to their several suitcases and a large plastic toy plane. The kids were quiet and well behaved and dressed in Western style, in trainers and shorts. We stopped briefly along the way at a restaurant called ‘The Panda’. She told me that she and her husband had come from Yunnan ten years before. They saw Burma as a chance to improve their lives and create a better future for their children. Her husband was a businessman, ‘buying and selling’. I thought of the Yunnan I knew of the early 1990s, still rough, cut off. But this little family appeared more refined and from a less cut-throat world.

Once in Lashio, it was easy to tell that we were entering a much more Chinese world than anything I had ever seen before in Burma. It was just after the Chinese New Year, and we drove down street after street of houses, each in their own little walled compounds, decorated with red banners and ‘Happy New Year’ signs in yellow Chinese characters. The taxi pulled into one of these compounds, and up to a modest single-storey house, surrounded by a garden and small trees. There was a child’s tricycle out front, and I could see a television screen flickering just inside through the sliding glass doors. An elderly man and a younger woman came out to greet them, with broad smiles, embracing the children and helping them with their things.

From there the taxi drove me past a school and hospital and a government telecommunications centre, all set along a broad and well-maintained tree-lined avenue. There were also several churches. The Shan themselves, like the Burmese, are overwhelmingly Buddhist, but there were many Kachin in Lashio as well. There was a red-brick Kachin Baptist church, with a decorated Christmas tree outside, as well as a Roman Catholic one. During the early twentieth century, missionaries had been active in this area, especially the Roman Catholics. In the 1930s a group of Italian priests, later joined by a growing number of nuns, were using Lashio as a base, running schools and boarding houses and nurseries and medical clinics. From here they had ventured east across the Salween, into the then barely explored mountains, and across into China. They flourished even under military rule. In 1975 the Vatican entrusted Lashio to the Salesian Order and in 1990 a Burmese priest, Monsignor Charles Bo, had been appointed the first bishop of the newly created diocese of Lashio.

Other than the churches and a few pagodas and Buddhist monasteries, there was very little in Lashio that dated back to even the 1970s. This was partly the result of a monstrous inferno in 1988, perhaps one of the worst anywhere in the world in the twentieth century. Lashio then had a population of around 200,000. The disaster had started as a little kitchen fire, but within two hours the blaze had engulfed more than 2,000 buildings. Buildings in Lashio are not the same as buildings in, say, New York–many of the destroyed structures were small wooden houses and shops. But it was still an unusually fierce fire and left 113 people dead and tens of thousands injured or homeless.

I had arrived on a rainy day and the new town centre that has developed over the past several years looked muddy and unattractive. The streets here were in bad condition, strewn with rubbish no one would collect. The market area was a heap of flimsy looking two-storey concrete buildings, each with dozens of shops offering cheap Chinese goods and piles of second-hand clothes. One shop offered a range of cosmetics, and had a large advertisement for Jing Lon skin-whitening cream. Jing Lon was a Chinese brand, but whitening creams produced by more familiar brands like Noxema are readily found in cities all around the region, from Kyoto to Karachi. A fair complexion is the desired complexion in Burma, as it is everywhere in Asia, particularly for women, and these new melanin-suppressing ointments were extremely popular.

I watched a woman in ragged tribal clothes, just outside the shop, with two tiny children in tow, counting a handful of filthy banknotes of very small denomination, altogether amounting perhaps to the equivalent of $1, and then peering around to see what she might buy. Any of the cosmetics in the shop would have cost many times what she had, but there were hawkers on the pavement in front offering much cheaper wares. She looked at a soiled T-shirt, then a block of sandalwood (sandalwood paste is traditionally used as a sunblock), examining each item very closely, before leaving without making a purchase.

As I was coming into town I had seen white Toyota Landcruisers belonging to the UN’s World Food Programme or WFP, the international agency that specializes in delivering emergency food aid in disaster and war-torn situations. WFP had a field office in Lashio and had been given permission by the military government to run programmes in the area. This was a relatively new thing, both the desire of international aid agencies (and the Western governments that fund them) to provide humanitarian assistance in Burma, and the willingness of the authorities to allow outside aid to be delivered directly. Twenty years ago, UNICEF’s country director in Burma had warned of a ‘silent emergency’ affecting the country’s children, and had argued that help for the poorest should not have to wait for democratic change. His appeals were largely ignored. At the time, and for many years after, Western governments shied away from giving any aid to Burma, eager to see economic sanctions bite, and the Burmese army didn’t particularly want foreigners (especially Western foreigners) trooping around the countryside, close to rebel lines.

Only slowly did a different view gain the upper hand. There was a growing appreciation of the severity of humanitarian needs in Burma and this information was used to persuade governments in Europe and elsewhere that the plight of Burma’s poorest people should no longer play second fiddle to political concerns. A third of all Burma’s sixty million people were living on $1 a day or less, and at least as many were living on only a little more. Millions were malnourished and millions of children were stunted in their growth. Any other country in a similar situation would have received far more help from the West.

The Burmese regime was always in favour of development assistance, but this they saw mainly in terms of big projects, new roads, new bridges, new schools, new hospitals. They had worried that ‘humanitarian assistance’ was closely linked to notions of ‘humanitarian intervention’, and would be a stepping stone towards other kinds of unwanted attention. But they, too, became increasingly aware of the depth of need and over time became more comfortable with several of the agencies, like WFP, which was then given access to once off-limits areas. UN surveys had shown that there were desperately poor people in areas all around the country. But amongst the poorest of the poor were the tribal peoples in the hills to the east of Lashio, the one-time war zone that was now China’s doorstep to Burma.

China was once much worse off than Burma. In the 1930s Burma’s per capita GDP was at least twice that of China’s. By the 1960s China had caught up. Today, China’s per capita GDP is at least six times greater. And in the absence of Western trade and investment, it was China that was now driving Burma’s development. American and European sanctions meant that the Western involvement in this part of the country was limited almost exclusively to the provision of humanitarian aid. China, though, was unrestrained, investing in infrastructure projects, building roads and dams, cutting down teak forests, mining for jade, and selling its own consumer goods. The net result was that few jobs were being created for local people and a more unequal society was being established.