Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (12 page)

For the ruling generals, the pride of Lashio was a replica of Rangoon’s Shwedagon pagoda, built just on the edge of town. It looked exactly the same as the original, though it was smaller, with no other pagodas or shrines around it, and it was hollow. The inside was cavernous and brightly lit; the floor was covered in rugs, and on the walls were frescoes of well-known Buddhist structures from elsewhere in the country. All were simply painted and in bright colours, like a mural on the wall of a nursery school. And at the end of this series of frescoes was a framed white sign that listed them all, as ‘Great Religious Structures’ in Burma. They were listed and categorized chronologically. First were a few from the medieval Pagan period, a few from the subsequent Ava period and so on, until the period of the current military government, which had the largest number of all. The point was clear: this is a government that supports Buddhism, and is unrivalled in doing so.

The messaging continued. An inner circle displayed scenes from the life and past lives of the Buddha, fairly common in pagodas and monasteries, so nothing very special. But an innermost circle featured a collection of about ten or so statues of the Buddha, large ones, in shining gold. They were impressive, and little carpets gave worshippers a chance to prostrate themselves in front of each image. Written underneath the images were the names of various top generals and their wives, the military couples likely the donors of the statues. I imagine they had trooped in together as part of a grand televised ceremony, in a public demonstration of their piety, as well as to make merit for their own future incarnations.

And in a way the replica was part of the grand state-building project. As in Stalin’s Russia, where every Soviet Socialist Republic had to have its own opera house, in contemporary Burma a replica of the Shwedagon was an aspect of the regime’s ambition for these far-flung towns. It was part of exporting ‘Burmese’ Buddhism to the outer, minority-inhabited regions, but it was also part of establishing a grid of national institutions.

The replica was also a sort of monument to a war that was almost won. Lashio had been at the epicentre of decades of counter-insurgency. Burma’s top generals had seen many of their fellow officers and men killed in the cruel fighting that had taken place over decades. Battles never heard of outside the country are etched in their minds. Perhaps more than many others, they see a difference between the situation of thirty years ago, when the Shan hills were literally in a state of anarchy, and today, when the guns are largely silent. And here, on a hill spur overlooking this once besieged city, was an emblem of their ethnic identity and their anti-communism. The new pagoda in Lashio was called Yan-taing-aung or, loosely, ‘We Win All Our Fights’.

Lashio sits in a valley over two and a half thousand feet above sea level. The area was once very prosperous and before British rule the valley around Lashio had been a hub of Burmese royal authority, a Burmese governor lording it over his charges from a hilltop fort nearby. These were the days when caravan journeys from the inland cities of China to Mandalay took many weeks or months and Lashio provided an important stopover. Tea and silver were then plentiful in the local markets. By the mid-nineteenth century there was also some opium. Opium poppies are not indigenous to the region, but are actually an import, from very long ago, from western Europe, where they grew wild in Roman times. The Arabs brought them to Asia in the eighth century
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and a thousand years later the British were harvesting opium in India and shipping the increasingly popular drug to China. It was around this time that opium first appeared on the scene in Burma as well, theoretically banned, but usually tolerated.

When the British first arrived in Lashio in the 1880s, they found the entire valley in ruins, the result of years of rebellion and attacks from highland tribes. It was, however, still a natural seat of local government, and the new colonial masters chose Lashio for the headquarters of their ‘Northern Shan States’. The ‘Superintendent of the Northern Shan States’, normally a young Englishman, was stationed in Lashio, together with a garrison of Indian soldiers and military police. His job was to keep the peace, ensure the local chiefs were well-behaved and paying their taxes, and occasionally fly the Union Jack along the Chinese frontier.

During the early decades of the twentieth century Lashio was a not very important frontier town, with China about a hundred miles away along a single dirt road. It was a quiet frontier. Whilst India’s Northwest Frontier along the borders of Afghanistan conjured images of dashing cavalry charges and Great Game intrigues, this eastern frontier of the Indian Empire was a sort of dead end, with no real threat on the other side, only a small stream of mule caravans and impoverished tribal peoples.

This changed during the Japanese war, when Lashio occupied a key strategic position along the Burma Road. The Japanese took the town in late April 1942 and three years later, when the Allied counter-offensive was in full swing, Lashio lay on the march from northern Burma, already in British hands, to Mandalay. Chinese armies in the area were under the American command of Lieutenant General Daniel Sultan, of Oxford, Mississippi, who first seized the important Baldwin silver and lead mines twenty-two miles to the northwest, mines big enough to supply all the lead needed by the Japanese war machine. The Americans then bombed Lashio from the sky, before British Indian troops retook the town in April 1945. Lashio and its environs were then quickly forgotten by the outside world.

Only now, seven decades after the building of the Burma road, is the area around Lashio becoming critical again for China. Soon the town will sit astride the future pipeline, carrying up to 20 per cent of China’s imported oil, the new rail line transporting goods bound for Europe. Renewed fighting anywhere nearby would be a disaster. Lashio is today the headquarters of the Burmese North east Regional Commander’, a major general whose division-strength command is in charge of managing relations with the myriad armed groups nearby. If there is a new offensive, Lashio will be the launchpad.

With the ceasefires, some of the ethnic insurgent leaders had hoped for compromise. Many had once advocated independence from Burma. Now they said they only wanted a ‘federal system’ of government, with equal rights for all citizens and a degree of local autonomy. But the idea of ‘federalism’ was never something the Burmese army leadership was going to accept. It spelled weakness and fragility, a recipe for an eventual break-up of the country.

With a federal system this country will fall apart within ten years. Look at the map! We’re a small country. Why should we stay divided in a hundred little pieces? Many countries have had to forge unity by force. Only then can we survive. Otherwise we’ll be eaten up by the Chinese. The foreigners will criticize us, but they are hypocrites. They’ve all done the same thing.

I was talking to a recently retired army colonel, a man with a dark leathery face and big hands. He was wearing a pale blue shirt and an old
longyi
, but it was easy to picture him in jungle fatigues, marching his men over the hills. He believed that the civil war would end not through some recognition of ethnic difference, but through assimilation. Roads and railways would grid the nation together. Trade and a single system of education would slowly but surely weaken local difference.

In a way, the Burmese army’s policies towards their opponents were the direct opposite of the policy of Western governments towards the ruling junta. Western governments had employed economic embargoes and diplomatic isolation, hoping that by shunning the Burmese generals, the generals would eventually come around. They didn’t. The Burmese army employed very different tactics. They fêted their erstwhile foes, calling them ‘leaders of the national races’. They took them to the big cities, created new desires and allowed them to enrich themselves. Business links, even illicit ones, were actively promoted. They did this knowing that it would sap the insurgents’ strength as fighting organizations. By 2010 the Burmese army was in a far stronger position than when the ceasefires were first agreed.

Under the new constitution, some power would be devolved to local governments, each with their own semi-elected legislatures. It would be far from a federal system and the real authority of the local governments would be heavily circumscribed. But it was a small concession to ethnic minority leaders who had been fighting for genuine self-determination.

The Burmese military leadership also offered the ex-insurgent armies a deal on their future armed status: reorganize your men into a ‘Border Guard Force’, that will partly be officered by us and that will ultimately come under our authority. It meant a partial but not complete integration with the Burmese army. Acceptance would mean sweet business deals and a place for former rebel leaders in the new order. Some of the smaller militias accepted. The rest have not, so far.

What has emerged over the past twenty years has been neither war nor peace, but a weird half-way house, still dominated by men of violence, an almost medieval world of rival fiefdoms, some owing allegiances to a distant overlord, a complex web of feuds and fealties, the idea of a modern state still set far in the future.

To the southeast of Lashio is the territory the United Wa State Army or UWSA, boasting more than 30,000 armed men backed by armour and artillery and even surface-to-air missiles. The Wa were once a very remote people, like the Rawang. As late as the 1930s, British control over their mountain fastness was incomplete. The British divided them into the ‘Tame Wa’ and the ‘Wild Wa’. The difference to the colonial administrators was that the latter wore (almost) no clothes and were infamous as head-hunters, living in earthen tunnels along the crests of the higher ranges. Today, though, the Wa are big players in the Burma–China borderlands. Their army is one of the largest private armies in the world, with as many soldiers as the Taliban, controlling a territory larger than Belgium. In the 1990s they were the world’s largest producers and traffickers in heroin but have more recently turned to methamphetamines to help fund their mini-state.

More importantly, the Wa are no longer living at the back of beyond, but on the margins of China, the emerging superpower. Under their ceasefire with the Burmese army, they are allowed to keep their guns and their autonomy. To enter the Wa zone from Burma proper there are checkpoints and Burmese soldiers are not allowed. But there is no border with China. Coming from Lashio a couple of hours away, the dirt roads become Chinese highways. And much of the Wa zone is on the Chinese electricity grid, and even its internet and mobile phone grid. Blackberrys don’t work in Rangoon but they do in the Wa area. Their leaders are mainly China-born Wa (there is a Wa minority in China as well), have Chinese names, and send their kids to school in China. They are rich and enjoy continued if discreet support from the local Chinese authorities across the unmarked frontier. It’s a stunning reversal in Burma’s geography. What had been remote is now closer to the new centre. What were muddy mountain hamlets are now more modern than Rangoon, once a rival of Singapore.

Even stranger an entity than the territory of the United Wa State Army is the town of Mongla further south, along the Mekong and adjacent to Laos. A one-time communist rebel base, Mongla transformed itself over the 1990s into a sleazy holiday destination for Chinese tourists, complete with casinos, transvestite cabarets, 24-hour restaurants and nightclubs, and brothels featuring women from across Asia and even Russia and the Ukraine. Officially, the area around Mongla is called the Shan State 4th Special Region. Its leader, Lin Mingxian, was a Chinese Red Guard radical during the Cultural Revolution, who joined the Burmese communist insurgency as a ‘volunteer’, rising up to be the commander of ‘815 War Zone’. When the ceasefires were agreed, he kept his own militia, carved out his own little niche and went hard to work. By the early 2000s, thousands of Chinese were flocking across the border to Mongla every day and the money was rolling in.

Lin built a massive Miami Beach–style mansion in pastel colours on a bluff overlooking his fiefdom. He entertained visiting Chinese and Burmese VIPs at the huge casino halls, some with a hundred gaming tables or more. Unlike the wrecks plying the streets in Rangoon, here there were gleaming new SUVs. He encouraged prostitution but policed it, setting up a special red-light district with mandatory and regular health checks. Russian women were said to command 50 per cent more than the local ladies. To show his drug-trafficking days were behind him, Lin erected an Anti-Narcotics Museum, also in bright pink. As in the Wa zone, Mongla became an Alice in Wonderland world, where the back of beyond was suddenly transformed through its connection with China into a mini-metropolis.

But some of the Chinese higher-ups were not very happy. Hundreds of their officials had been siphoning off money from public accounts to spend (and often lose) at Lin Mingxian’s gambling dens. Tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars were streaming into Mongla, most of it illegally (and off the Chinese government’s books). When the daughter of a high-ranking party official lost a quarter of a million dollars during a weekend jaunt to Mongla, Beijing decided to take action.

In January 2005, units of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army crossed over into Mongla (‘Operation Blue Arrow’), shut down the casinos and sealed the border. But in a remarkable feat of entrepreneurship, Lin, the former communist radical, turned crisis into opportunity by taking his operation online. By 2007 he had built more than two dozen new casinos nearby but these were connected to cameras with fast internet connections. Anyone in China can now place a bet of up to a million dollars online without setting foot in this once far-flung corner of Burma.

It was through this deeply fractured world, full of distrust and with long traditions of violence, that the Chinese began to move into Burma. Warlords, businessmen, ethnic leaders, and military men–most of those in power were a mix of all four. When the border first opened up in the 1980s, the first sign of the new China was the flood of cheap Chinese goods into Burmese markets, coming via Lashio and then on to Mandalay. Then came the logging, on a gargantuan scale. The forests of Burma’s north and east were mercilessly chopped down, with hundreds of lorries a day ferrying huge teak and other hardwood logs to waiting Chinese sawmills. The jade mines of the Kachin Hills were another big attraction. Burmese jade has been highly prized in China for centuries and with the end of fighting ever greater quantities could be transported across to Yunnan and then to markets in Hong Kong and elsewhere. There was also of course the trade in heroin, long a staple of the Golden Triangle, which in the 1990s fed a growing number of Chinese addicts. By the early 2000s, the border trade was worth billions of dollars a year. Over 2010 and early 2011 the sale of Burmese jade to China was worth more than $4 billion.