Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (13 page)

There are also enormous new Chinese-owned and run plantations, many growing rubber. Other plantations, some thousands of acres in size, grow rubber, sugar cane, cassava and pineapples. Chinese businessmen ‘rent’ the land from local authorities. The small-time farmers who were there–Burmese, Kachins, Shans and others–have had no choice but to vacate their land, receiving minimal compensation in return. No one knows how many thousands of people may have been displaced so far.

There are other commodities as well. The Chinese, like the Romans, infamously eat everything, the more exotic the better, and see medicinal or aphrodisiac value in the rarest animals. Burma’s forests had been home to many endangered species, from snow leopards to rhinos. All are now being hunted and shipped across to impatient customers over the border. For years the New York conservationist Alan Rabinowitz has worked tirelessly to protect Burma’s surviving tigers and in this he has had some success, persuading the government to designate huge areas of the far north as sanctuaries. But implementing even the best of plans has been almost impossible, given the enormous disparity between the incomes of local would-be poachers and the prices being offered by Chinese buyers. Mongla has become a key hub. A report in 2010 by TRAFFIC, an international network fighting illicit trafficking in wildlife, said that they had found the skin of a clouded leopard, pieces of elephant hide, containers with bear bile extracted from live animals, and a dead silver pheasant, as well as parts of many other endangered species in the Mongla market. The tiger parts they found included entire skins, bones, paws, penises and teeth. Chinese customers come to buy what they want, for themselves or for resale in China. One speciality is ‘tiger-bone wine’, costing $88 for a small bottle, and said to be a health-boosting tonic. It can even be ordered by telephone for delivery to the Chinese town of Daluo across the border.

Women as well have become a commodity. Since 1978, couples in China’s cities have been to restricted to only one child as part of a draconian and successful effort at limiting the country’s population. Nearly all preferred a son, and often chose to terminate pregnancies rather than having a daughter as their only child. What this has meant a generation on is that there are now forty million more men in China than women, or forty million men who will need to find a wife outside China if they are to marry at all. For Burma (where there is no similar gender discrimination), it has meant a boom in the illegal trafficking of women to China. The trafficked girls and women are often sold to men in poor Chinese villages for whom the going rate of 20,000 to 40,000 yuan (about $3,000 to $6,000) is a bargain, compared to the dowry that they would need to pay for a Chinese bride. The women are usually tricked into believing they are going to a new job in China. A few manage to escape.

But all these things pale in magnitude in comparison to the new plans that are being drawn up. And the most important plans involve the thing that industrializing China really needs most from the outside world: energy.

There is the oil and gas that will soon be delivered by the new pipeline. There are also Burma’s great rivers, the Irrawaddy and especially the Salween, that rush down from their Himalayan and Tibetan sources to the Bay of Bengal. Neither has been dammed and the Salween is the longest pristine river system in the world, with a diversity of plant and animal life that has only begun to be explored. It won’t last much longer. Over the past few years China’s state-owned enterprises have negotiated agreements with the Burmese junta to build a giant $9 billion 7.1 gigawatt hydropower station across the Salween. Another project, already under way, will dam the Irrawaddy just north of Myitkyina. Ten thousand or so Chinese workers have arrived to carry out the construction, living in their own camp, in rows of little wooden houses. Other projects aim to dam the Salween further downstream. Altogether, if realized, these will provide more than 20 gigawatts of electricity. To put this into perspective, Burma today consumes less than a tenth that amount; 20 gigawatts is about what is consumed by all of Thailand. Some of the new electricity will stay in Burma, but the vast majority will be exported to China. A dam financed by the World Bank is required to do an extensive environmental impact study, but the World Bank is not allowed by Western governments to operate in Burma. There is no doubt that Burma desperately needs electricity, that these dams will provide this electricity (some smaller ones already do so), and that the sale of electricity could be a vital money-earner in future. But the potential environmental consequences could be catastrophic, not only for this area, but further downriver, impacting on the tens of millions of people who depend on the Irrawaddy and the Salween for their survival.

Lashio’s Guan Yin temple is the biggest Chinese temple in Burma. Guan Yin is the Chinese personification of mercy and seen as the Chinese version of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion in the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon. It was a holiday and the place was packed with families, many just strolling around, many in traditional Chinese cloth shoes. There were monks and little novices, all shaven-headed, not in the familiar brown robes of Burmese Buddhist monks, but in the slate-grey kimono-style robes of China. A series of impressive stone staircases led from one outdoor plaza to the next, until they reached the main temple with a tiered roof and three massive images of Guan Yin. There were offerings of incense and candles and Chinese men and women with their eyes tightly shut made wishes before the statues. Little whiffs of dark smoke drifted upwards. To the side was an ancestor hall, where offerings could be made to one’s ancestors. On the side wall was a giant painting telling the story of the Monkey King.

Outside, on the lower plaza, was a small Ferris wheel. Kids were running around everywhere, many of the boys brandishing toy guns. Some of the girls were dressed in pink princess costumes. Parents bought Italian ices for their children and sugar-cane juice for themselves. Everyone was eating watermelon. Here and there little grey-robed novices, no more than nine or ten years old, were running around as well, though without the toy guns; if they became too raucous, a monk would come by and quietly discipline them. The more well-to-do had cameras and snapped posed photographs of their families, with the green Shan Hills in the background.

From the temple I took a taxi downtown to talk to a Chinese businessman whose contact details I had been given in Mandalay. He didn’t live in Lashio but was there for a couple of weeks, supervising the construction of a plastics factory. ‘I hope Western sanctions will remain forever,’ he said. He was short and plump and had a smooth round face. It was getting dark and we were in a small restaurant, drinking Johnnie Walker whisky on ice and eating roasted peanuts from a little lacquer bowl.

I know, maybe it’s not a good thing, but they help us, a lot. There are so many Chinese in Lashio now. There is talk of opening an Institute of Confucian Studies here too. I think the government will allow this. Why not? It will be good for Burma’s political development. They don’t need democracy, not for a while. But they need to improve their government. I think Confucian ideas will help.

He was originally from Hubei, far in the interior of China, and clearly saw Burma as a backward place, but one with potential. When we got up to leave, he said, ‘You know, I’ve been here for a while now, and I have feelings for your people. They deserve better.’

Was China the emerging superpower going to be a responsible neighbour, quietly making possible an end to decades of war, building infrastructure, investing in the economy, and bringing Burma into the twenty-first century? Or was China a plundering behemoth, grasping everything within its reach, without concern for the environment or the rights of individuals or communities? For a poor country like Burma, being next to China, the economic powerhouse of the world, should be a huge advantage–but will it? At a time when Chinese influence around the world was starting to be felt more strongly than ever, Burma was the canary in the coalmine.

When I was looking at the map a few years ago, the story of China’s and India’s attempts to find new connections to and across Burma seemed a straightforward one. But the situation in Burma was complex and Burma, as much as China or India, was shaping the direction of what was to come. Western sanctions had pushed the country’s ruling junta ever closer to Beijing and had created an unusually privileged environment for Chinese business. The Burmese government’s alliance with China was a tactical move, but would it become permanent, sealing in a future for Burma as a raw material exporter to China? And here, along the frontier, the situation was incredibly complicated, with multiple armed groups and ceasefires that remained tenuous at best, even as China began to pour billions of dollars into new infra structure. Would China be able to navigate the world of Burmese politics to its advantage?

America was hovering on the edge. So far at least, attempts by the US government to talk to the Burmese have not delivered much. Early in his administration, President Obama called for a new partnership with Beijing, but by 2010 relations between the current and rising superpower were tense, and a more competitive dynamic was emerging. Burma was a low priority for American policy-makers and so it was perhaps unsurprising that Beijing rather than Washington was moulding the local environment. Things could change, but for now Burma seems to offer a prime example of declining US influence in the region.

And what of India? Trade between Burma and India was growing, if not as rapidly as with China. But the nature of this trade was entirely different, based on a $1 billion Burmese export of beans and pulses and the import of Indian pharmaceuticals and a few other products. The trade was carried out via Rangoon and not across the long land border. The two governments have talked of improving road connections, and of India building a new port on Burma’s Arakan coast. But by 2010 there was little beyond talk, and there was clearly not the same momentum in India–Burma relations as between Burma and China. We will later see the reasons why this was the case.

Most importantly there was China itself. Its motivations were still a mystery to me. I knew something of the old history of Yunnan, the province just on the other side of the border, but it was difficult in my mind to relate the colourful and romantic histories I had read to the aggressive capitalism streaming over the frontier.

From Lashio a better road, almost a highway, snaked through the hills to Muse. It was built and maintained as a toll road by a company called Asia World, owned by the son-in-law of none other than Lo Hsing-han, the 1970s Lashio opium warlord. Check points lined the way. Truckloads of watermelons, grown on the new plantations, careered eastward. Muse was the border crossing, with big green-roofed warehouses and customs houses on the Burmese side and a modern skyline of office towers and high-rise hotels, the bright lights of China, on the other. For me, though, this was the end of the line. I had no permission to cross the border and would have to backtrack to Rangoon before going by air, first to Beijing and then to the other side of the Burma–China frontier. I would travel across Yunnan province, in China’s far southwest, to places I had been before, nearly twenty years ago, as well as others I had long wanted to see, a land of forgotten kingdoms and lost civilizations, now China’s springboard to Burma and beyond.

Around the time that Alexander the Great was preparing to conquer the known world, in the fourth century
BC
, Hui Wen, the king of Qin, was also expanding his domains, laying the basis for an empire that would grow and expand to the present day. This was during China’s ‘Warring States’ period. The country had not yet been unified and Hui Wen’s kingdom was only one of several feudal states that were constantly fighting one another for supremacy. Qin was situated just beyond the Yellow River, a dry and dusty region adjacent to the Gobi Desert. To the south was the kingdom of Shu, located where Sichuan province is today, entirely different in language and customs, as well as rich and fertile. Hui Wen’s main aim was to incorporate his other rivals to the east, but he was convinced by his advisors that by first adding Shu to his domains he would gain the strategic edge he wanted. He needed, however, to come up with a clever plan, as there were rugged mountains between the two kingdoms and no road through which to march his armoured crossbow-wielding legions.

He decided on a ruse. Qin already had diplomatic ties with Shu and had sent women to the ruler of Shu to become his concubines. According to Chinese chroniclers, this Shu ruler had also fallen madly in love with a transvestite from the far north and had become distraught when the transvestite died. The Qin court regarded him as a greedy and lecherous clown. There were also rumours of dissension within the Shu regime. For Hui Wen the turmoil presented an opportunity and he had his men construct statues of cows made of stone and placed them in an area of Qin where he knew visiting Shu ambassadors would see them. He also had blocks of gold placed near the statues, so it would seem (said the Chinese annals) that the cows were excreting gold. The plan worked. The ruler of Shu soon heard of the golden cowpats and requested that he be sent a few of these miraculous cows. Hui Wen replied that he would be happy to present them as a gift but that he would first need to build a special road through the mountains, as the cows were delicate and needed to be transported with care. The Shu ruler accepted. The result was the ‘Stone Cattle Road’, an amazing feat of early engineering, with huge wooden planks laid on top of great vertical beams, bored straight into the mountainside. And as soon as the road was completed, the Qin launched their invasion, and permanently annexed the land of Shu. It was a step towards the creation of the first Chinese empire, and a major expansion southwest towards new and alien domains.

In the late 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party embarked on a series of epic reforms, reforms that liberalized the economy while maintaining strict political control. They would unleash market forces and propel China into the first rank of global economic powers. Under the growing authority of party leader Deng Xiaoping, the system of people’s communes that had been the bedrock of daily life and economic activity in the countryside was ended, private business was encouraged, and villagers were allowed to leave their old homes and travel as they wished in search of jobs. New Special Economic Zones were established to attract foreign capital. All this was a drastic departure from the policies of the recent past, policies that had led to widespread famine, entrenched poverty, and little or no room for individual freedom. In the early 1990s, after conservatives threatened a reversal, Deng underlined the communist state’s new commitment to a market economy, telling the nation that ‘to get rich is glorious’, reinvigorating reform efforts and setting the stage for what has now been three decades of unprecedented growth.

The results of China’s reforms are well known. Manufacturing, especially for sales abroad, has skyrocketed. According to official statistics, the country has enjoyed export-led growth rates of 8–15 per cent a year since the early 1990s, even during the recent recession. In late 2010, China’s economy overtook Japan’s as the second biggest in the world, after the United States. Chinese reserves of foreign currency stand at well over $2 trillion, by far the largest in the world, and Chinese per capita GDP has increased twelve-fold over the past twenty years. Only 10 per cent of the population now live below the official poverty line, compared to 64 per cent before the reforms began in 1978. Life expectancy has increased dramatically and a country that was 80 per cent illiterate half a century ago now enjoys a literacy rate approaching 90 per cent.

Literally hundreds of millions of people have moved from the countryside to China’s ever-expanding mega-cities, especially along the southeastern coast, in what has been the greatest migration in human history. In the process, the percentage of Chinese people living in urban areas has grown from 18 per cent to 39 per cent. Across China in 1978, there was one phone for every 2,000 people and one TV for every 3,000. In 2011, 83 per cent of all Chinese had a telephone and more than a third were internet users. All this has been complemented by immense works of infrastructure, from the fastest trains in the world to dozens of world-class airports to entire cities levelled and rebuilt. At the beginning of Deng’s reforms, Shanghai had three buildings over twenty storeys tall. Today it has more than 2,000. An industrial revolution of a scale and intensity never before experienced is today transforming the lives of the 1.3 billion people who live in the People’s Republic.

I have had a long fascination with China. Growing up, I lived for several years in Thailand and travelled often with my family to places in southeast Asia, like Singapore and Penang, where Chinese culture was an enduring part of the local scene. This was the world of the overseas Chinese, whose diaspora, now totalling over sixty million people, extends around the globe. Until very recently, nearly all overseas Chinese had originated from the southeast coast of China; the ancestors of nearly all Chinese-Americans, for example, come from a sliver of territory along the Pearl River delta (near Guangzhou and Hong Kong). It is as if all people of European descent outside Europe came only from Norway or Portugal. Living in Thailand I gained a familiarity with the culture of this small part of China, the food, the dialects, the appearance of the people, but not at all with the rest of the vast Chinese nation. The People’s Republic was then in the final years of the Cultural Revolution and at the very start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms; there were no real opportunities to travel there as a tourist.

At university in America I took many classes in Chinese history and politics and an intensive course in Mandarin. My first visit to mainland China was in 1991, to Yunnan, on my way to the Burmese border. But it was only later, in the early 2000s, that I made my first trips to Beijing and the other big cities of the coast. By then, China’s ultra-fast development was already well under way. When I went again in 2009, the pace of change had become even faster, and like everybody else I could only be impressed by the transformations taking place.

There was the new Beijing airport terminal, spacious and hyper-efficient, with an immigration officer so polite and soft-spoken that I couldn’t tell whether she was asking an official question or just being friendly. ‘Are you staying long?’ ‘Where are you from originally?’ ‘Is this your first time in China?’ ‘Have a good time!’ The terminal, built in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, was bigger than all five London Heathrow terminals combined and had been voted by
Conde Nast Traveller
as the ‘best airport in the world’. Altogether, more than $30 billion had been spent on Olympic venues and related infrastructure. There was the new 90,000-person capacity National Stadium, known as the ‘Bird’s Nest’ for its striking design, with an outer skeleton of 42,000 tons of intertwined steel covering an inner ‘skin’ of double-layered plastic which keeps out the wind and rain and filters UVA light. Nearby was the National Aquatics Centre, in the form of a semi-transparent cube, with a surface that gives the impression of giant connected bubbles, and the National Theatre, a huge egg-shaped glass and titanium structure surrounded by water. On my first morning back, I walked for miles along the broad and immaculate pavements, across big plazas and past one shopping mall and office building after another. Everything seemed planned and orderly, the car traffic and pedestrian crowds dwarfed by the monumental architecture around them.

Beijing sits near the edge of the Chinese world. To the south are the speakers of the many different Chinese dialects–languages really, as different from one another as French from Spanish–stretching all the way from the Yellow River basin to Vietnam and Burma, more than 2,000 miles away, the distance from Paris to Cairo. But just a hundred miles or so to the north is the Gobi Desert and the Great Wall, and on the other side the grasslands of Mongolia and the vast arc of Mongolian and Turkish-speaking peoples (the Mongolian and Turkish languages are closely related) that reaches from the Arctic Circle to the Aegean Sea.

Beijing is also an old city. The Mongols, who conquered China from the north, were the first to make the area their capital. The Ming emperors who replaced them decided to rule China from the same region and founded Beijing at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Its name means ‘Northern Capital’ and it has remained the capital of China ever since, with only a few short interruptions. And over the intervening centuries it has been the administrative hub of vast empires and republics as well as one of the most populous cities in the world. Today, the Beijing municipal area–about the size of the greater metropolitan area of New York–is home to twenty-two million people.

There is, however, little sense of an old place or of organic growth or accretion. Instead, the overwhelming feeling is of a designed space, looking forward to the future, confidently and without nostalgia. Near my hotel was the financial district with the offices of over a thousand different firms, international ones like Goldman Sachs and UBS as well as Chinese ones like the People’s Bank of China, the steel and glass towers all lined up as if on parade. Unlike Manhattan or central London, it’s not a jumble of the ultra-modern with the old. In the 1950s many parts of Beijing were torn down, the leafy courtyards and cobblestone alleys replaced by grey and boxy Soviet-style buildings and broad stately avenues. Much more has been demolished over the past twenty years. Soon, almost nothing more than a few decades old will be left.

The main commercial area is along Wangfujing, Beijing’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue or Bond Street. A Chinese city usually conjures up images of teeming masses, pushing and elbowing along narrow streets. But Wangfujing is entirely pedestrianized, its wide expanse barely filled by the well-dressed shoppers ambling along. For hundreds of years it was lined with princely residences. Today there is one mall or department store after another. I walked past The Place with signs for Mango and French Connection out front, as well as a huge outdoor screen showing random clips of fashion shows. Next door was a higher-end mall, with advertisements for Gucci, Coach and Marc Jacobs. And off to the side was Snack Street with neatly organized stalls offering a variety of Chinese specialities, from crispy sesame cakes to the more exotic ‘silk worms on a stick’ and ‘starfish fried in shark oil’. For the less adventurous there was also a McDonald’s and a Kentucky Fried Chicken (by far the most popular fast-food chain in China). It was a cool spring day, but many of the women on the street were carrying umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun; here too, porcelain-white skin was seen as a key ingredient of feminine beauty.

To the south was Tiananmen Square. A portrait of Chairman Mao still hangs over the square. The square had been expanded in the early 1950s to serve as the principal parade ground for the People’s Liberation Army. During the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of impassioned people in identical Mao suits, feverishly waving their little red books of Mao’s quotations, gathered to hear the chairman’s calls for a ‘Cultural Revolution’ against the old and existing order. In 1989, equally large crowds calling for democratic change had assembled here, before being crushed by tanks and automatic weapons.

On my second day, with some free time on my hands, I went to see Chairman Mao’s embalmed body, which is kept in a special mausoleum on the other side of Tiananmen Square from the Forbidden City. I joined a large crowd of Chinese people, quietly shuffling along, past the entrance area where I bought a ticket as if to a movie, and then into a big hall where there were dozens of bouquets and bunches of flowers. In little groups we were then ushered into a smaller, darkened room, to within a yard of so of the Great Helmsman himself, stiff and waxy. A woman next to me was silently weeping as if overcome with emotion. We were allowed just a few seconds each to look, before having to pop out of the back door and into the bright sunshine outside.

There is a selective preservation of the past in Beijing. There is Mao’s photograph over Tiananmen Square (the only place I saw a photograph of him anywhere in China) and the mausoleum. Parts of the old city wall have been kept or even recreated. The homes of ‘good’ Chinese writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth century are museums. And there is the Forbidden City itself, the enormous palace complex of the old emperors, with its mustard-coloured tiled roofs and vermilion walls, a reminder of ‘feudal’ oppression of days gone by, but perhaps as well a sign of pride in the country’s imperial greatness. There is a desire too to demonstrate the antiquity of Chinese civilization, which some like to believe is more ancient than any other. At one end of Wangfujing was the Oriental Plaza, called ‘a city-in-a-city’, with several shopping complexes and a Hyatt Hotel. When the plaza was being built a few years ago, an eagle-eyed postgraduate student of Beijing University named Yue Shenyang happened to pass along the construction site and spotted a black charcoal mark on the dusty ground. He dug around and found the broken bones of animals as well as stone tools. They are today kept in glass cases in a small museum created on site, next to a life-size statue of a dark-skinned but Chinese-looking woman, bare-breasted and in a furry loincloth, nursing her baby. A pamphlet I was given said: ‘The discovery of palaeoanthropology relic in Wangfujing is the first time around the world discovering palaeoanthropology in the downtown of an international metropolis…Further discretion is advised.’