Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (17 page)

There were incidents of extreme violence. Anything that was seen as different from mainstream culture was maligned and attacked, and that included the practice of Islam, still widespread in parts of Yunnan. All over China mosques became places of extreme harassment, as Muslims were forced under pain of death to raise pigs and eat pork.

In the town of Shadian, not far from Kunming, the local people fought back. Shadian people had a long tradition of blacksmithing and weapons manufacture, going back to medieval times when their ancestors had arrived in Yunnan with the Mongol and Turkish garrisons of Kublai Khan. The town had produced many accomplished Islamic scholars and was where one of the first translations of the Koran into Chinese had been written. During the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1975, the local men made their own guns and organized a Muslim paramilitary force. They battled the all-Han militia that had also been set up. Policemen were sent to deal with the violence and were killed. Finally, in July that year, the town was attacked by several regiments of the People’s Liberation Army, supported by heavy artillery and airpower. The town was effectively destroyed and nearly 2,000 men, women and children are believed to have been killed in what was the only ethnic uprising during the Cultural Revolution.

By the time China began opening up to the outside world a few years later, there was no hint of minority protest in Yunnan, only an overwhelming desire for something different.

I spent part of my few days in Kunming attending a seminar on Burma at one of the local universities. I have attended many seminars on Burma in America and Europe and the head line topic is almost always some variant of ‘The Future of Democracy in Burma’. Here the agenda centred much more on mapping and understanding what was actually happening in the country and less on working backwards from a specific policy ambition. Several of the Chinese academics spoke Burmese well and were knowledgeable on the nitty-gritty of specific issues, from the Burmese army’s relations with individual militias to cross-border trade. They were close to the action.

The university was on the edge of town and was leafy and tranquil, with impressive lecture halls and students bicycling around, not very different, in appearance at least, from a New England college campus. It was here that the warlord Long Yun had allowed refugee intellectuals to study and teach, at a time when the heartland of the country was in the grip of Japanese invaders. The scholars I met were all exceedingly hospitable, treating me and other seminar participants to many meals, where the several courses of food were complemented by endless rounds of mao-tai toasts. They were funny and unpretentious and laughed often at themselves. There was also a handful of Burmese students present, from a mix of ethnic backgrounds, all on scholarships and fluent in Chinese. They seemed somewhat awed by their situation, and asked me quietly for advice on their studies and their future.

During a guided tour I was shown an older building in a traditional Chinese style, with stone walls and a sloping roof. It was an examination hall built centuries ago, I was told, before the rest of the campus. Inside were little rooms, like cells, each with a life-size mannequin of a Chinese scholar, in a layered silk robe and black hat, seated behind a wooden desk. Candidates for the civil service would live here for days in isolation to write their exams. There was a small bed in the room as well as a tiny child-size toilet.

One evening I went to a trendy restaurant nearby called Salvador’s. The menu served quesadillas and falafel as well as gourmet coffees. It was a favourite of Western tourists and the few expats who lived here. A student I met said:

Yunnan’s the kind of place where people come to get away from it all, to get away from the rat race back east. Many people like me come to the university to study and then decide to stay on. It’s cheaper here, the people are friendly, and there’s not all the pressure to make money. It’s very laid back.

Others were less laid back. On my last day in Kunming I met a businessman connected to one of the big government-owned corporations. He was in his early forties, a heavy-set man with thick black hair and glasses. He was originally from Tianjin, in the north east near Beijing, but had made Kunming his home. He was very optimistic about Yunnan’s future and enthusiastic about its growing links with the rest of Asia, including Burma. ‘The Yunnan government has a very clear development strategy,’ he said. ‘Yunnan will be made into China’s gateway to South Asia and southeast Asia.’ It was about as straightforward an exposition as I had heard so far.

There were two aims. One was to raise living standards for everyone. The other was to make sure that local minority groups stayed happy and felt they were benefiting from China’s economic progress. Traditionally, he said, the main problem in Yunnan was its location, in the extreme southwest and far from the big ports. The government’s idea was to solve this problem by expanding links southward as well as improving transport links to the Chinese coast. Many different schemes were being developed that would tie Yunnan to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma, and further west to Bangladesh and India. All involved multi-billion-dollar investments in infrastructure. All meant Yunnan becoming the new regional hub.

Railways were a big part of the plan. A high-speed rail line will connect Kunming to Shanghai, nearly 1,240 miles away, and help bind this once isolated region more closely into the national economy. From Kunming, existing rail lines will be upgraded and new ones laid. One line would travel southwest to Ruili on the Burma border and then onward to Rangoon, with a branch extending directly to the sea, near Ramree Island. There is hope that this will one day be high-speed as well, running at 120 miles an hour over the entire route (Kunming is almost equidistant between Rangoon and Shanghai). A second line would head in a more southerly direction, connecting Kunming with the Laos capital Vientiane and proceed from there to Bangkok. The trains would move across once inaccessible mountain terrain, through tunnels yet to be created. Well over $20 billion would be spent. Ties with southeast Asia were already growing fast. By 2010, trade between China and southeast Asia was approaching $300 billion a year, but most of this was transported by sea. Cargo from Burma, Laos and Thailand could only move by lorry up and down the intervening mountains. Costs–in time and money–would drop precipitously.

It wasn’t all about roads and railways either. Yunnan was aggressively developing its own industries, from tobacco to steel, readying itself to be a major exporter not only to Burma, as it was now, but to the entire tier of countries to its south. Part of the pipeline from Burma will stop near here, in the Kunming suburb of Anning, where $3.4 billion is being spent on a refinery capable of handling over 220,000 barrels a day. It will be complete by 2013.

Tourism will also be a big draw. Yunnan has great natural beauty and a year-round temperate climate and was being carefully branded as an unspoiled and exotic location within China for Chinese as well as foreign tourists. The businessman said: ‘People will come here on holiday, maybe with their wives or girlfriends and have a good feeling about Yunnan. Then they will want to spend time here and invest their money.’

The ideas seemed sound, though it wasn’t clear that they could easily be realized. So far, at least, things seemed to be going according to plan, but possible roadblocks were not difficult to see.

Around the time I was in China, a big scandal was being exposed in the city of Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek’s old wartime capital (then usually spelled Chungking), now metamorphosed beyond recognition like every other city in China, with a forest of sky scrapers to rival Manhattan. It’s not part of Yunnan but just to the north, perched along steep cliffs overlooking the Yangtze River. In theory it’s the world’s largest city, with thirty million people, but that’s partly because the surrounding districts with many satellite towns have been included in its vast metropolitan area. In any case it’s still a mega-city, one that many in the Chinese leadership hope will attract billions of dollars more investment and one day rival Shanghai. In late 2009, a five-month long special police probe uncovered an enormous criminal network that reached to the very heights of local government.

Dozens of people were arrested, including the deputy police commissioner himself, Wen Qiang, who was charged with having received over $15 million in bribes in return for protecting criminal bosses throughout Chongqing. Some 25,000 police from outside the local jurisdiction had to be brought in for the crack-down, raiding illegal arms factories and netting nearly 2,000 firearms. Graft and racketeering involved a scandalous mix of both criminal and communist party chiefs, who ran gambling dens and brothels like the White House club in the basement of the Marriott Hotel. The ‘Godmother of Chongqing’ was a fifty-something-year-old woman named Xie Caiping, who was married to the deputy police commissioner’s brother. She was said to have kept a private stable of sixteen young men as lovers and zoomed around town in one of her fleet of Ferraris and Lamborghinis until her arrest.

There was no similar public scandal in Kunming. But it was hard to believe that serious corruption wasn’t a problem in Yunnan as well. After all, across the border in Burma were the ex-insurgent armies, a less than squeaky clean army regime, a multi-billion dollar drugs industry, and trafficking in all manner of contraband from people to precious stones. I was told in Kunming that it was impossible for central authorities to maintain the sort of tight supervision they would like over a country of China’s size. Local officials and local businesses often did what they wanted and knew well how to circumvent the system. Criminal networks were bound to flourish.

Another major problem is the tremendous stress on the local environment caused by recent development. This was true in Yunnan as well as in many parts of China. In 2010 Yunnan would experience the worst drought in living memory, one that left eight million people short of drinking water and devastated billions of dollars worth of crops. Though this may well have been the consequence of global climate conditions, many suspected that the massive deforestation of the countryside was at least partly to blame. In areas close to Burma, more than 95 per cent of forest cover has been cut down over the past thirty years and much of the cleared land turned into rubber plantations (rubber trees are known for their insatiable thirst). Huge dams may also have been a culprit. The same year saw unprecedented drought conditions in Burma, Laos and Thailand as well and people and governments in these countries began to think more carefully about their riparian rights and Yunnan’s upstream management. There was a growing environmental consciousness in China too. Further deforestation or the building of environment-wrecking dams in Yunnan would no longer be an easy sell.

I enquired about all these things but the businessman was undeterred in his enthusiasm. ‘We’ll find a way!’ he said. And when I asked about plans for India, he became even more excited and explained his vision for a ‘Southern Silk Road’. Current trade between India and China, a fairly modest $60 billion in value, takes place almost entirely by sea, via Singapore and the Straits of Malacca. ‘A new road across Burma will mean a journey from Kunming to Calcutta could be made in just three or four days instead of ten! With a railroad, it could be made in 48 hours!’ Down the street, work was beginning on a 72-storey twin-tower complex, projected to be the biggest building in Yunnan, with a five-star hotel, ‘amusement and leisure facilities’, and ‘Grade-A office space’. It was to be called South Asia Gate and Kunming’s commercial centre for trade with Burma, India and beyond.

He saw the future relationship with India solely in terms of trade. India currently runs a big deficit with China. It exports are mainly iron ore for China’s steel mills and other raw materials. China in return sells manufactured goods. Yunnan stood to benefit immensely. For the businessman at least there was no hint of geopolitics or an unfolding Great Game with India, only money. ‘Yunnan is still poor, but this will change, fast.’

In ancient and medieval times, Yunnan had been a crossroads of sorts, linking the Chinese empires to the north with Tibet, India, Burma and other places to the southwest. It was now becoming a hub again, but as an integral part of China. Would its old cultures and civilizations have any bearing on the future? From Kunming I travelled on to Dali, the capital of the last independent kingdom of Yunnan.

I had been in Dali once before, in early 1992, during the same trip that took me to Kunming and then the China–Burma border. Tourism was still new to Yunnan then, with many ‘out of bounds’ areas, but Dali had been open for a few years and had already become a little gathering place for backpackers. The choice of accommodation, though, was still very limited. Two or three ‘guest-houses’ had been set aside for foreigners, simple concrete buildings constructed around a courtyard, each with a number and no name. They were reasonably clean, with unadorned walls, wooden beds, and thin foam mattresses. They were also very cheap (a few dollars a night). The simplicity of accommodation added to the sense of being off the beaten track and in a place where everything was still untouched by global tourism. There were a couple of private eateries and these served the kind of fare familiar in backpacker havens elsewhere in Asia, like banana pancakes and lassi, and omelettes and ice-cold beer. I tried out the ‘Shiatsu’ massage clinic that had just opened up and received a very painful massage from a mute giant with enormous hands.

The town was beautiful, like a small town in Montana or Colorado in early winter, dry and cold, with the great cobalt sky and snow-covered mountains dwarfing the simple little streets and houses. I can’t remember any Chinese tourists, only a handful of Westerners in anoraks and hiking boots (and me the only Burmese, I am certain) and an equal number of Japanese. The Japanese were of a special kind: adventurous and keen to experience whatever was on offer. I remember seeing a couple of them, with long wild-looking hair, in greatcoats and long felt boots, sunburned and smiling, walking into one of our back packer eateries. They were trying hard to blend into the surroundings and looked almost Tibetan and I guessed that they had just come from a many-day trek further north, perhaps on horseback,

On that trip, I had come to Dali from Kunming via Xiaguan. Xiaguan was the local city and was at the south end of the enormous Lake Dali. Dali was the ‘old town’, several miles to the north and on the west bank of the same lake. I had spent a first night in Xiaguan: an entirely grey and cheerless place, the staff at the hotel disinterested, the carpets stained. There was almost no cooked food to be found anywhere and even at the hotel there was only a Chinese menu at the grubby restaurant, with no possibility of an English translation. I managed to get a local soup, which was more or less a layer of oil on top of boiling water with a few unidentifiable lumps of vegetables thrown in. I ate some popcorn I had bought from a street vendor to round off my meal.

Bleak Xiaguan and then charming Dali, both along a vast lake, is what I had remembered. But now, looking out the window from my bus, I was hard pressed to recognize anything I saw. The street we were on wound past the lake’s edge and there were small sporty cars driving past at a leisurely speed. Just beyond was a promenade lined with lampposts and flowering potted plants, cafés along the waterfront, and many well-heeled people. On the other side of the street were elegant apartments, with balconies facing the lake and the mountains in the distance. There were no yachts, but one could almost imagine being in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva. ‘This is Xiaguan,’ said the Chinese man sitting next to me and indeed, a moment later, I saw signs in English and Chinese saying the same. We drove by big office towers, shopping centres and high-rise hotels until, after about twenty minutes, we were before the massive stone walls of Dali itself.

It was immediately apparent that a big part of Dali had been converted into the sort of place young Western tourists are habitually drawn to, like Khao San Road in Bangkok or Thamel in Kathmandu, but with Chinese characteristics. Where there had been just a couple of basic guest-houses twenty years ago, there were now dozens of small hotels, restaurants and cafés, and shops selling everything from Mao-era souvenirs to bootlegged CDs and DVDs. All this was centred on what was called Yangren Jie, or ‘Westerner Street’, just off the main high street. There was the Bad Monkey bar, the Phoenix pub with ‘The Best Fish and Chips in Dali’, and pizza places one after another. But unlike Bangkok or Kathmandu, everything was clean and whole some, with no suggestion of prostitution, no beggars, every thing orderly and well-managed. It was as if some central authority had said: ‘Let’s create a street just for Westerners. We’ll give them everything they want, including fish and chips and pizza. But let’s keep it clean. No drugs, no prostitution. And we’ll try to keep them separate from everyone else.’ Which is probably what happened. Westerner Street was a big success and now the Western-oriented establishments were spilling over into nearby alleys. There were travel agencies and places offering tours and bicycles for hire. One afternoon, tired from travelling and wanting something familiar, I found a café that offered free movies. There was a little library of DVDs down stairs at the café itself, and upstairs was a very comfortable living room with a huge flat screen television with a DVD player and a fine sunny view out the window. There was no one else there. For about three dollars I had a pleasant Chinese lunch, and then spent a couple of relaxing hours lounging in a big sofa, drinking beer and watching
Sideways
for the second time.

There were many Western tourists here, but outside Westerner Street they were overwhelmed by the multitude of Chinese tourists who flowed into Dali every day, day trippers mainly who preferred to spend the night at Xiaguan’s more impersonal modern hotels. The pedestrian was king in Dali and few cars and no buses were allowed within Dali’s newly restored stone walls. The old Dali of the early 1990s had been refitted into a sort of movie set (and indeed movies are now often filmed here). A great gate (which I didn’t remember from my first visit) marked the entrance to the south and a wide cobblestone avenue led to a central plaza where popcorn was sold at a kiosk. The same avenue then continued for over a mile. The shop-houses all had wooden façades and sloping roofs with dark-blue glazed tiles.

Dali was touted as the main city of the Bai people and the Bai Autonomous Prefecture. The Bai are classed as a Yunnan ‘minority nationality’ and there are reckoned to be about two million Bai people altogether, both in this area and elsewhere in the province. They have their own language (Bai is thought to be distantly related to both Burmese and Tibetan), though most ethnic Bai are now either bilingual or speak only Mandarin. And everywhere in Dali were women in what were said to be authentic Bai costumes, with thin white cotton trousers and embroidered pastel-coloured waistcoats, selling souvenirs at the more touristy shops (which were nearly all the shops), working as waitresses at the bigger restaurants, receptionists at the hotels, and as ticket-sellers at all the sites.

For much of its early history, Burma’s neighbour to the northeast was not China, but the independent kingdom of Yunnan, with Dali as its capital. And from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries this kingdom was a power in its own right, at times allying itself with the Tibetan empire to its west, at times with China’s Tang and Song dynasties. Its mounted armies ventured deep into what is today Burma and may have been behind the founding of its medieval city of Pagan. We don’t know what the people of Yunnan called themselves (‘Yunnan’ itself is a relatively new word). The Chinese called their ruler the Nanzhao, the Lord of the South, and this became the name of the kingdom as well.

Yunnan had come under partial Han Chinese authority in ancient times, but in the third century
AD
the last of the Chinese garrisons withdrew, leaving Yunnan to its mix of native peoples. Amongst these peoples would have been some of the ancestors of the modern Burmese, as well as the minority peoples of Yunnan today, speaking a range of languages and dialects. In the ninth century, the Chinese ethnographer Fan Cho compiled the
Man Shu
, or ‘Book of the Southern Barbarians’, in which he described Yunnan’s different communities. There were, he said, various Wu-man or ‘black southern barbarians’, so-called after their dark complexions. Many were pastoral folk, tending goats and sheep, and slowly drifting southward, along the many river valleys, from the Tibetan marches down to the hot and arid plains of Burma. Some of the barbarians ‘were plentiful all over the mountain wilds’. Others were ‘brave, fierce, nimble and active…they bred horses, white or piebald, and trained the wild mulberry to make the finest bows’. Still another group included women who ‘only like milk and cream’ and who are ‘fat and white and fond of gadding about’. To Chinese eyes they were not a particularly hygienic lot, but cheerful nonetheless. One tribe known as the Mo-man were said to live their lives without ever washing their hands or faces. ‘Men and women all wear sheep-skins. Their custom is to like drinking liquor, and singing and dancing.’

From Dali, around the time of the Islamic conquest of Spain, the Nanzhao ruler had unified six nearby principalities into a single state and then had gone on to mobilize these diverse tribal communities. From the start it was a militaristic state, expanding energetically in every direction. In these early medieval times, eastern Asia was dominated by two great powers: China and Tibet. The Tibetans were the upstart power, but at the height of their imperial reach. For some time Nanzhao fought alongside the equally aggressive Tibetans. In 755, when China was wracked by internal rebellion, the Tibetans and Nanzhao joined together to pillage Chinese cities.

Later, the Chinese managed to break apart the Tibet–Nanzhao alliance. Tibetan expansion was then a big headache for the Chinese court and the Chinese were trying for a policy of continental encirclement, aiming to bring together the Turks and Arabs to the west, the Indians to the south and Nanzhao to the southeast, in a grand coalition to crush Lhasa. ‘Using barbarians against barbarians’ was a time-honoured Chinese creed. When a combined Nanzhao–Chinese army defeated a Tibetan force near the present-day Burmese border, the Tibetan side included captives from as far away as Samarkand and Arabs from the Abbasid caliphate, men from the court of Harun al-Rashid and
A Thousand and One Nights
, taken prisoner on a Yunnan hillside together with 20,000 suits of armour. In appreciation, the Chinese received Nanzhao’s envoys as representatives of a high-ranking kingdom, ahead of Japan, welcoming them with an honour guard of war-elephants and presenting exotic gifts.

The Nanzhao were then at the pinnacle of their power. They invaded south to Burma, plundering the little walled towns of the Irrawaddy valley, and perhaps even reaching the distant and sandy shores of the Bay of Bengal. During a period of supreme confidence they would even break their pact with China, attacking Chinese-controlled Hanoi, and marching over the mountains into Sichuan and sacking the city of Chengdu. All this from Dali, where the ruler of Nanzhao sat on his throne, swathed in tiger-skins, ‘red and black with stripes deep and luminous, from the finest tigers in the highest and remotest mountains’.

When the Nanzhao dynasty eventually fell it was more because of internal intrigue than external pressure. The whole royal family was wiped out in a power struggle in 902, and was replaced by a slightly more modest regime, still based at Dali. By then Buddhism had a firm grip on local society and the kings of Dali emerged as committed patrons of the faith. The capital itself became an important centre of Buddhist learning. The links with Burma were strong, and the new Burmese kingdom at Pagan most likely developed in the shadow of Dali’s influence. And via Burma there would have been ties as well to India, then divided into Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms, on the eve of the Muslim invasions.

The kings of Dali adopted the name Gandhara for their realm. It’s the same word as Kandahar in modern-day Afghanistan and remains the literary Burmese name for Yunnan. Gandhara was once an almost mythical Buddhist land, straddling the present Pakistan–Afghanistan frontier at the time of Alexander the Great, and was remembered long afterwards as a place of profound scholarship, governed by sages, peaceful and devout. The Dali kings even styled themselves as descendants of the great Indian and Buddhist emperor Asoka, who had reigned in the third century
BC
, seeing themselves as part of a fraternity of Buddhist states, from middle India to Ceylon to Vietnam.

Dali also associated itself with Mithila, the important commercial and religious centre once home to the Buddha himself, the New York of the ancient Indian world, with ‘storehouses filled, and sixteen thousand dancing girls and treasure with wealth in plenty’. Other great Buddhist sites were also transposed, metaphorically, to the surrounding landscape. A cave on the other side of Lake Dali became the famed Kukkutapada cave (the original is in north India) where the monk Maha Kasyapa is believed to be waiting in a trance for the coming of the next Buddha. Next to the cave is said to be a stupa with relics of the Buddha’s great disciple Ananda as well as the Pippala cave where the First Council of Buddhism was held. In this way, Dali became a facsimile of the holy land. As with the later kings of Burma, the kings of Dali wanted an Indian pedigree, and claimed descent from that greatest of Indian emperors, Asoka. The Persian scholar Rashid al-Din wrote that the king of Gandhara styled himself maharaja.

A variety of Buddhist schools flourished here. Chan Buddhism, better known in the West by its Japanese pronunciation, Zen, was a preferred school. Zen had begun in the seventh century within the Chinese Buddhist world as a reaction to the never-ending production line of monastic texts, commentaries, philosophical debates, images and rituals that its founders believed were choking off a more practical way to salvation. They hated all intellectualization and systematizations and often refused to write anything down. Their sayings were purposely cryptic and their style of teaching known as ‘strange words and stranger actions’. Later, Tantric Buddhism, an import from both Bengal and Tibet, gained the upper hand. Its leaders were the Azhali, originally adepts in yoga and arcane rituals, who were believed to command supernatural powers. In Burma they would be known as the Ari, infamous for their heterodox ways and sexual licentiousness.