Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (23 page)

In 1793, China’s Qianlong Emperor told visiting British envoy Sir George Macartney that the Middle Kingdom desired little from the outside world. But the Middle Kingdom today desperately desires the raw materials needed to bring further power to its industrial revolution, in particular oil and gas. China has oil but consumes more than it produces. It was an exporter of oil until 1993 but since then its imports have risen dramatically. It now imports more than 170 million tons a year and at present trends (an admittedly speculative projection), China could be importing five times this amount within twenty years. The Chinese also need copper, iron ore and rare earth minerals and easy access to export markets as well.

All these raw materials will come from the Middle East and Africa as well as Australia and the countries of the Pacific Rim, increasing significantly the importance of Indian Ocean shipping lanes for Beijing. From Ruili to the sea is now only about a 24-hour drive, over the road that passes through Mandalay and then over the Arakan hills, to a brand-new port that Chinese engineers have begun to build on the island of Ramree. The oil and gas pipelines will travel along the same route, as well as the railway lines and expressways that will follow. Within a few years, China and Chinese influence may be much more present on the Bay of Bengal than at any time in history.

At first glance, there seems little reason to doubt that all this will happen. Western sanctions on Burma have entered their third decade and are still going strong, removing any possible American or European competition. The Burmese regularly affirm their appreciation of Chinese friendship, and the Chinese in turn continue to provide key diplomatic support. Unlike Western governments, Beijing could not care less about the nature of Burma’s own political system. China has good relations with regimes throughout southeast Asia–democratic, communist, authoritarian, or somewhere in between–and is happy doing business with them all. What China does care about is stability in Burma. Chinese government officials say this often and it is not just a mantra. Perhaps more than any other government, Beijing realizes that after decades of civil war, the fighting in Burma has almost entirely stopped. They saw the Burmese moving ahead towards a new constitution and new elections and were more than satisfied. They also felt that their economic projects–though motivated by self-interest–were helping the Burmese too, and that massive infrastructure development will do more for Burma in the long term than the humanitarian efforts undertaken by some Western countries. But by 2009 a certain nervousness was also creeping into the picture.

Then came the Kokang incident. Kokang is a small ethnic Chinese enclave just inside Burma, a few dozen miles to the east of Ruili. Its people, like many people on the Yunnan side of the border, are descended from pioneers and freebooters who drifted in from other parts of China over the centuries. They speak Mandarin with a particular accent and long supplied muleteers for the caravans that once travelled through the area. In more recent times, Kokang also supplied many of Burma’s better-known drug barons, and in the 1970s and 1980s militia from Kokang were part of the insurgent army of the Communist Party of Burma. When the Communist Party of Burma collapsed in 1989, the Kokang militia broke away, restyling itself the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army. It was the first to agree to a ceasefire with the Burmese junta and by 2009 this ceasefire had lasted a full twenty years.

For the leaders in Beijing, the fighting that erupted in August 2009 came like a bolt out of the blue. The Kokang militia had long been involved in illegal narcotics trafficking and gun-running and even gun production, and the charge of illegal weapons production was used as a pretence for the Burmese army to move forcefully into the enclave and establish a new leadership. There had been a growing split in the top ranks of the militia, and the Burmese saw an opportunity they did not want to miss.

It was not particularly bloody, and was over in days, but it was the largest military operation undertaken by the Burmese army along the border since the early 1990s. Some 20,000 refugees–all ethnic Chinese–fled into China, creating the largest refugee crisis on China’s border since the end of the Vietnam War. Beijing was caught off guard and was intensely upset.

The Kokang incident has weighed heavily on Beijing’s thinking ever since. Kokang and the other areas controlled by ethnic-based militias had been seen as useful buffers. Yunnan officials and businessmen had turned them into mini-Chinas, and used them as footholds for their influence inside the Burma frontier. The Chinese tried to wish away the incongruity between their support for the Burmese junta and their chummy relations with these militias. ‘The Chinese like to feed both sides, be the big brother to everyone,’ a man in Ruili told me. But there was no clear thinking about what the end-game might be; Beijing had been content to leave the Yunnan provincial government to set the direction, allowing local security forces to maintain day-today contact with all the armed groups.

But the willingness of the Burmese army to use force meant that the borderlands were much more volatile than Beijing had suspected. It meant that the Burmese were unpredictable. And it also meant that subcontracting Burma to Yunnan was no longer an option. Yunnan authorities had given little or no warning that Kokang was about to be overrun. With billions of dollars being invested in the pipeline and other projects, a more proactive approach was now required. Added to the mix was a gnawing sense that the clear run Beijing had enjoyed for twenty years could shift quickly.

This was at the time when the Burmese junta and the Americans were trying to improve ties, under President Obama’s new policy of ‘engagement’, and though this had not gone very far very fast, the mere possibility of a Burmese rapprochement with Washington was making the Chinese extremely anxious. In the Chinese journal
Contemporary International Relations
, two academics at Yunnan University, Luo Shengrong and Wang Aiping, argued that the Kokang attack was a carefully timed message from the Burmese generals not to take them for granted. ‘It was done to show the West that Myanmar’s military government is adjusting its foreign policy, from just facing China to starting to have frequent contact with the United States, India and other large nations,’ they wrote in a December 2009 article. The Burmese believed Sino-American relations were increasingly confrontational, and they wanted to demonstrate to Washington ‘what a useful ally’ Burma could be. The Kokang militia were known drug-traffickers and the Burmese were also calculating that the Americans still cared about reducing drug production in the region. There is actually little sign that Washington took notice. But not according to the Chinese academics, who seized on a meeting just weeks later between American diplomats and Burmese Prime Minister Thein Sein on the side of the United Nations General Assembly debate in New York. At a regional summit in Singapore in November, President Obama himself shook Prime Minister Thein Sein’s hand, the first such gesture since the 1980s. The Chinese were suspicious. There is a well-known saying in China,
Yelang zi da
, meaning roughly ‘Yelang thinks too highly of itself’, that is used to refer to anyone arrogant or conceited. Yelang was an ancient kingdom on China’s southwestern border, that had straddled the trade routes to India and the Indian Ocean, whose kings had seen themselves as equals of the Han emperor. This was laughable in Chinese eyes. Was Burma the Yelang of the early twenty-first century, daring to play off Beijing, New Delhi and Washington? China’s leaders felt they now had too much at stake. In late 2009 and 2010 they began to move, fast.

And so, in those years, Beijing began to move its Burma policy into high gear. Close attention was focused on the situation between the Burmese army and their biggest battle field rivals the United Wa State Army. The Wa were balking at Burmese demands to accept the new constitutional order and become a Border Guard Force and Beijing, fearing all-out war between the two sides, stepped in quietly to mediate and pressure both to maintain the existing ceasefire. A war between the Burmese and the Wa would be a first-class catastrophe for the Chinese. There could easily be a wave of tens, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Chinese-speaking refugees flooding across into Yunnan, their pictures beamed into television sets in Beijing and Shanghai. If the fighting carried on, who would China support? More importantly, would Washington take advantage of the situation, lending a helpful hand to the Burmese generals and in the process winning them over? Beijing would take no chances.

Soon, the Chinese were sending a wave of top leaders to cement ties with the junta and make sure that any tentative contacts with the Americans remained just that–tentative. Powerful Chinese Communist Party politburo member and likely future president Xi Jinping came in December 2009. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao followed in June 2010. There were other visits, too, by other politburo members, provincial governors and party secretaries. Dozens of economic agreements were signed and promises made of further cooperation.

Chinese support for the Burmese military regime is sometimes lumped together with its support for other countries inimical to the West, like Sudan or Zimbabwe, and its growing commercial presence there viewed as comparable to its quickly expanding relations with many other poorer countries, especially in Africa. These too were countries that were able to provide raw materials and where Chinese economic interests appeared to be trumping any other consideration.

Burma was something qualitatively different as it was alone in sitting right next to a newly invigorated Chinese hinterland. There has been an unprecedented migration of ethnic Chinese into Burma, one of the largest waves of Chinese emigration in history, with estimates now running in the millions. The border has become blurred. And between the two countries there is a long and convoluted history, not always friendly by any means. The Chinese are not in a position to tell the Burmese what to do and are keenly aware that Burmese nationalism has often had China in its sights. And any backlash in Burma or violence along the border would have serious consequences for Beijing. Burma sits on top of the Bay of Bengal and will soon be southwestern China’s access to the sea as well as a conduit for its twenty-first-century energy needs. The stakes will only climb higher.

In late 2010, as the Burmese elections approached, and with the remaining ceasefires still holding, Burma, under the increasingly watchful eye of Beijing, appeared to be lurching firmly towards China. In August, Chinese warships made their first ever call at Rangoon. A week later Burmese supremo, General Than Shwe himself, travelled to China and was received with great honours. China’s President Hu Jintao called for stability along the frontier and declared that maintaining good relations with Burma was ‘the unswerving policy’ of his country.

But there is another Asian giant, also waiting in the wings. Less than two months before travelling to Beijing, General Than Shwe made another rare foreign visit, to New Delhi, and was received there with equally open arms. The symbolism on both sides was clear: for the Burmese, the visit was a demonstration that it would seek to balance China with India. And for the Indians it was a signal that Burma was of increasing strategic significance, and that Delhi would not sit idly by and allow China to cement its economic hold over the country. A slew of economic agreements were signed here too and plans for new overland connections between Burma and India were finalized and set into motion. India’s historic ties to Burma are even deeper than China’s and indeed, for most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, India and Burma were both part of British India. Just after Than Shwe visited New Delhi, and before he travelled to Beijing,
The Economist
ran the cover story ‘China and India: Contest of the Century’, arguing that the relationship between the new powers was destined to shape world politics. India was another and critical piece of the emerging puzzle.

From afar, China’s push across Burma seemed straightforward, but close up what is unfolding is incredibly complex, involving not only the two governments, but many other peoples, histories and relationships in between. And in India, too, as we will see, the region across the border from Burma is at least as complex, with its own once independent kingdoms, highland communities, conflicting nationalist narratives, and ongoing insurgencies. More than a thousand years ago, the emperor of China sought, in vain, to find a southwestern passage to India. But in just these few decades, once insurmountable geographical and political barriers are being overcome. A millennia-old frontier has reached the hills and valleys between Burma and Yunnan and is sliding over into a world of unfinished civil war and uncertain political futures. China and India are now also closer to one another than at any time before.

Whilst visiting China in 1938, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru told Chiang Kai-shek: ‘More and more, I think of India and China pulling together in the future.’ Nehru was at the time a leader of the Indian National Congress and would go on to become the country’s first prime minister. He saw China as a friend and as a natural partner in leading post-colonial Asia. And even after the communist take-over of China, his vision of close Sino-Indian cooperation remained strong. Under Nehru’s leadership, independent India remained formally neutral in the new Cold War and focused its attentions on building up the Non-Aligned Movement, the grouping largely of Asian and African countries that vowed to steer clear of American or Soviet military alliances. Nehru wanted both India and China to have major roles in this new ‘developing world’ and made it possible for Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to take part in its inaugural meeting, even though communist Beijing was clearly an ally of Moscow. Not long before, Nehru even turned down an American offer of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council (now much coveted by New Delhi) in protest against Washington’s refusal to offer the same to the Chinese communist regime. Pandit Nehru had spent much of his life as a leader of India’s non-violent campaign against British rule, alongside and as a student of Mahatma Gandhi. He saw India’s foreign policy in an idealistic light.

China’s leadership saw things differently. They had come to power in a blood-soaked civil war and would go on to fight the Americans to a standstill in Korea. They adopted an expansive view of China’s geography and aggressively sought to resurrect the boundaries of the Manchu Empire. By 1951 they were on India’s doorstep. That year, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet, and eight years later crushed a Tibetan uprising, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee to India, where he was warmly welcomed and has lived ever since. China and India now shared a 1,240-mile-long border and by the late 1950s disputes over the border had led to mutual recriminations and increasing tensions. Pandit Nehru’s dream of Sino-Indian cooperation withered and then collapsed entirely in 1962 with a war that has coloured perceptions on both sides ever since.

The origins of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, like so many conflicts of the past half century, actually go back to colonial times and the drawing up of the border between what was then British India and Beijing’s Manchu rulers. In 1825, the British East India Company gained control over the erstwhile Burmese possession of Assam. Assam is today a state in India’s northeast, but had been an independent country for centuries before coming first under Burmese occupation in the early nineteenth century and then under British colonial rule. To the north of Assam was Tibet, at the time part of the Manchu Empire, but the boundaries were unclear. This had not mattered much at first. For a while colonial policy-makers were not even sure what to do with Assam, but soon Assam grew in significance once it was discovered that its upland plains were an ideal place to grow Britain’s new favourite drink–tea. An obvious and natural boundary between Assam and Tibet were the Himalayas. Colonial agents, however, learned that in the foothills south of the Himalayas were people who spoke Tibetan as well as others who practised Tibetan Buddhism. At Tawang, in the foothills, there was even an important Tibetan monastery that had been the birthplace of the Sixth Dalai Lama. The British would have either to risk a foreign presence dangerously close to their new tea-rich possessions or come up with a fudge.

The British then ‘discovered’ a distinction between what they called ‘Outer Tibet’ (the main part of Tibet north of the Himalayas and including the capital Lhasa) and the foothills that were to the south of the Himalayas but north of the Assam valley. The foothills would be incorporated into British India, though only lightly administered, if at all. Tibet itself was not particularly important, but from the 1830s the British were concerned about growing Russian influence throughout Central Asia. Russia was Britain’s competitor in the ‘Great Game’, and British Indian strategists worried about Russian intrigue in Lhasa. The British also had no desire to see Manchu Chinese forces too close to their Indian territories.

In 1905, an expeditionary force under Francis Younghusband had somewhat cavalierly invaded Tibet, killing many lightly armed Tibetan defenders, before withdrawing, not having achieved very much. A few year later however, when the Manchu Empire collapsed and the Dalai Lama’s regime declared itself fully independent, British diplomats were able swiftly to take advantage of the new environment. A separate boundary agreement was soon concluded with Lhasa. The ‘McMahon Line’ (named after the British diplomat Henry McMahon who negotiated the agreement in 1914) recognized the highest ridges of the Himalayas as the border between Tibet and British India, leaving the Tibetan-speaking foothills on the British side. The government of China protested but couldn’t do anything about it. From the 1910s until the 1951 invasion, Tibet proper was isolated and independent, whilst the British in India continued to govern, lightly, the Tibetan-speaking areas just north of Assam. When the British left India in 1948, these Tibetan and culturally related areas became part of the new Indian dominion as the ‘Northeast Frontier Agency’.

Independent India and communist China thus inherited a border that could easily be disputed. Pandit Nehru’s government, though espousing eternal friendship with Beijing, was adamant that the McMahon Line remain the international frontier. The Chinese rejected the McMahon Line as a colonial artifice. Of course the Chinese claim rested in turn on the Chinese claim to Tibet, and their vision of Beijing as the inheritor of all areas that had once been under Manchu suzerainty, however tenuous or fleeting. For a while, no one complained too much. But the arrival of the Dalai Lama in India in 1959 created new pressures. Beijing began insisting that all the foothills below the McMahon Line were part of China.

The Chinese army had also started building a road through a remote wind-swept desert far to the west, near Kashmir. It was on the other end of the Himalayan range, at a place called Aksai Chin. The Chinese had no historical claim at all to Aksai Chin but this did not deter them. Aksai Chin would be another area of contention. In those days, Beijing had road access to its far-western possessions in Xinjiang; Aksai Chin was the critical link that would allow this road to continue on to Tibet. There was as yet no direct road (as now exists) from China proper to Tibet. China and India had talks on both issues, the McMahon Line and Aksai Chin, but diplomacy went nowhere. There were clashes along the border. Pandit Nehru apparently believed that the Chinese would eventually back down and, despite objections from senior military officers, he pursued a ‘Forward Policy’, establishing Indian outposts along or even beyond the McMahon Line in the frozen Himalayan peaks. Nationalist feelings ran high on both sides.

In December 1961 the Indian army invaded the Portuguese-controlled enclave of Goa in the south of the country and incorporated Goa into the Indian republic. This act, together with India’s ‘Forward Policy’ and its very public support for the Dalai Lama, fuelled Chinese anxieties. The Chinese also feared potential Indian ties to the Americans, who were busy funding and equipping Tibetan insurgents (as well as the Chinese Nationalist fighters based in Burma). In a late round of negotiations, Beijing essentially offered to let India keep the disputed territory in the northeast in return for recognition of its annexation of Aksai Chin, which it viewed at the time as being of greater strategic importance. The offer was rejected.

Then, in October 1962, the Chinese launched a massive two-front assault. This was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Beijing knew high-level international attention was firmly fixed elsewhere. Two Chinese divisions attacked in waves, supported with machine guns and heavy mortars. In the western theatre (around Aksai Chin), the Chinese overran key Indian positions, despite a spirited defence, and then marched towards Leh, the capital of the erstwhile kingdom of Ladakh, and in 1963 part of Indian-administered Kashmir. In the east, Chinese troops advanced along a 500-mile front, descending from the Himalayan passes, and seizing Tawang on 24 October. The Indians were woefully unprepared and were outnumbered five to one. The Indian army was trained for tank battles on the plains and deserts along the border with Pakistan, and not for fighting in frozen mountain conditions. The Chinese for their part had been fighting not only in Korea against the Americans but in Tibet itself and could be much more easily resupplied from their high-altitude positions.

Reinforcements including light tanks were rushed in from Calcutta, the Punjab and elsewhere. But it was to no avail. By mid-November, the Chinese had wiped out nearly all Indian positions in the east and were on the outskirts of the major town of Tezpur in the heart of Assam. The local government soon fled, after burning all the cash in the local bank and freeing all the inmates from the mental asylum. After the Indian 48th Brigade collapsed on 20 November, there was no organized Indian military force left on either front. The rout was complete. The next day, the Chinese ordered a ceasefire and retreated back to the McMahon Line.

The Chinese got what they wanted–control over the road from Xinjiang to Tibet, and the removal of any Indian threat, real or imagined, beyond the McMahon Line. Beijing had also humiliated New Delhi. India was left in shock and with a dread of China as a mortal threat. In the decades that followed, however, both countries had other preoccupations and the border dispute was left on the back burner. China was soon convulsed by its own Cultural Revolution. And India was again distracted by its wars with Pakistan. Both were also in their very different ways trying to hold together their gigantic new nations. To the extent that China focused on the rest of Asia, it was to export its brand of communism through local communist movements in places like Indonesia, Thailand and Burma, and to support North Vietnam’s war against the South and later the Khmer Rouge against the American-backed government in Phnom Penh. In all these places, India didn’t bother to have much influence at all.

Neither Beijing nor New Delhi was then thinking about economic opportunities abroad. And southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s did not present an especially enticing market. The end of colonial rule had often proved a violent process and the region was wracked by bloody conflicts and civil unrest. There were wars in Indochina leaving millions dead and entire countries in ruins. In Indonesia, mass killings followed the military coup of 1966. There would be a long-running insurgency in Aceh and in 1975 the Indonesian army invaded East Timor, until then a Portuguese colonial possession. The Burmese communist rebellion was at its height. In 1978 Vietnam invaded genocidal Cambodia and the entire region was divided between Vietnam and its ally Laos on the one side, and those countries, like Thailand and Indonesia, who opposed the Vietnamese-installed regime. Poverty remained endemic, except in a few small places like the island-state of Singapore.

The two Asian giants only began to improve relations in the 1980s. Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Pandit Nehru, travelled to China in 1988, and was the first prime minister to do so since his grandfather went in 1954. China’s elder statesman Deng Xiaoping met with Rajiv Gandhi and told him, ‘If there should be an Asian Age in the next century, then it can only be realized after both India and China become developed economies.’ Many more high-level trips followed, in both directions. In 2005, during a visit of Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao to New Delhi, his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh said, ‘India and China can together reshape the world order.’ There were shades of an old ambition, of India and China taking their places as global powers, but in the contest for regional economic influence China was already far ahead.

India for me was never quite a foreign country. My parents were born in the 1930s, at a time when Burma was still part of the Indian Empire; my great-grandfather had studied at Calcutta University in the late nineteenth century and I remember seeing when I was a small child the portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru in my grandfather’s study. I was drawn to Burma’s part in the British India story and this led me to graduate work at Cambridge where I studied under historians of the British Raj. On trips back to Rangoon, I sought out people of the older generation, including in my own family, who were, from the way they spoke English and in their learning more generally, very much products of the Empire. It was a colonial legacy that was still very present in the 1980s.

In 1995 I spent two months travelling through parts of India, from Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills (where I was very graciously given an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama), down through Rajasthan to Bombay and then around south India. And over the years, I made other, much shorter trips to New Delhi, mainly for work but also to see old friends. When I went back in 2008 and 2009, reports about India’s ‘rise’ in the world were everywhere in the news, in the West and in India too. There seemed an endless stream of books and articles celebrating India’s economic success as well as others warning Americans and Europeans of the dangers that the rise of India was posing to present and future jobs. India was now a nuclear power, its military modernizing fast, and its IT companies amongst the best in the world. Over the first decade of the new millennium, India’s stock market had been yielding returns for investors of up to 350 per cent a year. Indian millionaires and billionaires were more visible at fashionable events in the West than at any time since the heyday of the maharajas during the British Raj, Indian writer Aravind Adiga had just won the Booker prize for
The White Tiger
, and even India’s space agency was sending its Chandrayaan rocket on an unmanned mission to the moon. And while lifting millions from poverty, India had remained a democracy and a free if at times tumultuous society.

Back in Delhi, though, I could see little that had changed since I was last there in the 1990s, at least on the surface. The airport was singularly unimpressive, with mouldy walls and long queues (though a new terminal has since been built), and the road into town was as slow, chaotic and noisy as ever. Monkeys wandered around freely, both individually and in small groups. And though there were several smart hotels, they were all hugely overpriced, and still nothing very special by the standards of Asia’s ultra-luxurious tourist industry. A few stylish bars and clubs had cropped up in recent years and away from the centre of the city were new shopping malls and office and apartment complexes. And there was as well a very new subway, as good as any in the world, with punctual trains and immaculate stations. But there was nothing like the transformations further east, in Beijing and elsewhere. Instead, in Delhi, the past still seemed all around.