Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (4 page)

American, British and French warships had appeared within days off the coast with offers of help. But after years of sanctions, vociferous condemnation, and active support for the opposition, Burma’s generals were unsurprisingly reluctant to accept help from any Western military, all the more so after President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush separately renewed their condemnation of the regime less than forty-eight hours after the cyclone had struck. For three long weeks there was a stalemate, as the Burmese authorities prioritized their own security fears over the fate of millions of survivors; Burmese nationals were allowed to deliver aid, and all aid, including military-transported aid, was accepted from friendly governments (like India) but Westerners were kept from entering the disaster zone, including the UN disaster teams most needed. The small stream of aid reaching cyclone victims was nothing like what was required. There were then calls for forceful intervention as well as intensive diplomacy. Finally the junta agreed to a mechanism involving themselves, the United Nations, and the regional organization known as ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). It was a face-saver for them, as well as a way of ensuring that no Western soldiers would set foot on Burmese soil. Dozens of UN agencies and international charities then began delivering food and medicines directly to affected communities. Luckily for everyone, a much feared ‘second wave of deaths’ from waterborne illness never materialized.

‘It’s shameful that funding for Burma has been so low’, a long-time aid official in Rangoon told me. Burma receives less international assistance than any other developing country, about $4 [US] a year per person compared to ten times that for communist Laos next door. We were meeting over coffee in the lobby of the Chatrium Hotel, several months after Nargis. The Chatrium had become the hotel of choice for UN officials and the growing aid community, thanks to its central location, reasonable rates, and decent internet connection. The bigger trees nearby had been knocked down by the storm, but it was still pleasantly green outside. A sign out front said that a meeting on ‘Food Security’ was scheduled for 3 p.m. in the ballroom.

‘Tens of thousands of people die every year from treatable diseases,’ he said. ‘Yes, the government is autocratic, but there are dozens of other places around the world, with equally bad governments, where we give far more in humanitarian aid.’ Even aid for cyclone victims was low. Despite all the brouhaha at the time and calls for invasion to help these people, once there actually was opportunity to help directly, the money was less than forthcoming. Altogether, about half a billion dollars worth of assistance has been given to Cyclone Nargis victims, compared with the $10 billion that went into reconstructing Aceh after the tsunami. Everybody said they supported humanitarian aid to Burma’s poorest. But in practice, Western governments generally shied away.

By 2009, though, there were some glimmers of possible change. The junta had embarked on what they called a ‘Roadmap to Democracy’, carefully scripted, and leading to a new constitution and a plan for fresh elections the following year. Many in the NLD rejected this constitution as being insufficiently democratic, more a device to sanctify rather than end military domination. Like past constitutions in Indonesia and Thailand, this one allotted a quarter of the seats in the legislature to the armed forces, providing future generals an effective veto in parliament. The president would only be indirectly elected, and the army would retain control over security-related ministries. All this provoked considerable debate. Not so much amongst ordinary people, who worried more about simply getting by, but amongst government officials, dissidents and other activists, aid workers and intellectuals, as well as the sizeable community of expatriates now living and working in Rangoon.

Some saw little more than an attempt to create a fig-leaf for continued military rule. ‘How can we trust them! You’ll see, they just want legitimacy, and to continue in power forever. We can’t sacrifice our principles now, not for a constitution that is so far from what we’ve fought for all these years.’ Others, however, saw an opportunity for change. ‘Even a mixed civilian–military government is better than what we have now, which is pure army rule,’ one university lecturer argued. ‘What’s the alternative? Revolution? It won’t happen here! We need to be pragmatic. We need to move step by step, to broaden government, bring in new people, and focus on actual policies. The army has to be kept on board. Dreaming of instant democracy won’t get us anywhere.’

In all my visits to Rangoon, these arguments were made to me many times by many people. Foreign diplomats, UN officials and what was left of the Burmese intelligentsia gathered around in receptions and dinners and speculated endlessly about the junta’s latest actions or decrees. Distrust of the ruling generals was sky high. But with the ruling generals in their late sixties and seventies and at least the prospect of some kind of election and some kind of new government, there was also an air of transition.

There was a lot of talk about the minutiae of Burmese politics, but there was far less discussion of the much bigger drama that seemed to me to be unfolding all around. Far away in Europe and America there was constant speculation about ‘the rise of India and China’, and its effect on everything from climate change to jobs, to more generally on the world’s economy and political order. There was nervousness that hundreds of years of Western domination was finally coming to an end and that different priorities and different values would need to be accommodated like never before. The West’s entanglements in the Islamic world and the threats of terrorism were diverting attention in other directions, especially for foreign-policy and security establishments. But for business investors and others with a more long-term horizon, the emergence of a modernizing India and especially a modernizing China was unmistakably the most important issue of our lifetimes. Sitting one evening in my hotel room, I watched a panel on CNN debate what China’s and India’s continued economic growth would mean for the world. I wondered what it would mean for Burma and I knew that, although the focus in Rangoon was on internal politics, elsewhere others were beginning to look at Burma in a very different way.

In the heart of downtown Rangoon, close to the waterfront, is Mughal Street. In 1858, when the Indian Mutiny (or ‘The First War of Indian Independence’) was crushed, the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was banished to Rangoon, where he lived in a small house next to the Shwedagon pagoda until his death four year later. His tomb has since become a Sufi shrine, attracting pilgrims as well as a regular stream of dignitaries from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. He brought with him dozens of courtiers and attendants and today many of the shopkeepers and others on Mughal Street claim descent from this exiled court. It’s a broad street, running towards the river, with little girls in veils and boys in snow-white skullcaps on their way to a madrassa, several kebab shops and halal restaurants, as well as a surprising and sizeable concentration of optometrists. Walking around one morning I noticed a small medical clinic with a sign saying ‘Trained in Edinburgh’ and wondered what youthful memories of Scotland lingered behind.

There is in this part of Rangoon a wonderful mixing of cultures and religions from across the Indian subcontinent. The Indian population is now only a fraction of what it once was, and what is left is like a museum piece, a living remnant of a past connection. There is a grand banyan tree with statues and portraits of the Hindu gods Hanuman and Rama and the goddess Sita. And a few blocks away is the Mughal Shia mosque as well as several Sunni mosques, including ones belonging to the city’s sizeable Bengali and Tamil Muslim communities. There’s an eighteenth-century Armenian church, a Jain temple and a Parsi fire-temple, a temple to the Tantric goddess Kali and a multi-coloured temple to the Hindu elephant god Ganesh.

There is even a Jewish synagogue, the Musmeah Yeshua synagogue, right in the heart of the Muslim quarter. In the years before World War Two, Rangoon was home to over 2,000 Jews (out of a population of about half a million). The leading families, the Sophaers, the Cohens, and the Sassoons, were, like their cousins in India, from a mix of Ashkenazi and Sephardic backgrounds, but most were immigrants from Baghdad who had reached Burma in the late nineteenth century. There was a Judah Ezekiel street, named after an early settler, and Rangoon even had a Jewish mayor–David Sophaer–in the 1930s. They have now almost all left, all except for about twenty, for the US and Israel and elsewhere, but the handsome synagogue is still there, and recently refurbished. On a rainy afternoon, Moses Samuels, the caretaker, proudly showed me the two Torahs that remained (dozens of others have been surreptitiously removed to Israel over the years), and I was introduced to his son, Sammy Samuels, back home after graduating from Yeshivah University in New York.

There is a long-standing Chinese community as well in Rangoon. They are not recent immigrants but the descendants of people who came from two directions: by sea and overland. The Chinese who came by sea were part of the worldwide Chinese diaspora, that stretched from Singapore to San Francisco. They were from the coastal provinces along China’s southeast coast and spoke not the Mandarin Chinese of Beijing, but a mix of different southern dialects like Cantonese and Fukienese. The Cantonese in Rangoon were mainly artisans and were called by the Burmese ‘the short sleeve’ or
let-to
Chinese for the short-sleeve shirts they wore. The Fukienese were mainly merchants and were known as the ‘long sleeve’ or
let-shay
Chinese. Few Burmese cared to probe beyond these distinctions. As in most places, Chinese immigrants were industrious and seen as good business men. And, as many immigrants were single men, they normally took Burmese wives, a practice not particularly frowned upon and one that has led over the centuries to many in Rangoon having some Chinese ancestry. More than a hundred years ago, the top British official in Burma wrote of this group: ‘Most mixed races in the East seem to inherit the vices of both parents, but [the mixed Chinese–Burmese] seems to have been endowed with the good qualities of both his father and his mother. He is intelligent, steady, and industrious, and decidedly superior in many ways to the pure Burman.’ But except for these Chinese and mixed Chinese families, not many in Rangoon knew or cared much about China in those days. Nothing about China was taught in schools and most aspects of Chinese culture would have been a mystery to the average Burmese.

On the streets of downtown Rangoon, Indian and Chinese worlds nowadays appear almost in collision: the kebab shops and Hindu shrines, the bearded men and women in saris yielding almost entirely, after a heterogeneous zone of a block or two, to joss houses, men in baggy shorts and shop signs in Chinese characters. Chinatown is right next to the Indian quarter and has its noisy and crowded little restaurants and karaoke bars, an imposing Hokkien temple, and stores selling herbal medicine, offering acupuncture, and cut-price flights to Taiwan and Hong Kong.

This collision of the older Indian and Chinese worlds is a friendly and cosmopolitan one. But a much newer and far bigger collision, perhaps friendly as well, but with at least the potential for conflict, is fast approaching.

As British planners a century ago looked at the map and thought big thoughts, now Chinese planners have been doing the same. China’s development has been concentrated on its eastern coast, from Beijing and Shanghai south towards Hong Kong. Yet to the west are still many poor and backward areas and these include areas with many non-Han Chinese minorities. The planners have been vexed by this gap between a prosperous east coast and a relatively underdeveloped interior. What China is lacking is its California, another coast that would provide its remote interior provinces with an outlet to the sea. Chinese academics have written about a ‘Two Oceans’ policy. The first ocean is the Pacific. The second would be the Indian Ocean. They didn’t say that Burma would become China’s California, but clearly they saw Burma as the bridge to the Bay of Bengal and the waters beyond.

They have also written about their ‘Malacca Dilemma’. China is heavily dependent on foreign oil and approximately 80 per cent of these oil imports currently pass through the Straits of Malacca, near Singapore, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and just 1.7 miles across at the narrowest point. For Chinese strategists, the straits are a natural chokepoint, through which future enemies could cut off foreign energy supplies. An alternative route needs to be found. Burma again is a key.

In Rangoon itself there are few signs of a dramatic Chinese push south. On a flight in from Thailand in late 2008, I found myself sitting in the middle of a big group of middle-aged men who were speaking Mandarin, snapping photographs of one another, flipping through the duty-free catalogue (one bought a watch, the first time I’ve ever seen anyone buy a watch on a plane) and enjoying the free drinks and savoury snacks. A few hours later, at my hotel, I discovered that the group were a touring high-level delegation from Harbin, a northern Chinese city in what was once Manchuria, close to the Russian border. A big banner had been draped across the entrance that read ‘Welcome to the Vice-Governor of Heilongjiang Province and Party’ and I saw the same group lounging in the reception area, talking and smoking cigarettes. Otherwise I had seen very few other visitors from the People’s Republic, only stories in the papers reporting on this and other visits from high-ranking officials and businessmen.

Chinese plans, though, aren’t just talk. In the early 1990s the Burmese–Chinese border, after decades shut, was reopened to trade. Since then, an estimated one to two million Chinese have made their homes–temporary and permanent–in northern and north east Burma. Chinese businesses have come to dominate much of the economy, with Chinese owning and running everything from small shops to big mining and construction firms. Roads have been built linking Chinese border towns to the valley of the Irrawaddy River and beyond. And much bigger plans are afoot. Reversing old British dreams, the Chinese have proposed connecting China to the Burmese coast by high-speed rail so that Chinese products could be shipped from new factories in the Chinese interior direct to the Indian Ocean. Massive hydroelectric dams are being built in Burma’s far north that when completed will produce as much electricity as China’s famous Three Gorges Dam, the vast majority of which will go to China. And most importantly of all, work has recently begun on an oil and gas pipeline that, in a couple of years, will start to transport Burma’s newly found offshore gas to China’s Yunnan province, as well as oil from the Middle East and Africa. It’s a strategic hedge against the Straits of Malacca, one that may bring Chinese political influence right up to the Indian Ocean, for the first time in history.