Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (7 page)

Here he sits on this throne, the enormous teak pillars holding up the darkened roof, his princes and ministers lying prostrate on the ground before him, the music of flutes and drums off to the side, the blue black mountains in the distance, like some sylvan lord in a fairy tale.

In a military dictatorship, a general’s whim is quickly turned to reality, and the palace reproduction was completed within a couple of years. But what had first been constructed in teak was now constructed in concrete and then painted over in red and gold. The reason was understandable. Concrete would last longer than wood. Each individual structure was remade as an exact replica. But the overall impression was disappointing. In concrete, unpopulated and without the strange interiors, there was no sense of the original’s fantastic and almost whimsical quality. At the rear of the site, in one of the larger pavilions, was a sort of museum with some of the old royal costumes on display in glass cases and a row of stiff portraits, photographs of the princes and ministers of the extinguished court. The rebuilding of the old palace would be the start of a trend, to underline Burma’s pre-colonial past: other old palaces were rebuilt, statues of old kings erected in various towns, and news of archaeological discoveries eagerly announced.

It was perhaps, then, natural that the junta decided, some time in the early 2000s, to follow traditional practice and build a whole new capital as well–a couple of hundred miles south of Mandalay, in the old heartland of upper Burma. Since about 2004, construction has continued almost non-stop; there are now several gargantuan public buildings (like the parliament that in 2010 was still to be completed), a vast parade ground, many more smaller ministry offices, and literally hundreds of apartment blocks for civil servants, private homes for more senior officials, shopping centres, landscaped gardens, golf courses (ubiquitous in Burma since the days of Scottish traders) and even a zoo.

For junta supremo General Than Shwe, being remembered as the founder of the new capital (as Mindon is titled in the royal chronicles as ‘the Founder of Mandalay’) was almost certainly a key motivation. There were likely other motivations. The declared reason was that the new city, Naypyitaw, which in Burmese means simply ‘The Capital’, was in a much more central geographical location than Rangoon. This is true. Naypyitaw is exactly half-way between Rangoon and Mandalay, and within easy reach of the restive Shan Hills and border areas further north and east. New roads have been built to provide it with easy access to different parts of the country. It is also far from the coast and the paranoia of the ruling generals about a possible American seaborne invasion cannot be under-estimated. And finally the new capital provides an insurrection-proof geography. Western media reports often refer to Naypyitaw as Burma’s ‘jungle capital’ or, to add even greater mystery, its ‘jungle hideout’. It is nothing of the kind. It is set amongst what was farmland, in an otherwise hot and dusty landscape, with the old British railway and logging town of Pyinmana now included within its boundaries.

The shift in capitals came without any warning. On the morning of 6 November 2005, the staff of all government ministries simply packed up and left, being told to do so just the day before. There had been rumours that a new administrative centre was in the making, but not much more. Even Beijing was caught unawares. The building of the new capital was a mark of the regime’s nativist tendencies, the sudden move a reminder of its secrecy. And in not telling China beforehand, the regime signalled that, whatever Beijing wanted, they saw themselves as something other than a client state. The Chinese may have thought that in the Burmese regime, especially under Western sanctions, they had an easy and ready-made partner, but in this they would be frustrated.

Relations between the Burmese and Chinese governments today are good, at least on the surface, but it has not always been this way. In the late 1940s and 1950s Burma’s leaders were keen to curry favour with the new People’s Republic and became the very first country outside the Soviet bloc to recognize the new communist state. This was not so much the result of any ideological attraction (though many in the Burmese government were then of a left-wing bent), but an innate sense of the country’s vulnerability next to a Chinese Goliath that had just been reborn after decades of civil war. The border was a somewhat arbitrary colonial one and Chinese maps were showing considerable swathes of northern and eastern Burma as part of their territory.

In 1949, as most of the defeated Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek retreated across the straits to Taiwan, another section slipped over into Burma, hoping to use Burma as a base for a recapture of China. Rangoon was fearful of Beijing’s displeasure, attacking Nationalist bases, and building up its army to do so. Beijing’s policy at the time was to court the Burmese and both sides made sure problems along the border did not get in the way of good relations. In 1960 the Burmese army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army even launched a joint operation along the border, effectively ending any serious threat from the Chinese Nationalists.

Later in the 1960s, however, relations between Burma and its big neighbour worsened dramatically. By the middle years of that decade, China had come under the grip of its Cultural Revolution, and radicals were trying actively to encourage communist insurgencies elsewhere in Asia. There was already a significant, home-grown, communist insurgency in Burma, but they were then on a back foot, with no real hope of armed victory. China’s communist radicals wanted to change this. After a series of bloody internal purges, copycats of the kind taking place in China, the Communist Party of Burma converted itself into a Maoist organization, with a new batch of Chinese-trained leaders waiting just across the border. At the same time, the Chinese embassy in Rangoon began to stir up trouble. The embassy had been allowed to fund Chinese-language schools in Rangoon and these schools started teaching a Maoist curriculum, aimed at turning their students into Burma-based Red Guards, whilst at the same time Chinese embassy officials openly distributed copies of Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ and other propaganda. Tensions rose, not only with the Burmese government, but with the Burmese people generally.

Violence erupted in June 1967 after stories circulated of Chinese students assaulting their Burmese teachers, and for three days Chinese people and property were attacked by mobs all around Rangoon. Chinese schools were burnt down, together with the Chinese information centre, as well as ordinary homes and shops. A Chinese aid worker was knifed. Thousands of people tried to storm the embassy itself but were driven back by government troops who opened fire, wounding nine people. Only armed patrols with machine guns were able to drive the population back indoors.

The reply from China was swift. Gargantuan crowds of more than 300,000 placard-waving Chinese gathered in the pouring rain outside the Burmese embassy in Beijing calling for the overthrow of the ‘fascist’ Burmese military regime. More importantly, Chinese support for the insurgent Communist Party of Burma swelled and in early 1968 a large force, ostensibly led by exiled Burmese communists but in fact officered by Chinese, crossed over from Yunnan and seized a big slice of territory in the eastern hills. It was nothing less than an invasion from China. At one point the communists were within striking range of Mandalay, stopped only by the tenacious resistance of the Burmese army. For twenty more years the fighting between the Burmese government and communist forces would continue, at great cost especially to the local civilian population. Only by the late 1970s, as the political scene in China changed, did Beijing ratchet down its support for the Communist Party of Burma. Both sides then took a pragmatic stance and relations slowly began to improve. By the mid-1980s there were talks about renewing trade and the first Chinese business scouts arrived in Mandalay, exploring opportunities. From then, relations, especially economic relations, would grow quickly. But the shadows of the past remained.

The new Chinese in Mandalay were entrepreneurs, taking advantage of the new openings, and over the coming days I saw them everywhere, shopping in the more expensive shops and eating in big groups in the Chinese restaurants all over town. At night they (the men, at least) frequented the many karaoke bars and massage parlours that had popped up near 78th Street. It’s not always easy to distinguish a Burmese from a Chinese. The Burmese tend to be darker, with more rounded or deep-set eyes, and perhaps a narrower or more prominent nose, but the difference is sometimes slight, and in both countries there’s a wide variety of appearances. But these new Chinese were easy to spot, never dressed in a Burmese
longyi
(as many of the Burma-born Chinese were), but in the somewhat baggy, Western-style clothes of modern China.

I met one by chance at the office of a friend. My friend ran a small import–export firm and the Chinese man, a businessman in a beige safari-suit, bowing and smiling, was just leaving. He spoke some English and he said he had been in Mandalay only a few months but was excited by the prospects. He said new roads and future railways would bring the two countries closer than ever before, leading to growing business ties and better cooperation. He was looking at the possibility of investing in a factory (he didn’t say what kind) and had been involved before in importing Burmese timber and gems. ‘It’s kind of a golden age for China–Burma relations’, he said.

It was a confidence that came from feeling that history was on their side. And that their ways had proved better. Very recently, a ‘Confucius Institute’ was set up in Mandalay, one of several in Burma, providing language training as well as other courses about China. And in the same way that Western observers saw Burma’s poverty and misgovernment and assumed Western models provided the answer, the Chinese did the same. I thought of an inscription, which I think is still there, on the wall of a nineteenth-century Chinese temple on the outskirts of Mandalay, that reads, ‘Enlightenment finds its way even among the outer barbarians.’

The enormous influx of Chinese people and Chinese investment in many ways parallels the Indian influx of similar (or even greater) size a century before. The Chinese were bringing in much-needed money and skills and the country could well benefit from closer contacts with its fast-developing neighbour. Being next to the biggest growth engine in the world could be an enormous boon. And, like many of the Indian immigrants in the early twentieth century, the Chinese immigrants of the early twenty-first saw Burma as a land of opportunity. They were not grand strategists or politicians. Many were far from rich and were seeking to improve their lives the only way they knew how. But the intensity of resentment from local people suggested that a backlash of sorts might not be far beyond the horizon. The Indians had come under the protection of colonial rule. And the Chinese were now coming into a Burma that was independent but lacked political freedom. People felt they had no choice but to accept what was happening and bide their time.

Draw a circle around Mandalay with a radius of only a little more than 700 miles. That circle reaches west over Bangladesh and across the hill states of India, to Assam, West Bengal, Orissa and Bihar; north and east to China’s Yunnan and Sichuan provinces and parts of Tibet; and southward to cover most of Laos and Thailand. Within that circle are the homes of no fewer than 600 million people, nearly one in ten of all the people on the planet. And nearly all the people of this Mandalay-centric world are poor–the circle includes as many poor people as all the poor in sub-Saharan Africa. But there is also movement, energy, and uncertain futures. Poverty rates, on the Chinese side at least, are falling fast. Money is being made. On the opposite fringes of this world are Delhi and Beijing, but here in Mandalay it is Chinese influence that is clearly in the ascendancy.

By the time 2010 rolled around, work was already beginning on the oil and gas pipeline and as well as on an entire network of related highways and railways, cutting right past Mandalay on the way to the sea. It seemed on the surface that Burma would be drawn ever more tightly eastward. For the new visionaries of China, the map would soon be changed forever. But what of the Burmese government, the ruling junta? In the Western media they tend to be portrayed as lackeys of Beijing, a client regime that is happy to allow in a flood of Chinese people and goods. The relationship, however, is far more complex.

To the west of Mandalay is the Irrawaddy River. To the east is a vast limestone plateau that rises suddenly and then extends all the way to the Yangtze River and the central provinces of China nearly a thousand miles away.

I hired a car and a driver. The car was a beat-up 1980s Honda and the driver was a young man with white racing gloves who played Burmese rap music the entire way. The rap music phenomenon in Burma was something new to me. And as my personal exposure to new music more or less ended with university in the late 1980s, I am utterly unfamiliar with rap music even in the West and so could not really judge or appreciate what I was hearing. In the weeks ahead I would hear more Burmese rap music, at tea-shops and restaurants, and knew that it was very popular, with concerts by the better-known stars attracting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of young people.

After a few miles, we had left Mandalay’s dusty avenues and were on a bumpy road lined with shady trees, passing little hamlets and open fields, a brown and burnt countryside just after the harvest. Soon we began our ascent. The distance to Maymyo, our destination, was only forty-three miles, but it was 4,000 feet up the limestone cliffs. The road wound around and around, and after about twenty minutes, looking back, the great plain of the Irrawaddy was visible to a distance very far away, including Mandalay and the dozens of little towns all around, the gold of the innumerable and from here tiny-looking pagodas reflecting the afternoon sun. There was a place to stop to admire the view, a half-way point prosaically named ‘21 miles’, and I saw there a Burmese family, their car parked, snapping photographs of each other against the imposing background.

Marco Polo, who never went to Burma but heard about it second-hand, described this area as ‘a very unfrequented country, with great woods abounding in elephants and unicorns and a number of other wild beasts’. The Burma of the lowlands had faded away, and in its place were pine trees and red azaleas, more prosperous-looking farms and white picket fences. The heat and humidity gave way to clear skies and a cool breeze.

The Candacraig hotel looked exactly as I had remembered it from more than a dozen years before. An imposing mock-Tudor house with a gravel driveway and neatly tended grounds, it was probably not much different from how it was a hundred years ago, when it wasn’t a hotel but a ‘chummery’ or ‘bachelor’s quarters’ for the visiting (male) staff of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, an important Scottish logging firm in its day.

There were elegant sliding doors and potted plants and a big teak staircase that led up to the six bedrooms upstairs. On the ground floor, there was a dining room to one side and a small bar on the other. Just outside (stepping out from the bar room) was a well-maintained tennis court, and later I would see four middle-aged Burmese men in whites enjoying a game of doubles. My bedroom was enormous, the size of a small Manhattan apartment, with newly made and not very attractive wooden furniture, a fire place, a rusty bathroom, and an old creaky bed. There were no modern comforts, no television or anything that suggested the twenty-first or even the late twentieth century. It was very quiet and through the open windows I could only hear the sound of rustling leaves from the very tall trees overhead. I was the only guest.

I had arrived early and after some unpacking headed on foot towards the town centre, a couple of miles away. I walked down what had been Park Road, a winding road shaded by soaring pine trees, past homes whose owners long ago had named them ‘Oakhurst’, ‘Ranelagh’, ‘East Ridge’ and ‘Penzille’. Some of these names were still visible on signs. Others I looked up later on an old map of Maymyo. There were all very grand, mainly red-brick, some with a vague Tudor effect and set on an acre or more of land. Some looked well kept with freshly cut grass; others were in poor condition as if no one had lived there for years.

A British writer a hundred years ago had written: ‘To the Burmans of the plains, the climate is unsuited, but natives of Northern India, Gourkas [
sic
], and Europeans, who pay adequate attention to dress and dwelling houses enjoy excellent health.’ I was a Burman (at least by ancestry) but to me the weather was perfect, sunny and cool, perhaps in the low sixties Fahrenheit. The British had tried very hard to evoke a sense of home but everywhere were reminders that this was not Britain–the eucalyptus trees and bougainvillea and the little lizards that were climbing up the walls at the hotel. And in this way, Maymyo seemed less like anything authentically British and more like attempts elsewhere to transport a sense of Britishness, say in North America, Australia or New Zealand.

Very near to where I was walking was where a British army officer named Colonel Henry Morshead had been mysteriously murdered in 1931. Colonel Morshead had served in France and in Waziristan and had been part of early expeditions up Mount Everest. In 1931 he was serving in Burma as Director of the Survey of India. One day, when he was on holiday in Maymyo, he went out for an early morning pony ride. About an hour later his pony returned, riderless and stained with blood. A search was begun at once and an entire battalion of Indian soldiers, Dogras and Madras Pioneers, was later sent into the forests close by. Colonel Morshead’s body was finally found with two bullet wounds. Dacoits were suspected, but the murder remains a mystery. In Jeffrey Archer’s recent novel
Paths to Glory
, Morshead appears as a character, killed in Maymyo in the last chapter, not by a mystery assailant, but by his wife’s secret ‘Pakistani lover’.

I passed ‘Craddock Court’ and then ‘Croxton’, both now hotels as well, the latter once the ‘family holiday home’ of the same Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation that had built the Candacraig. I had seen pictures from this time, of black-tie dinners and fair-haired children in costumes posing at fancy-dress parties. There was polo and other sports at the Maymyo Gymkhana Club, amateur theatricals, and an endless round of parties during the high season. Standing in front of ‘Croxton’, with no one else around other than a very small Indian-looking man trimming the hedges, I had no trouble imagining that time, not as a glamorous Merchant Ivory film, but as real life, where the black tie dinner was followed by a climb up the wooden staircase to a rusty bathroom and an uncomfortable bed.

For the British, Burma was not very interesting in itself, but held an important geographical location, guarding India’s eastern flank. In the 1820s an aggressive Burmese empire had threatened Britain’s own expanding Indian possessions, taking Assam and Manipur (what is today India’s ‘Northeast’) and menacing Bengal. The British were at first drawn in unwittingly, but then came to see control over the Irrawaddy valley and the adjacent hills as a vital part of their defence of India. Burma was a buffer against China as well as against the French, who were then moving up the Mekong River from Saigon.

Burma was also about making money. In addition to the rice, teak and oil of the lowlands, there were many other natural resources here in the highlands as well, ready to be exploited, including tungsten, silver, lead, copper, and zinc. The Scots dominated business, but profit-seekers came from all over the world. One was Herbert Hoover, about twenty years before he became president of the United States, who arrived in Burma as an up-and-coming partner of an international mining company. With a young family in tow, he even lived for a time in Maymyo and set up his own firm to make money from the silver mines recently identified near the Chinese border. He would write that the Burmese were ‘the only truly happy and cheerful race in Asia’. He would also make millions for himself.

In pre-colonial times, demographics and geography kept both India and China far away. There were mountains and jungle and few people in the vast spaces in between Asia’s big civilizations. But by the twentieth century this was changing. Populations were growing and filling in the landscape. And new technologies conquered once forbidding terrain. For most of British rule, the strategic and economic motives were still not there for Burma to become China’s back door. Then in the 1930s the situation changed, as Japanese armies closed in on China’s beleaguered Nationalist government from the east and Burma’s strategic position became obvious for the whole world to see. The Allies would build the ‘Burma Road’ and then the ‘Stilwell Road’, desperate to connect India with China and keep Chinese forces supplied. It is these same roads that are now being remade, but for very different reasons.

For China the route that ran through Maymyo, from the Middle Kingdom to the plains of central Burma, had long been of some significance. Since ancient times Burma had been a source of precious commodities, like amber and jade. And under the final Burmese dynasty, large quantities of cotton and tea had also found their way to Chinese markets. Tea was indigenous to the hills just northeast of Maymyo, and the export of tea across the border was such an important part of the local economy that a Burmese minister in the early nineteenth century dismissed as ‘preposterous’ the British claim that there was tea in China too. Invading armies had also come this way. The Mongols had passed through in the thirteenth century, as did a great Chinese and Manchu force in the seventeenth century, sent to arrest and execute a renegade prince. In the 1700s the Manchus had invaded again, not once but four times, but each time were defeated by a spirited Burmese regime.

In British times the Chinese had turned inward, engulfed in civil war and warlordism. But in the 1930s, as Japanese armies swept through China’s eastern coastline, Burma’s military value sky rocketed, not only for the Chinese but for all the powers fighting Japanese expansion. Overnight, the country turned from back water to strategic centre. For the British, Burma became an essential part of any plan to protect India from the Japanese. For the Americans, Burma was critical to continued access to China and support for the armies of Chiang Kai-shek. And for the Japanese, Burma became a potential springboard to India and Asian domination.

Through the 1930s, Japanese armies had overrun the entire Chinese coastline, from Manchuria to Hong Kong. In 1937, after months of intense fighting, more than 200,000 Japanese imperial troops and naval aircraft had captured Shanghai (other than its Western enclaves) and by the end of 1937, the then capital Nanjing had itself been taken, leading to the killing of as many as 300,000 Chinese men, women and children. The industrial centre of Wuhan was next together with the cities of the south coast. Chiang Kai-shek withdrew his government to Chongqing along the middle Yangtze and continued a stubborn defence. The Chinese–both Chiang’s Nationalist forces and the Communists under Mao Zedong–would soon be tying down no fewer than twenty Japanese divisions. As war between the US and the Axis powers approached, Washington was increasingly anxious to keep China in the fight. Sending help via China’s own port cities was now impossible. A back door via Rangoon was the only option and the Burma Road was born.

From Rangoon, American war materials were sent by both truck and train up to Mandalay and then over the hills, from Maymyo to Lashio, the easternmost railway station in British Burma. A new road then joined Lashio to Chinese-held Kunming, more than 500 miles away. The road was built at literally break-neck speed, by 200,000 Chinese labourers using shovels, or some times nothing but their bare hands, to dig away at hills and mountains. At least 2,000 died in the process. But by 1938, where there had only been dirt tracks and jungle ravines, there was now a road capable of handling military lorries.

The war then came to Burma from the other direction. Beginning in December 1941, Emperor Hirohito’s forces swept through almost all of southeast Asia, from Manila to Jakarta and Singapore, in a series of lightning conquests. For the Japanese, cutting the Burma Road had become a top priority and this they achieved by March 1942, after an invasion of Burma from Thailand and the capture of Rangoon. The British, caught unawares and with little preparation, then began a long northward withdrawal.

On 5 April in Maymyo, an American general, Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, met Chiang Kai-shek. Mrs Luce was there to interview Stilwell for a cover story in
Life
magazine and the British brought out kilted soldiers with bagpipes to welcome the Chinese leader and his wife, the Wellesley College educated ‘Dragon Lady’ Madame Chiang. The Chinese 5th, 6th and 66th Armies were then marching into Burma to join the anti-Japanese fight; 50,000 would soon die. In an innovative and never very satisfactory Allied arrangement, Stilwell had been placed (at least theoretically) in charge of the Chinese forces and appointed as Chiang’s chief of staff. The American press were soon running enthusiastic headlines like ‘Chinese Cavalry Rout Jap Panzers in Burma’ and ‘Look Out Hirohito!’ But within days Mandalay too fell to the enemy and the British were in full retreat. Maymyo and Lashio were overrun and the Burma Road was gone.

The rapid collapse of its entire Far Eastern empire was a humiliating blow to British prestige. Plans were soon drawn up for a reconquest of Burma, to be followed by Malaya and Singapore. Few, however, believed that an overland invasion from India was possible, given the harsh terrain along the Burma–India border, and instead most British commanders favoured an amphibious assault on Rangoon. It would be a repeat of the East India Company’s landing at Rangoon in 1824, which had caught by surprise the forces of the king of Burma. Winston Churchill pushed for Allied support, as without American planes and sea transport little would be possible. But the Americans were not interested. Roosevelt himself, whilst sympathetic to Indian desires for independence, was scathing in his views of the Burmese. He told Churchill:

I have never liked Burma or the Burmese! And you people must have had a terrible time with them for the past fifty years…I wish you could put the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice.

For Washington, the main priority was not liberating Burma itself, but reopening the Burma Road. The US was now battling the Japanese across the Pacific and keeping the Chinese going was a top concern. Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were not entirely isolated as American pilots had begun flying the ‘Over the Hump’, from Calcutta over the eastern Himalayas to Yunnan. But this was an extremely dangerous route and capable of transporting only a fraction of what had been possible via Rangoon. Overland access was urgently needed, but for this the recapture of Rangoon was unnecessary. Instead, the Americans wanted to construct a new road, leading from Ledo in Assam across the northern fringes of Burma to Yunnan. Assam was still firmly in British hands and a railway line ran close to the Burmese border. From there to China was dense jungle and mountains, one after another.