Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (9 page)

Except from China. Relations with China had begun improving from the 1980s and now went from strength to strength. The border was opened up for the first time in decades. In the early 1990s Beijing provided credit for military and other purchases estimated at well over a billion dollars in total. Chinese businesses didn’t care less about the National League for Democracy or whether or not Burma was moving towards democratic government. And though the Asian financial crisis affected China as well, China’s trade ties with Burma continued to expand.

Psychological support from Beijing was equally important, coming at a time when Western powers were cutting off long-standing military ties and just after US warships had appeared off the Rangoon coast. As Western rhetoric in favour of an immediate democratic transition became more shrill, China’s steady declarations of friendship and pledges of ‘non-interference in the internal affairs of Myanmar’ rose in value. The more the British and the Americans berated the regime at the UN, the more Chinese diplomatic protection became essential to the regime’s foreign policy.

Burma’s generals were thankful for China’s friendship. But they were the same generation of generals who had fought nearly all their lives against Chinese-backed communist insurgents (and, some believed, regular Chinese soldiers), seeing their men and fellow officers die by the hundreds. Several generals in the 1990s had been trained in the West and had fond memories of America. In their minds, something wasn’t quite right. The Chinese wanted their friendship to lead to ever closer economic integration. But the junta started hedging their bets.

Fear is too strong a word. But an anxiety about China is deeply ingrained in Burmese thinking. There are the memories of past invasions. All schoolchildren learn of the Tayok-pyay-min, the ‘king who ran away from the Chinese’, the medieval ruler who feared an imminent Chinese assault and abandoned his capital. The defence of the kingdom from eighteenth-century Manchu invaders is celebrated in song and poetry. Though the main invasions from China were led by non-ethnic Chinese rulers–Mongols and Manchus–the Burmese rarely make the distinction. There is no special dislike of China or Chinese culture; dislike suggests a familiarity that is not there. Rather, there is a sense of the dangers of being next to an increasingly powerful and populous nation, whose internal wars and politics have time and again spilled over to wreak havoc on the much smaller country to the southwest.

Through the 1990s improved relations with the Americans and Europeans seemed unlikely. The 1990 election results were still fresh in people’s minds. In 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi was freed after several years under house arrest and called again for the junta to hand over power to the winning NLD. This was never going to happen, but popular campaigns in the West, demonizing the regime and demanding tough punishments, strongly influenced any possibility of improved ties. China at the same time was offering more help, more arms sales, and big plans for closer relations.

The generals turned first to India to try to redress the balance. India, like America, had been a keen supporter of the pro-democracy opposition, but was now in the process of reversing policy. Frosty relations soon thawed and by 1995 the two armies were even undertaking a joint operation, ‘Operation Golden Bird’, to try to dislodge anti-Indian government militant groups sheltering on the Burmese side of the border. Military to military relations were scaled up. Trade ties increased significantly as well, but this trade was of a very different type to that with China. With China, the Burmese ran a huge official trade deficit, importing nearly all consumer goods from China and exporting logs and jade and other precious stones, much of this contraband, as well as heroin. With India, the Burmese had a big trade surplus, as clever entrepreneurs and market-savvy farmers began to grow beans (used to make Indian dal), exporting a billion dollars’ worth by the early 2000s.

The generals also turned to their neighbours to the east and south east, countries like Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, grouped together as the ‘Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ or ASEAN. Some of these countries were also uneasy about China’s free run in Burma and desired a balance. Burma wanted to join the group and this was accepted. Burmese leaders hoped that ASEAN membership would result in a major increase in investment; ASEAN leaders hoped the Burmese would at least compromise with the pro-democracy opposition, more to get Western pressure off their backs than anything else. The first didn’t happen because of the Asian financial crisis. The second didn’t happen because for the Burmese generals compromise, at least negotiated compromise with Aung San Suu Kyi, seemed unnecessary and potentially perilous, the upside very small, the downside much greater.

Then came the prospect of Burma as a major exporter of energy. Burma had once been a significant oil producer in the days before oil was found in Arabia and Persia. It was the Burmah Oil company that had given rise to British Petroleum or BP. By the 1950s, however, most of the oil fields had run dry and the isolationist government under General Ne Win had not bothered to invite outside exploration. This changed in the early 1990s and within a few years a considerable quantity, not of oil but natural gas, was discovered offshore. A potentially enormous amount more was waiting to be found. Proven reserves stand at about 10 trillion cubic feet, but estimates run as high as 90 trillion cubic feet, which would make the Burmese gas fields the tenth largest in the world, worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The big oil companies lined up to develop the fields and win a share of the profits. Thailand was an initial beneficiary and the French company Total built a pipeline connecting one of the gas fields over the hills to near Bangkok, where it was turned into electricity. By 2006, the Burmese military government was receiving over $2 billion a year in revenue from these sales. Competition then heated up for access to another, bigger, field just to the west. A consortium including Indian and South Korean companies was involved in the development of the field, but no decision was taken at first about where the gas would go.

The Koreans wanted to liquefy the gas so that it could be sold to different customers around the world. India wanted a pipe line to its landlocked northeastern states or via Bangladesh to Calcutta. The Chinese wanted a pipeline too, but to their Yunnan province. There were years of opaque negotiations. The Burmese seemed to be edging towards either the Korean or Indian proposals. Then, in January 2006, the US and UK tabled a resolution at the United Nations Security Council condemning the junta’s human-rights record and calling for talks with Aung San Suu Kyi. This would have been the first ever Security Council resolution on Burma, something the government could not easily ignore. The Chinese stepped in and vetoed the resolution. Two months later, news began to appear that the new gas pipeline would be built to China.

But the cement had not yet fully dried on Burma’s new international orientation. No one in Burma wanted the country simply to be a client state of Beijing, and many in the ruling establishment had far greater personal ties westward than to China. Whereas English was widely spoken by the educated class, no Burmese person I knew spoke Chinese. People watched American movies and those with money aspired to send their children to school or university in the US, UK or Australia. Many had relatives across the English-speaking world.

In late 2008 and 2009 both Washington and the Burmese generals took some initial steps to improve relations. This had actually begun during the height of the crisis surrounding Cyclone Nargis, when the first planeload of American aid landing at Rangoon’s airport included not only the head of the US government aid agency, but Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of the US Pacific Command, probably the most senior US military man to set foot in Burma since the Second World War. And the Americans, especially on the military side, were not unaware of China’s growing influence and of how far their own influence had fallen over the past twenty years.

The incoming Obama administration said that ‘engagement’ with the authorities would complement continued ‘sanctions’ and soon the Burmese released over a hundred political prisoners and allowed senior US envoys to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi. Washington reciprocated through several small gestures, including a handshake between President Obama and the Burmese prime minister at a regional summit. For the Burmese, as a watershed approached in relations with China, there was curiosity to see whether a normalization of ties with the US was possible, and on what terms. But in the end the gap in expectations between the two sides was too large to bridge, and the interest in reaching a deal too tenuous. Washington found it difficult even to begin to relax sanctions without the generals starting a meaningful dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi, yet this was probably the last thing they were willing to do.

‘We know that India can’t really balance China for us’, one former Burmese officer told me:

We would like better relations with the Americans, but as long as they are only interested in ‘regime change’ [he used this term in English], there’s really nothing to talk about. They say ‘release Aung San Suu Kyi or do this or that and then we will see how we might want to improve ties with you, how we might decrease sanctions’. We don’t like sanctions but we can live with them. We’re asked to make risky concessions in return for vague promises. Maybe this works with other countries, but it won’t work with us.

The relative decline of the West is often exaggerated. The West is still far richer, its universities second-to-none and the armed forces of the United States have no parallel. But here, in this small but strategic slice of Asia, the post-Western world is perhaps more evident than anywhere else. Walking around in Maymyo, the West seems more a memory and something very far away, sanctions and boycotts having kept out the businesses and aid programmes that would otherwise exist, leaving the landscape to be crafted by others. The money to be made, the fears to be addressed, the relations that need to be fostered, have become Asian, and close at hand.

And in this intra-Asian world, relations with China are paramount. Neither India nor the countries of southeast Asia have so far been able to compete with what China is offering and able to deliver. India is no further from Mandalay or even Maymyo than China, but contemporary Indian influences are practically non-existent. The Burmese leadership has been sceptical, and hedging its bets, but the country is being drawn into the Chinese economic orbit nonetheless. Will this continue? Will India ever become the ‘balancer’ of China in the region? Will American attempts to re-engage the junta bear fruit? From a distance, China’s and India’s stated desires to find new links to and across Burma seem straightforward, the question only of their relative prowess. But here it was clear that it wasn’t all about Beijing and Delhi, and that Burmese fears and desires will also be a major factor in determining the future.

And there is an additional twist: Burma’s unfinished civil war.

I had asked the staff at the Candacraig if they could organize a car and a driver to take me to Hsipaw, a little town to the east. It was along the road to China. I considered taking the train but train journeys in Burma are slow, unreliable, and either hot and stuffy or air-conditioned to near freezing. But the train ride from Maymyo to Hsipaw includes the once-famous Gokteik Gorge and a viaduct built a hundred years ago by Pennsylvania Steel across the jungle ravine. It was tempting, but in the end I decided I would see more from a car.

The next morning, a black 1960s Mercedes appeared, driven by an Indian-looking man with slicked-back hair. We agreed on a price of 10,000 Burmese kyat (about $10). The car had clearly seen better days but was comfortable enough. There was no rap music this time. The countryside from Maymyo was lovely, with big trees and rolling hills, and the air wonderfully fresh and cool. We passed a group of Indian Roman Catholic nuns walking along the road as well as many north-Indian-looking women, handsome and well-dressed, in trousers and long blouses, tending their little shops by the side of the road. There was even a Nepali Hindu shrine (I was later told there was a sizeable Nepali settlement in the area) and I saw men and women strolling around in formal Nepali dress as if on their way to a festival. We stopped for breakfast at a halal restaurant run by a Muslim family. There were two huge posters. One was of Mecca, the other of a Mediterranean-style villa with neoclassical columns and a red sports car in the driveway. We were now less than a day’s drive from China, but there was little indication here of anything Chinese, only many reminders, from the faces of the people, that this was once a part of British India.

After an hour or so we reached the Gokteik Gorge, a deep and jagged canyon that sliced right through the countryside, and began snaking slowly down for miles, the two-lane road switching back and forth, the car making nearly 180-degree turns, finally crossing the narrow river over a wooden bridge, and then powering back up. The river was at 2,000 feet above sea level and the hills around were one or two thousand feet higher. Bunches of banana trees mixed with evergreens. There were big sixteen-wheel lorries, as well as cars and scooters, coming and going, and little shrines to local deities had been erected, some with fresh flowers and incense, as a way for drivers to ask for protection along particularly dangerous turns. From the river, I could see the great steel viaduct overhead in the distance. We had left ‘Burma proper’ and were now in the Shan Hills, the home of the Shan people, where for decades a series of small wars has devastated a once idyllic land.

The geography of Burma is important in understanding its history, its current ethnic make-up, and its possible futures. Its core, close to half the country in size and more than two-thirds in population, is the long and flat Irrawaddy valley, the home of the majority Burmese Buddhists or ‘Burmans’, extending a thousand miles from the river’s upper reaches to the delta and the Bay of Bengal. To the west and north are mountain ranges, inhabited by other peoples, like the Naga and the Kachin, mainly Christians, extending up into the Himalayas. And to the east are the Shan Hills, actually a plateau about the size of England, with their own hills and mountains as well as lower-lying valleys. The Shan are the dominant people of the plateau and are also Buddhists. They are the second-largest ethnic group in the country, after the Burmese. But dozens of other peoples also live on the plateau, people like the Wa and the Palaung, who inhabit the higher elevations.

In the areas closer to the present China border, local chiefs in pre-colonial times often owed dual allegiances, to the Burmese crown as well as to the more distant imperial court in Beijing. Today, it is a region of near endless linguistic diversity where over recent decades little nationalisms have grown on top of one another, with new aspirations for statehood or self-determination sprouting up one underneath the other.

Burma’s population is reckoned at around sixty million. No one really knows for sure how many people live in Burma, and how many belong to each of the various groups, or even how to categorize ethnicity more generally. Given the political and armed conflicts, it is in everyone’s interest to play up or play down the population of a given group, depending on where one stands. And there has not been a comprehensive census since the one in 1931, part of the grand India-wide surveys that were carried out by colonial authorities every ten years. Since independence there have been censuses as well, but these have been only partial, as the country was still at civil war, and people in areas close to the fighting could not be fully counted.

Determining exactly how many of the sixty million are ethnic Burmese or Shan or anything else is even harder. There is really no answer. My parents are both Burmese, as were all four of my grandparents. All were Buddhists and all grew up speaking Burmese, both key markers of Burmese identity. But that’s not really the whole story. My great-grandparents and more distant ancestors included people from both India and China, Buddhists and Muslims, as well as Shans from this area near China, and Mons, another major ethnic group, from the Irrawaddy delta. In any census, though, I would simply be listed as ‘Burman’ in the current, somewhat artificial lexicon.

And ethnicity in Burma is at least partly a choice. Many people speak more than one, sometimes several, languages, and even have more than one name, say a Burmese name as well as a Shan or a Chinese one. Religion could be a barrier to intermarriage and a clear sign of ethnic affiliation, but there are few hard and fast lines between Hindu, Buddhist and Chinese religious beliefs and practices; only Islam and Christianity tend to stand apart.

In Burma, in the past, and today, there are no strict restrictions on sex or marriage outside one’s community–parental preferences perhaps, but no formal prohibitions or taboos. Foreign migrants–Indians, Chinese and Europeans–were and are overwhelmingly men; many found local wives and their children normally merged into the broader community. Some formed distinct little communities. In earlier times, there were communities of Armenians, Japanese (
ronin
, or rogue ‘masterless’ samurai from Nagasaki), Portuguese and even the descendants of the crew of a captured eighteenth-century French warship, but all became part of the Burmese melting pot, at least in the valley.

In the mountains it was different. Here the rough terrain meant that communities stayed more isolated from one another and an area of just a few miles could be home to many different languages, costumes and customs. The part of Burma where I was travelling was perhaps one of the most ethnically varied areas in the world, where ethnic and linguistic strains from many directions have jumbled up together, with literally dozens of distinct languages and hundreds of dialects, representing entirely unrelated language families, as different from each other as English and Estonian. Like the Caucasus at the other end of Asia, this is a mountain Babel which has long proved inimical to any centralizing authority.

As with early Burmese history, the early history of the Shan people is also murky. The Shan chronicles point to an ancient past, but no one really knows when or where either the ‘Burmese’ or the ‘Shan’ actually emerged as distinct ethnic groups, only that the earliest known examples of their writing first appeared in late medieval times. Before that time, we only have Chinese records that mention the troublesome groups living in this region, people who cultivated cinnamon and mined jade and who tattooed themselves and wore monkey hide as armour. The Chinese claimed some were cannibals.

‘Shan’ in Burmese is spelled ‘Syam’. It’s the same word as ‘Siam’, the old name for Thailand. And it’s the word the Burmese use to refer to people who call themselves ‘Tai’. And ‘Tai’ is just a different version of ‘Thai’, as in ‘Thailand’. In China, there’s a minority called the ‘Dai’ who live in the areas closest to Burma and who speak more or less the same language. The nuances are more confusing still, but the important thing to remember is this: ‘Thai’, ‘Tai’, ‘Dai’ and ‘Shan’ are all ways of referring to very similar languages and (to the extent that language helps define ethnicity) to a related group of people. These languages are not always mutually intelligible, but they are very closely related, at least as closely as the various Romance languages, Spanish, Italian and French. They include the Thai spoken in Bangkok, but also Lao, the slightly different tongue spoken in Laos. Some of the Shan dialects spoken in parts of Burma are almost identical to the Thai spoken in parts of northern Thailand, others the same as the Dai spoken across the border in China.

The Shan chronicles say that more than a thousand years ago two brothers, Khun Lung and Khun Lai, descended from heaven and became the kings of one of the little highland valleys. Their sons became the chiefs of nearby principalities, and their descendants became rulers of a vast region, from the Black River valley of northern Vietnam to the Brahmaputra valley of Assam in present-day India. It is a story of gradual expansion, which allowed the Shan in medieval times to challenge the domination of the older empires–Pagan in central Burma, Dali in Yunnan, and Angkor in Cambodia. By the fourteenth century, these Shan or Tai chiefs had extended their sway south towards modern-day Bangkok, to the country later known as Thailand, the land of the Tai.

There were periods when Shan dominion extended far and wide across mainland southeast Asia. But the Shans were never able to maintain any real unity. Instead of a single kingdom there were dozens of little principalities. At times the Shan submitted to Burmese authority and became close allies of the Burmese kings; at other times they offered some form of tribute but otherwise kept their distance. Some also sent tribute to the Chinese emperor and received coveted titles in return. They were a middle people, expert in the art of balancing identities, playing off bigger powers, and benefiting from long-distance trade, including in arms and ideas.

The rulers of these Shan principalities styled themselves
saopha
or ‘Lords of the Sky’. In Burmese, the same word is rendered
sawbwa
. The Burmese court also styled the more important ones
naywin bayin
or ‘Lords of the Sunset’. They would send their sons to be educated at Ava and later Mandalay, and would offer their daughters to be one of the Burmese king’s many dozen wives or concubines. In this way a tight cultural link was formed between the Burmese royal family and many of the Shan princely families, especially in those areas closest to Burma proper. The Shan courts became miniature versions of the Burmese court of Ava.

By the time the British arrived on the scene, there were a score of these little Shan principalities, scattered over the eastern hills. One of them was Hsipaw.

There were two or three dozen shops lining the main avenue that led from the river to the monastery–Hsipaw’s main street. At a few little restaurants people sat both inside and on the dusty ground outside, under the shade of a tree, on tiny plastic stools, drinking and smoking and talking. One place had a couple of billiard tables. For the more affluent, there was also a Dohtawaddy Tennis Club (Dohtawaddy being the classical, Indian-derived name for Hsipaw), which was just a court and some rickety wooden benches. At a kiosk, fake DVDs were sold for about $1 each, with a little sign in front advertising
The Hurt Locker
and
Angels and Demons
.

Hsipaw had been founded in 1636 and in the late nineteenth century British visitors could still make out the outlines of an old wall and moat, buried under decades of jungle growth. But there was no sign now of anything particularly old. The little buildings that made up the centre of town seemed small and improvised, made of wood or sometimes just bamboo and thatch. I’ve rarely ever held a hammer in my hand and have next to no idea how a modern house is made, but looking at these simple structures I was fairly sure that I could build one myself.

Towards the end of the avenue was a cinema, also small. It couldn’t have been more than ten feet high, and because the road was higher than the entrance, seemed almost like a bunker, half hidden underground. It was just one room, with the ticket seller out in front. The main set of doors was open, and I could see several rows of seats facing a screen. It was what I imagined an early twentieth-century cinema to be, the sort that would have a piano on the side adding music to the silent pictures. A few paces away was the town’s lone bookstore, which doubled as the local office of the National League for Democracy. It was really just a stall with a couple of dozen English books displayed out front, and many more Burmese books, for rent as well as for sale, in the back. The Burmese are voracious readers, and the many Burmese novels, biographies and current affairs books, all printed on the cheapest possible paper and bound in what looked like masking tape, were all well-thumbed. Amongst the English-language selections was George Orwell’s
Burmese Days
(available as a Penguin paperback) as well as a few English guidebooks about Burma, some photocopies of the original stapled together, presumably for the occasional tourist who came by.

During the few days I was in Hsipaw, I got into the habit of eating at the same restaurant for nearly all my meals. It was the biggest one in town, which isn’t saying much, where the main street joined the road heading towards China. It was airy and from the table at the corner that became my regular spot, I could watch what passed for a busy intersection. Just opposite the restaurant was a tall signpost with signs listing the distances to different places, like Rangoon or Mandalay, in miles and furlongs. Burma is one of only three countries left in the world (the United States and Liberia are the other two) where only imperial rather than metric measurements are used officially.

I had found the restaurant on my first night by following a group of well-heeled middle-aged Italians. They were with a Burmese guide, a young woman who spoke to them in what seemed to be fluent Italian. It was just after sunset and I was curious to see where she was leading them. They first stopped at a restaurant where I had initially thought of eating myself as it had been recommended by my guest-house. But it was closed for some reason and so the group kept walking on, with me a few discreet yards behind, in my
longyi
and flip-flops, looking like any other denizen of Hsipaw. Perhaps they thought I was a government spy. After a few minutes we came to the corner restaurant, the Italians taking one table and me the adjacent one, by the road. Over the meal I could overhear everything they were saying. As I know no Italian, I could not tell what they were talking about, but guessed from their smiles and hand gestures that they were often complimenting the guide on the food. Every now and then enormous lorries loaded with the trunks of giant trees rumbled past, literally shaking the little restaurant. They were heading towards the border, only a few hours away.