The Courageous Monks

Myanmar and the world

The outside world shares responsibility for the unfolding tragedy in Myanmar
LIKE North Korea's Workers' Party, another vile dictatorship that has visited misery and penury on its own people, Myanmar's junta has survived in part through diplomatic triangulation. Like North Korea, it has borne isolation and rhetorical hostility from the West by cosying up to the neighbours, notably China. And it has tried to avoid total subservience to any one of these by playing them off against each other....

Western and Indian analysts worry that China sees Myanmar as part of its so-called “string of pearls” policy of building naval and intelligence bases around the Indian Ocean. There were reports that China was delivering signals equipment for monitoring stations on various coastal sites, and had a permanent presence on Great Coco Island (see map). Such talk has fuelled Indian paranoia, though Western analysts dismiss it.

Border trade, through the thriving, sleazy town of Ruili, also boomed. In the 1990s it included opium and heroin; shared needles produced China's first HIV epidemic, helping teach China the importance of “stability” in its neighbour.

In recent years the economic relationship has been transformed by China's hunger for energy and its involvement in big infrastructure projects. According to EarthRights International, an American NGO, Chinese firms are by now involved in about 40 hydropower projects and at least 17 onshore and offshore oil-and-gas projects. They have also announced plans to build a 2,400km (1,500 mile) oil-and-gas pipeline from Arakan in western Myanmar to China's Yunnan province."

See also The Irrawaddy