Modern China-Myanmar Relations

The use of the material has been facilitated by the involvement of Fan Hongwei and the Research School of Southeast Asian Studies at Xiamen University. Indeed the book is a jointly-authored result of collaboration between Professor Fan and Professor David I. Steinberg of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The collaboration is, of course, welcome, and it is productive, though it has probably made the book more repetitive than it needed to be, and perhaps at times clouded its argumentation and its presentation. The authors have not claimed particular chapters as theirs, though now and then the text or notes refer to ‘the author’ without indicating which one is in question. It would be a demanding task of linguistic analysis to determine the prime responsibility for chapters or sections of the work and perhaps a frustrating one. The authors have worked together and achieved substantial consistency.

Their first challenge is to deal with the record of Sino-Burman relations between 1950 (two years after Burma secured independence from Britain, and a few months after the proclamation of the People’s Republic) and the late 1980s (the years of the coup in Burma, of Tiananmen, of the end of the Cold War). The authors argue that the period is not only in itself interesting – and the use of Chinese material, though largely confirming what earlier historians have been able to conclude, adds to its interest – but also that it provides a legacy to those who have guided Myanmar-China relations in more recent decades. After the Korean war – even before the armistice was concluded – China’s policy towards other powers became more flexible, and in 1954 it set out the ‘five principles’ of its international policy in the agreement with India over Tibet, principles that were added to at Bandung in 1955, but not displaced. China was still deploying the principles when it fell out with India in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and they remained useful in its approach to regional security.

The main break in its relations with Burma came in 1967 with the ‘6.26’ anti-Chinese riots. Those have normally been seen as the result of the overflow into China’s foreign relations of the Cultural Revolution. The authors argue quite persuasively that Ne Win used the nationalism aroused in Burma to strengthen the somewhat tenuous hold the military regime he had set up in 1962 then had. The Burmese government was, however, surprisingly assertive in the policies it adopted. Indeed, as the authors point out, relations were not fully restored in the 1970s, though that was partly because the Gang of Four refused to drop the two-track (government and party) policy and continued to support the Burma Communist Party. The authors suggest that the memory of this phase was enduring.

With the PRC’s compromise with the US, Burma lost something of the special place it had in the PRC’s foreign policy: with the normalisation of China’s relations with other states, Burma was no longer so useful. The Dengist reforms, moreover, took the PRC down a new development path, while Burma, under an ageing Ne Win, stuck to its failed experiment in ‘socialism’. Political events, Fan and Steinberg suggest, brought the two states together again: the establishment of SLORC and the Tiananmen massacre and the international disapproval they evoked, especially from the US and the EC/EU.

How closely they came together is not altogether clear, and we have of course no access to recent archives, Chinese or otherwise, that might add to our information. It often seemed to outside observers and commentators that SLORC and then SPDC abandoned the traditional Burmese determination to retain their independence of China as of other states. The authors give figures – as they insist, not very reliable – on trade, aid and investment, and give excellent accounts of China’s attempts to avoid total dependence on transit through the Straits of Melaka by promoting infrastructural projects in Myanmar, of the Chinese search for minerals such as nickel and manganese, and of the growth of the Chinese population in Myanmar, insofar as it is possible to do more than guess. But they also point to the junta’s endeavours to keep open links with other countries despite and because of the impact of sanctions. The Tatmadaw, for example, secured weapons from India as well as China.

Burma’s politics are unpredictable as they always have been. Some observers argued that change, which could be quite abrupt, was bound to come some time, but they could never say when. When reforms came their extent and durability were open to question. Were they overestimated in ‘the West’ because of a wish to diminish China’s role? The attitude of the Chinese was itself unclear: indeed there was, of course, more than one attitude, since, as the authors make very clear, there is a Yunnan policy as well as a Beijing policy, and as well as state interests, there are non-state interests, large, medium and small. It seems that the Chinese had counselled the junta to adopt less unrelenting policies, even cajoled it: they did not want disorder. And, though the surprising suspension of the Myitsone dam project was unwelcome, it may be that the PRC is prepared to accept a degree of change, an acceptance that would show Myanmar and its neighbours that, though ‘rising’, it was still prepared to follow the five principles. Where its policies are most crucial is where the rulers of Burma/Myanmar have found most difficulty, not only since 1950: how are the ‘minorities’ to be integrated into the state?

There are, as the authors put it, ‘multiple dilemmas’ facing Beijing and Yunnan, the Burmans and the minorities. They will need, as they say, ‘constant re-evaluation’. But their work, along with Maung Aung Myoe’s In the Name of Pauk-Phaw [Singapore: ISEAS, 2011], offers the basis for adopting more perceptive attitudes and perhaps more effective policies towards Myanmar and its peoples. 

 Nicholas Tarling, New Zealand Asia Institute, The University of Auckland (n.tarling@auckland.ac.nz)