President Arroyo in Davos clearly expressed what people who cannot stand the human-rights abuses being committed by the military junta of Burma feel. Unfortunately, Vietnam disagrees with her. So does China.
At the Security Council some weeks earlier, China and Russia both thwarted the US-sponsored effort to sanction Burma (or if you prefer Myanmar).
Burma is very important to China. And vice versa. Without China providing consumer goods to make life bearable, the oppressed Burmese people would rise in revolt against the military junta (as they did against the more benign Burmese Socialist Program Party, or BSSP, which was being pestered by the then China-supported Burmese Communist Party. The BCP’s headquarters and sanctuaries were across the border, in China’s Yunnan province.)
Our group of Filipino journalists covering Asia from Hong Kong called Burma “the Hermit Kingdom.” That there were hermit Buddhist monks in Burma made the term aptly romantic. It was Johnny Gatbonton, who first used the term, in a country report about Burma in The Asia Magazine and later in Orientations.
Before it was made strictly socialist Buddhist, Burma was a British colony and then a self-governing country that was one of the richest countries in Asia. It became self-governing, two years after us. We became the autonomous Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1935, Burma became a self-governing member of the British Commonwealth in 1937. Rivaling the Philippines, it had the most westernized elite class of professionals, politicians, military officers and schoolteachers in Southeast Asia.
In 1962 Gen. Ne Win began to dominate Burma’s politics. First he was a military ruler, then he governed—until 1988—as a constitutional president. Indians, a carry over of the British colonial times, controlled the civil service. Burma’s Chinese dominated both corporate commerce and the retail trade. Ne Win banned both races. (That is why all the money and brains of the Tiger Balm fortune moved form Burma to Singapore and Hong Kong, where before Tiger Balm was a Burma-Hong Kong-Singapore family enterprise of the Aw clan.)
Just before the SLORC generals came to power in 1988, the ascetic Burmese socialism of Ne Win did itself in. It unwittingly prepared the ground for the 1988 uprisings and riots, which brought the SLORC generals to power and made Burma become absolutely dependent on China.
Ne Win’s central bankers, in September 1987 (when the Philippines was starting to have serious brownouts while President Cory Aquino was being beset by coup attempts), demonetized a massive portion of Burma’s currency. So, the people lost faith in the kyat. They preferred solid commodities to Burmese money. Farmers held on to the rice they harvested. Rice and other commodities became very scarce—and expensive. (That happened to us during the Japanese Occupation. You had to have a bayong of Japanese money to buy a ganta of rice or a dozen eggs.)
While the country’s economy became more miserable day by day, the BSSP’s military did what the AFP now wants to do to the CPP-NPA. But the Burmese communists who weren’t killed or captured managed to run back—across the frontier—to their bases in Yunnan.
Not only Burmese communists went to Burma from China when they needed to. Chinese traders also did and Chinese goods. While before 1988 it was illegal and subversive for China to be the source of the greater part of the canned food, clothes, pencils and whatever else that Burma needed, under the SLORC generals it became the only right thing to do.
During these last 19 years, China has been building and repairing Burma’s infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports. It has modernized and equipped the Burmese military (without making communists of them). China has, meanwhile, contained the Burmese Communist Party, so that it no longer fight the generals as it did Ne Win.
Illegal China-Burma trade was more or less US$3 billion a year in 1987. Now, legal and flourishing, it is at least 10 times that much.
What does China get out of this? Oil and other goods from the outside world can reach Yunnan and China’s southwest through Burma by sea and land. That costs less than transporting these things by land from the north or from the Southeast (Guangdong, Fujian etc.) via the South China Sea.
There are other things. These pertain to China’s security concerns vis-à-vis India. But these concerns have been diminishing. Happy commercial partnership is the dominant idea in China-India relations these days.