A large number of people demonstrated in the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, on July 7.
After the coup, the Burmese military blocked social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to block communication channels for the Burmese people, and on the 6th it even shut down the Internet service. On the 11th, hundreds of Burmese people gathered in front of the Chinese Embassy in Yangon to demonstrate and denounce Beijing‘s support for the military regime in Burma.
According to the Central News Agency, photos circulating on the Internet recently showed some staff members unloading several boxes of goods from a flight, and Burmese questioned whether those were technicians and technical equipment used by the Chinese Communist Party to assist the Burmese military in disconnecting the Internet.
In this regard, the Chinese embassy in Myanmar published a statement on Facebook on the evening of the 10th, denying the online rumors and saying that the Chinese flights to and from Myanmar are normal cargo flights, carrying seafood and other import and export goods. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin also said at a regular press conference on the 10th that he had not heard of the Chinese Communist Party providing equipment and IT experts to the Burmese side. He also said that the rumors about the Chinese side are false.
However, Burmese netizens questioned how anyone could import seafood at this point in Time and why it would be shipped in wooden crates. The hashtag “Chinese cargo plane Yangon” (#ChineseCargoYGN) went viral on social media on the 11th.
On the morning of the 11th, hundreds of Burmese people gathered in front of the Chinese embassy in Yangon to protest, chanting “Stop helping the military coup”, “Stop interfering in our national affairs”, “Please respect our choice. Please respect our choice, the military dictatorship must fail,” and “Shame on China (CCP)” placards in English and Chinese, while protesters told the media that “Chinese (CCP) officials seem to support the military coup in some way.
The largest protest march since the military coup erupted in Yangon, Burma’s largest city, on June 6, with thousands taking to the streets to denounce the coup and the military blocking the Internet for the day. NetBlocks, an Internet monitoring website, reported a nationwide shutdown in Myanmar, with Internet connection levels dropping to 16 percent of normal.
According to the Voice of America, the Chinese Communist Party has significant economic and strategic interests in Burma, and often supports Burma’s position. While Western countries have expressed strong condemnation following the Feb. 1 coup in Myanmar, the Chinese Communist Party has taken an ambiguous stance, saying it wants the situation to remain stable, and some official Chinese media have even referred to the military takeover as a “cabinet reshuffle.
In this regard, Jiang Feng, a self-publisher, analyzed in his program “Jiang Feng’s Talk” that if the junta wants to stage a coup, it must consider whether it has the ability to withstand the sanctions that follow the West, especially since the Burmese people have become more capable of resisting the junta after five years of democratic Education. Therefore, a military coup by the Burmese junta must have stronger support than ever before, including financial assistance that can stand up to U.S. sanctions. Then there is only one answer: the junta’s longtime outside force, the Communist Party of China, has the wherewithal and determination to intervene in Burmese politics more powerfully than ever before.
He said that Burma is located between China and India, a geographical location that, in addition to being conducive to coping with the current conflict between China and India for power in Asia, Burma is also a focal point for the U.S. and Chinese political systems to contend with. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to win a possible window of relative leniency in its policy toward China in the face of changes in the U.S. political arena, and perhaps even use this window to resolve the Taiwan issue, it must be prepared to go to war with the U.S. Then, for the Chinese Communist Party, Burma, the choke point of the energy corridor, cannot be stuck by the U.S. Myanmar’s geographical location has thus become a strategic focus for China and the U.S. to compete for.
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