People in Yangon, Myanmar, pass by a burning temporary barricade on the street on April 3, 2021, on bicycles.
As the situation in Burma becomes increasingly hot and chaotic, there has been no end to the voices in Burma accusing the Chinese Communist Party of meddling in Burma’s affairs and disrupting its democratic process. Several U.S. scholars have pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party has been interacting with the Burmese military, the NLD government and even ethnic armed groups, making the situation in Burma even more complicated.
Recently, the military government has escalated its bloody crackdown on the civilian resistance movement, with former NLD government officials publicly calling for a new military alliance to confront the military government, and several local ethnic armed groups have spoken out, threatening to “respond” to the military government’s violent massacres of civilians. International fears of a serious civil war in Burma have been heightened by accusations of Chinese support for the military coup and accusations of Chinese involvement in the country’s current political turmoil.
A recent article in the Myanmar Times pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party has ties to a variety of forces in Myanmar and that it has huge interests in the country. Regardless of who is in power, the CCP’s main concern is that it does not lose its vested interests in Myanmar.
According to the report, the West began to alienate the Burmese government after the Rohingya incident, leading the former NLD government to rely more and more on Chinese funding to sustain Burma’s economic development and to join the “China-Myanmar Economic Corridor,” a Belt and Road project promoted by Beijing authorities. By 2019 and 2020, more than 90 percent of Myanmar’s major energy development projects will have been awarded to Chinese state-owned enterprises and related companies. Now that the Burmese military has seized power and controls the lifeblood of the country’s economy, the Communist Party’s official media has downplayed the military coup as a “major cabinet reshuffle” and has blocked several UN statements condemning the Burmese military and any resolution against the military government.
In an interview with the Voice of America on Sunday (4), several U.S. scholars of international relations and policy also discussed the complexities of the interaction between the Chinese Communist Party and various political forces in Burma.
Joy Joy Yang, a Burmese-born scholar who recently graduated from Johns Hopkins University’s Master’s Program in Advanced International Studies, said in the interview, “There are a lot of interests in Burma, and Beijing is not just dealing with the military government, it’s also dealing with the democratically elected government, and it’s also dealing with different ethnic groups along the border between China and Burma. So there are complex interactions.”
Yang Banghong further noted that the Chinese Communist Party has many strategic and economic interests in Myanmar. Beijing appears to have a close relationship with the Burmese military government, which has resources at its disposal, but in fact the two sides are in a “marriage of convenience” and “the Burmese military government does not necessarily like to be led by Beijing’s nose all the time.
Sun Yun, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and co-director of the East Asia Program, told VOA that Burma has been fighting each other for years without results, and that the Chinese Communist government has also judged the proximity of Burma’s ethnic groups to each other. For example, she pointed out that the Wa ethnic group in Burma is considered “a staunch follower and defender of the Beijing government”, while the Kachin ethnic group, which has long been influenced by Western religious culture and has close ties with the West, is classified by Beijing as “unstable”.
According to Sun Yun’s analysis, it is believed that the Chinese government should step in to facilitate a compromise between the Burmese military and the NLD, but at present, neither the military government nor the democratically elected interim government has the will to sit down and negotiate with each other. If the Chinese Communist Party asks the Burmese military to negotiate with the NLD, the military, which holds the barrel of a gun, will be unhappy, and the Chinese Communist Party will certainly not want its relationship with the Burmese military to be damaged, so it will “put more emphasis on the relationship with various forces” rather than using the demand for stability to force any party to get results.
Sun Yun admits that the Burmese people want the international community to intervene by force, but the current U.S. administration is “not in a position to send troops” either diplomatically or politically, and neither the Communist Party nor the Russian authorities would agree if the UN pushed for forceful intervention.
Liu Zhongn, a senior reporter for the Myanmar Times, told VOA that more than 40 percent of Myanmar’s GDP is in the informal economy, and a large amount of jade and gemstone mines are smuggled into China every year, and some ethnic armed groups along the border use these natural resources to exchange weapons with the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist authorities can not only gain substantial economic benefits by trading with those armed groups, but can also exert pressure on the central government of Burma by controlling those armed groups. For example, if the Burmese government does not go through with large Chinese projects, the CCP gives more weapons to local ethnic armed groups to “let them make trouble.
Me Me Khant, a Burmese-born graduate student in international policy at Stanford University, also told VOA that the CCP is actually supporting different political groups within Burma behind the scenes, and has even been supporting some insurgent forces, including supplying weapons and equipment to the Wa anti-government army. She believes that Beijing will build alliances with any institution in Burma, whether government or private, political party or local armed forces, on the condition that it can support the CCP’s interests in Burma.
Kanter noted that Beijing’s support for various forces, although profit-seeking, will inevitably affect the situation in Burma and the balance between Burma’s various factions.
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