A country that sits between two aspiring superpowers has some very complicated choices to make. Yet Myanmar, whose entire upper half is wedged between northeastern India and southwestern China, seems to have consistently made the wrong choices through much of the 20th century and all of the 21st. It emerged as a modern nation in 1948, its decolonization from Britain a messy and traumatic affair that included the mysterious assassination, a year before independence, of some of its most important leaders. Its contentious democratic system, marked by hostilities between nationalists and communists, and between the Buddhist, Burmese-speaking majority known as Burmans and the largely Christian hill tribes, soon broke down into full-fledged civil war.
Still, none of this marked it out as an unusual nation at the time. Its vast neighbors India and China had, and were indeed still undergoing, their own crises, which included civil war and large-scale massacres. Yet when the nationalist military took over in Myanmar in 1962, the result was something like an army in possession of a state. And although the names of governing councils have been changed, the generals in charge moved around and even the national economic path switched from “the Burmese way to socialism” to capitalism, there has been a military junta in power for over half a century, its intentions mostly inscrutable to the West. The favorite adjective for this junta in the Western media, based only partially on the fact that George Orwell served as an imperial policeman in Myanmar in the 1920s, is “Orwellian.”
Where China meets India is an attempt to offer a nuanced portrait of Myanmar, especially of the paradox where a seemingly static country, subject to economic sanctions from Europe and the US, is also poised between two of the most dynamic, and rapacious, powers in the world. “Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia,” the book’s subtitle reads, and its author, Thant Myint-U, makes clear that this seeming backwater is a place where some kind of fundamental reorientation is taking place, with a colorful combination of ethnic militias, drug lords, sex workers, businessmen and migrant populations floating back and forth across a gray frontier zone.
Traveling to Lashio, in the northeastern corner of Myanmar, Thant writes about the quasi-independent territory carved out by the United Wa State Army, former headhunters, former anti-junta guerrillas, and now drug lords and allies of the junta: “The dirt roads become Chinese highways. And much of the Wa zone is on the Chinese electricity grid, and even its Internet and mobile phone grid. BlackBerrys don’t work in Rangoon but they do in the Wa area ... It’s a stunning reversal in Burma’s geography. What had been remote is now closer to the new center. What were muddy mountain hamlets are now more modern than Rangoon.”
When Thant crosses the border into China, he finds shopping malls, amusement parks and heritage tourism, all evidence of the growing consumerism that is one of the factors driving China’s alliance with the Myanmar junta. In the absence of competition from the West, China can not only push the global market into what was once the frontier, it can also lay a claim to Myanmar’s considerable natural resources. It could be the beginning, Thant writes, of a new Great Game in which India and China take on the roles once occupied by British India and tsarist Russia, with each aspiring superpower wary about the other, both eager for access to the vast reserves of natural gas off the Myanmar coast, and with China especially anxious to secure access to the Bay of Bengal and create an alternative shipping route for the vast quantities of fuel required by its growth engine.
Thant writes compellingly about how both India and China have changed their attitudes towards the military junta. Each, originally, backed opponents to the regime, with China shoring up the Burmese communists and India throwing its support behind the pro-democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel peace prize (and whose father Aung San was one of the nationalist leaders killed in 1947). Suu Kyi was recently released by the junta after nearly two decades of house arrest, and her party, the National League for Democracy, although immensely popular in the 1980s and 1990s, seems to have since withered under the repressive measures of the state apparatus.
India, meanwhile, has largely abandoned the pro-democracy movement, including the activists it once encouraged to cross the border. It has now adopted a policy of placating the junta, unblushingly escorting its then senior leader, General Than Shwe, around when he recently visited such sites as Bodhgaya, where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, and the Mahatma Gandhi memorial. Just as China has plans to push southwards from Kunming into Myanmar and the Bay of Bengal, India has its own “Look East” policy, which includes blueprints for a grand Trans-Asia Highway that will link the poor, violent states of its northeastern corner to Myanmar and, eventually, to China.
It is fairly clear where Thant’s sympathies lie in this new Great Game. The grandson of a former secretary general of the UN, Thant is a cosmopolitan who has grown up in the West. He shares the West’s unease about China, especially its tendency to suppress minority groups and individual liberties. Like many liberal Westerners, he is less aware of India’s similarly poor record when dealing with its own minorities and dissenters. But he can also see that while China means business in expanding into Myanmar, India’s parallel policy is mostly talk, the Trans-Asia Highway still consisting of imaginary lines superimposed on old highways filled with potholes.
Thant is less compelling when addressing these wonkish questions than when he is acting as an idiosyncratic cultural historian. This was the strength of his previous book, The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma, which, in spite of its melancholy about Myanmar’s present, offered a visible delight at the country’s rich, varied past and its links with India and China. There are similar forays into history in the current book as well, moments where Thant revels in stories of the past — about the Naxi people, who might have inspired James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon; about the influence of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam on the area — and becomes a sort of time traveler, wise and solitary, as he takes in the glass storefronts and plasma screens but also reflects on the world that has passed. At such moments, when his writing is shot through with a sense of history, the book possesses a heartfelt and welcome optimism, giving voice to a desire for connections that exceeds all notions of foreign policy, geopolitics or business and becomes, instead, about people encountering each other in all their glorious difference.
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