The following article originally appeared in Foreign Policy on June 15, 2015. An excerpt is below and the full text can be accessed here.
Beijing’s effort at currying favour with Aung San Suu Kyi
and the NLD is borne partly of desperation, and indicates how swiftly Beijing’s
stock in Myanmar is falling. China was Myanmar’s main backer and largest
investor during its years of international seclusion, supporting strategic
infrastructure projects such as oil and gas pipelines, ports, and dams. Between
1988 and 2013, China accounted for a whopping 42 percent of the $33.67 billion
in foreign investment that flowed into Myanmar. But the nature of these
projects — including concerns about forcibly-relocated populations, land
confiscation, environmental hazards, and the inflow of cheap goods and labor —
made China unpopular with the Burmese public (the extent of such sentiments is
impossible to determine, in the absence of reliable public-opinion surveys.)
Myanmar’s military was even more reliant on China: Almost
60 percent of the country’s arms imports during that same period came from the
Middle Kingdom. And until recently, the military remained favorably disposed to
their northern neighbor. Yet Beijing appears to have ruined the one good
relationship it had going in the country. The suspension of the Chinese-backed
Myitsone dam on the Irrawaddy River in 2011 — a project initially agreed
between Myanmar’s military junta and the state-owned China Power Investment
Corp. in 2005 — hurt ties. But it was the killing of five Chinese citizens by
Myanmar’s air force in March, while conducting raids on rebels along the
border, and China’s response, that has significantly widened the rift with the
military. Although Naypyidaw offered a grovelling apology, Beijing’s
provocative decision to stage live-fire military exercises along the border in
early June further tarnished relations with its one real constituency in
Myanmar. [Read more.]