Burma a Thorny Territory for China
Last week, a stream of about 30,000 refugees walked and drove across that border fleeing an attack by the Burmese government that killed as many as 500 people, mostly ethnic Han Chinese. While some returned, many have not and more are coming across at Qingshuihe, 80km down the road.
In that rugged and often impenetrable country, China just got itself a new headache to add to the freshly throbbing one in its racially riven province of Xinxiang. It's a problem that has highlighted the increasingly deep and potentially fragile ties China has with its fellow totalitarian regime across the border.
It's hard to believe that only 70 years ago, Burma was the rice bowl of Asia - a country that was for 100 years the biggest state in British India and the brightest facet in that shining jewel. Since the coup in 1962, the vast teak forests of central Burma have been stripped, denuding the land and causing its once mighty river, the Irrawaddy, to silt up; its infrastructure has collapsed; most of its universities have been shuttered; and unless they join the mercenaries, many young men end up serving in the army on subsistence wages for the junta's rapacious leaders.
These days, Burma is awash with infrastructure projects, highways are being cut through its northern jungles, a series of culturally devastating and environmentally disastrous dams are being planned on the Salween River for hydro-electricity.
Mines are being built to extract its potentially vast deposits of minerals. A giant oil and gas pipeline, thousands of kilometres long, is being laid through the country and into Yunnan. The teak forests to the north are being logged for furniture. The country's jade and rubies are being shipped to adorn the bodies and houses of the wealthy. There is even a blueprint to dredge the Irrawaddy and make it navigable all they way to the Chinese border.
And who is this for? Well, the booty is being split: China gets the goods and energy, Burma's generals get the money. Certainly, China is not alone in the rape of Burma. The Japanese were the first to prop up the regime in the 1960s and 70s, along with the South Koreans. Thailand sucks up vast quantities of its natural gas, its looming regional nemesis. And now India is also seeking out its own spoils.
But China has the cash, the proximity and less scruples. In the past 15 years, an increasingly confident and wealthy China has ramped up its offshore investment program seeking energy and food security.
Chinese business has always been a part of the fabric of the region. In every major mercantile centre, the Chinese have money and influence. Coming from a more sophisticated and aggressive culture with long and deep roots in trade and, at one time, innovation, the Chinese have understood the importance of taking control of critical institutions, such as banks, in order to make money and wield influence. The Chinese control many of the banks in Burma today. Because of this, the Chinese have been reviled in Burma and in many other countries in the region. Singapore was formed so the Chinese could create there own enclave away from the Malays.
Since its vast investment program in Burma began, Chinese nationals have flooded into Burma, particularly in the north. The country's second-largest centre, Mandalay, is conservatively believed to be at least 20 per cent Chinese. The total number of Chinese living in Burma is thought to be one million or more, but the Burmese government has not conducted a census since the early 1990s.
In Kokang two weeks ago, the Chinese were being targeted with bullets, their shops and homes looted. Many are afraid to go home.
For several decades after Burma's increasingly isolated and repressive military regime took charge of the place in 1962, battles raged between the government and a multiplicity of armed militia representing a range of ethnic minorities. One of these was the Kokang, a group of about 150,000 ethnic Han Chinese who have lived in the region for centuries. Militarily, they are the weakest of the militias and until last week they had a 20-year truce with the junta. Kokang is more Chinese than Burmese - they speak Mandarin, use the renmimbi and the Chinese mobile system.
It's the same story with many tribes close to China's borders and markets. Still, the Chinese are not particularly fond of the 50 or so casinos the Kokang run in the town of Laogai just down the road from Nansan, in exchange for promising to give up the drug trade in 2003. The Chinese are even less fond of the vast quantity of heroin and methamphetamine that cross its borders from the Wa ethnic group, now surrounded by the Burmese military and possibly its next target. There is a rapidly growing meth and ice problem raging across southern China and creeping its way north.
One theory says the attack on the ethnic groups by the junta government came at the behest of the Chinese to wipe out the drug trade, but China's reaction and a bald statement about protecting "Chinese people" would seem to counter that. China has close links to the Wa, too.
Burma is also looking elsewhere. Many in the US and Europe are urging the lifting of economic sanctions, saying they have only isolated Burma and forced it into China's arms. A change in that policy would threaten China's position in Burma. And Burma is getting closer to North Korea, which has spooked China's military. The threat of Burma getting nuclear weapons is enough to cause panic as this would leave China with the problem of two of the world's most erratic regimes with nuclear arms to its north and south - North Korea and Burma.
As China continues to have problems with its own internal ethnic tensions, some of those it faces in Burma are richly ironic, but the entire situation is becoming more complex and fraught by the day.
