The British were in Burma for more than 120 years, but were never sure what to do with it. They completed their conquest in 1885, annexing Upper Burma and abolishing the ancient, semi-divine monarchy, apparently on the whim of Randolph Churchill. This was contrary to the British imperial tradition of indirect rule, and brought about a crisis of legitimacy which was never overcome. British rule was never fully accepted, even though the country prospered under the Raj, becoming the greatest exporter of rice in the world. In the short-lived democracy after independence, the rather bumbling U-Nu kept winning landslide victories in elections. But he was overthrown in an army coup which established a sort of voodoo socialism under the enigmatic General Ne Win, who proceeded to impoverish the country, while enriching himself, and cutting Burma off from most contact with the outside world. Burma became a largely forgotten country.
There things remained until the great insurrection of 1988 in which the whole of Burmese society seemed to join, until it was put down with great brutality. If Burma has gradually entered public consciousness, it is because it has been seen as the stage for one of the most prolonged struggles between despotism and the desire for freedom in the modern world.
Thant Myint-U — author of two earlier books on Burmese history — wants us to take a larger view. He is rather non-committal on the political future of Burma, indeed, rather detached. It is a main contention of the book that in concentrating on the struggle for democracy, we are victims of myopia, failing to see how the future of Burma will be determined above all by its geographical relations with China and India, and by the needs of two economies that are developing at breakneck speed.
Any recent visitor to Burma — especially to Mandalay — must be struck by the Chinese presence. Mandalay is now about a third Chinese, and there is ethnic Chinese immigration running into millions. (On the plane I took there a few years ago, 90 per cent of the other passengers were mainland Chinese.) Chinese need for the natural resources of foreign countries suggests that Burma, with gigantic reserves of natural gas — anything from 10 to 90 trillion cubic feet — as well as teak and gems, is destined to become a client state of China. (The Chinese also have an apparently inexhaustible appetite for bits of endangered species for medicinal and aphrodisiac purposes, including clouded leopard, bear bile, and the skin, teeth and penises of tigers.)
Thant Myint-U’s suggestion is that our obsession with human rights, while doing nothing to change the situation internally, is pushing the Junta inexorably into the arms of Peking.
Going back over more than 1000 years, Thant-Myint-U shows how from the earliest times China looked for a direct trading route to India — which had inevitably to go through Burma. China’s current vast need for energy and for an outlet to the Indian ocean entails a huge pipeline to import Burmese oil and gas from Arakhan state on the Bay of Bengal to Yunan in south west China. The Chinese are also building massive hydroelectric dams in northern Burma, which will produce as much electricity as the Three Gorges dam, nearly all of which will go to China. A dam on the mighty Salween river will also produce benefits to China incomparably greater that any to the Burmese population.
But Thant Myint-U does not just give us a picture of a new Great Game, in which India and China take on the roles of England and Russia. He travels widely in the borderlands of Burma, India and China, and gives a vivid sense not only of the ethnic diversity of all three countries, but of how the unimaginable — until a few years ago — changes are transforming lives. When I first went to Rangoon, in 1988, I felt I had slipped back 50 years (in Mandalay, more like 100 to a place time had forgot.) But although Rangoon now has many of the accoutrements of modernity — expensive hotels, internet cafés, rush hours — the new wealth is confined to a couple of hundred thousand people.
So is Burma destined to be simply a crossroads, a client state? We come back to the question of legitimacy. Would a democratic Burma be more likely to stand up for the interests of its own citizens than one in which a small ruling clique make arrangements with China which could as well be purely in their own sectional interests rather than in those of the population as a whole? I would think that the answer is obviously yes. As Thant Myint-U says ‘A peaceful, prosperous and democratic Burma would be a game-changer for all Asia.’ We can but hope.