Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (22 page)

The Chinese government began its ‘Go West’ strategy in 2000 and has since spent enormous amounts of money trying to develop infrastructure in these poorer interior regions. Yunnan’s economy has benefited considerably, quadrupling in size from approximately $24 billion at the beginning of the decade to $91 billion in 2009. In Kunming ambitions are soaring. A few months after I was in Ruili, in July 2009, Yunnan’s governor, Jin Guangrong, suggested the creation of a ‘Eurasian Land Bridge’, an ultra-modern train line that would run from the Pearl River Delta (near Hong Kong and Guangzhou), through Yunnan and Burma, all the way to Rotterdam. China had growing export markets in Africa, he explained, and this would cut no less than 6,000 kilometres off the current Guangdong to Cairo sea-route.

Perhaps one day soon freight trains bound for Holland will indeed run right past Ruili. For now, Ruili’s interests and concerns are much more parochial. Here development means first and fore most the Burma market. Ruili is not so much an indication of general development in this frontier region, as an outpost of China’s east coast prosperity, and a bridgehead towards Burma. Over the past two decades or so, relentless logging has denuded the once lush mountain scenery, and intensive irrigation and big hydro power projects have brought drought and environmental destruction. A growing popular reaction is forcing Chinese companies to look across the border, to Burma, for more forests to cut down, and more rivers to dam, and Ruili is becoming wealthier from this hunger for new resources.

However, reaching into Burma presents special challenges–drugs and disease, not only HIV/AIDS but also malaria, are rampant along parts of the frontier. There is also the huge Chinese migrant population in Burma. The Burmese tend to see them as Chinese colonists. For the Chinese authorities, however, they are also a worry. In this age of Chinese nationalism, any threat to their safety would have country-wide repercussions. A few Chinese were kidnapped by criminals in Burma in late 2009 and held for ransom; this made national headlines. Anti-Chinese riots would be a disaster for Beijing. In a normal situation, all these challenges would be managed together with the government on the other side of the border. But Burma is a special case. There is a Burmese government. But there are also all the many non-government armies, independent of any state’s control.

The Ruili River valley has been seen for a long time as a natural border between Burma and China. It has been said to mark the limit of Burmese royal authority on the one side and the beginning of the Chinese empire on the other. But this was more a conceit in the minds of Burmese courtiers and Chinese mandarins than a reality for the people of the area themselves. Both sides of what is today the border were within the realm of the Shan peoples, here called the Dai, governed by their own hereditary chiefs, with no obvious cultural or linguistic frontier dividing them. Further to the southwest, towards Mandalay, the influence and power of the Burmese kings and Burmese court culture increased, whilst to the northeast, successive Beijing-based dynasties–Mongol, Chinese and Manchu–attempted to extend and consolidate their direct administration.

The Dai are today categorized as yet another official nationality of the People’s Republic and over a million of them live in Yunnan, in this area as well as further south, closer to the Laos and Thai borders, where their dialect and customs are almost indistinguishable from those of their cousins next door. On the Chinese side, consolidating Beijing’s hold over these messy borderlands was only half-finished when the communist revolution brought along a much more determined and often violent integrationist campaign.

Up to the 1950s there was still a Shan
sawbwa
governing the area, a man by the name of Fang Yu-chih, who would have been forgotten by history if it were not for his inspired appointment, in 1942, of C. Y. Lee as his private secretary. C. Y. Lee was born in 1917 in Hunan province and belonged to a family of distinguished scholars. He earned a bachelor’s degree from China’s Southwest University and emigrated in 1943 to the United States, earning a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale University, and then writing a bestselling novel,
The Flower Drum Song
, adapted in 1958 for a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. In the period between his graduation from university in 1940 and his emigration to America, C. Y. Lee lived in Mangshih (the town adjoining Ruili) as private secretary to the local prince,
sawbwa
Fang.

On his arrival, the new Secretary Lee wrote:

To my pleasant surprise, Mangshih is not a poverty-stricken wilderness as I had pictured it: it is a small utopia of some two thousand square miles, endowed with rich valleys and rolling hills, its little villages surrounded by bamboo clusters. The rice fields extend for miles like soft green velvet carpets, dotted here and there by huge banyans and tall and slender papaya trees; beyond the hills, mountains rise into strips of haze in the deep blue semi-tropical sky. The red Buddhist temples peek from behind clusters of bamboos. Mangshih is like an art gallery full of oriental water colours.

The
sawbwa
was then forty-one and saw the Burmese and Chinese worlds closing in around him. He believed that the key to Mangshih’s future was to modernize itself and make itself into a bridge between the two countries. With this thinking in mind he turned his little town into an appealing stopover on the new road from Mandalay to Kunming, with cafés and public bathhouses owned by Shanghai merchants. He also conducted his inspection tours in a new Buick, before returning home to meals of roast beef and fried chicken, all part of the ‘modernization drive’.

The
sawbwa
decided as well that the time was right to take his first concubine (he was already married), and for this important mission he had Secretary Lee accompany him on a pleasure trip to Rangoon. They journeyed by car, down the Burma Road to Mandalay, and then by rail. High-class pimps in Rangoon were happy to see him. He was invited to parties and made the rounds at the clubs and racecourses. ‘Being a
Sawbwa
has this advantage in Burma,’ he told Secretary Lee. ‘You attract a lot of women, like a piece of rotten meat attracting horseflies.’ He met and settled on a beautiful wavy-haired Eurasian named Ida. She was the daughter of an Irish seaman and a Chinese dancing girl, but feeling that this wasn’t quite the right pair of pedigrees for a future royal wife he turned her parents into an English colonel and a Mongolian princess. Ida played badminton and bridge and even spoke a little French which she had learned from the Hindu professional strongman who helped raise her. She wore khaki shorts and high heels and the
sawbwa
called her ‘Ida darling’, the only English he had learned as part of his modernization efforts.

This was a world that ended abruptly in 1953 when the Chinese communists, already four years in Beijing, marched in and then abolished the
sawbwa
system. Many local people as well as the entire court fled to Burma. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, all the palaces of the Shan or Dai rulers were torn down, scores of monasteries and pagodas demolished, monks defrocked and forced into hard labour. The Shan aristocrats who stayed were beaten up or killed. The old hereditary elites disappeared. But on the Burmese side, a new breed of local chiefs, warlords and middle men emerged to take their place. And they are still there today.

Directly south of Ruili are the Wa Hills and the territory controlled by the United Wa State Army. In the 1970s and 1980s, Wa militia had been part of the forces controlled by the Burmese communist insurgents, backed by Beijing and fighting Rangoon. When the communist insurgency collapsed in 1989, the Wa militia regrouped to establish the UWSA, with Beijing’s tacit support. The current Wa leaders speak Chinese fluently and enjoy a close relationship with Chinese officialdom. Several were born on the other side of the border, in the Wa autonomous prefecture in Yunnan. Their top military officers and business associates are ethnic Chinese. When they agreed to a ceasefire with the Burmese army in 1989, the Burmese promised development assistance and looked to Western governments and the United Nations for help. This never came and instead China has stepped into the breach, building roads and other infrastructure and encouraging trade and investment. Chinese rubber plantations have replaced some of the old opium fields. And the Chinese, aware that disease respects no international boundary, have facilitated trans-border health programmes. But big problems remain. The Wa are not only well armed but have started in recent years to produce arms as well, helped informally and perhaps illegally by ordnance factories in Yunnan. The degree of official complicity in Yunnan is not known, but there are allegations that arms manufactured by the Wa are making their way to India, to insurgent groups in India’s far northeast. Han Chinese rule over Yunnan may now be well consolidated, but in expanding its reach into Burma, Beijing is having to deal with yet another, very similar but ‘less cooked’ array of barbarians, as well as a frontier mindset amongst its own, sometimes wayward local officials.

In the past, these marcher lords have been the cause of war. In the 1760s clashes between the Shan chiefs in this area, chiefs who owed nominal allegiance to both the king of Burma and the emperor of China, were quickly transformed into armed conflict between Burma and China itself. The trigger was the murder of a Chinese businessman, followed by Chinese demands for redress and Burmese support for a recalcitrant local ruler. Four massive Manchu Chinese armies would invade Burma over a four-year period, intent on imperial conquest. The Burmese emerged victorious in the end, but Sino-Burmese relations remained damaged for decades.

But frontier personalities have also been important bridge-builders and peacemakers. There is, for instance, the amazing case, only recently discovered, of a man named Wu Shangxian, nick named Ai-chiao-hu or ‘The Short-Legged Tiger’. Wu was an ethnic Chinese, born into a poor family in the east of Yunnan. Sometime in the 1740s, he arrived in the Wa Hills in search of fortune, setting up a business at the one of the great silver mines in the area. He quickly became rich, and later became a trusted confidant of the governor of Yunnan, who appointed him a collector of taxes. This was a time when there wasn’t much trade between the Burmese kingdom and China proper, and Wu and the Yunnan governor both reckoned that growth in trade would mean more money for them. As neither government seemed very interested in improving commercial ties, they decided to intervene, directly. Wu made his way to the Burmese court of Ava, pretending to be no less than an envoy from the emperor of China. The Burmese were flattered and pleased by this attention. When Wu went back to China, a Burmese embassy accompanied him, and together they went to Beijing where they were courteously received. In the end, not much came of the ‘exchange’ of embassies, but only because civil conflict in Burma made any proper follow-up impossible. Wu himself was eventually found out (by a new governor of Yunnan) and arrested.

What these incidents demonstrate is the role local people have long played in the evolution of the Burma–China frontier. Today, with a virtually open frontier, there has been more contact and commerce than at any time in recent history, and this has created new and dynamic networks far from any state control. They include local ethnic Chinese networks, running from overseas communities in Taiwan or Hong Kong to towns along the border. But they also include networks of other, non-Chinese, people, like the Shan or Dai, who sometimes act as middlemen and run businesses linking the Burma–China border not only with Mandalay and Kunming, but also the Thai cities of Chiangmai and Bangkok. Inside Yunnan, the Shan/Dai are heavily influenced by Chinese culture, profess Chinese ways, and speak in a Dai dialect long influenced by Chinese. Closer to the border, their orientation is more towards Burma and Burmese culture. Further south, it’s the connections with Thailand that are strong. Families may have relatives in all three countries, perfectly positioned to exploit expanding markets.

Local peoples and local dynamics are shaping the emerging landscape, as much as any directive from Beijing. And it’s a landscape that is being pulled onto the global stage.

In the fifteenth century a colossal fleet of ships, under the command of the imperial eunuch Zheng He, sailed several times around the Indian Ocean, reaching the east coast of Africa, and possibly beyond. The fleet included huge vessels over 400 feet long and 150 feet in beam, twice the size of the biggest Spanish and Portuguese ships at the time, as well as water tankers and transports carrying nearly 30,000 soldiers. It was a dramatic projection not so much of Chinese power but Chinese prestige, meant to shock and awe the peoples of the Indian Ocean into grateful submission. Zheng He, a Muslim native of the Yunnan–Burma borderlands, brought back presents from Asian and African kings, including a giraffe for the emperor’s menagerie, as well as news of the Western world. But unlike the European expeditions of a century later, which would lead to lasting trade and conquest, the Chinese expeditions were a one-off, like the American missions to the moon. The Chinese security establishment of the time wanted attention instead to be focused towards the empire’s inland frontiers, where they were facing irksome enemies like the Oirat Mongols and the Uighur kingdom of Turpan, and China never tried again to develop a blue-water navy.

Until now. Over the past twenty years, China’s navy has been growing. China still doesn’t have an aircraft carrier, the mark of a true global naval power, but it does have an expanding fleet of destroyers (bought from the Russians) and submarines, including nuclear ones, and China is said to be testing the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile, one capable of threatening America’s Pacific Fleet. In late 2008, the Chinese decided to flex some of their new muscles and joined the international task force that was fighting pirates off the Somali coast, sending some of their best ships as well as commandos expert in martial arts. A year later, a retired Chinese admiral proposed the establishment of a permanent naval base in the western Indian Ocean. The fight against the pirates is meant as a sign of things to come.