The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  BURMA AND HUMAN RIGHTS

  On the day I arrived in Yangon, a large crowd was lining the streets of one of the main avenues near the center of town. They were there to greet the country’s president, Thein Sein, who had just returned from an overseas trip. Only a couple of years beforehand, such a stage-managed stunt of support for the leader would have been evidence of the corrosive weakness of the Burmese military regime. But this was the autumn of 2012, and there actually was reason to celebrate. Thein Sein, the former general-turned-civilian-politician, had just become the first Burmese leader in four decades to visit the U.S., a political prize for the surprisingly brisk burst of political and economic reforms he had introduced since taking power in 2011. And while he was on American soil, he received an even bigger reward from his new American friends: the Obama administration announced that it would start lifting the sanctions which for most of the previous two decades had smothered its economy. Burma was being welcomed back into the modern world.

  The trip was even more remarkable for the odd-couple act that Thein Sein put on with Burma’s most famous resident. At the same time that the president visited the U.S., Aung San Suu Kyi was also making her first trip to the country since being released from house arrest in late 2010. For part of her fifteen years of isolation, Thein Sein had been the number-four leader in the Burmese regime that incarcerated her. Yet, as both of them toured the U.S.—he at polite diplomatic engagements at the United Nations, she at a series of rapturous rallies where she was greeted like a rock star—they went out of their way to say glowing things about each other. Whenever he was given the chance, Thein Sein praised her for the responsible role she was playing as the main opposition leader in Parliament. After she was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal, an honor which she had actually been awarded during her period of house arrest, Thein Sein said, “We are proud of her.” For her part, Aung San Suu Kyi told audiences that Thein Sein was sincere in his efforts to promote reform, and that he needed all the help he could get from Burma’s American friends. For several decades, he had been banned from visiting the U.S. and she had been prevented from trying, but here was the former dissident and her onetime jailer making the case for each other to American audiences. When they met at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, Thein Sein, wearing a V-neck sweater and comfortable shoes, came across as her kindly uncle.

  Shortly before he left for the U.S., Thein Sein made another trip, this time to Beijing. In a meeting with Xi Jinping, he insisted that Burma’s embrace of democracy would not affect its friendship with its “traditional neighbor” China. But the statement was not really true. The voyage that took Thein Sein to New York was also, in many ways, a journey away from Beijing. The powerful backstory to Burma’s perestroika has been a desire to break free from overweening Chinese influence.

  There are, of course, many reasons why the new civilian government in Burma has decided to change course after five decades of brutal military rule. There was the gnawing shame of isolation that kept its leaders from traveling to many parts of the world and left its economy hamstrung. In the 1960s, Yangon had been a thriving Asian hub, the sort of place where PanAm flights to the region stopped, but four decades later, the sense of stagnation was overwhelming. Zarganar, the country’s best-known comedian, who was jailed four times by the military, described his disbelief when he was allowed to leave the country for the first time and visit Thailand in 2011. “When I saw the airport, I got a shock,” he said. “When I saw a good road and big bridge, I got a shock. And seeing the big buildings, I got a shock.” Yet, on top of the desire to modernize the country, the new government also wanted to escape from China’s suffocating embrace. Burma’s political revolution really began in earnest with an act of defiance toward Beijing, the decision to block a plan for a Chinese company to build a huge dam in the northeast of the country. At the time Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in late 2010, the political direction was still unclear: it could easily have been one more in the series of head feints the military had pulled in the past. The signal that this time things really were different came with the decision to stop the Myitsone Dam (pronounced Mitso), which had become the subject of an unprecedented political campaign within Burma. “It was a very significant step,” U Han Thar Myint, one of the central committee members of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, told me. “It was the first time that the government had made a major decision based on the opinion of the people in fifty years.”

  Burma’s tilt away from China is yet more evidence of the backlash against Beijing that has seeped across Asia in recent years. But it is significant in another important way. Burma has become a trial run for how much importance the U.S. will place on human rights and political reform in this new era of geopolitical competition in Asia. Burma’s opening is raising some fairly fundamental questions about Washington’s objectives in Asia. Thein Sein’s visit to the U.S. has lent the impression that Burma is in the process of being “flipped,” from a nation that sought patronage from China to one that takes direction from the U.S. As the U.S. seeks to shore up its diplomatic presence in the region in response to China, the temptation to try and draw Burma into the American camp is very strong. In a region where a new balance of power is taking shape, there is a certain cold, realistic logic to the idea of downplaying concerns about human rights in order to win new friends. That would be a big mistake. If Washington’s objective were to contain China, then it would need the support of as many regimes in the region as it could muster. But if its goal is to foster an Asia of strong, independent states, then political reform and human rights will be a central objective. The endgame in Asia for Washington is not to have a bigger club of sometimes embarrassing friends than China; it is to forge a robust and stable set of rules and institutions laced with American values of openness and political pluralism which will be resistant to Chinese pressure. That is the real prize. And Burma is now the test case.

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  When Western governments imposed sanctions on Burma in the late 1980s, China was far from alone in filling Burma’s gap. India has major interests in the country, and there has been a huge amount of Thai investment, including in controversial areas like teak and jewels. But, particularly during the late 2000s, the Chinese presence expanded rapidly. Some of those investments are quirky. Not far from the Shwedagon Pagoda, the gold-domed temple that rises from the center of Yangon, there is a Chinese-run entertainment center called Ice Wonderland, where you can pose beside ice statues of Mickey Mouse and descend slides made from ice. Residents of subtropical Yangon borrow long thermal coats to survive the minus five degrees Celsius. But there are also investments like the Myitsone Dam. The project is one of those jaw-dropping Chinese development schemes that speak to an almost mythical confidence in the power of engineering. The Myitsone Dam was planned to be one of seven in the mountains at the start of the Irrawaddy River that would in total have generated twenty gigawatts—more than the Three Gorges Dam itself. The Chinese group behind the project was CPI, part of one of China’s most important energy groups, and run by the daughter of a former Chinese premier.

  Right from the start, however, the project encountered resistance. Myitsone is in Kachin State, in one of the areas of the country that have been ravaged for decades by fighting between the government and the Kachin ethnic minority. As Ko Maw Tun Aung, an environmental activist originally from Kachin, told me, Myitsone is an almost sacred place in Kachin culture, considered to be a spiritual birthplace. “It is the sort of mystical place we hear about in bedtime stories,” he said. The Chinese also found themselves in bed with some of the least savory elements of the former regime. Their partner was a Burmese company called Asia World, which is the subject of U.S. sanctions and has been accused of being involved in heroin smuggling. The U.S. Treasury Department describes the company’s owners as “regime henchmen” and “junta cronies.”

  In a country where, until recently, politics had been tightly controlled, the
dam quickly became a catalyst for an intense burst of campaigning. The well-known writer Ju began to hold events decrying the damage to the river valley. She was joined by cartoonists, artists, composers, and poets. “It is a different country now; it is not good enough for the Chinese just to do a deal with the regime,” said the writer Ko Tar. The media also began to campaign aggressively against the dam—led by the Eleven Media Group, which started out publishing a sports weekly but now publishes the most dynamic newspaper in the country. The movement quickly took on a life of its own, largely bypassing the National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, which was the nominal opposition. Sensing the shifting tide, “the Lady” lent her support. She released a public letter calling for an “amicable” resolution to the issue and made an appearance at a Yangon art gallery that was showing an exhibition about the dam.

  Not only did the campaign against the dam open unprecedented space for political activism, it was also notable for the stridently anti-Chinese sentiments that it exposed. The project struck a chord across many sections of society that felt that China had become far too influential during the years of isolation and that it was time to take a stand. U Tin Oo, one of the leading figures in the NLD, described the broader issue as being whether Burma becomes “not just China’s satellite state, but China’s vassal state.” The media coverage of the campaign played up the anti-China angle. Than Htut Aung, chairman and CEO of the Eleven Media Group, said in one interview: “I informed the government and the opposition of the real situation in our country. In the 19th century, the superpowers were the British and the French. They colonised India and us. In the 20th century, the superpower was the US and they took Vietnam, Korea and Germany. In the 21st century, it’s China and we cannot sacrifice our country to China. I told the generals and Aung San and she knows.” Even among the military, some of whose members have become very rich doing business with China, there was resentment about the regime’s closeness to Beijing, which in the 1960s had backed a Communist insurgency and had denounced the Burmese military as “fascist.” Thein Sein had himself commanded a unit of the army which fought against the China-backed Burmese Communist Party.

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  Yangon has some of the buzz of the cool, new thing these days, the best hotels packed with Westerners who have decided to take the chance of looking around. When I met one of the anti-dam activists in a café called Coffee Circles, we were surrounded by hip, young Americans and Europeans, typing on their MacBooks and talking enthusiastically into headphone sets, the sort of frontier atmosphere that you could see in Shanghai a decade ago. Burma is also the exciting new topic in American foreign policy. The dramatic political opening has presented a big strategic opportunity for the U.S., which it has grabbed with both hands. The then secretary of state Hillary Clinton visited the country in late 2011, and Barack Obama followed suit in 2012. But just how the U.S. chooses to engage with Burma’s government—and how quickly it withdraws remaining sanctions—will have a big influence on the sort of society that emerges. Plenty of pitfalls lie ahead. The reforms that have been introduced so far to open the economy are only partial, and their success is not assured. Cronyism is easy to catch, but difficult to get rid of. Lots of members of the old regime and the business interests connected to them would be happy to see the government give the impression of reform, allowing sanctions to disappear, while changing little in the way the country is really run. Momentum could easily be lost. The U.S., therefore, faces a lot of difficult decisions. If Washington lets its companies rush in quickly to Burma with few questions asked, it could retard the pace of reform. But if it puts a lot of pressure on the government, some leading figures might seek to tilt back toward China.

  In his latest book, On China, Henry Kissinger warns that “an explicit American project to… create a bloc of democratic states for an ideological crusade is unlikely to succeed.” Kissinger has long criticized the Wilsonian tradition in American foreign policy for its missionary, evangelical quality, which he argues alienates potential partners and allies and frustrates national interests. In Asia, he believes that the American promotion of human rights as a central goal is bound to complicate the cool-headed negotiations that Washington will need to have with China in the coming years. The Chinese, he argues, will view this as a threat to their own legitimacy, creating even more competition between the two great powers. Kissinger believes there is too much at stake for the U.S. to indulge in an emotionally satisfying but counterproductive campaign for democracy.

  This brand of realism holds strong appeal for many in Washington who are less optimistic than Kissinger about the prospects of doing diplomatic business with China. If the goal is to push back against Chinese adventurism, some argue, that exercise will be made much harder if human rights are treated as a central issue. It will be more difficult, for instance, to improve relations with Vietnam or Cambodia if Washington is constantly harping on their political failings. If the U.S. pushes too hard on human-rights issues, so the argument goes, it could help carve the region into rigid camps, authoritarian and democratic. No one in Asia likes the U.S. when it is delivering shrill lectures about political values that it has been happy to ignore in many other parts of the world. The Obama administration has at times appeared to support parts of this view, especially when dealing directly with China. “Successive administrations and Chinese governments have been poised back and forth on these issues, and we have to continue to press them,” Hillary Clinton said before her first visit to Beijing as secretary of state in 2009. “But our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis.”

  Yet, in the long run, it would be a mistake to downplay human rights. It is obviously important to get the tone right and to avoid hectoring, but political reform should still be a central plank of U.S. strategy. In some cases, close attention to human-rights issues could aggravate rivalry with China, but the bigger risk for the region is that Washington and Beijing get drawn into a contest for influence in which they are constantly lowering the common denominator in order to avoid “losing” a country to the other side, the cynical logic attributed to Franklin Roosevelt of “he may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.” In the end, promoting good governance is a way of keeping U.S. policy makers honest. If Washington starts backpedaling on the need for reform in places like Burma, those countries could find themselves pawns in a great-power confrontation between China and the U.S. Elements of the old regime in Burma would be delighted to play Beijing and Washington against each other, allowing them to fend off the pressure for further reforms while maintaining a hold on power. Indeed, some of the activists who helped stop the Myitsone Dam worry that this is already happening. “We are already being used,” says Ko Maw Tun Aung. “It feels that we are being played with, that we are slowly being dragged into these regional games.”

  This debate is already being played out in Washington as the Pentagon tries to revive contacts with a host of militaries around Southeast Asia as part of the Obama administration’s “pivot.” The U.S. military has reopened links with Indonesia’s armed forces, which had been put on hold because of human-rights abuses in East Timor, and it has paid for the sons of Hun Sen, the authoritarian leader of Cambodia, to attend the West Point military academy. Washington is also reviving military-to-military ties with its Burmese counterpart, which over the last two decades has been responsible for a host of crimes against humanity. The Pentagon is confident that, through these sorts of relationships, it can help mold the culture of the military in Burma and boost the careers of younger officers who want to make a break from the past. But it is treacherous terrain, where it is easy to fall back onto the habit of turning a blind eye on abuses in return for political support.

  Washington has played this game with Burma before. In the Cold War 1960s, when the U.S. was worried about both Soviet and Chinese influence in Southeast Asia, the U.S. saw the Burmese military as an imp
ortant counterweight against the spread of communism. The last Burmese president to visit the White House was Ne Win, the very man who ushered in the country’s five decades of military rule with the coup he launched in 1962. In 1966, he visited Washington at the invitation of the Johnson administration, which had arranged for him to play golf in Maui for four days on the way. Ne Win was given the keys to the city of Washington, and he and his wife had a private dinner with the Johnsons at the White House. Over the years, Ne Win proved adept at navigating between the U.S. and China as he cemented his hold on power; the Burmese military eventually secured weapons purchases and training from both countries.

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  Burma is an important test in another way. The sort of politics that emerges in countries like Burma will influence the kind of Asian regionalism that develops. Asia will be much more immune to the machinations of great powers if the region is dominated by well-run, independent, and stable states that are free from the sort of crony-vested interests that outsiders can manipulate. States with strong institutions are better able to stand up for themselves. A strong consensus behind transparency and good governance can place limits on the worst elements of the Chinese system—the more ruthless, cash-rich state-owned companies, which support extravagant projects that appeal to some elite interests but have little popular support. Through the remaining sanctions, the U.S. still has the leverage to nudge Burma toward introducing stronger rules for monitoring huge investment projects, such as large dams. In the process, Washington might lose some of its new friends in the Burmese elite, but in the long run it will help Burmese society. If the U.S. appeared to be trying to impose democratic reforms on a reluctant region, it would be breaking the Asian iron rule and creating problems for itself. But the reality is that, across the region, there is strong popular pressure for more transparent and less abusive government. Indeed, if China tries to push back against this trend, it will only intensify the backlash against its influence. Even from a realist’s point of view, promoting good governance is also good politics for the U.S. It plays to American strengths and Chinese weaknesses.