Revisiting China’s Mercurial History With Myanmar

Following Xi Jinping’s recent high profile visit to Myanmar, the first by a Chinese president in nearly two decades, one might assume that Naypyidaw had pivoted to welcome its powerful neighbor to the north once more. For China, developing and maintaining positive ties with Myanmar is of significant importance not only to ensure stability along its borders, but also because its neighbor is richly endowed with natural resources and geographically strategic, with the potential to provide China with an access point to the Indian Ocean. However, the future trajectory of China-Myanmar ties is likely to be heavily influenced by their complicated past. The high-level embrace of Beijing in Naypyidaw belies broader fears of dependency and complex tensions stemming from local grievances over Chinese influence and domestic politics.

After Mao Zedong and his Communist Party forces defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, Myanmar (then known as Burma) was among the first noncommunist countries to officially recognize the newly established People’s Republic of China in 1950. For its part, Burma had declared its own independence two years earlier in 1948 after more than a century as a British colony.

Both in their infancy, the two countries forged a seemingly tight partnership. Leaders signed an initial trade deal in 1954, followed by a boundary agreement in 1960 that entered into force a year later. Their proximity was enshrined in the coining of the term “pauk-phaw” (or “baobo” in Chinese), which had been translated as “cousin” or “brother” or “fraternal relations.” Such slogans are a common instrument for the conduct of Chinese politics, both foreign and domestic. (Xi echoed the characterization of fraternal ties during both his first trip to Myanmar as vice president in 2009 and in his recent 2020 visit).

Despite the friendly ties between the two countries in their early years, political changes in both Myanmar and China and the intensification of the Cold War coincided with turmoil in the “familial” relationship. The presence of Chinese Nationalist forces who had fled across the border after the Chinese Civil War plagued stability for both China and Myanmar. The PRC was competing with the Republic of China – led by Chiang and those who fled to Taiwan – for recognition as the “rightful” representative of China internationally. A military campaign in the early 1960s defeated the remaining Kuomintang (KMT) forces in Burma, with Taiwan evacuating their remaining troops.

Research has argued that the KMT’s presence in Myanmar’s northeastern ethnic regions not only challenged Myanmar’s sovereignty but also played a role in institutionalizing the Myanmar military, stoking anti-Burmese sentiment, and triggering grievances over power and resource distribution.

Myanmar’s parliamentary government was overthrown in a coup d’etat in 1962 and subsequently ruled by a military junta. The new government expelled Chinese communities in Myanmar and anti-Chinese riots erupted in 1967.

At the same time, China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution on the domestic front and internationally seeking to export revolution. China has at times intervened in cross-border affairs, from hosting refugees who have entered China’s southwestern Yunnan province to, most recently, seeking to play a proactive role in facilitating Myanmar’’s peace process.

Although diplomatic ties were renormalized in 1971, then-Burmese Prime Minister Ne Win’s isolationist economic policies and Beijing’s ongoing support for the Burma Communist Party hindered the emergence of a robust economic relationship. China did, however, extend some aid projects in the 1980s, though economic ties between China and Myanmar did not kick off until the 1990s. During that decade, both faced isolation from the West after their respective crackdowns on political reform movements and found complementarity in the other’s economy to foster development. Since the ‘90s, economic linkages, trade in particular, have been the through line across both China’s and Myanmar's political evolutions. China also became the primary source of military armaments and munitions for the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s armed forces.

In 1992, China accounted for only 2.7 percent of the share of Myanmar’s imports; by 2001 that share had risen to 10.7 percent, and by 2018 it was more than 32 percent, according to World Integrated Trade Solutions data. As for exports, less than one-third of a percent of Myanmar’s exports were bound for China in 1992. In 2010, China’s share of Myanmar’s exports increased to just shy of 3 percent only to grow exponentially in the last decade, peaking at more than 40 percent in 2016 before dropping to 33 percent by 2018.

While some observers claimed that fears of exploitation and over-reliance on China were a driver behind Myanmar’s military government’s 2011 decision to institute democratic reforms, economic activity with China remains on its upward trajectory. Nevertheless, others, including other regional and Western countries alike, have also upped their entry into the Myanmar market, diversifying Myanmar’s economic partners.

Human rights and domestic policy vis-a-vis ethnic communities appear to be one policy area in which Beijing and Naypyidaw are aligned. Myanmar authorities, under both the military junta and the de facto leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, have described the consequences of policies concerning ethnic minorities as strictly a domestic issue, particularly in response to systematic criticism over the treatment of the Rohingya, an unrecognized Muslim ethnic group who live primarily in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state. The Myanmar government’s position bears a strong resemblance to the way Beijing has rebuffed condemnation for its policies in Tibet and Xinjiang. Moreover, China has used its position on the United Nations Security Council to shield Myanmar from international institutional opprobrium.

And yet, Beijing’s proclivity to align itself with Myanmar’s military leaders and now democratic elites has not won over populations at the local level.

Local backlash against Chinese investment and projects in Myanmar are not new phenomena in response to the country’s linkage to the Belt and Road Initiative, but instead have long been at the heart of the dynamic bilateral relationship between Beijing and Naypyidaw. Without greater transparency on new infrastructure projects or a commitment to making China’s presence a means of facilitating exchange and alleviating tensions between central and local authorities in Myanmar, suspicion will linger and the existing “friendship” will likely continue to be seen as politically instrumental.