The Han that rock the cradle

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

FOR most of the past three weeks 19 members of the Yang family have lived in “125”, a refugee camp that straddles the Myanmar-China border. They left their homes in February when fighting flared up between Burmese government troops and local rebels, says one of the Yang sisters, carrying the youngest of her six children on her back in a red velvet sling. But after shelling came perilously close to the camp one night, they fled again, this time crossing into China, laden down with bedding, clothes and “water-smoking pipe”, or giant bamboo hookah. They joined the 60,000 or so Burmese who, the Chinese state media say, have entered Yunnan province since early February.

The fighting in Kokang, a small region in Myanmar’s northern Shan state, is the bloodiest the country has seen for years. It risks undermining Myanmar’s ceasefire talks. It also worsens an already turbulent relationship between Myanmar and China and highlights differences between the central government in Beijing and far-flung Yunnan, one of China’s poorest provinces, which shares a 2,000km border with Myanmar.

The conflict involves China partly because the fighting is on its doorstep: on March 8th stray bombs damaged a house on the Chinese side. Kokang also retains a special place in China’s psyche. It was part of the country until the Qing dynasty ceded it to Britain in 1897. Around 90% of the Kokang are ethnic Han-Chinese (a similar proportion make up China’s own population); they speak Mandarin, use Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, and many have friends and relatives in Yunnan. Some have Chinese identity cards.

The government of Myanmar claims the Chinese are training Kokang fighters. Some accuse them of arming or financing the Kokang militia, too, and of allowing them to use Chinese territory to outflank government troops. The militia’s octogenarian leader, Peng Jiasheng (known as Phone Kyar Shin in Burmese), denies these allegations but has tried to whip up Chinese support online, reminding the Chinese of their “common race and roots”. Though they are not Chinese citizens, the Kokang’s ethnicity increases domestic pressure on China’s government to respond in some way, reckons Enze Han of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Some Chinese people criticised the government when it failed to react to anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia in 1998.

China’s government has tried to dissociate itself from the conflict. An editorial in the state-run Global Times newspaper warned people to “avoid any premature stance or interference” in Myanmar’s affairs; Chinese news reports refer to “border people” rather than “refugees”. The government has yet to allow the United Nations refugee agency access to the camps. A facility for refugees at the international convention centre in Nansan, a town just across the border from the main crossing-point in the Kokang capital, Laukkai, was shut within three weeks of the conflict starting. It is unclear what happened to the inhabitants. Some richer Kokang booked into hotels or rented places in Nansan, but the city is not overrun with Burmese—and few have returned to their homes.

For the government in Beijing the local conflict is bothersome: China’s leaders care more about domestic stability and regional economic ties than border tribes. Official policy towards Myanmar, as elsewhere, is not to intervene. Myanmar’s military junta relied on China when the West imposed sanctions in the 1990s, which led to a backlash against the country in 2011 after Thein Sein came to power. Some contracts have since been renegotiated and Chinese investment has recovered. China now sees Myanmar mainly as a trading partner and energy supplier.

But the influx of Kokang has forced China to become more involved. Resources have been mobilised quickly to deal with the incomers and several temporary facilities opened—though at least one has been closed, and there have been unconfirmed reports of refugees being forced back to Myanmar. Still, the situation is a lot better than in the recent past. In 2009 30,000 people fled another flare-up in Kokang, the largest refugee crisis on China’s border since the war with Vietnam in 1979. In 2011-12 hostilities in Kachin again forced thousands into Yunnan. On both occasions, China’s humanitarian response was weak and late, says Yun Sun of the Stimson Centre, a think-tank in Washington. Since then a succession of natural disasters has given China more experience in dealing with internally displaced people.

The conflict also sheds light on the different priorities of Beijing and Yunnan. Although trade with Myanmar accounts for less than 1% of China’s total, it makes up 24% of Yunnan’s. Residents on both sides benefit from being allowed to move freely, but fighting jeopardises that. So local Yunnanese ought to have a strong incentive to end the fighting.

At the same time illegitimate commercial activities conducted by Chinese companies in northern Myanmar—including illegal mining, logging and smuggling conducted under the noses of local officials—help to finance local militias. These illicit ventures are sources of conflict with locals. And they are at the root of Burmese accusations that China is supporting and arming the separatists. The government in Beijing could do more to clamp down on such trade.

It has already moved to increase its oversight of Yunnan and the border with Myanmar. In 2009 provincial officials either did not know or did not tell the authorities in Beijing that a conflict was brewing. Now the Chinese army, rather than the local border police, controls the boundary. And officials in Beijing have established direct links with ethnic groups inside Myanmar, rather than going through their Yunnanese counterparts, as before. But the Chinese authorities do not have an appetite for being sucked in. Unless the violence gets much worse, the government in Beijing is unlikely to step in to try to make peace between Myanmar’s government and the Kokang.

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