Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Burma Update: China to Stay Silent?

On Tuesday I wondered whether China would stick its nose in the current uprising in Burma to help its business partner, the ruling military junta. China's largest constraint, I felt, is its very public non-interventionist policy, a position popular throughout the globe.

As the junta has begun violently dispersing peaceful protests, China has thus far remained silent. Via Foreign Policy's Passport, an analyst from RAND believes China couldn't flex its muscle in Burma even if it wanted to. An excerpt:

China has interests and involvements in Burma, but limited leverage. Burma is not some kind of client state of China. It is a xenophobic, divided, tribalized country with a nationalistic government; it bears more resemblance to one of the less coherent sub-Saharan African states than to most other East Asian countries. It's not an easy place to influence. Through most of the 1980s there was a Burmese Communist Party, which consisted primarily of the Wa tribe plus Chinese leadership. When the Wa decided to turn anti-communist in the late 1980s and chased the Chinese leadership into China, China's influence in the country was drastically reduced but there was little China could do without military intervention. So Beijing basically sat by passively when it happened.

There's a crucial lesson in that episode. The fact that China has economic involvements in this neighboring country and sells weapons to it doesn't mean anymore than when big U.S. companies are involved in some third world country and the U.S. government also sells weapons to it. Those things imply neither political commitment to a certain regime nor any ability to change the regime. The Chinese have been pressing Rangoon diplomatically for some time to liberalize the political system. Going beyond that to some kind of active Chinese attempt to impose a new kind of politics would be like the U.S. invading Mexico to clean up Mexican politics, but much messier because Burmese nationalism and tribalism make Mexico's nationalism and Iraq's tribalism seem modest by comparison.

One would hope that our experience with regime change in Iraq would temper somewhat the occasional neocon fantasy that China could simply install a new regime in North Korea or the apparent new fantasy of some liberals that China could just install a different kind of government in Burma."

I doubt most liberal Westerners actually believe China, of all countries, would install a more liberal regime in Burma, but the rest of this analysis sounds convincing to me. All the same, I do think we may see a time when China's anti-interventionist rhetoric will come into conflict with its strategic interests, and the consequences of that conflict would be very telling.