Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia
By Thant Myint-U.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.  $27.00

Reviewed by Marc A. Sorel

The last four months have been a watershed period in US-Burma diplomacy.  It began two years prior, with Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell’s visit to Burma in November 2009 – at that time, the highest-ranking US official in nearly 14 years to visit the country.  Following the first visit to Burma by Obama’s coordinator for Burma policy Ambassador Derek Mitchell in October, and after speaking with Burmese political activist Aung San Suu Kyi, President Obama announced last month that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would visit Burma.  Clinton completed her three-day visit on December 2^nd, the first by a US Secretary of State in 50 years.

In response to these US overtures, the Burmese government established a National Human Rights Commission, embarked on a new round of peace talks with restive ethnic minority groups, eased media censorship laws, legalized labor unions, and reached an agreement with Suu Kyi to re-register her political party on the condition that she run for office in the next round of elections.  Together, these steps constitute the “flickers of progress” after “years of darkness” in Burma that President Obama noted in his announcement of Clinton’s visit.

As UN diplomat Thant Myint-U persuasively explains in Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia with an insightful, if at times excessively anecdotal account, the changes underway in Burma are as complex as the country’s political and economic future is undecided.  The central characters in Thant’s story are not people, but nation-states: China, India, and Burma -- past, present, and future.  Employing a style that weaves shoe leather reporting with travelogue anecdote, rich historical context, and political analysis, Thant recounts his travels in the three countries’ interiors and along their intersecting peripheries to answer a simply worded, yet daunting question: what will be Burma’s fate as India and China grow?

Thant’s book comes at an opportune time: Burma’s key exports -- jade, off-shore oil and gas, and hydroelectric power -- as well as its geopolitical position make the country of increasing importance to India and China.  For China, Burma could solve two strategic problems, Thant argues.  First, it could be China’s “California” -- a western sea coast that attracts tourists and their wallets as they transit Yunnan en route to Burma.  Second, hydroelectric dams, oil pipelines and train tracks laid from Burmese ports to Yunnan would ensure vital shipments of fuel and natural resources, circumventing the Malaccan straits and precluding the possibility that a future Indian or US naval blockade of Chinese maritime traffic would materially affect Chinese interests.  For India, whose “Look East” policy promised new avenues of economic engagement with Asian nations, trade has been largely limited to commodities and raw materials, constrained by the remoteness of the provinces east of Bangladesh and the lack of shipping capacity of Burmese ports.  Thailand is getting in on the action too, with a multi-billion dollar industrial park and tourist destination planned for the sliver of Burma that extends southward along the Andaman coast.  An explicit aim of the Thai government is for the park to house environmentally damaging industries currently situated in and around Bangkok.  The West, whose sanctions regime Thant suggests is becoming increasingly irrelevant, is largely absent from this picture.

Thant does well when describing Burma’s present geopolitical context, but he is at his best while unpacking the layers of historical, economic, political, and ethnographic complexity affecting the country’s future.  Although China leads on commercial diplomacy, India has stronger cultural ties through its dominance of the region for most of the last 2,000 years, epitomized by the fact that nearly 90% of Burma is Buddhist, and the Burmese elites speak English, not Mandarin.  But India’s historic influence is under threat.  Restive Burmese minorities such as the Wa, which control a semi-autonomous region the size of Belgium along the Chinese border with one of the largest private armies in the world, benefit from Chinese commercial influence.  Thant contemplates these contrasts when he vists Wa (sustained by its trade in methamphetamine, and “discreet” support from the Chinese), and recalls the still-struggling portions of Rangoon in the south.

Despite China’s growing presence in the country, Thant is careful to point out that the future trajectory of Chinese influence is anything but guaranteed.  His first example is the Kokang incident, a Burmese military operation against ethnic minorities in Shan state in 2009 that displaced nearly 30,000 refugees to neighboring Yunnan province.  This is precisely the kind of scenario China seeks to prevent along its border with North Korea.  Chinese foreign policy analysts cited the incident as a signal from the junta that it would not be a supplicant to Beijing’s interests.  Add to this the Burmese government’s decision in September, spurred in part by local protests, to suspend construction of a hydroelectric dam that would have carried energy to western China, and the future of Burma-Chinese relations is even less clear.

II.

Part history, political analysis, long-form travel feature, and economic analysis, Thant’s interdisciplinary narrative facilitates a compelling blend of historical, political, and economic perspectives, but it also results in anecdotal overload and conclusions implicitly drawn without factual confirmation.  By recounting what he observes, as he observes it, Thant imbues his text with an urgency that is absorbing when done well.  But when Thant mentions for a fourth time the television programming in his hotel room, the device wears thin.  Juxtaposed with his telling of Burmese, Chinese, and Indian history and his thoughtful political analysis, Thant’s notebook-emptying asides become more distracting than helpful.

Thant also occasionally gets his facts wrong, and goes a bridge too far in the conclusions he draws from anecdotal evidence.  Thant incorrectly translates “Beijing” to mean “Northern Peace” when in fact it means “Northern City” or “Northern Capital,” in contrast with Nanjing or “Southern Capital.” Perhaps Thant was thinking of the Chinese capital’s other name – Beiping – which does mean Northern Peace, but was last used officially from 1928 until 1949, and before that, during the Ming dynasty. Additionally, Thant assumes that a group of Chinese businessmen with whom he shares a plane ride in Burma are members of a senior-ranking delegation; he uses that assumption to buttress his point about China’s growing presence in Burma.  But he is either unable or unwilling to confirm his hunch, which raises doubts about his ability to back up his central conclusions with verified evidence.

III.

Between the lines of Thant’s book is a clear call to Washington to deepen its engagement with Burma.  He characterizes the competition among outside powers for commercial position in Burma as a new “Great Game,” invoking the contest between Russia and Britain for dominance in Central and South Asia during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Thant also poses a persistent question throughout his descriptions of Chinese commercial influence in Burma: will the Burmese people benefit from China’s involvement?

The thrust of Thant’s argument is that Burma, through its commercial ties, political reforms, and geopolitical pressures from its ambitious neighbors, is reintegrating into the international system, and its pace of reintegration is accelerating.  Pick your metaphor --  wave, train, bus -- Thant’s point is that if the US fails to catch this momentous opportunity, it may lose the interest and favor of an emerging key player in the region, and fall behind in its competition for influence throughout Asia.  The appeal, as Thant presents it here, is persuasive from an economic perspective.

But is the opportunity as large, and the moment as significant, as Thant suggests it is?  Thant steers clear of articulating how the US can reconcile its necessary and legitimate calls for political reform in Burma with the urge for expanded commercial engagement and regional influence -- a wise choice for someone removed from the complexities of the policymaking process in Washington and Naypitaw, and presumably interested in maintaining his neutrality as a UN diplomat in New York.  Whether there is room for Burma amidst the panoply of Asian markets is an open question.  Instead of answering it definitively, though, Thant strangely suggests how the US may engage with Burma in part by reminding the reader that the country has been on the mind of past US Presidents: Franklin Delano Roosevelt detested it, Theodore Roosevelt once hunted near China’s border with the country, and Herbert Hoover visited one of its silver mines as a business executive before he became Commander in Chief.

The current US President is unlikely to visit Rangoon any time soon.  But that does not mean engagement is a dead-end.  Driven in part by its competition with China for influence in East Asia, the US under the Obama administration has pursued a dual track of engagement and sanctions with Burma.  During a press briefing at the end of his October trip before departing Rangoon, Burma Coordinator Mitchell enumerated the four focal points of US policy toward Burma: human rights, development, democracy, and national reconciliation.  Secretary Clinton elaborated on Mitchell’s principles during her recent trip, when she urged Burma to cut its ties to North Korea, end ethnic violence and internal conflict, and start talks regarding joint searches with the US for troops killed on Burmese soil in World War II.  The last of these items is key, mostly because it parallels an essential precondition of normalizing US-Vietnam relations in the mid-1990s.  Only after a series of Congressional investigations into POW-MIA status in Vietnam did then-President Bill Clinton normalize relations with the former pariah state.

How the US-Burma relationship evolves will have significant consequences for the US, Burma and the region.  Thant knows this, and his book could not have been better-timed, as western policymakers, diplomats, academics, journalists, and businesspeople try to make sense of a country that has been relatively closed to them for a generation.  As the US deepens its engagement with Burma, as China and India continue to pursue their commercial interests in the country, as the Burmese government undertakes serious political reforms, and as “the rest” continue to rise, Where China Meets India helps us understand a complex regional dynamic at a critical point in its development.  The end game is anything but pre-determined.

Marc A. Sorel is a graduate of Yale University, where he received his B.A. in History, and Georgetown University, where he received his J.D.-M.S.F.S. He has worked for the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, and the United Nations.