Myanmar battle is rankling China
Beijing is in a tricky position as the neighboring nation’s fight with rebels spills across the border.
BEIJING — For more than a month, ethnic Chinese rebels and Myanmar government forces have battled in a remote area of northern Myanmar, leaving several hundred soldiers and insurgents dead. The fighting, which came after five years of calm, is now spilling beyond Myanmar’s border.
On Friday, a Myanmar air force plane strayed over the border and dropped a bomb in China’s Yunnan province, killing four people in a sugar cane field and injuring nine. Myanmar also bombed Chinese territory last weekend, damaging a house. Tens of thousands of refugees have crossed from the Kokang region into China, many sheltering in camps set up by the Chinese Red Cross.
The fighting, which began Feb. 9, has placed Chinese leaders in Beijing in an increasingly awkward position. The Kokang rebels speak Mandarin and have deep commercial and personal connections in Yunnan. Many ethnic Chinese in the Kokang region complain of being treated like secondclass citizens by their own government, and the rebels are fighting for more autonomy.
But China has for years said that it adheres to a policy of noninterference in other countries’ “domestic affairs” and insists that other nations do likewise. (The stance is aimed as much at deflecting foreign criticism of China’s human rights record and other issues as at preventing China from stumbling into misadventures abroad.)
Chinese authorities also view Myanmar as a strategically significant neighbor with abundant natural resources and access to the Indian Ocean. With Myanmar’s recent nascent steps toward democratic reform bringing closer ties with Western countries, including the U.S., China is eager to maintain amicable relations — and strong influence — with its southern neighbor.
China says it has not lent any official backing to the rebels. But Myanmar’s chief of military affairs and security, Lt. Gen. Mya Htun Oo, said last month that rebels were recruiting former Chinese soldiers as mercenaries. Myanmar’s information minister, Ye Htut, called on Beijing to rein in Yunnan officials who might be offering support.
After Friday’s deadly bombing in the city of Lincang, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin summoned Myanmar Ambassador Thit Linn Ohn and lodged a complaint.
In a commentary, the state-run New China News Agency said the bombing had “made it all the more imperative for Myanmar to honor its commitment to safeguarding peace and security on the border area to avoid a spillover of its war fire.” China’s air force also sent planes to patrol the border.
But the commentary added that “the conflict in northern Myanmar [is] the country’s internal affair and the Chinese side has always respected Myanmar’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.... China hopes the conflict can be resolved peacefully as soon as possible.”
Overall, it was a relatively restrained reaction from Beijing, which often responds with much more umbrage to less provocative moves from neighbors, such as Japan, that it sees as infringing upon Chinese territory.
The rebels’ leader, Peng Jiasheng, 85, has taken to social media to appeal to all those of “common race and roots.” But China’s staterun media have devoted only limited attention to the situation, and Chinese censors have blocked online images showing casualties in an apparent bid to prevent nationalist sentiment from growing too strong.
Wei Tingting, a native of Kokang now in Nansan town in China, said in a phone interview that bullets often come flying onto the Chinese side; during the phone call she said she heard three explosions and could see smoke rising in the distance.
Chinese police have instructed people in Nansan not to post photos of refugees or other images related to the conflict online, Wei said, and have restricted locals’ access to the refugee camps.
“Last time I tried to go to the camps, officials stopped me and gave me a phone number for the Red Cross, and so far I haven’t been able to get through to them,” Wei said. Some refugees, she said, had recently been urged by Chinese authorities to return home. “It seems [Chinese officials] just want to get rid of the problem,” she said.
Li Jiheng, Communist Party secretary of Yunnan province, said early this month in Beijing that more than 60,000 Burmese had entered the border area. China had offered temporary accommodation to more than 14,000 and supplied food, water and medicine to them, he said. Others are staying in hotels, apartments or with friends.
The rebels call themselves the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army. Peng had controlled the region since a self-administered zone was set up in 1989, but he lost control after fighting broke out in 2009. He went into hiding, but recently re-emerged.
Min Zaw Oo of the Myanmar Peace Center in Yangon said Peng’s forces were in disarray after 2009, but he later received new funding and began rebuilding. “From 2012 to 2014, there has been a massive buildup of his military, and his forces have multiplied tenfold in two years,” Min Zaw Oo said. Two other small rebel groups in the area have lent suppor t.
The rebels now have 1,500 to 2,000 fighters and are equipped with Chinesemade versions of AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, said Min Zaw Oo, who described the fighting around Kokang’s capital, Laukkai, as “trench warfare.”
“It is not Beijing’s policy to arm the rebels,” he said, “but individuals from local Chinese military units and also local Chinese officials and businessmen may be involved.”
A report in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post early this month, quoting an unnamed source, said that Maj. Gen. Huang Xing — one of 14 Chinese generals detained in recent months on suspicion of corruption — was accused of violating military discipline by leaking state secrets to the Kokang rebels in 2009.
A new pipeline of Chinese-made weapons into Myanmar could undermine the country’s cease-fire talks and spell more instability as the nation prepares for elections this year.
A new round of cease-fire talks encompassing a variety of ethnic militias is slated to resume this month. “Our concern is that other [rebel] groups could be getting weapons from” Peng’s group, Min Zaw Oo said.
Htun Myat Lin, a spokesman for the rebels, said in a phone interview that his group had had “no contact” with Chinese authorities. He said the Kokang rebels now numbered 3,000, and the three allied rebel groups together have 5,000 fighters.
Ranks have swelled in recent weeks, he said, particularly since a Feb. 13 clash with government forces that left a number of civilians dead.
The rebels, he said, want a federation-style arrangement with Myanmar’s national government that grants Kokang a high degree of autonomy. “We don’t want to be separate,” he said.
Dai Yonghong, director of the Center for Myanmar Studies at Sichuan University, said China would not let the conflict near its border lead to serious degeneration of ties between the two governments, particularly because the U.S., Japan and India are all taking a heightened interest in Myanmar.
“Myanmar is China’s security barrier and strategic buffer. China’s top security concern is to keep Myanmar from joining the U.S. ‘encirclement of China’ policy,” he wrote in a recent commentary for the East Asia Forum. “China needs to maintain good and sustainable bilateral relations with Myanmar to prevent this.”
‘China’s top security concern is to keep Myanmar from joining the U.S. “encirclement of China” policy.’ — Dai Yonghong, director of the Center for Myanmar Studies at Sichuan University