Burma v China - the case of disaster response

It is quite interesting to consider the differences between these two countries (or rather their regimes) as highlighted by the recent catastrophes. In the normal course of events, minus cyclones and earthquakes, they tend to get lumped together as regimes that abuse human rights. One could argue, however, that when disaster happens Burma has more in common with the United States than it does with China. I'm thinking, of course, about Katrina and the response that was so delayed - not to mention the failure to invest in the maintenance of levees that could have averted most of the worst effects - as well as the bland refusal of either government to really recognize the extent of human loss at the time. By contrast, the Chinese had at least 50,000 troops in the disaster area by the next day and the scale of the rescue effort increased from there.

The criminality of the Burmese regime is accentuated by the fact that the cyclone wasn't even a Category 5. It was a 4 when it initially hit the Irrawaddy delta coast and it was a 2 by the time it reached Rangoon. Yet it killed about 100,000 people. I was in Vietnam a couple of years ago when they had the worst typhoon in a decade. It was a 4 or 5. The Army rushed to the affected areas to build defences and evacuate people before it hit. A handful of people died. Nobody was left to fend for themselves in the aftermath.

Even if you think the Vietnamese Communists have a bad record on human rights, you can hardly fault them for valuing the lives of ordinary people when disaster strikes. The Vietnamese armed forces do not exist primarily for regime maintenance, as in Burma, but for national defence. I think the situation in China is similar to that in Vietnam. Although the latter has never had anything resembling the Tien An Men violence of 1989, there is a similarity in that the armed forces do not threaten ordinary people, while they do step in to provide support in times of real danger. Moreover, despite its brutal repression in 1989, the Chinese regime did respond. In the aftermath of the protests a number of policy changes were put into place that effectively tackled the causes of discontent.

Let them eat cake!
In Burma, by contrast, the armed forces are a constant threat and they show no sign of recognizing any problem. While various aid agencies estimate that a million people have so far received no aid at all, the regime insists that the emergency is over and reconstruction has begun. In a statement reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, a Burmese leader was quoted today saying that people in the Irrawaddy delta did not need supplies because they could eat frogs.

China's role in the third world

Had an interesting discussion at work yesterday about China's role in Africa and other underdeveloped regions. It was prompted by an article in The Economist on Chinese investment in Africa. It discusses the new Chinese presence in Africa in typical Economist terms:

China already buys a tenth of sub-Saharan Africa's exports and owns almost $1.2 billion of direct investments in the region.... A Chinese diaspora in Africa now numbers perhaps 80,000, including labourers and businessmen, who bring entrepreneurial wit and wisdom to places usually visited only by Land Cruisers from international aid agencies.

I mean wow! How big is the European 'diaspora' in Africa by comparison? Who bought the Landcruisers? "In the cold war Maoists dotted Africa with hospitals, football stadiums and disastrous ideas." And, if I remember correctly, infrastructure projects (the TanZam railway). Now China only wants access to raw materials. The West, of course, never tried any such thing. 'We' never undermined African efforts with our protectionism and our support for apartheid, Ian Smith, Mobutu, the Nigerian junta or Tubman "our aircraft carrier in Africa".

Sadly, China's success is an obstacle, as well as an inspiration. Its rise has bid up the price of Africa's traditional raw commodities, and depressed the price of manufactured goods. Thus Africa's factories and assembly lines, such as they are, are losing out to its mines, quarries and oilfields in the competition for investment....

China is doing its bit to improve infrastructure, building roads and railways. But it could do more to open up its own markets. China is quite open to yarn, but not jerseys; diamonds, but not jewellery. If it has as much “solidarity” with Africa as it claims, it could offer to lower tariffs on processed goods...

Competition from whom? Here we get to the nub of the question, which is: how dare those Chinese upstarts encroach upon our territory? How dare they not lower their trade barriers while demanding that we lower ours? The hypocrisy astounds me.

Discussion of the Economist article segued into a discussion of Burma, one of our pet topics. China (also India and Thailand) are playing an increasing role in that country, to the detriment of Western efforts to boycott the regime. Asia Times has this to say:

Foreign investment into Myanmar surged to a record high US$6 billion in the fiscal 2005-06 year that ended in March, up from the paltry $158.3 million recorded the previous year...

That's five times the amount of Chinese investment in the whole of Africa!

Myanmar has significantly managed to bypass the Western-controlled multilateral lending agencies, including the World Bank, which has in the main observed the US and EU sanctions, and accessed capital investment directly from private-sector Asian sources. While various US and European companies closed down their Myanmar-based investments because of the sanctions, Chinese and Indian - mainly energy - companies have rapidly filled the gap.

Western sanctions' failure to achieve economic collapse and political change in Myanmar significantly underscores both the United States' and Europe's waning and China's and India's growing economic influence in the region. As Asia's economies become more integrated, particularly through greater Chinese- and Indian-inspired trade and investment links, Western-led economic threats clearly no longer strike fear into the region's roguish regimes.

Myanmar's ruling junta last year abruptly moved the national capital from the coastal city of Yangon to the inland, mountainous redoubt of Naypyidaw. Ironically, perhaps, the junta is now pumping profits earned from China and India into building up a new military-industrial complex, where the ruling generals are living comfortably and hunkering down against a possible US military rather than economic threat.

All this raises interesting questions. Burma has become the new locus of competition between local powerhouses - China, India and Thailand. The West seems to have an outdated notion of its own importance, but its sanctions no longer work - if they ever did. What is the right way to go in a situation like this? From the realpolitik point of view, the only possibilty is to compete. In this argument, Aung San Suu Kyi might ask us to boycott, but she has no power and the boycott has no effect. An alternative scenario is that we invest in Burma with as much vigour as China and India do. Not in extractive industries, but in manufacturing and services that require education - it would encourage them to reopen schools and universities. I don't believe in the mantra that markets create democracy, but if you look at Korea, Taiwan and Brazil, economic development does bring about changes. The mechanism here is not markets => democracy. On the contrary, the mechanism is more likely to be economic development leads to shortages of educated labour and this gives the educated part of the population the power to demand a share of political power.

The Burmese generals are bent on enriching themselves, but in the long-run they cannot succeed without the co-operation of the people. To date their opposition has mainly come from the university-educated class - so they closed the universities. But I think their ability to control the mass of the population stems from the fact that there is no shortage of unskilled labour. From the point of view of the regime, it's easy to replace people you have killed or locked up. Once you start to depend economically on an educated class of people, you can't just get rid of them and you have to make compromises with their demands for more democracy. I think that greater economic security is the fundamental reason that democracy has made progress in South Korea and Taiwan (not to mention earlier in the West itself). You can stave off the inevitable by importing skilled workers, creating a more competitive labour market and making life for the indigenous workers more insecure (as in Singapore, for example). So there's no necessary and inevitable causation between increasing wealth and democratization, but it does seem to help. It will be interesting to see how long the Burmese generals will want to see the top jobs going to immigrant Chinese and Indians rather than provide the necessary middle class education and jobs to their own people.

There are, however, other ways to view the road to democracy in Burma. After all, there are serious moral considerations in dealing with a regime like that and a boycott seems the right thing to do. As noted above, moreover, there is more to democratization than just growing wealth and an expanding middle class. A more appropriate comparison might be, not Taiwan or South Korea, but Saudi Arabia - a regime that managed for half a century or more to grow extremely wealthy without generating any resemblance of trickle down to the masses (Indonesia under Suharto presents a similar, if less stark, case). Most of the Burmese generals' wealth today does seem to come from resources (oil and gas) rather than the labour-intensive manufacturing that stimulated growth in East Asia. In such a case, the only possible route to democracy is overthrow of the regime. Period.