Siddhartha Deb welcomes a study of Burma's relations with its powerful neighbours

Welcome
A study of the relations of Burma with its powerful neighbors

A country that lies between two superpowers applicant has some very difficult choices to make. However, Burma, in the upper half is located between India and northern China, south-west, seems to have always taken the wrong decisions for much of the 20th century and throughout the 21st. Emerged as a modern nation in 1948, the decolonization of Britain in a murder mystery, including complicated and traumatic, one year before independence, some of its most important leaders. His adversary system of democracy, marked by fighting between nationalists and communists, Buddhists, Burmese-speaking, better known as the Burmese and the predominantly Christian tribes, which soon broke out in a civil war.

Yet none of this is marked as an unusual country right now. His neighbors large India and China, and were actually still in its own crisis, which included the civil war and mass killings. However, when the Nationalist army seized power in Burma in 1962, the result was something like an army in possession of a State. And although the names of the councils of government have changed, the general in charge of displaced and even how the national economy rose from the "Burmese Way to Socialism" to capitalism, there was a military junta in power since more than half a century, the most inscrutable intentions of west. The favorite adjective for this meeting in the Western media, based in part on the fact that George Orwell was an imperial policeman in Burma in 1920, is "Orwellian."

where China meets India is an attempt to offer a nuanced portrait of Burma, especially the paradox is also a country seemingly static, without prejudice to the economic sanctions in Europe and the United States, suspended between two of the most dynamic, and rapacious, governments around the world. "Burma and the new crossroads of Asia," says the subtitle of the book and the author, Thant Myint-U, clearly apparent that this haven is a place where a kind of fundamental change is underway, with a color combination of ethnic militias, drug lords, sex workers, businessmen and migrants floating back and forth across a gray area border.
Travel Lashio in the northeast corner eastern Burma, Thant writes on the quasi-independent territory carved out by the United Wa State Army, former headhunters, former junta against the guerrillas, drug lords and now and the allies of the junta: .. 'dirt roads become of highways in China and much of the Wa region is located in the power grid of China, and even your Internet and mobile phones BlackBerry does not work in Rangoon, but do so in the Wa region. .. It's a dramatic change in the geography of Burma. What had been a distance closer to the new center. What were the mountain villages are now more modern mud in Rangoon. " Thant

When crossing the border with China, to find shopping malls, theme parks and heritage tourism, all evidence of the growing consumerism is a major factor in the alliance of China with the Burmese junta. In the absence of competition from the west, China can not only stimulate the global market in what was the border, but can also put a considerable demand for natural resources in Burma. It could be the beginning, writes Thant, a new great game in which India and China play the role once occupied by British India and Tsarist Russia, with each aspiring superpower cautious about the other two applicants access the vast natural gas reserves off the coast of Burma, and all anxious to secure access to the Bay of Bengal and create an alternative transportation route for the large amount of fuel needed for its growth engine of China.

Thant writes convincingly about how India and China have changed their attitude towards the military junta. Each opponents originally supported the plan, with China, the strengthening of Communists of India and Burma to support the pro-democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (which father, Aung San was one of the nationalist leaders were killed in 1947). Suu Kyi was recently published by the Council, after almost two decades in prison, and his party, the National League for Democracy, although very popular in the 80s and 90s, seems to have disappeared from the state apparatus repressive.
• India, meanwhile, has largely abandoned the pro-democracy activists, including one while encouraging the border. Now, it adopted a policy of appeasement of the board, escorting his superiors so shamelessly leader, General Than Shwe, around when recently visited sites like Bodhgaya, where Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, and the memorial of Mahatma Gandhi. As China plans to push south of Kunming in Burma and the Bay of Bengal, India has its own "Look East" policy, which includes plans for a Trans-Asia highway between states and violent corners of the poor north- eastern Burma and possibly China.
• is quite clear that the sympathies Thant is in this new game Grand. The small-son of a former Secretary General of the UN, Thant is a cosmopolitan city that has grown in the west. It shares the unease of the West on China, particularly its tendency to suppress minorities and individual freedoms. Like many Western liberals, is less aware of the file similar poor in India when it comes to their own minorities and dissidents. But you can also see that China, expanding business destination in Burma, the parallel policy of India is mostly about the Trans-Asia is composed of imaginary lines superimposed on narrow roads full of nests bumps.
Thant is less convincing when it comes to these issues wonkish when it acts as an idiosyncratic cultural historian. It was the strength of his previous book,

The River

not lost: a personal history of Burma

, which, despite its melancholy in Burma, which provides a visible pleasure for the rich of the country, beyond different and their links with India and China. There are similar raids in the history of the book being, well, times when he delights in the stories of the past Thant - the Naxi, which may have inspired the novel by James Hilton

Lost Horizon

, the influence of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam in the region - and becomes a sort of time traveler, wise and lonely, as it has in the windows crystal and plasma displays, but also reflects on the world happened. In these moments, when his work is permeated by a sense of history, the book has an optimistic and sincere welcome, giving voice to a desire for connection that transcends all notions of foreign policy, geopolitics and business and becomes, instead of people find each other in all its glorious difference Siddhartha Deb
the Beautiful and Damned:. Life in the new India

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