The Myanmar Road vital to both Beijing and Yangoon

The Myanmar Road vital to both Beijing and Yangoon

China is helping renovate The Myanmar Road. And, as Pratap
Chatterjee of Inter Press Service reports, Beijing may not only
have trade in mind.

KUNMING, China: Dozens of trucks laden with old-growth teak
rumble through the mountains of the Chinese province of Yunnan
daily on their torturous 1,000 kilometer trip from the Myanmarese
border to Kunming and back.

This is The Myanmar Road, the famous World War II supply
lifeline for Chinese nationalist forces battling the advancing
Japanese. Today, instead of ammunition, it is Myanmarese teak
that is being smuggled into China on this serpentine mountain
highway.

As the teak trucks wind their way through the Yunnanese
mountains, over the upper reaches of the Salween and Mekong
rivers, the pass crews of Chinese workers busy repairing and
expanding the road form one to three lanes.

Chinese crew are often inside Myanmar, helping to repair the
road to Lashio, the nearest railhead that connects to Mandalay
and Yangon.

The Chinese have a bilateral cooperation project with Myanmar
to improve this road, which is used by an estimated 200 trucks
every day.

Foreigners have lately become interested again in Myanmar,
which has been in trade and diplomatic isolation since 1988 after
a bloody military suppression on pro-democracy activists.

And when a similar crackdown took place a year later at
Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Myanmar's military junta sympathized
with Chinese leaders. Sino-Myanmarese ties have never been
better.

Last December, Chinese Premier Li Peng Made a three-day
official visit to Myanmar. In a joint communique at the end of
Li's trip, the Chinese leader and Myanmar's Lt. Gen. Than Shwe
declared that they would work together to establish a "new
international political and economic order".

"There is talk in Beijing of Myanmar becoming a land bridge
for China to project its strategic interests in the Indian Ocean,
"says a political analyst in Bangkok. Yangon has allowed the
Chinese to set up military listening posts on islands near the
Malacca straits.

The listening posts may be new but the trade route is not.
Some 2,500 years ago, The Myanmar Road was part of the South-West
Silk Route over which traders used to carry silk from the
Chengdu, in China's Sichuan province, to South Asia.

This was about 400 years before its more famous namesake, the
Silk Route from China to Central Asia.

In the 1930s, Britain and the United States helped develop the
road to supply Chinese nationalists who were fleeing the Japanese
invasion of China. It fell into disuse after Myanmarese
independence and when the military seized power in 1962, except
as route for Myanmarese communist dissidents.

These days, official figures put border traffic between Yunnan
and Myanmar at US$360 million a year, but unofficial estimates
peg it a US$1.5 billion annually, after the more clandestine
trade is added in.

The teak is not the only commodity to make its way to China.

"My friends and I go back and forth regularly to Mandalay to
bring back gems to trade," says Farrakhan Ahmed, who has been
living in Ruili, on the Chinese border, for two years.

The booming Chinese economy is also ever hungry to receive
Myanmarese rice, while its drug addicts buy some 40 tons of pure
heroin from the jungle refineries in Myanmar every year.

Under the cover of night, trucks carrying small arms and
rocket launchers sometimes slip over the border in the other
direction, to supply the Myanmarese military regime in its war
against student rebels and indigenous minorities.

Then there are the cheap Chinese goods from soap to bicycles
and televisions that are displayed in markets in Mandalay, the
nearest major city in Myanmar's north-east.

For the Myanmarese, China is now the source of a sixth of its
imports. Some 44 percent of Yunnan's imports come from Myanmar.

The push to develop southern trading routes was first
suggested by Pan Qi, an ex-vice-minister of communications, in
the Beijing Review in 1985. It was given a major boost by the
Asian Development Bank (ADB) at a meeting to promote regional
links in Manila in August 1993.

The ADB believes US$15 billion need to be spent on developing
76 projects in order to unlock trade in the region. But this
trade is heavily slanted toward promoting the might of China and
Thailand, the region's two biggest economies.

The bigger gainer, analysts say, is clearly Beijing. "A new
structure is gradually emerging which will be fruitful through
trade and investment for China rather than those nations to her
south," wrote Ukrist Pathmanand, a guest columnist for the
Bangkok Post, in January.

Most of Yunnan's trade is currently handled by the Chinese
ports of Canton and Fancheng, 2,000 km away to the east. The
Vietnamese ports of Haiphong and Cai Lan started to take some of
this trade, after China and Vietnam opened their borders two
years ago.

But while the Chinese and Vietnamese ports serve the Asian
markets of Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, they involve along
overland journeys. This is why the trade route with Myanmar has
become vital for China's future export growth.

The route to the sea via Myanmar is 1,580 kilometers from
Kunming. The Myanmarese military, with Beijing's military
backing, has quelled insurgences along the route. In return, the
Chinese get to move in quickly and quietly to develop their
southwards push.

The new roads and the absence of armed resistance spell almost
certain environmental doom for the forests of north-eastern
Myanmar. Today, those forests are still among the densest in the
country because of the lack of road access for loggers.

Farther south in July 1993, the Myanmarese, with a Chinese
interest-free loan, completed the US$ 300 million 2.9 kilometer
rail and road Syriam Bridge across the Pugu River in Yangon that
will help serve the country's ports.

Predicts an unpublished study for the Mekong secretariat, a
regional body that serves the countries of the lower Mekong:
"Yunnan's trade surplus could flood the market of the `economic
quadrangle' (Myanmar, China, Laos and Thailand), provided that
adequate transport facilities are available."

-- IPS