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