Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s
comments mark the strongest sign of support for the Myanmar military since last
year’s coup.
By Sebastian Strangio
April 04, 2022
Credit: Depositphotos
On Friday, China’s
government said that it will support Myanmar’s military government “no matter
how the situation changes” in the country over the coming months and years.
According to the Associated Press, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his
Myanmar counterpart Wunna Maung Lwin on Friday that Beijing “has always placed
Myanmar in an important position in its neighborly diplomacy” and wants to
“deepen exchanges and cooperation.”
Wang’s statement marks the latest and most unambiguous signal of
support for Myanmar’s military, which overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian
government in February 2021 and has continued to face fierce resistance from a
broad coalition of civilian militia groups, pro-democracy activists, and ethnic
armed organizations.
Wang’s supportive remark seems to reflect Beijing’s assessment
that the military junta will eventually prevail by force against the anti-coup
resistance, that outside support for the resistance will only prolong the
inevitable, and that this is the most likely route toward stability necessary
for the advancement of its key economic and strategic interests in the country.
These center around the creation of overland transport and communications
corridor running from Yunnan province to Myanmar’s Indian Ocean coast, which
are grouped together under the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), a
sub-pillar of the Belt and Road Initiative.
During his meeting with Wunna Maung Lwin on Friday, Wang said
that the two sides should accelerate work on CMEC, step up construction of
“major landmark projects” and “deepen solidarity in the fight against the
COVID-19 pandemic.”
“No matter how the situation changes, China will support Myanmar
in safeguarding its sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity, and
in exploring a development path suited to its national conditions,” Wang said.
This return to full “business as usual” caps off 14 months in
which China has gradually moved toward acceptance of the coup government.
Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing’s takeover was initially a headache for Beijing.
Having invested a considerable diplomatic capital in building a constructive
relationship with Aung San Suu Kyi’s government, with which it signed the CMEC
agreement in 2017, it once again was forced to deal with the Myanmar
institution that is most congenitally suspicious of China.
By mid-2021, however, after the military junta employed extreme
force to flatten the wave of public protests that followed the military coup,
China began stepping toward recognition of the self-claimed government.
In a June 2021 meeting, Wang met with Wunna Maung Lwin and employed similar language as
he did in Friday’s meeting. “In the past, present, and future,” he said, “China
supports Myanmar to independently choose a development path that suits its
national conditions.”
As Thompson Chau and John Liu noted in a comprehensive survey of
China-Myanmar relations published by Nikkei Asia early this year, by August
2021, the same month that Min Aung Hlaing crowned himself prime minister,
Chinese national and provincial officials began to restore ties with the
military administration. Chinese authorities and business lobbies in Rangoon
also began to engage publicly with junta officials and promote commercial
opportunities. In December, China delivered to
Myanmar’s navy a refurbished Ming-class submarine, renamed the UMS Minye Kyaw
Htin, making Myanmar the first country in Southeast Asia to take delivery of a
China-manufactured submarine.
China “needs Myanmar to be a relatively normal and stable
country,” Yun Sun of the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. told my colleague Shannon
Tiezzi shortly immediately after the coup. “If Myanmar is once again turning
into the pariah of the international community, then what will [Chinese-invested]
international connectivity projects lead to?”
Myanmar is currently very far from being “relatively normal and
stable.” But there are degrees of dysfunction, and from Beijing’s perspective,
the iron fist of the junta may be preferable to the years of generalized civil
war. Whether the military ultimately prevails in a way that fosters the limited
stability that the Chinese government wants remains to be seen.
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