Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [224]
The new government got to work on 5 January with a huge head of steam behind it. Edgar Snow, an American journalist and veteran of Mao Zedong’s ‘long march’, visited Rangoon a few weeks after independence. Snow had had his first taste of Burmese radicalism when he met Thein Pe in India in 1943 and was persuaded to write a preface to the latter’s What Happened in Burma. On his visit to Rangoon Snow stayed with Furnivall.12 It was from Furnivall, the British Foreign Office thought, that Snow had got the rather inflated figures of the pre-war profits of British firms that he used in an article to justify the forthcoming nationalization of British assets. An official in London remarked sourly of Furnivall that his ‘socialist antipathy to British firms in Burma, acquired during his long ICS service, is well known’.13
Snow marvelled at the youth of the new leadership. Nu himself was ‘an old man’ of forty-two; the interior minister was a stripling of thirty-six.14 Snow was charmed by the youthful enthusiasm, even naivety of his smiling hosts. It was Boys’ Day all year round, he thought. The government’s two-year plan for the economy was most impressive: Stalinism with a smile. Land would be given back to the tiller, as had been the case before the British invasion. Then collective farming on the Chinese model would gradually be introduced. The government would take over management of rice exports, the profit from which had gone into pockets in London, Bombay and Madras for a generation. The government would nationalize the great companies and pay off their former British and Indian owners with bonds, which meant the money would stay in Burma. Burma would become neutral in foreign affairs and a great start was to be made in March with the All-Asian Peasants Conference to be held in Mandalay. Snow put down the slightly unorthodox enthusiasm of the young Burmese rulers to the old national habit of mixing astrology, spirit worship and Buddhism. Burmese were ‘competent’ and pragmatic. They picked and mixed from every ideology on display. But even the amiable and left-leaning Snow worried about what the future would really bring to this small, young country wedged between two huge expansionist neighbours and perched atop the outposts of the British Empire, spruced up and given a new lease of life by its American cousin: ‘It’s like power and responsibility being suddenly handed to a student union, to realise the Utopia they have long demanded from their hopeless elders,’ he mused.15 Furnivall also shared these misgivings. When he first entered his new office, the Burmese minister of planning pumped the hand of the old ICS man and said: ‘Now we have independence, give us a plan.’ Nu, Furnivall thought, was charming and enthusiastic but ‘perhaps over-prolific of ideas’.16
Central to the health of the new republic was indeed the genial figure of Thakin Nu. The new prime minister epitomized the Buddhist socialism that was to be the hallmark of Burma’s independence. Always pining to return to the monastery, Nu was nevertheless no traditional man, but more a kind of intellectual magpie. He had been and continued to be a prolific writer and lecturer. His 1940 novel in Burmese, Man, the Wolf of Man, was so called after Thomas Hobbes’s dictum ‘Man is to man a wolf’. In it he had expatiated on the evils of colonial capitalism, asserting that the patient Burmese peasantry must be freed from debt to reach their true potential as spiritual beings. He said he had been influenced by writers as various as Sir Thomas More, G. F. Hegel, H. G. Wells and Sigmund Freud.17 His was a modernist Buddhism which opposed the mistaken use of the doctrine