Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [319]
In Burma itself, however, fear was retreating a little. The tide of war in the country was beginning to turn in the government’s favour and Burma’s positioning on the new map of Southeast Asia was becoming slightly clearer. In 1950 the Chinese communists finally defeated Chiang Kai Shek’s resistance on the mainland and the Viet Minh communists established a critical hold on the northwest of Vietnam. Yet 1950 was also the year when the hopes of the Malayan communist insurrection began to fade and Burmese communists lost their tactical advantage. In Burma the Karen and other minority revolts also surrendered their initial gains. The outcome of the Cold War in Asia seemed to be very evenly balanced. In the south of the region the British continued to provide a military presence that protected its capitalist economy, but further north the outcome remained uncertain. The leaders of the huge new Republic of India looked on with concern. Early in the year Nu was able to write with satisfaction to Nehru that a major Karen stronghold in the Irrawaddy delta had been retaken. He thanked the Indian prime minister for his moral and material support.49 Nehru, for his part, was grateful to Burma for its rice exports at a time when India was suffering food shortages. Revived Japanese purchases and the backwash of the Korean War were pushing up prices throughout Asia. Nehru visited Burma to cement his quiet alliance in the middle of the year. J. S. Furnivall was impressed by Nehru’s moral courage, if not by his appearance: ‘He is such a small and apparently un-aggressive, unassuming little man that it is difficult to imagine how he came to be so important.’50
The period 1950 to 1953 was one of reconsolidation in Burma. The government’s authority began to reassert itself, even if many of the failures which would eventually drive Burma to the margins of the new world order were also present: corruption, an arbitrary military and botched measures of economic development. One sign of the changing mood was the attempt of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to compromise with the Rangoon government. After their striking successes of 1949, the red-flag communists of the CPB and their Karen allies had abandoned their policy of trying to take and hold the towns. They now became more ‘Maoist’ in their strategy, basing themselves in villages and eliminating landlords. They were never again to seize the initiative. The government may have been weak, and its army underpaid and undersupplied, but it had kept its hold over Rangoon, the sole remaining financial prize in the country. It had done so because foreign financial and military aid, particularly small arms, had reached it in large quantities. Even in 1948 and 1949 Burma had never collapsed into total anarchy. In most districts notables and important men still held sway. They were generally suspicious of the communists and hostile to the Karens and other minority group rebels. Provided the government directed some cash, some local offices and, best of all, arms to them, they were prepared to come back into Rangoon’s fold.51
Under the surface of the government’s resurgence, however, the balance of power was shifting irrevocably towards the military, though Nu hardly noticed it as he flew around the world on missions of peace and sanctity in the early 1950s. The army had appropriated more and more of the country’s diminished wealth. It benefited from the feeling that Burma was a threatened country in the midst of an armed camp, with the Chinese, the rump of the British Empire