World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [12]
Since Burma’s shift to a market-oriented, open-door economy, both Rangoon, the modern capital, and Mandalay, the ancient City of Gems and royal seat of the last two Burmese kings, have been taken over by ethnic Chinese. Some of these Chinese are from families that have lived in Burma for generations. Like the Indians but to a lesser extent, the Chinese were disproportionately wealthy during the colonial period (1886–1948), which was characterized by essentially laissez-faire policies superimposed on Burma’s traditional rural economy. Although much of their wealth was confiscated during the socialist era (1962–88), the Chinese remained active in Burma’s black markets and, in a few cases, opium trafficking.
In Burma’s new market economy, the Sino-Burmese minority have been transformed almost overnight into a garishly prosperous business community. In addition, tens of thousands of poor but entrepreneurial immigrants from China, sweeping down from nearby Yunnan, have bought up the identity papers of dead Burmans for as little as three hundred dollars, becoming Burmese nationals overnight. Today, ethnic Chinese Burmese—looking uncomfortable in longyis, the traditional Burmese unisex sarongs—own nearly all of Mandalay’s shops, hotels, restaurants, and prime commercial and residential real estate. The same is more or less true in Rangoon. Only a tiny, dying handful of Burman-owned establishments (mainly printing houses and cheroot factories) are left, dwarfed by the Chinese-built and Chinese-owned high-rise buildings around them.
Typical of Southeast Asia, the Chinese dominate Burmese commerce at every level of society. Massive joint ventures—such as the Shangri-La Hotel deal between Lo Hsing-han, the Sino-Burmese chairman of the Asia World conglomerate, and Sino-Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok—have turned Mandalay and Rangoon into booming hubs for mainland Chinese and Southeast Asian Chinese business networks. (Non-Burmese Chinese investors are easy to spot. They’re the ones not in longyis but in cowboy boots and sunglasses, walking around with bottles of Johnny Walker Red.) At the humbler end of the spectrum, Chinese hawkers make an excellent living selling cheap bicycle tires from China—often more than thirty thousand tires a month—for rickshaws in Burma. Nor is Chinese dominance only an urban phenomenon. After two years of severe flooding in southern China, large numbers of Chinese farmers—over a million, some estimate—poured into northern Burma. These new Burmese “citizens” now grow rice on the cleared hill country they have taken over. Entire Chinese villages have sprung up in this way.
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With the United States boycotting Burma on human rights grounds, globalization for Burma has had a disproportionately Chinese face, although the presence of French and German foreign investors can be felt as well. “Name a large infrastructure project anywhere in Myanmar these days and there is a strong possibility it will be in the hands of Chinese contractors,” observed The Economist a few years ago. “Chinese engineers are working on improvements to the highway from Mandalay to Yangon. Chinese companies are developing the railway line from Mandalay to Myitkyina, near the Chinese border, and the line from Mandalay to the capital. With the help of chain gangs from Myanmar’s prisons, they are also building a line from Ye to Tavoy in Myanmar’s far south-east. . . . Against international competition, Chinese contractors have won the contract to build a big bridge across the Chindwin river. Other Chinese ventures range from a new international airport for Mandalay to housing for the armed forces and 30 irrigation dams. It was the Chinese, in association with Siemens, who last year installed a ground satellite station serving the capital.”
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The Chinese in Burma dominate not only legitimate trade and business but also more