World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [13]
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Burma-born, ethnic Chinese tycoon Lo Hsing-han, for example, was an infamous opium warlord in the 1960s, thought to be responsible for much of the heroin that wound up in American veins. According to Burma scholar Bertil Lintner, Lo started off in his native Kokang Province as a lieutenant to the pistol-toting lesbian opium queen, Olive Yang. In 1989, Lo cut a deal with SLORC, persuading fellow ethnic warlords to accept a cease-fire with the junta in exchange for valuable timber and mineral concessions. Today, Lo’s “Asia World” commercial empire includes a container shipping business, Rangoon port buildings, and tollbooths on the resurfaced Burma Road. Lo insists that he is now a legitimate businessman. “Since the market economy appeared in Myanmar,” he explains, “it is easier to earn money trading vehicles on the Chinese border.”
6 Whether or not Lo is clean—and most Western officials believe otherwise—Burma’s “Chinese underworld” remains as dominant in drug traffic and money laundering as Chinese merchants are in Mandalay’s booming, lawful markets.
Chinese Plutocrats, Burman Misery
Ever since SLORC embraced markets, Burma has been hemorrhaging natural resources, especially teak, jade, and rubies. Apart from SLORC generals, the beneficiaries have been almost exclusively ethnic Chinese and a handful of hill tribe smugglers.
Burma’s forests hold more than 70 percent of the world’s teak. The Burmese teak is a magnificent tree, sometimes reaching 150 feet, with opposing egg-shaped leaves and clusters of white flowers. Its timber is dark, heavy, oily, of unusual strength and durability. Long the wood of Burmese royalty, immortalized by Rudyard Kipling (“Elephints a-pilin’ teak / In the sludgy, squdgy creek, / Where the silence ’ung that ’eavy you was ’arf afraid to speak! / On the road to Mandalay . . .”), teak today is America’s wood of choice for boat decking and salad bowls.
For over a decade now, Burma’s hill tribes, particularly the Shan, have been selling enormous quantities of teak to Chinese buyers at fire-sale prices. Technically these sales are contraband, violating SLORC’s official monopoly on timber exports. In reality, SLORC generals struck a deal with hill tribe insurgents a decade ago, granting them economic freedom in exchange for a cease-fire. As a result, since 1989, convoys of trucks loaded with teak logs—sometimes over ten feet in diameter, from trees hundreds of years old—travel daily, snaking along the mountainous old Burma Road across the border into China’s Yunnan Province.
Meanwhile, SLORC’s official timber policy has been aggressive globally-oriented marketization under government concessions. Insisting that teak logging will facilitate Burma’s economic development, SLORC has invited the full support of the private sector in promoting “forestry” (i.e., deforestation), even exempting forestry exports from commercial tax. Along with European and Chinese foreign investors, most of SLORC’s business partners are Sino-Burmese tycoons who have close ties to Thai Chinese logging companies. Leading industrialist “May Flower” Kyaw Win, born to a poor Chinese family in the Northern Shan State, is a prominent example. Since moving into the timber business in 1990, Kyaw Win—also the managing director of Yangon Airlines and often spotted with top-ranking generals—has become one of the wealthiest men in Burma.
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By contrast, ethnic Burmans have profited almost not at all from the country’s market-driven deforestation. Shan tribespeople continue to earn money smuggling teak to Yunnan, but adding insult to injury, the Shan, along with the