World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [15]
Further, as ethnic Chinese developers in the nineties snapped up all the prime real estate in Mandalay—making fast fortunes as property values doubled and tripled in the chaotic new markets—indigenous Burmese Mandalayans were pushed farther and farther away from their native homes. (In 1990, SLORC had already forcibly relocated dissidents and Mandalayan monks.) Today, thousands of poor, displaced Burmans live in satellite shantytowns on the outskirts of Mandalay, within eyeshot of the gaudy, fenced-off mansions of the SLORC generals, many of whom are openly parasitic on Chinese businessmen.
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Free markets are supposed to lift all boats, and indeed often do. But this is distinctly not the perception of Burma’s roughly 30 million ethnic Burman majority. In their view, markets and economic liberalization have led to the domination and looting of their country by a relative handful of “outsiders,” chiefly ethnic Chinese, in symbiotic alliance with SLORC. Mandalay’s central business district is now filled with Chinese signs and Chinese music pouring out of Chinese shops. Burmese-made products have been almost entirely displaced by cheaper Chinese imports. Chinese restaurants serving grilled meat and fish overflow with loud Mandarin-speakers. “To go to Mandalay,” snaps a character in a local cartoon strip, “you need to master Chinese conversation.” When the sun sets, Mandalay’s new money heads to Chinese-owned karaoke bars, where young Chinese hostesses sing along to the latest songs from laser discs made in Hong Kong. On weekends, wealthy Chinese relax in the mountaintop resort of Maymyo, where they have bought up as vacation homes the grand Victorian houses left behind by British colonialists.
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Meanwhile, just below the surface, anti-Chinese hostility seethes among the Burman majority. As hatred of SLORC intensifies, hatred for the Chinese intensifies as well, not without justification: Crony capitalistic relationships between SLORC generals and Chinese entrepreneurs, not to mention arms sales from China, have been critical in propping up Burma’s reviled ruling junta. But in the current reign of fear, there is no avenue for venting resentment, whether against SLORC, the rich Chinese, or the market-oriented policies that have allowed both of these groups to make hundreds of millions while indigenous Burmans become an increasingly subjugated underclass in their own country. Alcoholism is sharply on the rise among Burmans, all the more startling given that liquor consumption is considered a sin according to one of the Five Commandments of Burmese Buddhism. Fittingly, the alcohol chiefly consumed is Chinese Tiger Beer, imported from China.
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Today, ordinary Burmans speak bitterly of “the Chinese invasion” or “recolonization by the Chinese.” “The people who put up these new buildings say they are Burmese, but we know they are really from China,” a Burman shopkeeper explained angrily. “They are taking over our business and pushing us out of our homes.”
16 Notwithstanding massive government repression—the Internet and all forms of political organization and free expression are banned—indigenous hostility against the Burmese Chinese is palpable and growing.
Chinese Market-Dominance in Historical Context
No other country has Burma’s lurid combination of Orwellian government, bulging rubies, and vast fields of opium poppies (which the current junta insists