![]() ![]() Meanwhile, Burmese regularly post pictures online of pipeline explosions, threatening China’s most important investment in Myanmar, the Myanmar-China pipeline project, which provides 13 percent of China’s natural gas imports and supplies oil to a multi-billion-dollar refinery outside of Kunming. The threat materialized in early March when dozens of Chinese textile factories around Yangon suffered serious damage in a mysterious, coordinated attack that caused losses of about $37 million. As China maintained its “wait and see” posture, the Myanmar public threatened to shut down or even destroy major Chinese investment projects. In the power grab’s immediate aftermath, thousands of protesters targeted China’s embassy in Yangon, demanding that it withdraw support from the Tatmadaw. On March 29, Chinese authorities took the drastic step of locking down the border and bolstering security in southern Yunnan province under the pretext of controlling COVID-19.Ĭhina’s economic interests also face a significant post-coup threat - in large part because Beijing refused to recognize that a coup had occurred. With the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, now deploying air strikes in Kachin and Shan states, China recognized the conflict will inevitably spill across the frontier. Facing significant pressure from their constituencies, these ethnic armed groups expanded military operations. ![]() While China urged armed groups dependent on it for supplies, trade and economic development to use restraint, this became increasingly untenable by mid-March as the military’s brutal crackdown on popular resistance to the coup continued and spread across Myanmar’s ethnic states. ![]() As the Myanmar army moved to counter these efforts, the neighboring Kachin Independence Army began fighting back, attacking police stations in the Kachin capital. Observing that the third member of their alliance, the Arakan Army, was positioned to benefit from the coup by consolidating territory acquired in Rakhine State since a 2019 cease-fire with the military, the two groups saw the post-coup landscape as an opening to realize their own territorial ambitions in the North. In the border area, fighting broke out almost immediately after the military seized power, first involving attacks by two organizations belonging to the Brotherhood Alliance based there - the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army. Third, China seeks to prevent the internationalization of Myanmar‘s conflicts, particularly preventing Western influence in the borderlands.įallout from the coup threatens all three. Second, China aims to protect and advance a strategic economic and energy corridor linking its southwestern provinces to the Indian Ocean. The first is to maintain stability in the China-Myanmar borderlands, where fighting between the military and powerful armed groups based along the China border will impact China’s national security interests. (The New York Times)Ĭhina experts have long identified three key interests of Beijing in Myanmar. Protesters gathered at the Chinese embassy in Yangon, Myanmar to call on China to withhold support for Myanmar’s military government. Consequently, Beijing will continue to lend cautious support and legitimacy to a tyrannical and capricious military dictatorship. Although China has strong incentives to avert chaos or collapse, it more importantly views Myanmar as a battleground for preventing the encroachment of democratic values and Western interests on its periphery. Since February 1, Beijing has profoundly shaped the trajectory of post-coup violence and blocked international efforts to restore stability. As Asia’s greatest power, China has strategic and economic stakes in its neighbor to the south that leave little space for genuine neutrality behind a façade of non-interference. The ultimate outcome of Myanmar’s nine-week-old coup will affect a range of international actors - but none more than China. ![]()
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