天堂.受难记

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LIKE North Korea's Workers' Party, another vile dictatorship that has visited misery and penury on its own people, Myanmar's junta has survived in part through diplomatic triangulation. Like North Korea, it has borne isolation and rhetorical hostility from the West by cosying up to the neighbours, notably China. And it has tried to avoid total subservience to any one of these by playing them off against each other.

Reuters

No way out?

As in the past, the world's initial response to the junta's violence was marked by bickering and point-scoring. On September 27th, the United Nations Security Council met in response to pressure from the West for co-ordinated sanctions. But Russia and China argued that the unrest was an internal matter that should not be on the council's agenda at all.

America announced new sanctions against the regime, in keeping with a policy some Western countries have pursued for nearly two decades. They are cheered on by a vocal and well-organised exile movement, and, when she was able to make her views known, by Aung San Suu Kyi herself. Her heroic stature has helped make Myanmar a fashionable cause. Awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1991, she has attracted the backing not just of fellow winners such as the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, but also of Laura Bush, the president's wife and Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister. The next Rambo movie features our hero taking on the tatmadaw single-handed.

Shareholder-activists and ordinary consumers have also done their bit to encourage a boycott. But the campaign to punish the regime sometimes seems to have lost sight of its real goal, and to be ready to celebrate isolation itself, not the change it is supposed to bring.

In fact, isolation has never really been on the cards. Any gap is eagerly filled by Myanmar's neighbours—not just China, but also India and Thailand and other members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Even in the Western camp there have been differences in approach between the three most important members, America, the EU and Japan.

American leaders have insisted the junta honour the 1990 election result and step aside. To this end, they have imposed wide-ranging sanctions. The most important of these block foreign aid and lending to Myanmar by the World Bank, IMF and Asian Development Bank. Official aid flows to Myanmar are among the lowest of any poor country in the world—around .50 a head each year, compared with, for example, in next-door Laos.

The EU has been more equivocal, demanding greater respect for human rights and a transition to civilian democracy, but appearing to accept fresh elections as the way to get there. Its sanctions have been correspondingly milder. Japan has been softer still. Burma's biggest aid donor until 1988, it has continued to provide small-scale help, apparently hoping to retain a smidgen of influence.

These days, however, if any countries can sway the junta they are the regional ones: ASEAN, especially Thailand; India; and above all China. When ASEAN controversially admitted Myanmar in 1997, on the organisation's 30th anniversary, it said membership would be an engine for positive change through “constructive engagement”. ASEAN's culturally sympathetic but fast-growing founder members would show Myanmar the way. This was guff.

Viewed most cynically, Myanmar's accession was part of a bid by ASEAN members to secure access to the country's rich resources: timber, oil, gas and minerals. Using more sophisticated (but no less cynical) geopolitical arguments, ASEAN diplomats justified admitting the unsavoury bunch as a way to prevent Myanmar becoming an arena in which China and India would vie for influence.

But this is happening anyway. China had a head start, and is maintaining its lead comfortably. Itself responsible for quelling an uprising with a massacre in 1989, China's government had few qualms about expanding ties with Myanmar during the 1990s. It supplied weaponry, including multiple-rocket launchers, fighter aircraft and guided-missile attack craft.

Western and Indian analysts worry that China sees Myanmar as part of its so-called “string of pearls” policy of building naval and intelligence bases around the Indian Ocean. There were reports that China was delivering signals equipment for monitoring stations on various coastal sites, and had a permanent presence on Great Coco Island (see map). Such talk has fuelled Indian paranoia, though Western analysts dismiss it.

Border trade, through the thriving, sleazy town of Ruili, also boomed. In the 1990s it included opium and heroin; shared needles produced China's first HIV epidemic, helping teach China the importance of “stability” in its neighbour.

In recent years the economic relationship has been transformed by China's hunger for energy and its involvement in big infrastructure projects. According to EarthRights International, an American NGO, Chinese firms are by now involved in about 40 hydropower projects and at least 17 onshore and offshore oil-and-gas projects. They have also announced plans to build a 2,400km (1,500 mile) oil-and-gas pipeline from Arakan in western Myanmar to China's Yunnan province.

China has also given the junta diplomatic support, helping for years to keep its behaviour off the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. But Myanmar is far from a client state. This week Chinese spokesmen called for restraint in responding to the protests. Their pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.