Free Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U

mobs all around Rangoon. Chinese schools were burnt down, together with the Chinese information centre, as well as ordinary homes and shops. A Chinese aid worker was knifed. Thousands of people tried to storm the embassy itself but were driven back by government troops who opened fire, wounding nine people. Only armed patrols with machine guns were able to drive the population back indoors.
    The reply from China was swift. Gargantuan crowds of more than 300,000 placard-waving Chinese gathered in the pouring rain outside the Burmese embassy in Beijing calling for the overthrow of the ‘fascist’ Burmese military regime. More importantly, Chinese support for the insurgent Communist Party of Burma swelled and in early 1968 a large force, ostensibly led by exiled Burmese communists but in fact officered by Chinese, crossed over from Yunnan and seized a big slice of territory in the eastern hills. It was nothing less than an invasion from China. At one point the communists were within striking range of Mandalay, stopped only by the tenacious resistance of the Burmese army. For twenty more years the fighting between the Burmese government and communist forces would continue, at great cost especially to the local civilian population. Only by the late 1970s, as the political scene in China changed, did Beijing ratchet down its support for the Communist Party of Burma. Both sides then took a pragmatic stance and relations slowly began to improve. By the mid-1980s there were talks about renewing trade and the first Chinese business scouts arrived in Mandalay, exploring opportunities. From then, relations, especially economic relations, would grow quickly. But the shadows of the past remained.
     
    The new Chinese in Mandalay were entrepreneurs, taking advantage of the new openings, and over the coming days I saw them everywhere, shopping in the more expensive shops and eating in big groups in the Chinese restaurants all over town. At night they (the men, at least) frequented the many karaoke bars and massage parlours that had popped up near 78th Street. It’s not always easy to distinguish a Burmese from a Chinese. The Burmese tend to be darker, with more rounded or deep-set eyes, and perhaps a narrower or more prominent nose, but the difference is sometimes slight, and in both countries there’s a wide variety of appearances. But these new Chinese were easy to spot, never dressed in a Burmese longyi (as many of the Burma-born Chinese were), but in the somewhat baggy, Western-style clothes of modern China.
    I met one by chance at the office of a friend. My friend ran a small import–export firm and the Chinese man, a businessman in a beige safari-suit, bowing and smiling, was just leaving. He spoke some English and he said he had been in Mandalay only a few months but was excited by the prospects. He said new roads and future railways would bring the two countries closer than ever before, leading to growing business ties and better cooperation. He was looking at the possibility of investing in a factory (he didn’t say what kind) and had been involved before in importing Burmese timber and gems. ‘It’s kind of a golden age for China–Burma relations’, he said.
    It was a confidence that came from feeling that history was on their side. And that their ways had proved better. Very recently, a ‘Confucius Institute’ was set up in Mandalay, one of several in Burma, providing language training as well as other courses about China. And in the same way that Western observers saw Burma’s poverty and misgovernment and assumed Western models provided the answer, the Chinese did the same. I thought of an inscription, which I think is still there, on the wall of a nineteenth-century Chinese temple on the outskirts of Mandalay, that reads, ‘Enlightenment finds its way even among the outer barbarians.’
    The enormous influx of Chinese people and Chinese investment in many ways parallels the Indian influx of similar (or even