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

greater) size a century before. The Chinese were bringing in much-needed money and skills and the country could well benefit from closer contacts with its fast-developing neighbour. Being next to the biggest growth engine in the world could be an enormous boon. And, like many of the Indian immigrants in the early twentieth century, the Chinese immigrants of the early twenty-first saw Burma as a land of opportunity. They were not grand strategists or politicians. Many were far from rich and were seeking to improve their lives the only way they knew how. But the intensity of resentment from local people suggested that a backlash of sorts might not be far beyond the horizon. The Indians had come under the protection of colonial rule. And the Chinese were now coming into a Burma that was independent but lacked political freedom. People felt they had no choice but to accept what was happening and bide their time.
     
    Draw a circle around Mandalay with a radius of only a little more than 700 miles. That circle reaches west over Bangladesh and across the hill states of India, to Assam, West Bengal, Orissa and Bihar; north and east to China’s Yunnan and Sichuan provinces and parts of Tibet; and southward to cover most of Laos and Thailand. Within that circle are the homes of no fewer than 600 million people, nearly one in ten of all the people on the planet. And nearly all the people of this Mandalay-centric world are poor–the circle includes as many poor people as all the poor in sub-Saharan Africa. But there is also movement, energy, and uncertain futures. Poverty rates, on the Chinese side at least, are falling fast. Money is being made. On the opposite fringes of this world are Delhi and Beijing, but here in Mandalay it is Chinese influence that is clearly in the ascendancy.
    By the time 2010 rolled around, work was already beginning on the oil and gas pipeline and as well as on an entire network of related highways and railways, cutting right past Mandalay on the way to the sea. It seemed on the surface that Burma would be drawn ever more tightly eastward. For the new visionaries of China, the map would soon be changed forever. But what of the Burmese government, the ruling junta? In the Western media they tend to be portrayed as lackeys of Beijing, a client regime that is happy to allow in a flood of Chinese people and goods. The relationship, however, is far more complex.

The Burma Road
    To the west of Mandalay is the Irrawaddy River. To the east is a vast limestone plateau that rises suddenly and then extends all the way to the Yangtze River and the central provinces of China nearly a thousand miles away.
    I hired a car and a driver. The car was a beat-up 1980s Honda and the driver was a young man with white racing gloves who played Burmese rap music the entire way. The rap music phenomenon in Burma was something new to me. And as my personal exposure to new music more or less ended with university in the late 1980s, I am utterly unfamiliar with rap music even in the West and so could not really judge or appreciate what I was hearing. In the weeks ahead I would hear more Burmese rap music, at tea-shops and restaurants, and knew that it was very popular, with concerts by the better-known stars attracting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of young people.
    After a few miles, we had left Mandalay’s dusty avenues and were on a bumpy road lined with shady trees, passing little hamlets and open fields, a brown and burnt countryside just after the harvest. Soon we began our ascent. The distance to Maymyo, our destination, was only forty-three miles, but it was 4,000 feet up the limestone cliffs. The road wound around and around, and after about twenty minutes, looking back, the great plain of the Irrawaddy was visible to a distance very far away, including Mandalay and the dozens of little towns all around, the gold of the innumerable and from here tiny-looking pagodas reflecting the afternoon sun. There was a place to stop to