Free Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know by David I. Steinberg Page B

Through,” he had to balance delicately the United States, the Colombo Plan, the Soviet Union, Eastern European states, and China. State scholars and military officers were sent abroad, mainly to the United States and United Kingdom. Various governments, including the United States, had information centers and libraries, and the British Council, the Ford Foundation, The Asia Foundation, and the Fulbright Program as well as Johns Hopkins University all provided various types of aid and training. Burma received economic assistance from all of them in various forms, but consciously U Nu was most concerned with China and Burma’s long, indefensible border with it. As one author wrote, Burma was carefully neutral but always in China’s shadow.

What were relations with China?
     
    Burmese relations with China were mutually cautious at the beginning but improved later. In an act of self-protection against an overwhelming neighbor, Burma was the first noncommunist country to recognize the People’s Republic. China, however, was skeptical at first. Revolutionary doctrine at that time stipulated that all noncommunist states controlled by capitalists or former colonial lackeys had nefarious plans or attitudes toward the new People’s Republic. Recognition by such countries was not automatic, as in normal diplomatic practice, but was treated with suspicion and had to be negotiated. Chairman Mao, who at that time was visiting Moscow, cabled to Beijing to reinforce that point when the Burmese relationship was being discussed. After several years, relations warmed, and therewere numerous high-level visits by Chinese leaders, including Chou En-lai, to cement the relationship called
paukpaw
(variously translated as cousins, brotherhood, or a relation based on kinship). Burma was the only country for which that term was used, and it indicated a special association but one that was not always smooth.
    At the same time in the 1950s, the Burmese military, perhaps in contrast to the civilian government, recognized that the only potential external enemy of the state was China. Military planners advocated expanding the Burmese army with three infantry and one armored division. They recognized that such augmented strength could not halt a Chinese invasion but could only perform a holding operation against it until the United States, as in the Korean War, came to its assistance. U Nu believed the plan too expensive for so short a duration, and instead opted for closer Chinese ties as insurance. (Illustrating a vast change in attitude, in the 2000s the State Peace and Development Council [SPDC] wanted to train a paramilitary force as a holding operation against the Americans until the Chinese came to their aid.) A border agreement was eventually signed with the Chinese, each side making modest concessions, but early communist Chinese maps continued to demark northern Burma as Chinese territory, as had Chinese Nationalist maps before them. This has since ceased.
    China provided various types of foreign economic assistance, usually popular and visible projects. Trade with China was limited, and overland trade was both illegal and spotty. Various insurgencies controlled many of the natural border crossings and a large area of the Shan State, called the Wa State, was inhabited by that ethnic group, some of whom (the “wild Wa”) had a reputation for dealing severely with outsiders (occasional headhunting for fertility rites). China began its support to the BCP only in the late 1960s, when the BCP, defeated in central Burma, began its own long march to the Wa area on the China border, where it established itself and recruited locally. Deng Xiao Ping famously said that state-to-state relations wereseparate from party-to-party relations, so this dualism of close national ties and close insurrectionist ties existed for some time. China armed and trained members of the BCP and operated a clandestine radio station from Yunnan for the BCP.
    It was only