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| Myanmar fighting poses border challenge for China (philstar.com) Updated August 29, 2009 12:11 PM BEIJING (AP) — China has told Myanmar to put an end to fighting with an ethnic militia that has sent 10,000 people fleeing across their border, a strong response underscoring the Communist country's concerns about potential instability. People were continuing to cross from Myanmar's mostly ethnic Chinese Kokang region into China's Yunnan province late Friday, according to witnesses reached by phone. Sounds of artillery and gunfire across the border in Myanmar rang out throughout the day, they said. The official Xinhua News Agency reported that the area remained tense with "some small clashes" between the Kokang ethnic army and government forces. Chinese authorities were housing the new arrivals at seven locations and providing medical services, according to a Yunnan government statement. In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said China hopes Myanmar can "properly deal with its domestic issue to safeguard the regional stability in the China-Myanmar border area." Myanmar must also ensure the safety and legal rights of Chinese citizens in that country, Jiang added in a statement posted on the ministry's Web site. China maintains close ties with Myanmar's ruling military junta. Beijing has consistently offered Myanmar diplomatic support based on its avowed policy of nonintervention, while China's border trade and oil and gas deals have thrown an economic lifeline to the ruling generals. Pak K. Lee, an expert on Myanmar and China at Kent University in Britain, said Beijing was not changing its noninterventionist stance, but was concerned about the fighting's effect on stability in Yunnan ahead of the highly sensitive Oct. 1 celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. "Absent the factor of the 60th anniversary, China might adopt a low-profile approach to the event. But now, it has to call on Myanmar to take prompt action to tackle the problem before it becomes unmanageable," Lee said. Details of the fighting in Myanmar were murky, although reports say militants who have long fought for autonomy for Myanmar's Kokang minority attacked police near the town of Laogai on Thursday, killing several officers. Xinhua cited sources saying that armed clashes started Thursday with three battles in the Kokang region. The fighting has forced normally brisk border trade to come to a standstill, it said. Myanmar's state-controlled media made no mention of the violence Saturday, continuing a news blackout. The junta, which generally does not comment on ethnic tensions, has not publicly addressed the violence. Myanmar's central government has rarely exerted authority over Kokang — a region in the northern Shan state — and essentially ceded control to a local militia after signing a cease-fire with them two decades ago. The region is one of several areas along Myanmar's borders where minority militias are seeking autonomy from the central government. But tensions have been rising in recent months as the junta tries to consolidate its control of the country and ensure stability ahead of national elections next year — the first since the opposition National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in 1990, a result the military ignored. The latest confrontation apparently began earlier this month after militia leaders refused to allow their guerrillas to be incorporated into a border guard force under Myanmar army command. Soldiers raided the home of militia leader Peng Jiashen on Aug. 8, and Peng's forces began mobilizing. Peng's troops were forced out of Laogai on Tuesday by government soldiers and a breakaway Kokang faction seeking to overthrow Peng. With an estimated population of 150,000, Kokang lies 1,400 miles (2,250 kilometers) southwest of Beijing and is surrounded by lush mountains in a region notorious for the production and use of heroin and methamphetamines, cross-border smuggling, gambling and prostitution. The region's links to China date back to the collapse of the Ming dynasty 350 years ago, when loyalists fled across the mountains into present-day Myanmar to escape Manchu invaders. In recent years, the area has attracted a flood of businessmen from China who have opened hotels, restaurants and shops selling motorcycles, electronics and other imports that are either pricey or unavailable in other parts of Myanmar. Many investors fled back across the border this month, according to Chinese reports. As the refugees poured in Friday, Chinese authorities housed them in unfinished buildings, some still with no windows, said a local factory manager in the border town of Nansan who would only give his surname, Li. A worker with an international medical charity, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals from the local government, said local authorities were caring for about 4,000 refugees. Several thousand more were staying in hotels or with friends and family on the Chinese side, he said. China itself has taken a hard line against minority activists in Xinjiang and Tibet, crushing anti-government protests with overwhelming force. |
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| From today's Times http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/busi...icle6816392.ece For China, the cost of oil and gas has just doubled. You will not find this new oil price quoted anywhere, but its burden will weigh heavily on the leadership in Beijing. It is not an oil price that can be measured in dollars per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. There has been no cutback by Opec, nor has a hurricane toppled offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. It is China's oil price; the cost of oil for the People's Republic is now measured in refugees, in tens of thousands of people fleeing Burma into China. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on Friday that as many as 30,000 people had crossed the Burmese border into Yunnan province in southwest China. An assault by the Burmese Army on the Kokang militia, an ethnic Chinese rebel group in Shan state, started the flight, but the refugees mean much more than a spot of trouble on the border. The brazen assault by Rangoon threatens to wreck China's carefully drawn strategy to transform Burma into a trading corridor of highways and oil and gas pipelines bringing energy and minerals into China's heartlands. It is trouble for Beijing because the refugees are ethnic Chinese, traders who have established small businesses in remote northeast Burma. About 7,000 Burmese troops moved to the border and reports suggest that they pursued the rebels on to Chinese soil. Wrong-footed by the unexpected assault by an ally, a government on which Beijing has lavished military aid, China's response has been timid. A spokesman for the Chinese Government urged Burma to protect the legal rights of Chinese citizens and said Beijing hoped that Myanmar could "appropriately solve its relevant internal problems and safeguard the stability of the China-Myanmar [Burma] border". China's loss of face might not have been so obvious had it not been for Daewoo's announcement of last week. The South Korean conglomerate trumpeted its participation in the Shwe gas project, a $5.6 billion (£3.4 billion) venture to exploit an offshore gasfield in the Bay of Bengal and pipe the gas to fuel-hungry cities in southwestern China. It is a massive undertaking, a steel tube stretching more than 1,000km across Burma and into the mountainous Yunnan province. The Shwe partners, which include Moge, the Burmese state oil company, have to supply gas to CNPC, the Chinese state oil group, for 30 years. China outbid India for the right to buy the gas and the Shwe venture is only one of a gamut of Chinese collaborations with one of the world's detested regimes. America has banned investments in Burma by US citizens since the 1988 pro-democracy protests and the imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader. The European Union prohibits military sales and has imposed a visa ban and asset freezes on the Burmese generals. China has no such qualms. There are plans for an oil highway, a second pipeline that would link southwest China to the Burmese coast. The link would provide cheaper and safer transport for Middle Eastern and African crude, avoiding a lengthy and dangerous passage through the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca. Chinese companies are sinking cash into Burmese mines, logging its forest and digging up its precious stones. After the bloody suppression of the monks' street protest in 2007, the West banged the table and harangued the generals, but for China it was business as usual. Foreign direct investment in Burma rose fivefold last year to almost $1 billion; almost all of the money was Chinese. Last week the lapdog bit its master's hand, not badly but a wound that will, nonetheless, create embarrassment and expense for Beijing. In London and Washington, there will be smirks as Beijing's cynical realpolitik gets its just desert. We should not be too smug. Britain was recently slapped by a general who turned out to be no poodle. We wanted lots of things from Libya - an end to its support for terrorism, diplomatic friendship, oil and gas deals and petrodollar investment. We may get some of those things but, in the embarrassing celebrations on the return to Tripoli of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has reminded us that we have no right to presume; in diplomacy, everything is negotiable. China's calculation over Burma is unlikely to be so different from our Government's assessment of Libya. Arguably, China is more realistic, less prone to moral histrionics. Burma's generals have waged war for decades against the country's ethnic minorities. Its Government is engaged in an intermittent but brutal campaign to subjugate a constellation of tribal groups whose stubborn independence mocks the generals' claim to dominion over the state that they renamed Myanmar. Beijing knows the history, geography and ethnography better than we do - the warring tribes, the heroin trade, Rangoon's dubious peace deals with opium warlords on the Thai and Chinese borders. The ceasefire between the Burmese Army and the rebels appears to be unravelling and we could speculate as to the reasons. As Burma's links with China multiply, as roads are built, as pipe is laid, the risk posed by the rebels and the drug trade become more inconvenient than the short-term profit. Burma's new friend is not keen on insurrection and it might be prepared to look away while the Burmese Army cracks a few heads on Chinese soil. We looked away; we dumped Burma, abandoning its people to their fate in a fit of righteous indignation over the pigheaded behaviour of the generals, a violent clique who showed not the slightest interest in bowing to the teachings of former colonial masters. We had Tony Blair's "ethical foreign policy" and Burma was the pilot test, the first and last occasion when we put morality before money. Premier Oil, a small British company, was told to quit Burma. Eventually, it did. Burma turned its face East and found bigger friends. Our writ no longer runs east of Suez. It is China's dominion and one good outcome of this Burmese refugee crisis is that Beijing must begin to acknowledge that, if it wishes to plunder the world like a colonial power, it must police it, too. Power brings responsibility and refugees. A more civilised Burma would bring Beijing less trouble and more profit. The same can be said of Libya. Our new "ally" is a staging post for African migrants who make their way in leaky boats to Sicily. It is a flow that could easily turn to a flood. As Burma is to China, Libya is our southern border. It is there, an opportunity for profit and for trouble, whether we like it or not. |