One Bed Different Dreams
One Bed Different Dreams
China and Russia have one bed but different dreams, China Surpasses the US in Diplomatic Influence, Russia Ukraine Ceasefire, Washington’s Proxy War in Myanmar Continues Along China’s Borders.
China and Russia have one bed but different dreams
By Geoff Raby (AFR/Pearls and Irritations)
Russian weakness has enabled China to emerge as Eurasia’s dominant power.
Visits by heads of state to each other are cloaked in symbolism. But insensitivity to cultural or historical nuances can see the best of intentions go awry.
In March 2013, when Xi Jinping made his first overseas visit as president, to mark the occasion, President Vladimir Putin presented his guest with a specially reproduced front page from Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, announcing on February 14, 1950, that the so-called Valentine’s Day treaty of friendship and co- operation had been signed by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
After having been kept for three months in Moscow by Stalin, Mao had to sign the treaty, which gave the USSR special access to Xinjiang, accepted Outer Mongolia was ‘‘independent’’ but within the USSR’s sphere of influence, and conceded more than a million hectares of territory in the far east taken from China by Imperial Russia with the 1860 Treaty of Peking.
Mao described these as ‘‘three bitter pills’’ he had been forced to swallow to secure Moscow’s economic and security support for his new regime. Later, during the height of the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, Mao said China had yet to present Russia with the bill for these territories. If Putin wasn’t, Xi most definitely would be aware of this history.
Putin’s brief two-day visit to China last week, included a day in Harbin in China’s far north-east, near the Russian border. Xi did not accompany him. Following the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, Harbin is best remembered as a sanctuary for refugees rather than a symbol of Russia-China friendship. Saint Sophia church in central Harbin, in the Byzantine style from the early 20th century, is today a local museum and tacky tourist souvenir store. Far from being ‘‘little Moscow’’, Russian influence has long gone, except for its bread.
In the Russian Far East, Chinese immigrants are starting to arrive in significant numbers, worrying locals that they will seek to reoccupy land that they believe traditionally belonged to China. To add to these concerns, in 2023 the Chinese government declared that the names of eight Russian cities in the territory lost to Russia in the Treaty of Peking be changed on Chinese maps back to their original Chinese names, including cities such as Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.
Xi and Putin are said to have met 43 times since Xi took charge in 2012. Putin likes to boast about the special relationship between Russia and China based on their ‘‘friendship’’. Famously, in February 2022, just 18 days before Putin invaded Ukraine, they declared the friendship was ‘‘without limits’’. Beijing was blindsided by the subsequent invasion; just as it was when Putin invaded Georgia on the eve of the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics.
Following Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the imposition of a limited sanctions regime, the Kremlin ‘‘pivoted east’’. As Xi’s anti-Western position hardened, Putin was a natural ally to push back against the US-led liberal international order.
China soon claimed this to be a model of a ‘‘new great power relationship’’, based on co-operation for the common good of the planet, rather than competition. Together, they increasingly sought to provide leadership to the global south. In Central Asia, this led to a ‘‘division of labour’’ between Russia providing security and China economic development, especially through the Belt and Road Initiative.
Over the past decade, however, China’s economy has continued to grow substantially faster than Russia’s. Meanwhile, Putin’s Ukraine folly has seen troops moved from the east to the western front. Russia’s military has underperformed; Russia’s claim to provide security for Central Asia carries less weight.
China has become more active in the security area, including opening its second overseas military base in Tajikistan. Beijing has also sought to assert itself politically.
In May 2023, it convened a summit of China plus the five central Asian states, without Russia’s participation. This will become a bi-annual process for economic and security co-ordination. A secretariat will be based in China.
China already hosts the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the New Development Bank. Use of the renminbi in trade settlements is becoming widespread. China has also broken ranks and unilaterally extended diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government in Kabul.
While public attitudes towards China are mixed, central Asian elites can see where their bread is buttered and are favourably disposed towards China. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has also raised fears of where the Putin Doctrine might next be applied, contributing to a broader questioning of both Russian and Soviet imperial legacies.
China has emerged as the dominant power in Eurasia. Putin therefore needs more than ever to stay close to Xi. China is not his only friend. India, which has bought as much hydrocarbons from sanctioned-Russia as China, is a bigger military customer. Despite India’s more favourable stance towards the US in recent years, Putin also needs it to help balance China.
Despite the superficial bonhomie of the visit optics, gone is the ‘‘friendship without limits’’ rhetoric. Significantly, no progress was made on the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline project, discussed for years and which Russia badly needs now to replace its European markets.
Fears in the West of a rising Chussia – a united China and Russia ‘‘axis of autocracies’’ – belies knowledge of their histories, approaches to security, and extent of economic integration in the global economy. The usual sour antipathy towards the US was in their joint statement; the strongest bond they share. Joint military and security exercises are to expand, but this is a long way from a mutual defence pact which neither wants nor even movement towards interoperability. The Chussia anxiety is much exaggerated.
Beijing’s biggest concern about Russia is regime stability. Failure in Ukraine could see Putin swept away by a colour revolution, although the possibility of that seems remote. Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s incandescent flame out across the political landscape would have horrified Xi. For better or worse, Xi finds himself now having to ride the tiger with Putin; regime survival in Moscow is in both their interests.
Read more here.
NB: Geoff Raby is the former Australian ambassador to China
First published in the Australian Financial Review, May 22, 2024
Washington’s Proxy War in Myanmar Continues Along China’s Borders
By Brian Berletic
Overshadowed by ongoing fighting in Eastern Europe and the Middle East as well as growing tensions between the US and China, the ongoing conflict in Myanmar nonetheless constitutes a critical component of what is a larger global conflict.
Depicted by Western governments and Western media as an isolated, internal conflict between a “military dictatorship” and the forces of “democracy,” in actuality the conflict represents decades of Anglo-American attempts to reassert Western control over the former British colony.
Much of the fighting is taking place between the central government and armed ethnic groups that had at one point been a part of the British Empire’s occupation force, utilized by the US and UK during World War 2 against the Japanese, and used ever since to disrupt Myanmar’s ambitions for independence and self-determination.
Alongside these armed ethnic groups, the US has constructed a parallel political establishment, eventually installed into power through compromised elections in 2020.
In 2021, Myanmar’s military removed from power the US client regime headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, advised by literal British and Australian citizens, and supported by a collection of US government-funded and backed political organizations, media platforms, and educational institutions both within and beyond Myanmar’s borders. The US has been semi-covertly backing attempts by the ousted regime to retake power through armed violence ever since.
Psychological Warfare Aims to Break Central Government Resolve
The fighting has continued mainly along Myanmar’s frontiers, regions that have hosted US-backed armed ethnic groups pursuing separatism for decades, but also at times and to a lesser degree, inside some of Myanmar’s urban centers.
While the US-backed opposition has failed to oust the central government or even significantly threaten it militarily, Western governments and the Western media have attempted to pass off temporary (and eventually reversed) gains as an impending opposition victory. Opposition strikes on central government and military facilities, including in the nation’s capital have also been passed off as growing opposition competence.
The Diplomat in its May 1, 2024 article, “Myanmar’s Revolution Has Entered a New, More Complicated Phase,” claimed:
Naypyidaw, the capital, has also come under unprecedented attack. In early April, a dozen resistance drones breached the city’s defenses and attacked military facilities across the sprawling city. Days later opposition forces fired several rocket attacks which hit a junta airbase next to Naypyidaw’s International Airport.
Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, D.C. who focuses on politics and security in Southeast Asia, said that the attack on the capital will have dented the junta’s morale.
“The drone and rocket attacks on Naypyidaw have caused little physical damage or casualties, but they have caused psychological damage; it is their fortress capital, and the physical manifestation of the bubble that the generals live in,” he said. “Attacks in Naypyidaw are meant to show that there is no place where the generals are safe.”
The very fact that Myanmar’s US-backed opposition must rely on symbolic gestures indicates its military deficiencies.
A similar strategy is being used by US-NATO-backed Ukraine. Missile and drone strikes are carried out against targets deep in Russian territory primarily to generate headlines for a proxy war Washington, London, and Brussels are otherwise decisively losing.
It is a strategy also used throughout the US proxy war in Syria from 2011 onward, with attempts to create psychological momentum designed to panic Damascus and its allies into breaking and fleeing. It too failed.
Another US Proxy War
US support for the opposition is a full spectrum. Political, media, and militant groups receive huge sums of money and support from the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Weapons and military training are provided by Americans and Europeans working with “humanitarian aid and advocacy organization” like the “Free Burma Rangers,” headed by a US Army veteran revealed to be in direct contact with the US Consulate in Chiang Mai in neighboring Thailand, according to US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks.
Despite the flow of resources into Myanmar’s opposition, the nature of post-colonial Myanmar constitutes vicious ethnic, religious, and political divides, meaning opposition forces are just as likely to fight with one another as they are the central government.
See-Sawing Battles
At the moment, the fighting remains stagnant despite headline-grabbing developments like the opposition’s seizure of the town of Myawaddy along the Myanmar-Thailand border. The New York Times reported the capture of the town by opposition fighters in an April 12, 2024 article titled, “Myanmar Rebels Take Key Trading Town, but Counteroffensive Looms.”
By April 24, 2024, less than two weeks later, the New York Times would publish an article titled, “Myanmar’s Junta Recaptures Town That Was a Significant Gain for Rebels.”
The see-sawing nature of the fighting is depicted by the Western media and the Western officials and analysts they interview as a sea change in the opposition’s favor, however Myanmar’s post-colonial history has consisted of decades of such fighting, including the changing of hands of various towns and cities along the edges of the central government’s control.
Just as the opposition is using drones and rockets to symbolically strike at key government and military facilities because they lack the military means to actually threaten them, it is taking vulnerable frontier towns and cities where government forces are spread out thinnest precisely because of its inability to fight and defeat Myanmar’s forces in pitched battles.
Target China
While ultimately the US seeks to re-install its client regime into power in Myanmar, preventing peace and development in Myanmar is a secondary objective.
The Southeast Asian country serves as an important partner for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which includes a port and hydrocarbons pipeline running the length of the country to China’s Kunming region. This allows China to move hydrocarbons from the Middle East to China without transiting the Strait of Malacca and other waters that could potentially be blockaded by the US’ growing military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
China’s BRI infrastructure has been repeatedly targeted by the US-backed militancy several times since 2021 as have Chinese businesses operating across Myanmar. Far from a battle between “democracy” and “dictatorship,” the conflict instead is one part of a much wider strategy of encirclement and containment by the United States of China stretching back to the end of World War 2. The US seeks to either control or destabilize nations along China’s periphery either creating US client regimes hostile to Beijing, or security crises along China’s border preventing trade, development, and economic growth of China itself.
An Ambiguous End Game
The final conclusion of Myanmar’s current conflict is far from clear.
While similar fighting has ebbed and flowed for decades, always ending in the central government’s favor, there are several factors that will determine whether or not this cycle will continue. While Myanmar’s military possesses resources and capabilities beyond the reach of the US-backed militants it is fighting, the ability and will to use them effectively is up to Myanmar’s central political and military leadership.
In terms of the opposition, among the many weaknesses of US-backed armed groups is their inability to work together with other ethnic and political fronts the US is sponsoring. Just as was the case in Syria, while at times the central government was overwhelmed by large numbers of militant operations across the country, the inability to coordinate them allowed government forces to defeat in detail each organization involved before moving on to the next.
A similar strategy appears to be in use by Myanmar’s military. Government forces withdraw where they are stretched, then return in force when resources can be redeployed effectively against opposition deployments. That the opposition is essentially engaged in “hit-and-run” operations exploiting gaps in the central government’s force deployments demonstrates a fundamental weakness requiring asymmetrical strategy and tactics.
Unless the opposition acquires more manpower and resources and/or can coordinate better among themselves, it is unlikely they will get the upper-hand over the central government, barring a fundamental mistake made by the government itself.
Of course, much depends on the wider global conflict the fighting in Myanmar fits into. With the US losing its proxy war in Ukraine, its influence eroding in the Middle East, and the disparity between a rising China and a waning United States continues to grow, Washington’s ability to sustain support for opposition groups within and beyond Myanmar’s borders may come into question. Should that happen, the cycle of deadly, destructive fighting debilitating Myanmar’s development as a nation for decades could begin coming to an end.
The above-mentioned Diplomat article would note the inability of opposition groups to work together.
It cited Aung Thu Nyein, director of the US government-affiliated “Institute for Strategy and Policy Myanmar” based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, saying:
Aung Thu Nyein says that the coming phase of the war could be tricky, and that more junta defeats could paradoxically divide the country further. He says the NUG remains popular in Myanmar among the general population but some of the ethnic groups are moving away from its leadership, forging their own paths and pursuing their own political agendas.
“The problem is a common agenda against the common enemy and building an alliance to fight together,” he said. But “the ethnic armed organizations can’t do that, and the National Unity Government can’t lead that.”
This means that even if the US-backed opposition was successful in ousting the central government and military, Myanmar itself would only descend further into chaos. The central government stands the only real chance of unifying the nation and moving it forward together with the rest of a rising Asia, but only if US-sponsored subversion and militancy ends or is successfully overcome.
Just as is the case with Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, Myanmar’s fighting is among an array of conflicts presented to the general public as spontaneous, unrelated crises the US must respond to, when in reality it is the US primarily driving them all, and all in order to preserve its ability to determine the outcome of regions around the world rather than the people actually living in these regions themselves.
The outcome of Myanmar’s ongoing fighting depends largely on the rest of the world’s ongoing efforts to either aid and abet US hegemony, or confront, oppose, and ultimately dismantle it. Until then, Myanmar’s fate remains suspended in perpetual armed conflict.
Read more here.
NB: Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.