I'll preface my remarks —submitted here at the express request of Claire, who should feel free with editing or deleting them as she sees fit— by acknowledging that I claim zero expertise in predicting or discoursing upon "geopolitical significance". But with the critical exceptions of India's northeastern states (and of Russia), I do have decades on the ground throughout all the countries and regions addressed in Vivek's essay; primarily as a university-affilitated researcher and independent consultant on wide-ranging ecological and societal "problemscapes": to use enviro planning jargon.
The focus of my fieldwork and of my previous academic writing has been the broad-spectrum evaluation —both pre- and post-implementation— of energy development and water resources management; port and navigation improvements; and interbasin transfer (IBT) schemes throughout that region.
I have more recently been producing interactive visualization apps and publications of which several relevant online examples will be hotlinked below....
I will not speak here of the descent of much of Myanmar into bloody madness following the 1st February 2021 Tatamadaw (Myanmar's national military) coup, which otherwise figures —if slenderly— in my upcoming virtual presentation at IAIA 2021.
In the forefront of the national problemscape theretofore is that Myanamar has the worst electrical generating capacity amongst the ASEAN countries. And absent enormous and speedy expansion of that capacity, industrialization, agricultural intensification, and overall modernization of the country are essentially foreclosed: Myanmar, with its population of ~55 million has a present total installed capacity of 4,400 megawatts (1 MW = 1,000 kW) of which only ~4,000 MW is connected to the national grid; to which in any case about one third of the population still has no mains access.
By comparison, Thailand, with a population of ~75 million, has at present ~45,000 MW of domestic installed capacity, plus another ~6,000 MW contractually allocated from existing Thai- and Chinese-developed energy projects (predominantly hydro but also thermal, and possibly to soon include photovoltaic solar) inside Laos.
Vivek mentioned the Myitsone hydropower project(s) in Myanmar's restive Kachin State as a key Chinese initiative. In 2018, I spent some weeks in Myitkyina, the Kachin State capital, travelling widely by land and by water (given the severe limitations of the movement of foreigners) and had seen about as much as possible, from the ground, the primary site of the "shelved in deference to the peoples will", Myitsone hydroelectric project, at the toe of the prospective staircase of seven dams with a combined installed capacity of ~20,000 MW: approaching the eventual installed capacity of all existing, under-construction, and in-planning hydropower installations within the vastly larger Lower Mekong Basin: excluding Yunan and Tibet.
Further to that... (The world's largest single hydro project, the PRC's Three Gorges dam, has an installed capacity of 22,500 MW, and it's siting required the permanent involuntarily dislocation of nearly two million Chinese.)
I had earlier met several senior staff of China Power International (CPI) at a conference in Kunming, Yunnan, whom I subsequently invited to participate in a semester abroad class for American undergrads based at Yunnan U. at which I lectured largely on environmental issues in the Himalayan origin rivers.
CPI was the PRC State Corporation holding the contract for the initial full development of Myitsone; a contract validly negotiated with the Myanmar military regime before the accession of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (DASSK) as State Counselor, and likely to be upheld if its enforcement ever came to litigation.
While Myitsone indeed was "shelved" (a skeleton crew of CPI engineers remained on site, and may well still), as at least USD $100 M was by then already spent by CPI on physical infrastructure; including a completed auxillary hydropower facility of ~90 MW to provide electricity through the larger construction phase, but never intended for near-term connection to the local Myanmar grid.
In the months prior to the February, 2021 Tatmadaw coup, DASSK had several times publicly acknowledged the validity of the CPI contract and suggested that rather then having to obligatorily reimburse CPI the $100 M, it might be preferable to go ahead with at least the 6,000 MW Myitsone dam alone.
Presumably, the overall Myitsone-Mali-N'Mai staircase would have been a "Build-Operate-Transfer" (BOT) scheme, typically for 30 years, which would have allocated only 10% of the power yield in the near term to the Myanmar junior partner, but eventually would have turned full ownership over to the Government of Myanmar; thereafter in perpetuity. BOT is a favored development approach given that only a minor share of the enormous capital development cost would be borne by the Burmese, but in the end they would hold a complete monopoly over the energy yield.
Even if the Mali-N'Mai components had been built, the forced relocations and replacement cost for inundated housing, agricultural lands, and existing infrastructure in the extremely mountainous and thinly populated uplands of Kachin State would have been so minor compared to the prospective energy yield as to qualify the project within the most socially and economically desirable category of hydropower development.
But of the c. 1.5 M residents of Kachin State, encompassing a number of quite different ethnicities in language, religion, and race, probably half or more live upbasin of the Irrawaddy/Ayeyarwadi mainstem valley beginning at the Myitsone damsite and extending below Bhamo and thence to the border with Shan State.
Left altogether unmentioned by Vivek are the joint Thai-Chinese proposals for a hydropower staircase on the Salween (Thanlwin in Burmese) mainstem, mostly well-inside the Union of Myanmar but like Myitsone, in sub-basins almost entirely occupied by ethnic minorities with a history —predating, coeval, and postdating the century of British colonial rule—of frequently-ferocious resistance to hegemony by non co-ethnics, including the Siamese and the dominant ethnic Burmese "Bamar".
The proposed Kung Long, Nong Pa, Mong Ton, Ywathit and Hat Gyi hydroelectric projects, in Myanmar's "minority-majority" Kayin/Karen, Shan, and Karenni States, which were "approved" in 2013 by the Nay Pyi Daw government are together projected to produce over 15,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity. None of them, to my knowledge, are advanced to the formal contractual level of Myitsone. Nevertheless, since the premininary site selection and design concepts were first put forward in the 1990s, the extreme and continuing hostility to any and every such project by local communities —in many cases precipitating violent encounters between the Tatmadaw and the local Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs)— has led to possibly 60,000 or more internally (i.e., within Mynamar) or externally (i.e., across the Salween to Thailand) displaced persons fleeing for their lives.
The number of deaths —pre-2021, coup— is likely in the thousands.
Vivek's unduly snide footnote regarding the (Republican) GOP House Freedom Caucus obviously being "pro-coup", as intellectually consistent with what? Their pro-fascist, totalitarian ideology? What they are in fact being consistent with with the boundless distaste on the American Right towards the vapid but dangerous virtue signalling now so large in our domestic politics:
Given half the US population's perspective on the dubious legitimacy of the Biden administration; and beyond that, on the doddering President's mental capacity, it is simply inconceivable that an American-led armed intervention will be launched to forcibly depose the Tatmadaw and "restore democracy". A new ground war in Asia to defeat the "illiberalism" spectre? And even more inconceivable is that the Blue Helmets will be taking on the task, given Russian and PRC membership on the UN Security Council and India's duly large influence in the UN General Assembly. However, I did appreciate what I understood to be Vivek's too-clever-by-half closing reference to the Marx Brothers on "principles".
Regarding the presumed disutility of transit corridors through Bangladesh, Claire's footnote and rather obsolete list of references makes no mention of the recently launched Indo-Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Protocol, to vastly improve the navigability of shipping routes linking Haldia (Kolkata is largely defunct now as West Bengal's primary port); dredged through the Sundarbans World Heritage Sites, to Mongla Port and thence via the Rivers Meghna and Jamuna —which is what the Brahmaputra is called inside Bangladesh— all the way eastward through Assam.
The problem with that is the Chinese proposal just announced in March 2021 to construct a hydropower cascade in the Brahmaputra's Tibetan mainstem headwater —the Yarlung Tsangpo— of which the primary megadam alone would have a installed generating capacity of 60 Gigawatts (= 60,000 MW). Absent a level of co-riparian cooperation hertofore atypical of Chinese water resources development, the discharge —hence, navigability— of the Brahmaputra all the way downbasin to the Bay of Bengal would be effectively at the whim of Chinese energy management priorities.
I was, too. I thought this piece was superb--exactly the kind of thing we wanted to publish when we said, "We need a new publication." None of this is being reported in the US media, as far as I know. But you couldn't begin to understand this situation unless you know all of this, could you?
I share some stuff with others, hoping they will join the movement. We hear a little in Canada about China's iniquities, but mostly we consume US news. When you are the mouse sleeping with the elephant.... But CBC in Canada is preoccupied with identity politics and the lastest gender fatuity. ( Camille Paglia says civilizations in decline become preoccupied with sex in all its various excesses. Could this be true?) Thanks for starting this Claire.
I'm thinking about Paglia's comment, but I don't know enough about a sufficiently wide variety of civilizations in their twilight eras to say. Were the Mayans preoccupied with sex in all its excesses? Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn islands? The Anasazi in the American southwest? I've never asked myself this question. Are the answers even known? Who among us knows about the end of Mayan civilization? Certainly, our civilization is preoccupied by sex, but hasn't it always been? Aren't all civilizations? I'm just not sure.
Lol. I wasn’t expecting an extensive list of possible exceptions! Good on you. As I recall she referenced the Romans and the Weimar Republic. I will have to go back and reread her to give you more. I will take it as an exercise assigned to the student. Have you read her?
Apr 13, 2021Liked by Claire Berlinski, Vivek Y. Kelkar
It occurs to me that Myanmar is less a matter of acquisitive importance to the People's Republic of China than it is of denial importance. With the deal the PRC signed with Russia concerning PRC access to Siberian resources (and the resulting subordination of Russia to the PRC, but that's for another tale) and the nascent PRC colonization of the vasty spaces of eastern Siberia, the PRC soon will have all the access to cheap, nearby and easily protectable supplies of oil, natural gas, timber, gold, etc, etc that are the wealth of that part of Siberia. It has no need of Myanmar's resources or to deal with those troublesome and fractious natives.
The PRC does, though, have a large interest in opening a third front (in addition to the chicken neck and the "disputed" PRC-India border that lies between occupied Tibet and Pakistan) against India. Myanmar also gives a measure of denial leverage to those shipping lanes that feed Japan and the RoK and through which so much of American imports flow.
Russia's interest in Myanmar is much the same as was its interest in northern Korea and Vietnam in years gone by--just to be in the way, to claim relevance, and today to assert a measure of independence from the PRC.
Good points Eric Hines. Yes, the acquisition of resources is secondary. "Denial leverage" as you call it is primary. It's the gateway that Myanmar offers to the Indian Ocean, the insurance against a Malacca Straits choke and a naval option in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea that come into China's calculations. That and the necessity of having a friendly and somewhat subservient nation next to Yunnan (and India) . Yunnan is not a province that's one of China's "economic successes". A relatively antagonistic country on that border would be problematic. The history of the region, especially from 1948 to '88, provides deep insights into why Myanmar is so critical today. It's something we could not cover in this piece with our constraints on length. We will, perhaps, look at the history in another piece.
Apr 13, 2021Liked by Claire Berlinski, Vivek Y. Kelkar
In three generations, are we going to meet a lot of Chinese young people who are ashamed of the colonial actions of 100 years ago, lamenting their great grandparents exploitation of the third world? Or is the CCP going to mold the historic record well enough that they won't be judged by future generations?
Instead, can we warn the Chinese public about this encroaching guilty feeling and pump the brakes on this sort of expansionism?
This is the problem with not being a historicist. I have zero confidence in how this is going to play out. Thanks for the incredibly informative article.
I'll preface my remarks —submitted here at the express request of Claire, who should feel free with editing or deleting them as she sees fit— by acknowledging that I claim zero expertise in predicting or discoursing upon "geopolitical significance". But with the critical exceptions of India's northeastern states (and of Russia), I do have decades on the ground throughout all the countries and regions addressed in Vivek's essay; primarily as a university-affilitated researcher and independent consultant on wide-ranging ecological and societal "problemscapes": to use enviro planning jargon.
The focus of my fieldwork and of my previous academic writing has been the broad-spectrum evaluation —both pre- and post-implementation— of energy development and water resources management; port and navigation improvements; and interbasin transfer (IBT) schemes throughout that region.
I have more recently been producing interactive visualization apps and publications of which several relevant online examples will be hotlinked below....
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/interbasin_transfer/interbasin_xfer_Salween_Chaophraya.pdf>
I will not speak here of the descent of much of Myanmar into bloody madness following the 1st February 2021 Tatamadaw (Myanmar's national military) coup, which otherwise figures —if slenderly— in my upcoming virtual presentation at IAIA 2021.
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/IAIA_2021/presentation.pdf>
In the forefront of the national problemscape theretofore is that Myanamar has the worst electrical generating capacity amongst the ASEAN countries. And absent enormous and speedy expansion of that capacity, industrialization, agricultural intensification, and overall modernization of the country are essentially foreclosed: Myanmar, with its population of ~55 million has a present total installed capacity of 4,400 megawatts (1 MW = 1,000 kW) of which only ~4,000 MW is connected to the national grid; to which in any case about one third of the population still has no mains access.
By comparison, Thailand, with a population of ~75 million, has at present ~45,000 MW of domestic installed capacity, plus another ~6,000 MW contractually allocated from existing Thai- and Chinese-developed energy projects (predominantly hydro but also thermal, and possibly to soon include photovoltaic solar) inside Laos.
Vivek mentioned the Myitsone hydropower project(s) in Myanmar's restive Kachin State as a key Chinese initiative. In 2018, I spent some weeks in Myitkyina, the Kachin State capital, travelling widely by land and by water (given the severe limitations of the movement of foreigners) and had seen about as much as possible, from the ground, the primary site of the "shelved in deference to the peoples will", Myitsone hydroelectric project, at the toe of the prospective staircase of seven dams with a combined installed capacity of ~20,000 MW: approaching the eventual installed capacity of all existing, under-construction, and in-planning hydropower installations within the vastly larger Lower Mekong Basin: excluding Yunan and Tibet.
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/Mong_Ton_eBook/thanlwin_landing_page.pdf>
Further to that... (The world's largest single hydro project, the PRC's Three Gorges dam, has an installed capacity of 22,500 MW, and it's siting required the permanent involuntarily dislocation of nearly two million Chinese.)
I had earlier met several senior staff of China Power International (CPI) at a conference in Kunming, Yunnan, whom I subsequently invited to participate in a semester abroad class for American undergrads based at Yunnan U. at which I lectured largely on environmental issues in the Himalayan origin rivers.
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/Baima_EIA_sim_Kunming_2015/Environmental_Impact_Assessment_simulation_homepage.pdf>
CPI was the PRC State Corporation holding the contract for the initial full development of Myitsone; a contract validly negotiated with the Myanmar military regime before the accession of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (DASSK) as State Counselor, and likely to be upheld if its enforcement ever came to litigation.
While Myitsone indeed was "shelved" (a skeleton crew of CPI engineers remained on site, and may well still), as at least USD $100 M was by then already spent by CPI on physical infrastructure; including a completed auxillary hydropower facility of ~90 MW to provide electricity through the larger construction phase, but never intended for near-term connection to the local Myanmar grid.
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/myitsone/myitsone_poster_interactive.pdf>
In the months prior to the February, 2021 Tatmadaw coup, DASSK had several times publicly acknowledged the validity of the CPI contract and suggested that rather then having to obligatorily reimburse CPI the $100 M, it might be preferable to go ahead with at least the 6,000 MW Myitsone dam alone.
Presumably, the overall Myitsone-Mali-N'Mai staircase would have been a "Build-Operate-Transfer" (BOT) scheme, typically for 30 years, which would have allocated only 10% of the power yield in the near term to the Myanmar junior partner, but eventually would have turned full ownership over to the Government of Myanmar; thereafter in perpetuity. BOT is a favored development approach given that only a minor share of the enormous capital development cost would be borne by the Burmese, but in the end they would hold a complete monopoly over the energy yield.
Even if the Mali-N'Mai components had been built, the forced relocations and replacement cost for inundated housing, agricultural lands, and existing infrastructure in the extremely mountainous and thinly populated uplands of Kachin State would have been so minor compared to the prospective energy yield as to qualify the project within the most socially and economically desirable category of hydropower development.
But of the c. 1.5 M residents of Kachin State, encompassing a number of quite different ethnicities in language, religion, and race, probably half or more live upbasin of the Irrawaddy/Ayeyarwadi mainstem valley beginning at the Myitsone damsite and extending below Bhamo and thence to the border with Shan State.
Left altogether unmentioned by Vivek are the joint Thai-Chinese proposals for a hydropower staircase on the Salween (Thanlwin in Burmese) mainstem, mostly well-inside the Union of Myanmar but like Myitsone, in sub-basins almost entirely occupied by ethnic minorities with a history —predating, coeval, and postdating the century of British colonial rule—of frequently-ferocious resistance to hegemony by non co-ethnics, including the Siamese and the dominant ethnic Burmese "Bamar".
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/Mong_Ton_eBook/thanlwin_landing_page.pdf>
The proposed Kung Long, Nong Pa, Mong Ton, Ywathit and Hat Gyi hydroelectric projects, in Myanmar's "minority-majority" Kayin/Karen, Shan, and Karenni States, which were "approved" in 2013 by the Nay Pyi Daw government are together projected to produce over 15,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity. None of them, to my knowledge, are advanced to the formal contractual level of Myitsone. Nevertheless, since the premininary site selection and design concepts were first put forward in the 1990s, the extreme and continuing hostility to any and every such project by local communities —in many cases precipitating violent encounters between the Tatmadaw and the local Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs)— has led to possibly 60,000 or more internally (i.e., within Mynamar) or externally (i.e., across the Salween to Thailand) displaced persons fleeing for their lives.
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/COTS_2018_online/Shan_Tasang_EIA_COTS_2018.pdf>
The number of deaths —pre-2021, coup— is likely in the thousands.
Vivek's unduly snide footnote regarding the (Republican) GOP House Freedom Caucus obviously being "pro-coup", as intellectually consistent with what? Their pro-fascist, totalitarian ideology? What they are in fact being consistent with with the boundless distaste on the American Right towards the vapid but dangerous virtue signalling now so large in our domestic politics:
Given half the US population's perspective on the dubious legitimacy of the Biden administration; and beyond that, on the doddering President's mental capacity, it is simply inconceivable that an American-led armed intervention will be launched to forcibly depose the Tatmadaw and "restore democracy". A new ground war in Asia to defeat the "illiberalism" spectre? And even more inconceivable is that the Blue Helmets will be taking on the task, given Russian and PRC membership on the UN Security Council and India's duly large influence in the UN General Assembly. However, I did appreciate what I understood to be Vivek's too-clever-by-half closing reference to the Marx Brothers on "principles".
Regarding the presumed disutility of transit corridors through Bangladesh, Claire's footnote and rather obsolete list of references makes no mention of the recently launched Indo-Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Protocol, to vastly improve the navigability of shipping routes linking Haldia (Kolkata is largely defunct now as West Bengal's primary port); dredged through the Sundarbans World Heritage Sites, to Mongla Port and thence via the Rivers Meghna and Jamuna —which is what the Brahmaputra is called inside Bangladesh— all the way eastward through Assam.
The problem with that is the Chinese proposal just announced in March 2021 to construct a hydropower cascade in the Brahmaputra's Tibetan mainstem headwater —the Yarlung Tsangpo— of which the primary megadam alone would have a installed generating capacity of 60 Gigawatts (= 60,000 MW). Absent a level of co-riparian cooperation hertofore atypical of Chinese water resources development, the discharge —hence, navigability— of the Brahmaputra all the way downbasin to the Bay of Bengal would be effectively at the whim of Chinese energy management priorities.
Primary website URL...
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com>
See this link too...
<https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/Sundarbans_redux/BOKU_eBook_text_pix_18_Apr.pdf>
Great article.
So much going on here I was unaware of. Thanks.
I was, too. I thought this piece was superb--exactly the kind of thing we wanted to publish when we said, "We need a new publication." None of this is being reported in the US media, as far as I know. But you couldn't begin to understand this situation unless you know all of this, could you?
I share some stuff with others, hoping they will join the movement. We hear a little in Canada about China's iniquities, but mostly we consume US news. When you are the mouse sleeping with the elephant.... But CBC in Canada is preoccupied with identity politics and the lastest gender fatuity. ( Camille Paglia says civilizations in decline become preoccupied with sex in all its various excesses. Could this be true?) Thanks for starting this Claire.
I'm thinking about Paglia's comment, but I don't know enough about a sufficiently wide variety of civilizations in their twilight eras to say. Were the Mayans preoccupied with sex in all its excesses? Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn islands? The Anasazi in the American southwest? I've never asked myself this question. Are the answers even known? Who among us knows about the end of Mayan civilization? Certainly, our civilization is preoccupied by sex, but hasn't it always been? Aren't all civilizations? I'm just not sure.
Lol. I wasn’t expecting an extensive list of possible exceptions! Good on you. As I recall she referenced the Romans and the Weimar Republic. I will have to go back and reread her to give you more. I will take it as an exercise assigned to the student. Have you read her?
I've read her extensively and I've always thought she has a lively, vibrant voice.
It occurs to me that Myanmar is less a matter of acquisitive importance to the People's Republic of China than it is of denial importance. With the deal the PRC signed with Russia concerning PRC access to Siberian resources (and the resulting subordination of Russia to the PRC, but that's for another tale) and the nascent PRC colonization of the vasty spaces of eastern Siberia, the PRC soon will have all the access to cheap, nearby and easily protectable supplies of oil, natural gas, timber, gold, etc, etc that are the wealth of that part of Siberia. It has no need of Myanmar's resources or to deal with those troublesome and fractious natives.
The PRC does, though, have a large interest in opening a third front (in addition to the chicken neck and the "disputed" PRC-India border that lies between occupied Tibet and Pakistan) against India. Myanmar also gives a measure of denial leverage to those shipping lanes that feed Japan and the RoK and through which so much of American imports flow.
Russia's interest in Myanmar is much the same as was its interest in northern Korea and Vietnam in years gone by--just to be in the way, to claim relevance, and today to assert a measure of independence from the PRC.
Eric Hines
Good points Eric Hines. Yes, the acquisition of resources is secondary. "Denial leverage" as you call it is primary. It's the gateway that Myanmar offers to the Indian Ocean, the insurance against a Malacca Straits choke and a naval option in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea that come into China's calculations. That and the necessity of having a friendly and somewhat subservient nation next to Yunnan (and India) . Yunnan is not a province that's one of China's "economic successes". A relatively antagonistic country on that border would be problematic. The history of the region, especially from 1948 to '88, provides deep insights into why Myanmar is so critical today. It's something we could not cover in this piece with our constraints on length. We will, perhaps, look at the history in another piece.
In three generations, are we going to meet a lot of Chinese young people who are ashamed of the colonial actions of 100 years ago, lamenting their great grandparents exploitation of the third world? Or is the CCP going to mold the historic record well enough that they won't be judged by future generations?
Instead, can we warn the Chinese public about this encroaching guilty feeling and pump the brakes on this sort of expansionism?
This is the problem with not being a historicist. I have zero confidence in how this is going to play out. Thanks for the incredibly informative article.