Beijing is propping up a brutal regime, trading fake legitimacy for strategic control
By Benedict Rogers in Nikkei Asia
The Chinese Communist Party is not only a perpetrator of grave violations of human rights within China and of transnational repression abroad. It is also a major facilitator of, and accomplice to, mass-atrocity crimes committed by other dictatorships.
It has enabled Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, helped keep Kim Jong Un’s regime in North Korea alive and provided a lifeline to the military junta in Myanmar.
In so doing, it has built a new axis of authoritarianism, epitomized by the summit of dictators which Beijing hosted last year. It is developing an alliance of dictatorships, which now operate increasingly as satellite states under China’s patronage and orbit, a successor to Russia’s old Warsaw Pact and a rival to the increasingly fractured NATO.
It is in Myanmar that the CCP’s influence is currently perhaps most significant dangerous, but also overlooked. Beijing sees Myanmar not only as its backyard but as a crucial geostrategic playground vital for securing its interests. It seeks “stability” in the war-torn country, not because it has any concern for the welfare of the people of Myanmar but because it wants to protect its economic pursuits: border trade corridors, infrastructure investments, access to rare earth minerals, jade and energy. And most significant of all, its maritime ambitions.
Crucially, China wants access to the Bay of Bengal. And if it secures that, alongside the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea and eventually the First Island Chain by seizing Taiwan, then its dominance in the region and ability to challenge the U.S. is achieved. Myanmar is key to these maritime ambitions. The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor and Myanmar’s place in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative are crucial factors in the CCP’s strategy for global dominance.
For all these reasons, China is the puppet master behind Myanmar’s current fake elections. On Dec. 28, the military held the first round of voting, to be followed by a second round on Jan. 11. But the election is a charade, a sham designed to legitimize an illegal, illegitimate, criminal regime.
Since it seized power in an illegal coup on Feb. 1 2021, overthrowing the democratically elected civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s junta has arrested over 30,000 people. More than 22,000 political prisoners, including Suu Kyi, many of her colleagues from the National League for Democracy and other democracy activists, remain in jail today. Over 40 political parties, including the NLD, have been dissolved by the regime and excluded from the elections, and anyone who criticizes the military’s election process is committing a crime under a new decree that could lead to a 20-year prison sentence or even capital punishment. Myanmar’s civil society and independent media is severely persecuted, and brave journalists and activists function only underground in grave danger or in exile. The rule of law and an independent judiciary are nonexistent.
Moreover, much of Myanmar’s population is disenfranchised. Elections are only taking place in military-controlled areas, and even there turnout in the first round was estimated at little more than 50%. Entire regions under the control of the pro-democracy or ethnic armed resistance groups are excluded, including almost the whole of Rakhine state. The Muslim-majority Rohingya people, who were stripped of their citizenship by a previous dictatorship in 1982 and rendered stateless, and have endured a genocide over the past decade, are completely shut out of the elections.
Most significantly, these fake elections are taking place while the military conducts daily airstrikes against civilians. On Dec. 10 — International Human Rights Day — the military bombed a hospital, reportedly killing more than 30 people, and similar atrocities continue almost every day throughout the country. China, together with Russia, is the major provider of arms, fighter jets, drones, surveillance technology, finance and fuel to enable the junta to continue these military atrocities against their own people.
But China is the architect of the sham elections because, according to a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), Beijing sees them as a “quid pro quo” for preventing the regime’s collapse. Already the junta has declared that the military-backed parties are ahead in the poll. That is no surprise, given how rigged it is.
Although China was initially displeased with the Myanmar regime immediately following the 2021 coup, for the past year Beijing has intervened to prop it up. Nervous about the prospect of the junta’s potential collapse, China has pressured ethnic armed groups operating on the Chinese border with Myanmar to agree to ceasefires with the military, and even return territory they had captured, particularly in areas where China has economic interests such as mining concessions. It should be no surprise to anyone who follows the CCP to know that Beijing prefers a human rights-violating dictatorship that it can influence and that is more likely to protect its interests to a democracy that it perceives as more pro-Western.
But at the same time, Beijing wants a regime that has a veneer of legitimacy. It wants to normalize its puppets in Naypyidaw — Myanmar’s capital — in order to provide diplomatic cover for both the generals and the CCP, and reset Myanmar’s relations and reputation in the region and beyond. As the ICG puts it, “Beijing would prefer to deal with a nominally civilian government” — and ideally with a more credible figure than the current dictator, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, who is facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for his role in crimes against humanity in Myanmar. China sees the general who staged the coup and plunged Myanmar into a new dark age of conflict as incompetent.
China’s dominance in Myanmar is a profoundly malign influence for the region and the world. Its exploitation of rare earth mining has resulted in toxic pollution of rivers not only in Myanmar but in neighboring Thailand. The role of Chinese organized crime syndicates in running scam centers, drug trafficking and human trafficking is a threat to regional and global security. Its patronage of the sham elections and provision of arms, jets and fuel makes it an accomplice to the military’s atrocities. And its ambition to control the Bay of Bengal make its role in Myanmar a geopolitical threat.
The U.S., the U.K., the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan and ASEAN need to wake up to this danger — fast. They must coordinate a response, rejecting the sham elections, redoubling support for pro-democracy forces in Myanmar, countering China’s influence and ultimately holding Beijing accountable for facilitating the junta’s crimes.
As the international community prepares to respond to the fake elections in Myanmar over the coming weeks, it cannot ignore the biggest elephant in the room: China’s malign influence in the region.
This article was originally published in Nikkei Asia.