The News
Myanmar’s bloody civil war is obstructing Beijing’s plans for a major trade route, the BBC reported, obstructing construction efforts and putting the key economic project at risk.
The Chinese-Myanmar Economic Corridor was intended to give Myanmar access to global markets via the Indian Ocean, uplifting the impoverished nation as well as supporting China’s investments in energy and the mining of lucrative rare earth minerals.
But in the three years since a 2021 coup removed Myanmar’s elected leader, the ruling military junta has lost control of much of the country putting the multibillion-dollar project at risk.
SIGNALS
China’s policy of hedging its bets is proving a strategic headache
China’s backing of both sides in Myanmar is “nothing new,” China analyst Lucas Myers argued for War on the Rocks. Beijing’s policy on Myanmar has long been a “hedging strategy” since the civil war broke out in 2021, Myers wrote, allowing China to ensure that whatever happens “it comes out on top.” However, with fighting in Myanmar boiling over, and an ongoing scandal of Burmese cyber scammers trafficking hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals across the border, Beijing is facing a strategic headache in managing — and arming — both the junta and the opposition rebels. Such vested interest in Myanmar’s stability could make China the most likely external force to negotiate peace, Fulcrum, a research site focused on Southeast Asia argued, but potentially exploitative interests may not deliver the most beneficial resolution for Myanmar itself.
Beijing fears for its energy supply chains
China’s development of economic corridors in the region forms part of Beijing’s goal to “influence the power dynamics in South Asia and beyond,” according to the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. In particular, China is concerned about its energy supply chains, which are reliant on the 800km Malacca Strait located between Malaysia and Indonesia. Ninety percent of China’s trade came by sea in 2022, and China’s dependency on foreign oil is predicted to reach 80% by 2030, meaning that Beijing is set to “move heaven and earth to mitigate the Malacca Straits and its potential chokepoint,” analyst Myers wrote for The Wilson Center, a DC think tank, in 2021. The China-Myanmar trade route would, if completed, allow China to import vast quantities of oil and gas overland from the resource-rich nation, and in turn develop an “expanded, interdependent market for China,” adding to its “economic and political power,” Chatham House, a UK think tank, wrote.