Pay Attention to Burma

Photo: Flickr/Franz Patzig

The United States’ recent decision to pursue a different tack with Burma has been cited by reports to be the reason for the unusual Chinese rebuke of the Burmese over a recent border spat. According to a recent Inter Press Agency article, the recent Chinese-Burmese border bust up may have been compounded by Chinese concerns over its long-time client state’s future relations with the U.S.

Some background: This latest Chinese rebuke comes as United States has moved rather aggressively in courting Burma in the last few weeks. Following Senator Jim Webb’s trip to Burma in August, the U.S has announced a shift in its Burma policy, announcing its plan for engagement with the junta’s reclusive leaders must be part of a “sustained process of interaction.” This move, which has been strongly supported by Burmese opposition, has been quickly followed by a meeting between Kurt Campbell, assistant U.S. secretary of state for Asia and Burmese health minister, U Thaung on the margins of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. This is the first such high-level talks in more than a decade.

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Engagement: The More, The Merrier

It is difficult to resist drawing comparisons when two apparently non-official “rescue” missions were made in the last fortnight alone by prominent U.S. political personalities. That they were to two of the world’s most closed countries — North Korea and Burma — has invited a flurry of perspectives on how the Obama adminstration should conduct themselves in its foreign policy.

Foreign Policy’s David Roftkopf advocates caution. He says:

Webb says he was not an official emissary of the administration. Bill Clinton said the same thing. Clearly, in both instances this particular bit of diplomatic kabuki theater is transparent to all. Webb is the regional subcommittee chair on a critical Senate subcommittee, he is close to the administration, was briefed by them before his trip and promises to brief them on his return. At no time did they renounce the trip and he traveled on a U.S. government plane. His visit was official and the credit for the release of Yettaw and the potential negative consequences of the mission must accrue to the president and his team.

Personally, I think making engagement a centerpiece of a new U.S. foreign policy is a major positive development for which the administration deserves great credit. But as with any such new initiative, we need to be careful about how we approach it prior to getting all the bugs worked out. The Webb mission, even with is success in terms of securing the release of Mr. Yettaw, winning a session with Suu Kyi and engaging in a rare exchange with the leader of the regime, raises important concerns that need to be addressed if the new policy is to work to our best advantage in the future.

Key to such caution will be how much the U.S. first engages with countries that wield more influence in both countries. Diplomatic pressure cannot come from America alone, it has to be multilateral and come from other countries. China figures centrally in both cases, but more so for North Korea. The Burma case is a little harder to crack because its neighbors reportedly have business interests in the country that predate the military regime in power. Economic sanctions therefore become ineffective.

Instead, the Obama administration could do better to cajole/entice Burma’s ASEAN neighbors, India and China, to apply more sustained pressure on the military junta to accede to international norms. While ASEAN member countries maintain an official non-interference stance, international outrage and the Southeast Asian regional grouping’s belated introduction of a Human Rights Mechanism in 2007 have combined to make that untenable. This is since any failure to condemn Burma’s ridiculous treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi would affect ASEAN’s credibility.

A commitment to engagement is a great starting point, but the Obama administration could expand their notion of “engagement” to take on a more pluralistic approach to advance its foreign policy agenda.

[This first appeared on TheAtlantic.com's Politics Channel.]

Replicating Singapore in China?

It was one hell of a kicker quote, but it probably summed up the appeal of Singapore’s model of governance for Chinese Communist Party cadres. “The Singapore model of development before democracy is something which suits China,” Lu Yuanli, a Chinese professor who studies Singapore, was quoted by The Straits Times to have said.

When I was back in Singapore on vacation last week, I stumbled on an article that ST carried in its print edition on June 24 about the “Singapore fever” among Chinese government officials. The full article is appended at the end of this entry, because you need to be a subscriber to access ST’s articles online.

Singapore’s system might be premised on too small a scale for China to copy its system entirely, but it can be and has been used as a template by many city officials eager to manage their own cities well. This symbiotic relationship probably started after what the same article called the “Second Wave” of Singapore “fever” after the late Deng Xiao Peng praised Singapore in the early 1990s.

There was the Suzhou-Singapore Industrial Park project that saw some hiccups a few years into its incarnation and then there is the program at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University that according to the ST article, has trained some 16,000 Chinese city officials.

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