China & India lock horns on Burma

In 2011, the historian Thant Myint-U published Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, arguing that Burma — not any Western capital — would be the hinge on which 21st-century Asia turns. Revisited from today, the case he made still shapes how both powers view the country.

Myint-U's starting point was geography. For centuries India and China developed as distinct civilizations, separated by the Himalayas, the Tibetan plateau, and the near-impenetrable jungles of Burma; contact came by camel caravan through Central Asia or by ship through the Strait of Malacca. By the late 2000s that barrier was being torn down by infrastructure.

China was driving the change. From the mid-1990s it began planning routes joining its landlocked interior to the Indian Ocean, and by 2010–11 the plans were becoming concrete: a new port at Kyaukphyu on Burma's coast, twin oil and gas pipelines running nearly a thousand miles to refineries in Yunnan province, and talk of a high-speed railway that would one day run from Rangoon to Kunming. The strategic logic was what Chinese strategists call the "Malacca dilemma" — the great bulk of China's oil imports passing through the narrow Strait of Malacca, a choke point a future adversary could close. A route across Burma would offer a second ocean: Chinese scholars have written about a "two oceans" vision in which Burma becomes, in Myint-U's memorable phrase, "China's California" — a seaboard for the country's landlocked west.

India had its own ambitions. Successive governments since the 1990s pursued the "Look East" policy — reviving port and waterway links to serve the country's isolated northeastern states and even reviving discussion of reopening the Stilwell Road, the World War II Allied supply route linking India's east with China's Yunnan province. Officials in Delhi spoke of Burma's importance for the security and development of the northeast while keeping a cautious eye on Beijing's push into the country.

Myint-U also caught, in real time, the political opening that began just as his book appeared. In March 2011 Burma's junta formally dissolved and power passed to a quasi-civilian government under the retired general Thein Sein. The 2010 elections had been widely condemned as fraudulent, but within months the new president was speaking against graft, inviting exiles to return, opening peace talks with ethnic rebels, and reaching out to Aung San Suu Kyi, released from house arrest in November 2010. In September 2011 he suspended construction of the Chinese-backed Myitsone dam — a signal that even Beijing's projects were no longer above public pressure.

History has added a darker coda since. The military retook full power in February 2021, and civil war has since turned the crossroads into a battlefield. But the underlying logic Myint-U identified — pipelines, ports, and competing Indian and Chinese ambitions converging on Burma — remains the frame through which the region is still best understood.

Editor's note: this article was substantially rewritten during our editorial review. The original 2011 version reproduced long passages from Thant Myint-U's book without attribution; the text above is an original summary of the book's argument.