Oct 12, 2010

Chairman Than Shwe Visits China

Myanmar's top military leader Senior General Than Shwe visited Beijing and Shanghai. He held talks with China's top leaders including President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and visited the World Expo in Shanghai. "China and Myanmar are friendly neighbours and this year marks the 60th anniversary of the bilateral ties. We would like to take this visit as an opportunity to further our traditional friendship and make new contributions to regional peace and stability," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a media briefing. On the elections she said, "As neighbour China hopes Myanmar brings all parties on board while maintaining peace and stability." General Than Shwe was accompanied by Thura U Shwe Mann, member of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and Chief of General Staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and Thiha Thura U Tin Aung Myint Oo, SPDC First Secretary, as civilians without the military titles. This is certainly symbolic and possibly will enable both countries to justify transformation to democracy as these leaders are expected to win the elections comfortably.

With the visit of Myanmar Chairman of the SPDC to China, relations between the two were in focus. China is going in for stability in the periphery and is thus not in tune with the international efforts for sanctions and has been supporting the regime in various ways in the past. This has led to some rethinking in Myanmar’s other neighbor India as well and the regime in the Nay Pyi Taw has been using this to advantage playing one Asian rival against the other. To what extent deomcratisation process underway will contribute to any change of approach remains to be seen but in the short term this is not likely to have a major impact.

            Beijing – Nay Pyi Taw relationship is also sustained on trade and energy linkages while there are some concerns about ethnic problems that are being brewed, whether these will lead to impacting the relationship per se remains to be seen.

OCT 2010