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Inter-National Conspiracy? Speculating on the Myitsone Dam Controversy in China, Burma, Kachin, and a Displaced Village

January 2020

DOI:10.1080/14650045.2020.1808886

Authors:

The University of Tokyo

In 2011, Burma/Myanmar one-sidedly halted the billions-worth construction of Myitsone Dam, derailing China's then-largest-ever hydroelectric project abroad and creating a lasting controversy in China-Burma relations. This decision followed an unprecedented public outcry in Burma and a decade of inter-ethnic resistance against this mega-project. This article explores how, throughout the Myitsone Dam controversy, actors at different scales and in three national societies speculated about hidden hostile international plots behind the project or the resistance. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in 2010-2019, interviews, and media analysis, this article takes seriously many Chinese, Burmese, and Kachin voices-from ambassadors and journalists, to activists and village elders-who claim or dispute various hidden hostile international strategies. The Myitsone case shows how deeply international speculating shapes Burma, often in ways that erase ethnic-minority actors, popular movements, or dispossession. More broadly, it shows how nationalist thinking and competing nationalisms can shape ideas about a frontier of resource extraction. Finally, ethnographic research has often revealed how marginalised people's conspiratorial narratives can reflect realities, but this study suggests using ethnography to let people challenge dominant conspiracy theories about themselves. Researchers across ethnographic disciplines, International Relations, and critical geopolitics face the analytical and ethical challenge of both contextualising and evaluating any people's claim that someone plots against them.

Rose protest against the Myitsone dam

…

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Inter-National Conspiracy? Speculating on the Myitsone

Dam Controversy in China, Burma, Kachin, and a Displaced

Village

Laur Kiik

a,b

School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom of Great

Britain and Northern Ireland;

School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia

ABSTRACT

In 2011, Burma/Myanmar one-sidedly halted the billions-worth

construction of Myitsone Dam, derailing China’s then-largest-ever

hydroelectric project abroad and creating a lasting controversy in

China–Burma relations. This decision followed an unprecedented

public outcry in Burma and a decade of inter-ethnic resistance

against this mega-project. This article explores how, throughout

the Myitsone Dam controversy, actors at dierent scales and in

three national societies speculated about hidden hostile inter-

national plots behind the project or the resistance. Drawing on

more than two years of ethnographic eldwork in 2010–2019,

interviews, and media analysis, this article takes seriously many

Chinese, Burmese, and Kachin voices – from ambassadors and

journalists, to activists and village elders – who claim or dispute

various hidden hostile inter-national strategies. The Myitsone case

shows how deeply inter-national speculating shapes Burma, often

in ways that erase ethnic-minority actors, popular movements, or

dispossession. More broadly, it shows how nationalist thinking and

competing nationalisms can shape ideas about a frontier of

resource extraction. Finally, ethnographic research has often

revealed how marginalised people’s conspiratorial narratives can

reect realities, but this study suggests using ethnography to let

people challenge dominant conspiracy theories about themselves.

Researchers across ethnographic disciplines, International

Relations, and critical geopolitics face the analytical and ethical

challenge of both contextualising and evaluating any people’s

claim that someone plots against them.

Introduction

This article explores popular and elite speculations about a spectacularly

stalled resource-extraction project – the Chinese-led multi-billion-dollar

Myitsone hydropower project in the ethnic Kachin region of war-torn

Burma/Myanmar. When in 2011, September 30, Burma’s President Thein

Sein one-sidedly halted building the Myitsone mega-dam, he stunned both

Chinese, Burmese, and worldwide observers and unleashed a diplomatic

CONTACT Laur Kiik laurkiik@gmail.com School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of

Oxford, Oxford, OX2 6PE UK

GEOPOLITICS

2023, VOL. 28, NO. 1, 72–98

https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1808886

scandal with Beijing. Citing ‘the people’s will’, he responded to an unprece-

dented and snowballing public outcry in this long military-dominated coun-

try. This decision heralded Burma’s then globally-noted transition from

military dictatorship to the current military–civilian partial democracy. The

abrupt suspension of a controversial resource-extraction project seemed like

a triumph of environmentalism.

Yet, many in Burma, China, and elsewhere asked: Why really did Burma’s

president halt this mega-project? Why did the Burmese military rulers betray

their political and economic friendship with the powerful Beijing government?

The Burmese dam opponents asked other questions: Why is Beijing trying to

build a mega-dam on Burma’s lifeblood, the Irrawaddy River? Burma’s ethnic

Kachin nationalists asked, instead, why are the Burmese government and

Chinese companies trying to ﬂood our heartland? Such inter-national con-

troversy around Myitsone Dam has continued for years, especially because

Beijing occasionally requests restarting its construction as part of the Eurasian

infrastructure giga-project, Belt-and-Road.

This article does not answer the above questions – for some answers, see my

other article (Kiik 2020) – but rather seeks to understand why so many

competing questions and suspicions arose. How did speculations about big

geopolitics, strategies, and conspiracies diﬀer between Chinese, Burmese,

Kachin, and displaced village actors? How did competing nationalisms shape

these speculations? What are the purposes and eﬀects of such speculations at

an inter-nationally contested frontier of resource extraction?

When saying ‘inter-national,’ I include here not only the Chinese, Burmese,

and others, but also Kachins as an ethnic nation. This deﬁnition, discussed

more below, challenges normative state-centric deﬁnitions, which equate

international-ness with state-to-state or inter-governmental relations.

My approach to such an inter-national controversy builds on the research

ﬁelds of critical geopolitics, broader human geography, and International

Relations that have increasingly attended to non-state, non-elite, ‘local’, and

‘everyday’ actors and visions. The article contributes speciﬁcally to the study of

‘popular geopolitics’ – the commonplace, mainstream-cultural, and emotional

understandings, representations, and practices of worldwide politics and ter-

ritorial struggles (Dittmer and Dodds 2008; Jones 2012).

The Chinese, Burmese, Kachin, and other explanations, which this article

explores, largely claim, or insinuate, something like hidden hostile geostrategy

or inter-national conspiracy. Even though stories about conspiracies – some

others’ secret plans to harm us – abound across human societies across history

and are intrinsic to politics, social scientists rarely focus on ‘conspiracy

theories.’ Such aversion reﬂects how people usually use this word to mock

paranoid and groundless ideas. However, recent research in human geography

and related ﬁelds has explored conspiracy theories as a globally widespread

form of both popular and elite geopolitical analysis (Jones 2012; Sakwa 2012).

GEOPOLITICS 73

Such an approach resonates with social anthropology, which has a rich litera-

ture of valuing and examining rumour, speculation, and conspiracy theories.

Social anthropologists and other ethnographers have usually refrained from

judging whether a conspiracy theory is correct or false, but rather shown –

through social context – how popular conspiracy theories reveal and indirectly

criticise power, social estrangement, inequity, and injustice (Boyer 2006;

Johnson-Schlee 2019; Marcus 1999; Mathur 2015; Rakopoulos 2018;

Silverstein 2002; West and Sanders 2003).

This article contributes to these ethnographies of popular geopolitics and

conspiracy theories by showing not only how speculative stories about great

power politics may critique existing social structures and inter-national rela-

tions, but also how such speculations’ purpose and eﬀect can instead be to

erase local agency and resistance. Thus, the Myitsone case aﬃrms that ‘claims

about conspiracies should be seen as narratives that are intrinsically linked to

power relations and the production of foreign policy knowledge’ (Aistrope and

Bleiker 2018). The article ﬁnds that believing and talking geopolitical and

conspiracy theories can work both to criticise or help dispossession and

repression at a site of inter-national natural-resource grabbing, and both to

encourage or dismiss resistance.

Moreover, the article shows how ethnographic research can foreground

voices of marginalised people who challenge conspiracy theories and geopo-

litical narratives that have erased them. Foregrounding those voices shows

why analysis of the Myitsone controversy must begin from the local-village,

the ethnic Kachin, and the later lowland Burmese anti-dam resistance – and

must understand these resistance movements as relational, composed of

diverse actors, and resulting from real-life experiences. The Myitsone contro-

versy’s Chinese pro-dam discourses, too, need to be contextualised on their

own terms. Thus, in this article, I try to take various conﬂicting discourses

seriously and critically, regardless of their institutional status or my political

sympathy. I present, contextualise, and contrast diverse voices telling stories of

nation, geopolitics, and conspiracy. These stories tell about a leaked diplo-

matic cable, wildly diﬀerent environmental impact assessments, company staﬀ

behaviour in a foreign village, and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Below,

such a cross-scale focus helps us notice that popular geopolitical thinking and

formal international-relations discourse echo each other.

By setting diverse voices side-by-side, I ﬁnd that a mode of nationalist

analysis or speculation has prevailed across the most disparate actors and

scales – from project-displaced villagers and minority ethno-national activists,

to worldwide newspapers, corporate leaders, and powerful governments.

Nationalist thinking views nations – rather than individuals, governments,

the rich, the poor, religions, spirits, or others – as the key actors in worldwide

aﬀairs. Thus, such thinking tends to blur distinct actors within or beyond

nations. Moreover, nationalists deﬁne one’s homeland as the world’s centre,

74 L. KIIK

not as a mere edge or frontier for somewhere else. Below, many Chinese,

Burmese, and Kachin observers all tend to assume that other countries-and-

nations have coherence, directionality, and strategy, speciﬁcally against our

nation.

Finally, to this journal’s Special Issue on ‘Myanmar’s resource frontiers’

(Sarma, Faxon and Roberts, forthcoming), this article adds the country’s most

talked-about resource extraction mega-project. Indeed, the article is about

talking about that project, showing how a resource frontier becomes inter-

national spectacle, shaped by accusations and counter-accusations of hostile

plots. Literature on resource frontiers has focused largely on political-

economy and political-ecology approaches. This article complements such

approaches by taking seriously popular and elite narratives of geostrategy

and conspiracy, to show what worldviews and underlying forces they reveal,

especially revealing the cross-scalar force of nationalism. Doing so, the study

meshes with others in this Special Issue, for example, by foregrounding how a

resource frontier is remade at scales from world-region to village

(Barbesgaard, forthcoming), especially through inter-ethnic/inter-national

contention over homelands (Faxon, forthcoming; O’Morchoe, forthcoming;

Wouter, forthcoming).

This study draws on more than two years of ethnographic ﬁeldwork in

Burma between 2010 and 2019. Fieldwork took place mostly in northernmost

Burma’s Kachin State, including occasionally at the Myitsone Dam area itself,

and more brieﬂy in Burma’s central city Yangon. I used English, Kachin

Jingpho, and Chinese languages. Fieldwork involved conventional ethno-

graphic methods: participant-observation in relevant social circles; semi-

structured interviews; and media analysis. All interviewees have been anon-

ymised to protect people’s safety and privacy when discussing sensitive topics,

because the studied social circles are small, and people might otherwise be

recognised. The article’s Chinese discourses mostly come from studying

Chinese media and written materials.

The article proceeds by ﬁrst discussing Burma’s relationship to inter-

national speculations. Next, the article’s four core sections explore disparate

voices – ﬁrst, from China, then, from Burma, Kachin, and a displaced village –

which assert, or dispute, hidden hostile inter-national strategies around the

Dam. A sub-section criticises certain poorly evidenced stories about big

geopolitics. The article concludes by discussing how inter-national specula-

tions can either help or resist dispossession at frontiers of natural-resource

extraction.

Speculating on/in Burma and Kachin

Burma/Myanmar suits researching speculations on hidden geopolitics and

conspiracies. After the 1962 military coup, the study of Burmese politics

GEOPOLITICS 75

came to resemble Kremlinology, because researchers of this closed, author-

itarian, and war-torn country often needed to depend on hearsay, speculation,

and anecdote. Burma’s military-state authorities restricted journalism, out-

siders’ visits, social-science research, and information ﬂow, while focusing on

propaganda and psychological warfare against its enemies. Occasionally, junta

leaders based abrupt decisions on astrology. Studying Burma’s politics was

sometimes called ‘reading the tea leaves,’ referring to the Burmese culture of

teashops where men, mostly, gather to talk gossip, business, and politics.

Under the military’s tyrannical rule, everyday talk on politics involved

much fear, distrust, and rumour – not least about the country’s deep ethnic

and religious tensions and violence. Burma is an ethnically diverse country,

where the majority group’s ethnocratic military-state has, since independence

in 1948, clashed against more than a dozen other ethnic nations’ armed

movements. Accusations of a deadly foreign or native conspiracy have

emerged both from the military-state’s propaganda and from among political

dissidents or ethnic and religious minorities. These accusations have long

motivated targeted violence. Thus, Gravers (1999) writes about ‘nationalism

as political paranoia in Burma’ and Skidmore (2004) about people’s fears

under the junta’s ‘terror making.’ Recent worldwide discussions about online

disinformation, fake news, and hate speech often discuss how, in the 2010s’

newly Internet-accessing Burma, the social-media platform Facebook helped

spread rumours against minority Muslims and a ‘global Islamic conspiracy,’

fuelling popular support for Buddhist pogroms against Muslims and the 2017

large-scale ethnic cleansing against Rohingya people (Cheesman 2017; Fink

2018; Schissler 2016).

Rumours, speculations, and conspiracy theories about ethnicity and conﬂict

are particularly relevant for this article, because the Myitsone hydropower

mega-project lies amidst an active conﬂict region. The project’s location in

northernmost Burma is home largely to Kachin people – an ethnic nation of

below million people. Since the early 1960s, this region has been engulfed in

war between Burma’s military-state, dominated by ethnic-majority Bamars,

and the insurgent Kachin Independence Organisation’s roughly ten-thousand

strong army (KIO/A). The KIO has evolved into an ethno-national proto-state

that governs certain territories and populations, running education, health-

care, and other systems (Dean 2005). The Myitsone hydropower project began

in the mid-2000s, amid amid a tense ceaseﬁre, which was signed in 1994 and

broke down in 2011, when war resumed (Sadan 2016). Since 2011, more than

100,000 war-displaced people have lived for several years in makeshift camps.

Notably, unlike the majority ethnic Bamars, whose Buddhism has informed

Burmese state nationalism, Kachins are mainly Christians.

Such little-understood and supposed ‘frontier nations’ as Burma and

Kachins can easily become narrated – from the outside – through imaginaries

about greater-power machinations. In the 2000s, one outside narrative was

76 L. KIIK

that Burma is China’s vassal state. Beijing had supposedly even established

military bases in Burma – Selth (2007) shows how Indian analysts often

propagated this misinformation. After the 2011 Myitsone Dam suspension,

Burma’s democratising reforms, and the concurrent Washington’s pivot to

Asia, the narrative shifted towards Burma being amidst a US–China geopoli-

tical turf-war. Recently, Western discussions about Burma tend to get side-

tracked when people ask: ‘But let’s talk about the real elephant-in-the-room:

China!’ A few Western journalists told me that worldwide newspapers will buy

their stories about anything in northern Burma only if they package it into the

best-selling theme of ‘Rising China.’ As we will see below, Chinese discussions

about Burma tend to get similarly side-tracked – by raising the geopolitical

spectre of USA and Japan. All such stories tend to underestimate Burma’s own

domestic dynamics, not least the power of competing nationalisms across the

country.

Geopolitical discourses sometimes present Burma’s minority ethnic

nations, such as Kachins, and their nationalist movements as if chess pieces

amidst greater-power rivalries – thus feeding into long-held Bamar suspicions

against minorities. Bamar leaders and publics have long seen Kachins and

Burma’s other minorities as if naïve hill peoples, whom the British colonists or

Western Christian missionaries brainwashed and misled into opposing Bamar

rule (Sadan 2013). More recently, Bamar political analyses have dismissed the

Kachin Independence Organisation and northern Burma’s other armed rebel

movements as if the Chinese government’s tools for controlling Burma. In

China, this misrepresentation has long reversed: the KIO and Kachins are

sometimes viewed as too Christian, pro-West, potentially US-allied, and thus

untrustworthy (Sun 2012). Thus, such many-sided speculations erase the KIO,

the broader ethno-national social movements, Burma’s other armed organisa-

tions, and other broader ethno-national social movements – by neglecting not

only their legitimacy, vision, and capacity, but also internal diversity, social

dynamics, and complexity (Brenner 2015; Dean 2011; Hedström 2016). They

thus contribute to leading Bamar nationalists towards supporting the Burmese

military as if the defender of Buddhist Burma, including against the many

supposed puppets of China or the West.

Burma’s marginalised non-Bamar and ‘frontier’ publics, too, may tend to

view complex social worlds as secretive struggles between competing nations

over resources, territory, and survival – in that sense, as geopolitics or inter-

national conspiracy. My previous writing (Kiik 2016a) explores Kachin pop-

ular analyses, which speculate on how ‘the Bamars’ – or, the Bamar military-

state leaders – are planning to destroy the Kachin nation through hidden

strategies. Such broad suspicion stems from long-term realities, observation,

and experiences. Yet, it also harms everyday inter-ethnic Kachin–Bamar rela-

tions and civilian cooperation, including when opposing such projects as the

Myitsone Dam.

GEOPOLITICS 77

Considering Burma’s ongoing violence, I try below to not only describe and

contextualise, but also carefully assess any claims of inter-national conspiracy

or hidden strategy, to avoid furthering misinformation or hate. The article

contributes to the study of conspiracy theories and geopolitical speculations in

and on Burma by showing how the analytical, political, and ethical challenges

connect. The Myitsone Dam controversy, which has inspired countless com-

peting explanations – some more, some less plausible, all with disparate

political eﬀects at disparate scales – is an excellent example.

The Myitsone Dam Controversy

Prepared by Burmese and Chinese companies and governments since the early

2000s and launched in the mid-2000s, the Upstream Irrawaddy hydropower

mega-project envisions constructing seven large dams on two rivers in north-

ernmost Burma’s sub-tropical Himalayan foothills. These dams would culmi-

nate with the largest one near the rivers’ conﬂuence – known as Myitsone –

which marks the beginning of Burma’s great river, the Irrawaddy

(Ayeyarwady). This project was China’s then-largest-ever hydropower project

abroad. Its seven dams could altogether generate around 18,000 mega-watts,

nearing the world’s largest dam, China’s Three Gorges Dam. 90% of electricity

generated was to supply southern China’s power grid, while the Burmese

government was to receive billions of dollars and some badly needed electri-

city. The main Myitsone Dam’s reservoir was to ﬂood over 700 square kilo-

metres, thus displacing more than 10,000 people.

Underground resistance against the Myitsone mega-dam began immedi-

ately after its ﬁrst scoping studies at local villages. Risking the military-state’s

repressions, some villagers wrote protest letters, collected signatures, and

urged authorities to stop the project. As the project moved forward during

the mid-2000s, resistance spread to broader ethnic Kachin society, and ﬁnally,

in 2010, to lowland Burmese cities and its ethnic-majority Bamar publics.

China’s ‘anti-ethno-political’ development approach failed to consider or

overcome how the Myitsone project clashes against both Kachin and

Burmese nationalisms (Kiik 2016b). Kachins sought to save and keep control

over their ethno-national heartland and villages around the famous Myitsone

conﬂuence; Bamars sought to save and keep control over the great Irrawaddy

River, on which lowland Burma’s civilisation has depended for centuries. Both

Kachin and lowland Burmese opponents saw the Dam as existentially threa-

tening the nation. In 2011, snowballing anti-dam resistance led Burma’s

President Thein Sein to one-sidedly suspend the dam’s construction, surpris-

ing both Chinese, Burmese, and worldwide observers and causing much

speculation, as explored below.

Many observers, scholars, and journalists have asked why this unexpected

inter-national scandal happened. The President may have considered several

78 L. KIIK

domestic and international factors together. My other article (Kiik 2020)

reviews both the diﬀerent explanations and the academic literature on

Myitsone Dam – and concludes that the President’s decision was made

possible ﬁrstly by the growing inter-ethnic resistance. Below, throughout this

article, I build on and refer to this diverse research literature on the Myitsone

anti-dam resistance and inter-national controversy (KDNG 2007; 2009;

Kempel 2012; Min Zin 2012; Sun 2012; Hkawn Ja Aung 2014; Kirchherr,

Disselhoﬀ, and Charles 2016; TNI 2016; Chan 2017; Foran et al. 2017; Jones

and Zou 2017; Su Mon Thazin Aung 2017; Tang-Lee 2017; Kirchherr 2018;

Hedström 2019; Teera-Hong 2019). This article contributes to this literature

by showing how the ongoing Myitsone controversy emerges partly from all

sides suspecting and speculating on hidden inter-national power dynamics

and plots.

Chinese (And Western) Speculation: China–US Rivalry

Until the 2011 Myitsone Dam suspension, Beijing oﬃcials assumed that the

Burmese regime would remain loyal to China (Sun 2012). Therefore, after the

unilateral suspension stunned Chinese companies and government, Chinese

media and policy circles saw a wave of post-mortem analysis and advocacy.

Various Chinese authors explored ‘Myitsone lessons’ for China’s Eurasian

infrastructure giga-project, the Belt and Road Initiative. One major theme

was conspiracy theories. Since the suspension, Chinese dam company leaders,

government oﬃcials, and pro-regime journalists and scholars have routinely

insinuated a Western or Japanese conspiracy, providing no evidence or spe-

ciﬁcs (see Kiik 2016b; TNI 2016). Reading such conspiratorial narratives,

I noticed that they usually refer to one speciﬁc sentence.

Namely, as the Myitsone suspension made worldwide headlines, a leading

Western newspaper published a short online article titled ‘WikiLeaks cables:

Americans funded groups that stalled Burma dam project’ (The Guardian 2011).

The article reports on a sentence in one of the few hundred thousand United

States’ diplomatic cables, which the WikiLeaks cyber-hackers had published

a year before. This cable, from early 2010, is the US Rangoon embassy head

reporting on ‘grassroots opposition to Chinese-backed dam in northern Burma.’

Towards the cable’s end, the diplomat expresses surprise and notes:

An unusual aspect of this case is the role grassroots organizations have played in

opposing the dam, which speaks to the growing strength of civil society groups in

Kachin State, including recipients of Embassy small grants.

The online newspaper article inspired other media publications, too, to

broadcast this quoted sentence and insinuate that US funding may help

explain the Myitsone Dam’s sudden suspension, popular anti-dam resis-

tance, and Burma’s ‘betrayal’ of China. The article was also immediately

GEOPOLITICS 79

quoted in the widely-read online encyclopaedia Wikipedia (2011), both in

the article on ‘Myitsone Dam’ and, notably, on ‘CIA activities in Myanmar.’

In the following years, journalists and international-relations scholars have

referenced this leaked cable sentence, sometimes as if evidence of broad ‘US

funding of anti-dam activities.’ The sentence has been cited, to discuss, with

varying degrees of evidence and accuracy, possible hidden Western involve-

ment or the Burmese government’s possible foreign policy calculations

(Dossi 2015; Han 2019; Lintner 2015; Sun 2012). Most such discussions

have neglected that the cable message refers only to Kachin civil society,

not to the lowland Burmese anti-dam campaign, and only to a small grant

programme, not large-scale or ‘broad’ funding. They have also neglected the

cable’s main message – which is that Kachin civil society was growing strong

and opposed a large dam project.

Instead, the cable came to strengthen speculations, whereby the US embassy

helped organise Kachin and Burmese widespread resistance against the mega-

project to hurt China and whereby the Burmese government suspended the

project to please the US government. Supposedly, Burma’s new post-junta

government was thus signalling that Burma is not China’s client state and

wants to improve relations with the West, ASEAN, and other countries.

Such stories of geopolitical turf-war can become self-fulﬁling prophesy: the

more that Western commentators publicised insinuations that the US drove

the Kachin and Burmese opposition against the Dam, the more did the

Chinese dam proponents ﬁnd conﬁrmation for their own conspiracy theories.

Sun (2012), too, observes that these WikiLeaks-based reports ‘reinforced

China’s perception that Western eﬀorts to sabotage Chinese projects and

alienate China–Myanmar relations are primarily motivated by the geopolitical

goal of curbing Chinese inﬂuence.’

The 2013 reportage on Myitsone Dam by a Communist Party-run energy

industry publication exempliﬁes how the Chinese dam proponents drew conﬁr-

mation from Western media. It quotes a Myitsone project’s top leader who says

that he read from Western media that the Burmese government shelved the dam

construction ‘to cater to the United States’ (S. Wang 2013). The Chinese-language

article dismisses Kachin and Burmese opposition. This is my direct translation:

It was not only the Kachin local armed forces, but the voice of NGOs opposing Myitsone

was also growing. [The Myitsone dam project’s] general manager Li Guanghua

recounted to the journalist that, as early as the initial construction phase of the project,

there had been NGO activities in the local area.

As for where these NGOs came from and who funded them, there was not much

information.

Only later, the British “Guardian” website revealed a cable, signed in early 2011 by [then

US embassy head], indicating that the American Embassy in Burma had through “small

80 L. KIIK

funds” supported civil-society organisations that opposed constructing the Myitsone

power station.

Since the suspension, Chinese pro-dam discourse has habitually claimed

Western conspiracy, most prominently in Chinese, Hong Kong, Burmese,

and other news media. Elsewhere, TNI (2016) and I (Kiik 2016b) review this

public discourse at greater length. For example, a Chinese regime tabloid

(Global Times 2016) cited the embassy cable to argue that ‘manipulation of

the Western media’ led people in Burma to think that Beijing is exploiting the

country’s resources. Another Chinese newspaper insinuated US sabotage by

complementing references to the cable with an accusation that some Burmese

anti-dam protesters who marched from Yangon to Myitsone were paid ‘5000

kyat per day’ and did not even know ‘what Myitsone is’ (Fan 2015).

China’s government oﬃcials and scholars, too, sometimes insinuate or

claim conspiracy. For example, as recently as in 2019, China’s ambassador

told Burmese media at his ﬁnal outgoing press conference that behind

Burmese opposition to Myitsone Dam are ‘some forces backed by foreign

countries’ that seek to damage China–Burma relations (Nan Lwin 2019). An

inﬂuential Chinese pro-regime international-aﬀairs professor (Y. Wang 2015)

writes in his book on the Belt and Road Initiative:

Many Western NGOs interfered with Chinese projects in developing countries, and the

most typical case is the Myitsone Dam. [. . .] [Western NGOs] have a knack for mobiliz-

ing people, and are good at organizing rallies and protests.

Assessing These Speculations

During ﬁeldwork, I asked several Kachin and Bamar persons who led resistance

to Myitsone Dam to comment on the claim that Western powers had paid and

instigated them. They expressed shock, anger, and amusement. For example,

one elderly Bamar conservationist shrugged the claim oﬀ as a strategic lie:

No! That’s China’s typical strategy – they make accusations. Ha-ha. I like USA, but I am

not a US agent. This is 100% wrong. Nobody told me to campaign against Myitsone

Dam. It was a people’s movement, led by a tiny group of us.

Importantly, the quoted US Embassy cable does not actually prove Western

proactivity in the Myitsone resistance. Burma’s diverse anti-junta activists

have for decades sought out available funding and technical support to pursue

their goals, including sometimes by applying for embassy or NGO grants (Kiik

2016b; Tang-Lee 2017). They do not consequently follow foreign marching

orders. Instead, throughout my ten years of engagement with Kachin society,

including ethnographic ﬁeldwork and everyday conversations with various

actors involved, I have observed how deeply Kachin activists are motivated by

GEOPOLITICS 81

their own ethnic nationalism. I will show so below, when discussing Kachin

and Burmese narratives on Myitsone Dam.

The supposed ‘US funding of anti-dam activities’ refers to only one

small grant for one project, which a Kachin activist group once applied

for. Using this case to generalise about anti-dam activities erases the

decade-long history of diverse local-village, Kachin, and later lowland

Burmese anti-dam resistance. It also belittles the many local-village,

Kachin, and Burmese persons who led or joined this decade-long anti-

dam resistance and followed their own histories, goals, and decisions, as

we will see below. Most people involved in this anti-dam activism got no

outside support or funding. Even the person who applied for the much-

cited small grant told me how their group nonetheless struggled ﬁnan-

cially. Moreover, as a Bamar leading activist emphasised, many people

risked their safety under Burma’s military-state repression: ‘The people

coming to our anti-dam events, the journalists reporting on Myitsone, the

celebrities signing our petition – everyone was taking a risk, but wanted to

participate.’ Most international civil society shied away from this popular

anti-dam outcry, due to the danger of Burmese regime repression (Kempel

2012, 16; Kirchherr 2018, 173). The Myitsone case does not exemplify the

US, Japanese, or other governments trying to contain Beijing, because it

lacks any evidence for those governments’ proactivity, rather revealing

their general disinterest.

Instead, to understand the Chinese conspiratorial narratives about the

Myitsone controversy, we need to consider contemporary China’s state-

nationalist and popular worldviews. Firstly, as the Soviet Union did,

Beijing’s oﬃcial rhetoric routinely insinuates that any anti-regime resis-

tance stems from evil foreign forces manipulating the supposedly naïve

masses. Most recently, Beijing issued such statements on the 2019–20

Hong Kong mass protests. Secondly, a key Chinese nationalist narrative

argues that, during the last few centuries, the West has humiliated China,

especially during the Opium Wars (Callahan 2009). In China’s public

discussions about the Myitsone suspension, the event sometimes became

‘yet another Western humiliation’ of China (Kiik 2016b). Thus, the

Myitsone conﬂict became about national self-determination not only for

many Kachin and Burmese people, but also for some Chinese nationalists.

Thirdly, another widespread assumption in contemporary Chinese dis-

course is that people worldwide would want to emulate the rapid economic

improvement that China has experienced since the 1980s. Analysing the

Myitsone controversy, Sun (2012) observes that the Chinese government

‘fails to understand or accept’ ‘non-mercantilist approaches toward economic

and social development’, especially in poor countries, and thus assumes that

any opposition to China in such poor countries as Burma must be ‘non-

indigenous, instigated by hostile Western forces.’

82 L. KIIK

Some Chinese analysts have called for abandoning such conspiratorial

explanations. Chinese journalists, advisors, and scholars have published cri-

tical reﬂections on why the Myitsone dam companies’ state-centric and brib-

ing approach failed (see TNI 2016; Kiik 2016b). For example, a Chinese

commerce-ministry expert, Jiang (2015, 14–16), denounces that, despite ‘the

tremendous economic, political and diplomatic costs of the suspension of the

Myitsone Dam project, no one in China was held responsible.’ Instead, she

notes, some Chinese analysts and the project’s leading hydropower company

have promoted ‘broad conspiracy theories,’ which ‘conceal the internal pro-

blems of how Chinese enterprises have operated.’

Indeed, talk of inter-national conspiracy serves important purposes. For the

Chinese companies, government, and dam proponents, it helps deﬂect ques-

tions about the hydroelectricity project’s ﬂaws, legitimacy, and politics. It helps

ignore the long-term Kachin and Burmese resistance and the project’s clash

against Kachin and Burmese nationalisms (Kiik 2016b). For Western and

other media companies, in contrast, such tales about US–China geopolitical

conspiracy and turf-war sell better than tales about Burma’s contexts and

actors. Consequently, worldwide media and academia tend to cover the

Myitsone Dam’s ‘China spectacle’ more than the Kachin, Burmese, or local

village anti-dam struggles, northern Burma’s war, war crimes, and humanitar-

ian crisis, or Burma’s other forcibly proceeding mega-dams, such as Hatgyi

and Mongton (Tasang).

Overstressing big geopolitics or natural-resource economics around the

Myitsone issue has contributed to misunderstanding the current Kachin war.

Since 2011, journalistic and scholarly accounts have mentioned the Myitsone

Dam, when blaming Chinese companies’ resource grabbing or China–US

rivalry for restarting the Kachin war. Such insinuations come amid wider

misrepresentations whereby this war is merely over jade and other natural

resources. For example, Christensen et al (2019) neglect most Burma and

Kachin studies research, but claim to explain the whole war through ﬂawed

data on jade and battles (see Tony Neil’s forthcoming publication). All such

misrepresentations neglect Burma’s history of decades-long ethno-political

wars, the Burmese military’s post-2008 countrywide counterinsurgency push,

and the countless involved people’s own visions and decisions (Brenner 2015;

Sadan 2016, 2013). They also reproduce state-centric prejudice against such

political actors as the Kachin Independence Organization (Dean 2005). Thus

too, such analyses of the Myitsone controversy, which highlight only the

Burmese president’s possible motives for suspending the dam’s construction,

assume sovereign countries and central governments as the default units of

politics and analysis, underestimating other actors’ capacity and impact.

However, overly geopolitical interpretation of the Myitsone issue misrepre-

sents not only the local-village, Kachin, and lowland Burmese popular anti-dam

resistance, but also the central Burmese government in Naypyitaw. Namely,

GEOPOLITICS 83

Burma’s president did not need to risk Beijing’s revenge by halting this mega-

project, in order to ‘cater to the US’ – not least because all Western countries had

by then already begun normalising relations with and easing sanctions on

Burma, in response to the government’s unprecedented democratising moves,

such as freeing many political prisoners and abolishing pre-publication censor-

ship (Chan 2017). Thus, Chan (2017) asks rhetorically: ‘why should Naypyitaw

risk paying a stupendous amount of compensation just to impress the West?’

Yeophantong (2016, 184) concludes similarly: ‘Although some observers have

interpreted Thein Sein’s move as indicating Myanmar’s desire to diversify away

from China, such accounts overlook the important role played by anti-dam

protestors and their sympathizers within the Myanmar government.’ Indeed,

geopolitical interpretation tends to assume that the Burmese regime is consistent

and well-planned. It sidesteps the fact that the Myitsone anti-dam movement

arose and grew independently from the regime and its plans – and, moreover,

impacted the president’s decision. For example, advisors persuaded the presi-

dent by forwarding him anti-dam messages (Kempel 2012; Yeophantong 2016;

Su Mon Thazin Aung 2017; Foran et al. 2017).

Moreover, overly geopolitical interpretation downplays the president’s

domestic motives, conﬁrmed by later research. For example, then-

government’s ministers and staﬀ have in later interviews indicated that the

government’s ‘reformist’ faction used the Myitsone public outcry to consoli-

date their power and legitimacy against a ‘hardliner’ faction that supported the

dam (Su Mon Thazin Aung 2017). Partly, the president likely sought to

prevent a popular anti-dam uprising from disrupting the whole military-

mandated reform process. This is also asserted by his then-spokesperson, Ye

Htut, in a memoir published several years later (2019). Having interviewed the

former president, Ye Htut claims:

[President Thein Sein] was concerned that further protests in other parts of the country

would lead to a political crisis and derail his reform process. His decision was not based

on geopolitics or a strategic decision to move away from China. [. . .] Although the

decision was for purely domestic reasons, the West said it was a strategic foreign policy

decision. The government did not attempt to clarify the situation. The Chinese began to

feel that they were the only loser in Myanmar’s democratization process.

Having contested the Western and Chinese speculations about the Burmese

government’s foreign-policy strategies, Ye Htut next premiers his own geopo-

litical speculation about China. His account illustrates my critical discussion,

above, of those Bamar nationalist representations, which portray ethnic-

minority rebel movements as if simply created, controlled, and used by Beijing:

It is not a coincidence that following the suspension of the Myitsone Dam project and

improvements in relations with the West, new ethnic armed groups appeared in Northern

Myanmar and more heavily armed conﬂicts in Kachin and Northern Shan State occurred.

84 L. KIIK

Nor does it seem to be a coincidence that none of the ethnic armed groups along the

Chinese border agreed to join the Nationwide Ceaseﬁre Agreement three years later.

This quote begins to show that the Chinese and Western speculations about

Myitsone Dam were not alone, but had important counterparts among

Burmese own speculations. I will now turn to those.

Burmese Speculation: China’s Neo-colonialism

The Myitsone project has two radically diﬀerent environmental impact assess-

ment reports – a Burmese researchers’ report calls for cancelling the Myitsone

mega-dam, but a Chinese-written report praises the project (see Foran et al.

2017, 626–629; Kiik 2020). Amid Burma’s countrywide outcry against

Myitsone Dam in 2011, the damning Burmese-written report was anon-

ymously leaked to anti-dam activists. Seen as scientiﬁcally authoritative, the

report helped the activists convince Burmese publics and some government

oﬃcials that the dam’s ecological impacts would threaten the country’s

survival.

A few years later, I visited a Burmese researcher who participated in this

environmental survey. I asked: ‘Why did the Burmese and Chinese reports

reach opposite conclusions, even though you did ﬁeld research together?’

A retired government employee, but with a then-opposition icon Aung San

Suu Kyi’s photo on his wall, the researcher told me:

Because our Burmese feeling and their Chinese feeling are diﬀerent. We want to protect

our environment. But for the Chinese, this is not their environment. For example, our

report mentions that we should study the dam’s downstream impact, too. But the

Chinese company rejected this: ‘Not to mention in the report!’ So, the Chinese report

Image 1. “Rose protest” against Myitsone Dam. (Photographer: Naw Awng).

GEOPOLITICS 85

has no scientiﬁc analysis. Their report’s environmental impact claims are only their

imagination.

When we did ﬁeld research together at Myitsone, I said to a Chinese professor: ‘Look,

this pagoda will be ﬂooded.’ He said: ‘Don’t worry! We will build a new one!’ So, I said:

‘You don’t know, this is our cultural heritage! You can’t feel like us.’ He didn’t answer.

We all saw the massive logging of Kachin forests. I asked the Chinese counterpart:

‘Forests are ﬂying to China – do you agree?’ He said nothing.

I am an old man – I participated in this environmental research not for myself. Not for

money. I did it for my country. Each person in our country has responsibility to save our

nature. Otherwise, nobody will survive.

Overall, lowland Burma’s 2009–2011 public movement against Myitsone Dam

spread so widely because Burmese activists, environmentalists, intellectuals,

journalists, artists, and others framed the dam as a national emergency. They

portrayed the Irrawaddy River – around which much of Burma’s history,

agriculture, and economy are built – as the country’s national lifeblood

under threat (Kempel 2012; Kiik 2016b; Kirchherr 2018; Kiik 2020). Various

campaigners told me about how a sense of patriotic duty fuelled this anti-dam

outcry.

The public outcry also channelled widespread anger against Chinese ‘colo-

nialism.’ Popular Burmese complaints against China and Chinese people are

many: dominating Burma’s economy; plundering Burma’s forests, jade, gas,

and other resources; immorally supporting the junta; migrating illegally into

Burma; traﬃcking Burmese women to Chinese men; and dumping low-quality

and counterfeit products into Burma. As the public outcry against Myitsone

Dam culminated towards September 2011, Burmese print media published

warnings about how China’s rising inﬂuence threatens Burma’s sovereignty.

In my interviews, Bamar anti-dam campaigners often decried that China

dominates and exploits Burma.

Some campaigners warned the Burmese public that the Myitsone project

helps China gradually ‘colonise’ Burma’s territory. For example, one concern

was whether Beijing could dominate Burma’s future by operating such a giant

dam that could control and interrupt the Irrawaddy River’s ﬂow downstream.

Some feared that the dam companies will settle thousands of Chinese workers

in the project area to build and later maintaining the dam. A Bamar scientist

detailed such fears:

Before, China was poor. But now, they come with bags of money and buy all our land.

Most people in their heart . . . they hate what the Chinese are doing. China’s Shwe oil-and

-gas pipeline divides Myanmar’s territory into two. People worry that the northern part,

including Mandalay, will be in China’s hand. If Myitsone Dam is constructed, many

workers from China will reside there. That may be China’s plan: Little-by-little, little-by-

little . . . and ﬁnally, they will take over Upper Myanmar.

Another senior environmentalist generalised:

86 L. KIIK

China has changed. Their GDP is close to America. Now they only care about getting

rich, not about people! Once they said ‘colonist, colonist!’ to the British. Now, they

became the new colonists.

However, exemplifying broader tendencies in nationalist thinking, when

Burmese or other observers speculate on Chinese geopolitical strategies, they

neglect diﬀerentiating between distinct Chinese actors. Namely, the dam

company, Beijing central government, Yunnan Province government, and

others are all diﬀerent actors with diﬀerent, sometimes competing interests

(Hameiri, Jones, and Zou 2019; Sun 2017). The Myitsone project’s leading

state-owned dam company deﬁed the Chinese fragmented party-state’s own

regulations, while seeking proﬁt, eventually damaging Beijing’s diplomacy in

Burma (Jones and Zou 2017). Thus, the company was not a straightforward

tool of Beijing’s geopolitics. Narratives that describe Myitsone Dam as China’s

‘colonization’ of Burma resonate with those Western, Indian, and other spec-

ulations, discussed above, which approach Burma as a mere greater-power

battleground.

The Myitsone mega-project resonated with Burmese nationalist fears of

besiegement – by former British colonists, by Chinese, Muslims, and other

‘outsiders.’ Using such fears, the Burmese military-government has long

justiﬁed itself and diverted public anger from itself. Throughout the

Myitsone project’s active years, the Chinese corporations did act violently,

recklessly, and undemocratically, but the Burmese military and Burmese

companies often did so even more directly – for example, by violently mal-

treating Myitsone residents. However, across the world, Chinese dam compa-

nies tend to get blamed for their domestic partners’ misconduct (Kirchherr,

Disselhoﬀ, and Charles 2016). Discussing Burma’s Myitsone anti-dam move-

ment, Lamb and Dao (2017 395, 409) ‘caution against reinforcing xenophobic

narratives about China’ and overlooking both ‘more foundational concerns

regarding participation, environmental governance, and hydropower devel-

opment.’ Indeed, Burmese public anger focusing against China unintention-

ally protects the repressive Burmese elites who partnered in and proﬁted from

the Myitsone mega-project, such as the top junta leaders or the junta-allied

Burmese narcotics cartel’s conglomerate, Asia World. Instead, as some

Burmese activists themselves worried, the anti-dam movement may have

risked prompting violence against Burma’s ethnic Chinese people (Min Zin

2012; Kiik 2020).

Despite some Burmese claims about Chinese takeover being perhaps overly

conspiratorial, they do reﬂect widespread concerns and experiences. For

example, both lowland Burmese and Kachin critics can point to the

Myitsone project as part of a much broader exploitative natural-resource

economy, dominated by Chinese companies. A Bamar businessman argued,

accordingly, ‘China is really stealing Burma’s resources, so it is not some crazy

GEOPOLITICS 87

conspiracy theory.’ Moreover, the dam project’s leaders themselves caused

Burmese public distrust by neither publishing the project contracts nor asses-

sing the dams’ downstream eﬀects. Yet, again, Chinese companies view such

business projects not as ‘colonising’ Burma, but rather as seeking proﬁt and

corporate growth.

Such tension between analysing the mega-project through either eco-

nomic motives or inter-national relations shaped the Myitsone controversy

throughout. This tension emerged ﬁrst in the mid-2000s, when the Chinese

companies arrived in Burma’s Kachin State and encountered ethnic Kachin

publics.

Kachin Speculation: Destroying Our Nation

Throughout ﬁeldwork, I found that nationalistic Kachin persons usually treat

resource-extraction projects, such as the Myitsone Dam, as inter-national – or,

geopolitical – aﬀairs between the equal nations of ‘the Kachins,’ ‘the Chinese,’

and ‘the Bamars.’ One reason why this inter-national analysis shaped the

Myitsone controversy was the dam construction’s location – the famous

Myitsone conﬂuence area, cherished as a Kachin national landmark and

cultural heartland, through which ancient ancestors once migrated in

Kachin oral histories. As Kachin anti-dam resistance spread during the

2000s, this inter-national analysis peaked in a widespread phrase, which

imagines the Kachin nation addressing the Chinese nation: ‘If we would

destroy your Great Wall, how would you feel?!’ I heard variations of this

statement in several interviews. The phrase was also published in a Kachin

NGO’s environmental magazine where people sent in articles, poems, and

caricatures, including against Myitsone Dam. Bamar activists used this phrase,

too – showing how both Kachin and Bamar actors saw the Myitsone issue as

partly about inter-national dignity. Later, in 2010–2011, Kachin activists

cultivated lowland Burmese people’s empathy by discussing the conﬂuence

as Kachin heritage and comparing it to Burmese national symbols – the

ancient Bagan temples and Yangon’s Shwedagon Pagoda (Kiik 2020). Many

Kachins saw outsiders reshaping the Myitsone area as an attack on Kachin

national dignity, causing much anger against China. For example, in July 2011,

amidst a heated anti-dam discussion at a Kachin youth training, one young

person complained to me: ‘In order for Shanghai to get electricity, our history

disappears.’

In Kachin popular analysis, then, Myitsone Dam symbolises how their

nation’s future is squeezed between more powerful Burmese and Chinese

forces. Since the dam project’s early stages in the mid-2000s, local village

residents, underground Kachin activists, church leaders, and exile media

gradually built popular resistance, seeking to defend the beloved conﬂuence

area from being ﬂooded and its people from being displaced (KDNG 2007;

88 L. KIIK

2009; Hkawn Ja Aung 2014; Teera-Hong 2019). Kachin dam opponents

interpreted the mega-project as a Kachin national emergency within

a broader complex of large-scale natural-resource grabbing across their home-

land (Kiik 2016a; Kiik 2020). They saw insult to Kachin national dignity,

especially because Kachin publics were generally not consulted, while thou-

sands of Kachin villagers were to be forcibly displaced and the beneﬁts would

mostly go to China and the reviled Burmese junta. In terms of existential

threat, if not deliberate conspiracy, people from among both Kachins and the

region’s various other ethnic groups feared most that an earthquake might

break the mega-dam and ﬂood the downstream Kachin State capital

Myitkyina, killing a few hundred thousand people.

Some saw Myitsone Dam as an example of how the Burmese military is

planning to conquer Kachin ethno-national resistance. In July 2011 – as

Kachin society reeled from renewed civil war and only a few months before

the Myitsone project was suspended – an inﬂuential church leader sum-

marised the two main reasons why such mega-projects as Myitsone Dam are

unacceptable. First, the projects were started without negotiating with local

people. Second, the Burmese regime uses these projects ‘to destroy’ non-

Bamar homelands. ‘If this dam breaks and ﬂoods, it is we who suﬀer.’

Consequently, when in 2011 the Burmese president suspended – rather than

fully stopped – the Dam’s construction, many Kachin actors remained scep-

tical. Paralleling the Chinese and other conspiratorial narratives about

Western meddling, these Kachins had their own distrustful analyses of the

president’s decision: Bamar generals were yet again deceiving and scheming

(Kiik 2020).

Various Kachin activists and allied foreign researchers have long argued

that the large-scale resource extraction activities across Burma’s highlands

belong amidst Burmese military-state strategies for expanding its controlled

territory and squeezing out the insurgent military-states (Bryant 1997; Woods

2011; discussed in Kiik 2016a). In the Myitsone case, for example, some

Kachin activists viewed the Dam’s massive reservoir as a Burmese military

plan to disrupt the Kachin Independence Organisation’s territorial control

(Kiik 2020). Woods (2018) mentions the Myitsone Dam as a prime example of

how the Burmese military-state gives vast land and resource concessions in

rebel-administrated territories to domestic and foreign investors, ‘in part

achieving counterinsurgency aims.’ An exile activist speculated:

The Burmese government has a plan: they make many dam projects in the Kachin area,

especially KIO area. In those dams’ name, they do military deployments. The KIO

cannot easily stop this, because the investment is from China – and the KIO’s head-

quarters rely on the Chinese border. This is a militarily, politically, economically

comprehensive strategy: they want to eliminate the Kachin army by using Kachin natural

resources.

GEOPOLITICS 89

Kachin dam opponents also scrutinised Beijing’s possible strategies. For

example, in 2013, a KIO-area educator told me that ‘a Chinese company

initiated this new war to remove the KIO – because they want free access for

building the Myitsone project and a commercial route to India.’ Also in 2013,

I met a senior Kachin political activist who helped lead the 2000s’ anti-dam

activities, while taking refuge in exile. With a soft voice, the activist voiced

resistance:

Initially, the Chinese company contacted only the military dictatorship. That is very

wrong, because the Kachin people were not notiﬁed – not until the Chinese already

arrived to work at Myitsone. But Kachins must preserve Myitsone for our future. We

oppose this Chinese company impacting and controlling our vital Myitsone area.

We have already experienced Chinese logging – they cut and transport everything to

China, including teak. China also controls the jade mining, while we become poorer and

poorer, and are left to using drugs. So many people have died from drugs. And now, the

Chinese would build and control seven dams.

They plan on controlling and occupying. Now, the Chinese government is interested in

precious minerals in northern Kachinland. Our duty is to protect – to prevent the

occupation of our land!

For such people, preventing Myitsone Dam means preventing the homeland

from becoming a resource-extraction frontier for other nations. Thus, this

activist continued laying out a national emergency: Many lowland Burmese

people are migrating to Kachin State – usually to seek livelihoods within its

natural-resource economy – turning Kachins into an ever-smaller minority in

their claimed homeland. Like the Burmese anti-dam activists above, Kachin

opponents worried that the Myitsone project would bring tens of thousands of

Chinese workers to settle for years to build and maintain the dams, thus

overwhelming and ‘morally corrupting’ local society, especially by seeking

women for sex.

Many Kachin people, however, did not view the Myitsone Dam project as

a speciﬁcally anti-Kachin scheme. Sometimes, people suggested to me that the

Dam is more a Chinese agenda, where Burmese leaders are merely pursuing

money. For example, one youth recalled sceptically:

Only after the radio – BBC, VOA, RFA – broadcasted about the Dam, did the pastors

start warning:

“This is a Burmese plan – they want to remove our Kachin people completely from

Kachin State! We Kachins are forced to relocate from the riverside. And the dam is on an

earthquake line, it could be damaged any time. People would die. If they build the dam,

Chinese will settle in our Kachin country, and our tradition and culture will disappear.”

But I don’t think they are planning to destroy our Kachin people. It’s just Chinese and

Burmese business. If they ﬁnish the dam, they can earn billions. And the Chinese know

how to build a strong dam, which won’t break easily. The activists are overthinking this.

90 L. KIIK

Despite some claims about anti-Kachin strategies being perhaps overly con-

spiratorial, they do stem from decades of experience and observation. Kachins

have experienced decades of the Burmese military’s brutal counterinsurgency

tactics and widespread military-state repression. Thus, my previous

publication (Kiik 2016a) discusses Kachin popular analyses whereby the

Burmese military is destroying the Kachin nation through various hidden

strategies, but also reﬂects on some logical and empirical weaknesses in

these popular analyses, such as overestimating the military-state’s coherence

and discounting the role of mere corruption. Many Kachins express despair

over their people’s poverty, narcotics addiction, war-driven displacement, land

and resource dispossession, and powerlessness. Kachin distrust towards

Burmese and Chinese projects emerges from such long-term experiences.

Moreover, the Myitsone project’s Chinese and Burmese leaders did indeed

sideline Kachins as a nation. In fact, the hydropower project’s public discourse

and pro-dam advocacy materials evaded all ethnic politics, never even men-

tioning the word ‘Kachin’ (Kiik 2016b). Thus, despite the Chinese companies

not having speciﬁcally anti-Kachin goals, their ‘anti-ethno-political silence’

did conﬁrm Kachin conspiratorial analysis whereby the Kachin nation was

being covertly erased.

Such erasure began originally at the dam construction area itself. I will now,

ﬁnally, turn to the heart of the Myitsone story.

Myitsone Speculation: They Do Not Count Us

One of the people who ﬁrst organised to resist damming at Myitsone – already

in 2003, amid ﬁrst preparatory studies for potential damming – was a church

elder from Tanghpre village next to the conﬂuence. Ten years later, I sit in his

living room. While his kids loudly and proudly prepare their English lessons,

he tells me how the villagers found out that the dam’s massive reservoir was to

ﬂood their homes, but no one had even consulted them, and how some

villagers thus began to resist (KDNG 2007; 2009; Hkawn Ja Aung 2014).

Violence and intimidation were used when resettling a few local villages into

two newly-built relocation villages. Tanghpre’s relocation village has no culti-

vable farmland, leaving people unable to grow their own food and relying on

the Chinese company’s rice donations. Drug abuse has spread and a powerful

company has grabbed local gold-panning sites. Thus, despite the project being

suspended, the church elder speaks of a broken community:

We, the villagers, feel we have become destroyed people. Even though the Myitsone

building is not going on, but for these villagers, it is hard in their heart, for their life, for

their religion. We have to spend maybe ﬁfteen years to re-establish the village as when we

were living in Tanghpre. People lost their livelihoods. If they do not give us rice, we can

do nothing. Here – is the new village. But this side – company covered; that side –

company covered; this mountain – government wildlife area. These villagers depend on

GEOPOLITICS 91

the river, stream, and mountain. Now, we can’t go anywhere: All stopped! How can these

people grow? This is the big, big problem they have given us.

He is both tragic and comic when talking about how the Chinese hydropower

company is, since the suspension, trying to befriend the villagers. Only after

their project became suspended did its leaders begin direct outreach to the

villagers. Yet, the church elder shows me his determination to resist, as he

pokes fun at the schmoozing of the Chinese company oﬃcials at the village:

Before the suspension, they never came to talk, even though they see us. That time, their

behaviour and mentality is: ‘We do not care about the villagers! We don’t need to talk

with you! We are boss. We have already talked with the government side. We have

power.’

But after Thein Sein announced suspension, next year, their behaviour changed. They

came to us and talked to us: ‘What do you need?’

And now in 2013, they changed even more. Now, what happens is – in the churches, we

make some concert, singing competition, and they come and see . . .

. . . He imitates the company representatives’ fake-sounding voices of enjoy-

ment: ‘Aa-aa-aah!’ And he keeps imitating their exaggeratedly friendly voices:

‘Oh, please, I request this song again, for me! 50,000 kyat [then ≈50 USD]!’

‘They come to church and listen to what we are doing, even though we do

not invite. They come and sit, and do . . . ’ – he claps his hands, as if excited,

and shouts ‘ha-ha-ha,’ twisting his mouth into a big smile. He shows me name-

cards – ‘Myitsone Management Department, Myitkyina Oﬃce,’ ‘Director,’

‘Deputy Director’ – and laughs: ‘And with these two, many people come.’

I giggle at his performance and ask: ‘Do you think they actually like the songs?’

He laughs again: ‘It is clear – if they love us truly, they will leave to China!

That’s just pretending.’

His determination to see the project leave is shared by many Kachin and

Burmese activists and numerous people, mentioned above, whom I met and

talked with. It was these people’s intentions, decisions, and world-making – in

a speciﬁc historical moment – which mobilised the anti-dam movement that

eventually grew remarkably widespread. This widespread resistance made the

president’s later decision to suspend Myitsone Dam’s construction even think-

able. Thus, any explanation of the Myitsone controversy must begin from

understanding this resistance, not from poorly evidenced stories of big

geopolitics.

When I tell the Tanghpre church leader about the idea that a Western-led

geopolitical conspiracy created the local anti-dam resistance, he quips: ‘Really,

they think that?! They should come talk to me!’ To explain why the Chinese

companies still claim that Americans organised the resistance, he turns to the

reason why he thinks his village and his nation were ignored in the ﬁrst place,

when the dam construction began:

92 L. KIIK

It’s because they don’t care about the Kachin, right? The Chinese do not ‘count’ the

Kachin in their mind. They do not ‘count’ us. I know that. That’s why they call us

shantou [in Mandarin, ‘mountain-top’ – an imperial era Han-Chinese name for Kachin

people]. For the Chinese, we are just some shantou.

As he curiously gauges my reaction to his analysis, I think about how aware

people can be about their own invisibility. In my experience, most patriots of

Kachinland think that their homeland is the centre of the world – as do we all

about our own homes. This man understands, though, that his village and his

beloved nation are easily relegated to the footnotes of grand stories, principally

those about China and America wrestling for power at some oﬀ-the-beaten-

path place. He knows that his people are seen as shantou – a mountaintop,

a frontier. (This story was ﬁrst told in Kiik 2017.)

Despite all the above Chinese, Burmese, and Kachin nationalist and con-

spiratorial analyses often lacking evidence or showing bias, they show people

pondering their own nation’s vulnerability in a nation-to-nation power hier-

archy. One Kachin young person summarised a common Kachin nationalist/

geopolitical view, discussed above, telling me that ‘Myitsone Dam is about

Kachins, Chinese, Bamars – three sides’, and adding:

Do you see the problem? Who controls this? China. China controls Burma. Burma

controls us, Kachins. We have no power. We plead to USA for help, but American people

don’t know what’s happening here.

Speculation, Nationalism, and Resource Frontiers

Believing and talking inter-national conspiracy theories can work both to

criticise or to help resource-grabbing and authoritarian rule, and both to

encourage or to dismiss resistance. A story about big inter-national machina-

tions can work to erase a place and people – by representing them as merely an

ethnic, resource, or geopolitical frontier. Lesser-known places and people are

especially easily turned into ‘frontier nations’ that attract outsiders’ geopoli-

tical gossip about being the puppets of this or that great power, because those

places’ voices struggle to reach far enough worldwide to contest the story.

Then again, such marginalised people have their own inter-national specula-

tions. Those make their homeland globally central – by claiming that this land

is special and thus at a vast power struggle’s heart.

Indeed, transnational resource extraction, such as Myitsone Dam, can

catapult oﬀ-the-beaten-path places and people’s livelihood struggles onto the

spectacular stage of speculations about great-power rivalries. As the Myitsone

church elder did above, people of such places then travel mentally across scales

to imagine the distant power-holders that try to shape their home’s future.

Nationalist thinking especially tends to suspect that outside forces are

plotting to overpower ‘specially our nation.’ As discussed above, nationalists

GEOPOLITICS 93

deﬁne one’s homeland as the world’s centre, not as a mere edge for somewhere

else, and view nations – not individuals, governments, the rich, the poor,

religions, spirits, or others – as the key actors in worldwide aﬀairs. As such,

nationalist analysis, which sees such controversies as Myitsone Dam through

an ‘inter-national’ lens, tends to lump together various distinct actors within

a nation. Such nationalist logic informed all the above Chinese, Kachin, and

Burmese analysis of geopolitics and conspiracy.

For both many Kachins and many lowland Burmese people, preventing

Myitsone Dam meant preventing the homeland from becoming a resource

frontier for other, more powerful nations. The fears of Burmese nationalists

towards China’s plans for dominating Burma resembled the Kachin national-

ists’ fears of Burmese military plans to crush the Kachin nation. Both Kachin

and Bamar opponents saw Myitsone Dam as merely one prominent example

within their homeland’s broader exploitative resource economy, dominated by

Chinese companies. While some Kachin and Burmese speculations about

colonisation and conspiracy around Myitsone Dam lacked evidence or showed

bias, they reﬂected broader realities and many people’s long-term experiences

and observations.

In contrast, those Chinese and Western speculations, whereby Western

governments secretly derailed the Myitsone project, oﬀered no evidence and

neglected the evidence of a decade-long history of local-village, Kachin, and

Burmese anti-dam resistance. Moreover, their insinuations veered into dis-

missing less powerful people’s capacity, intelligence, and political vision. The

Chinese companies, government, and dam proponents used claims of con-

spiracy to evade the project’s ﬂaws and to ignore the popular resistance.

However, as the Burmese and Kachin speculations did, these Chinese spec-

ulations resonated also with broader worldviews and nationalism. Chinese

nationalists often explain inter-national setbacks through the hidden machi-

nations of US, Japanese, and other powerful governments. Because Beijing had

assumed that the Burmese military-state is a reliable smaller ally, it considered

an outside-led conspiracy more likely. In the Myitsone Dam case, thus, the

Chinese, Kachin, and Burmese speculations all expressed similar fears of inter-

national conspiracy, despite these nations varying so much in size and

strength.

On one hand, then, this article contributed to the ethnographic literature in

social anthropology, human geography, and beyond, which shows how ‘sub-

altern’ conspiracy theories can sometimes express real structural inequity and

injustice. On the other hand, more uniquely, this article used ethnographic

methods to challenge an elite-driven and globally circulating conspiracy the-

ory about marginalised people – by highlighting those disregarded people’s

own voices.

The article also highlighted the challenges of writing ethnographically

about how people – whether the more powerful or the less powerful –

94 L. KIIK

speculate on secret hostile schemes. Such speculations have spread alongside

violence, misunderstanding, hate, and repression in Burma and beyond.

Ethnographic research, critical geopolitics, and mainstream international

relations all face the analytical, political, and ethical challenge of both con-

textualising and evaluating any people’s claim that someone plots against

them.

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful for the support, advice, and insight of friends and colleagues from

Myitsone, Myitkyina, Yangon, Tallinn, Oxford, and elsewhere, who made this article possible.

This article won the Burma Studies Foundation’s 2020 Sarah M. Bekker Burma Essay Prize.

ORCID

Laur Kiik http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2552-8971

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Oct 2021

Enze Han

This paper makes a novel contribution by examining the puzzle of one Southeast Asian nation, Myanmar, and its dramatic shift of ‘fortune’ in its international status and the domestic consequences of that shift during the decade of 2010–2020. It highlights how the country’s changing international relations affected its domestic political decision-making process. It puts forth the argument that the amount of international attention the country received since 2011 as the target of competitive courtship between China, United States, and the West in general, and the consequent feeling of being valued as a geostrategic asset, created strong conditions for overconfidence on part of Myanmar’s government and military. This favorable international environment also coincided with perceived progress in democratization domestically. Similar to its past patterns of behavior toward ethnic minorities, the Myanmar military and the government overestimated their likelihood of success in dealing with the Rohingya minority while underestimating the likelihood of punishment by the international community.

Confluences amid Conflict: How Resisting China's Myitsone Dam Project Linked Kachin and Bamar Nationalisms in War-Torn Burma

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2020

Laur Kiik

How do movements against resource extraction projects handle ethnic conflict? In 2011, Burma/Myanmar created a diplomatic scandal when it one-sidedly halted the construction of the Myitsone Dam, derailing China’s then largest-ever hydropower project abroad. Leading up to its suspension, this project faced resistance by Burma’s ethnic majority Bamars as well as by minority ethnic Kachins, even while Kachin–Bamar tensions were rising as a decades-long civil war resumed. Drawing from ethnographic interviews, discourse analysis, and more than two years of fieldwork between 2010 and 2019, this paper traces the multi-ethnic history of resistance to Myitsone Dam, as told through various activists’ own voices. More than from Burma’s democratic transition, environmentalism, or geopolitics, anti-dam resistance emerged from two separate civilian nationalist movements – Kachin and Bamar – that mirrored Burma’s Bamar nationalist domination and ethnic conflict. Yet, resistance partly emerged from difficult inter-ethnic encounters – or, “confluences amidst conflict.” Kachin fears of losing their homeland resembled Bamar fears of Chinese takeover. A rare story amid decades of war and resource grabbing, Myitsone is a struggle over homeland and nature that did not unite, but did link Burma’s clashing nations.

Myanmar in transition: China, conflict, and ceasefire economies in Kachin State

Research

Full-text available

Apr 2019

Jenny Hedström

In Myanmar, the notion that local conflicts can be halted by addressing economic rather than political grievances guides ceasefire agreements with non-state armed actors and informs regional efforts on economic development in troubled conflict areas. However, these economic development efforts are evolving alongside deeply held communal concerns about the intentions and effects of investments in areas previously controlled by ethnic minority armed actors. In this context, the Chinese government's flagship development project in Myanmar, the Myitsone Dam in Kachin State, became a rallying point for communal protest. This led the Myanmar government to halt work on the project in 2011. Currently, Myanmar is coming under immense pressure from the Chinese government to resume work on the Myitsone dam. At the same time, however, a strong social movement is actively opposing the dam project. This has resulted in increased military tension along the two countries' shared border. This illustrates that investments in economic infrastructure projects, while ostensibly aimed at increasing stability through economic concessions and regional development, may instead increase tension and insecurity.

After the Rice Frontier: Producing State and Ethnic Territory in Northwest Myanmar

Article

Feb 2021

Hilary Faxon

Scholarship on resource frontiers has often privileged moments of discovery and sites of spectacular infrastructure and extraction. Yet smallholders can alter socio-ecological landscapes in ways that structure spatial and political possibilities even after resource rushes wane. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research to illustrate how agrarian frontier histories shape contemporary ethnic and territorial boundary-making. In Kalay Valley, activists drew on the colonial principle of ethnic separation and aligned with a national turn towards territorialisation to successfully advocate for restoring the colonial boundary. But efforts at demarcation contrasted with historical practices of cultivating ambiguity on the rice frontier, spurring new forms of border work. I argue, first, that this case demonstrates a change in how land is governed in Myanmar – from a regime of cultivated ambiguity, towards one of negotiated delineation – and, second, that it underscores the need for greater attention to the ways in which agrarian frontier practices shape racialized territorialisation.

Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of BurmaHistories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma

Book

Sep 2013

Mandy Sadan

Since independence in 1948, Burma has suffered from many internal conflicts. One of the longest of these has been in the Kachin State, in the north of the country where Burma has borders with India to the west and China to the east. This book explores the origins of the armed movement that started in 1961 and considers why it has continued for so long. The book places the problems that have led to hostilities between the political heartland of Burma and one of its most important peripheries in a longer perspective than usual. It explains how the experience of globalisation and international geopolitics from the late eighteenth century onwards produced the local politics of exclusion and resistance. It also uses detailed ethnographic research to explore the social and cultural dynamics of Kachin ethno-nationalism, providing a rich analysis that goes beyond the purely political. This analysis also provides new insights on the work of Edmund Leach and recent representations of Zomia proposed by James C. Scott. The research draws upon an extensive range of sources, including archival materials in Jinghpaw and an extensive study of ritual and ritual language. Making a wide variety of cross-disciplinary observations, it explains in depth and breadth how a region such as the Kachin State came into being. When combined with detailed local insights into how these experiences contributed to the historical development of modern Kachin ethno-nationalism, the book encourages new ways of thinking about the Kachin region and its history of armed resistance.

Myanmar’s Political Transition and Lost Opportunities (2010–2016)

Book

Dec 2019

Ye Htut

Teak & Lead: Making Borders, Resources, and Territory in Colonial Burma

Article

Sep 2020

Frances O’Morchoe

Through a comparative historical analysis of two sites on Myanmar’s borders with China and Thailand, this article explores how natural resources affected border-making in Zomia. Firstly, the article argues that demand for natural resources drove lowland states’ territorialisation of the highlands in the late nineteenth century, including their desire to demarcate borders. Secondly, local actors chose different political strategies in response to lowland state penetration. Some chose to attempt to repel lowland states, others to avoid them. The type of natural resources available (‘lootable’ versus ‘unlootable’ resources) enhanced or diminished the effectiveness of the political tactics chosen by local actors. Thirdly, the article explores whether local politics or the ‘knowability’ of natural resources determined the differential success of border-making in the region. This attention to natural resources can deepen histories of ‘state-escaping’ highland peoples. This also has implications for the question of human agency and environmental determinism in Zomia, a question which is often implicit but unaddressed when scholars use the concept of the ‘friction of terrain’. In the context of accelerating climate change and the global spread of pathogens, understanding the potential for agency of non-human objects is more important than ever. Drawing on archival materials from the Myanmar National Archives, India Office Records, and the British Library, this study gives insights into both the politics of this region today, and how natural resources affected border-making at the margins of states.

Neoliberal Capitalism and Ethno-Territoriality in Highland Northeast India: Resource-Extraction, Capitalist Desires and Ethnic Closure

Article

Aug 2020

Jelle J.P. Wouters

In this article, I examine the relationship between state, ethnicity, territoriality and neoliberal capitalism in the tribal areas of highland Northeast India, where I focus in particular on the socioecological and socio-political corollaries of its rediscovery as a resource and capitalist frontier. In so doing, I apply (capitalist) ‘desire’ and (ethnic) ‘closure’ as key analytics to capture the contentiously unfolding history of the region’s present. This article shows how new resource and capital flows lead both to the production of capitalist ‘desires’ and socioecological destruction through the privatization, acquisition and depletion, mostly by ethnic tribal elites, of communal assets now embedded in newly capitalist relations, and to the intensification of a politics of exclusive ethnoterritorial belonging and rights. The latter comes in the form of volatile social processes of ethnic ‘closure’; an increasing preoccupation, that is, on part of tribal ethnic communities with the protecting, patrolling and legislating of ethno-territorial rights. The upshot of this is a dialectic between new neoliberal connectivities and ethnic ‘closure’, one that ensues in a frame of the specifics of governance and law in highland Northeast India.

Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State Building between China and Southeast AsiaBorderland State Building between China and Southeast Asia

Book

Oct 2019

Enze Han

Asymmetrical Neighbors explains the variations in state building across the borderland area between China, Myanmar, and Thailand. It presents a comparative historical account of the state and nation-building processes in the ethnically diverse and geographically rugged borderland area where China meets Southeast Asia. It argues the failure of the Myanmar state to consolidate its control over its borderland area is partly due to the political and military meddling by its two more powerful neighbors during the Cold War. Furthermore, both China and Thailand, being more economically advanced than Myanmar, have exerted heavy economic influence on the borderland area at the cost of Myanmar’s economic sovereignty. The book provides a historical account of the borderland that traces the pattern of relations between valley states and upland people before the mid-twentieth century. Then it discusses the implications of the Chinese nationalist KMT troops in Burma and Thailand and Burmese and Thai communist insurgencies since the mid-1960s on attempts by the three states to consolidate their respective borderland areas. The book also portrays the dynamics of the borderland economy and the dominance of both China and Thailand on Myanmar’s borderland territory in the post-Cold War period. It further discusses the comparative nation-building processes among the three states and the implications for the ethnic minority groups in the borderland area and their national identity contestations. Finally, the book provides an updated account of the current ethnic conflicts along Myanmar’s restive borderland and its ongoing peace negotiation process.

War and Peace in the Borderlands of Myanmar: The Kachin Ceasefire, 1994–2011

Article

Mar 2018

Strategic Violence During Democratization

Article

Mar 2019

Democratic transitions are often followed by conflict. This article explores one explanation: the military's strategic use of violence to retain control of economically valuable regions. The authors uncover this dynamic in Myanmar, a country transitioning from four decades of military rule. Fearing that the new civilian government will assert authority over jade mining, the military initiated violence in mining townships. Using geocoded data on conflict and jade mines, the authors find evidence for this strategic use of violence. As Myanmar started to transition in 2011, conflicts instigated by the military in jademining areas sharply rose. The article also addresses alternative explanations, including a shift in the military's strategy, colocation of mines and military headquarters, commodity prices, opposition to a controversial dam, and trends specific to Kachin State. With implications beyond Myanmar, the authors argue that outgoing generals can use instability to retain rents where plausible challengers to state authority provide a pretense for violence.

Inter-National Conspiracy? Speculating on the Myitsone Dam Controversy in China, Burma, Kachin, and a Displaced Village

Abstract and Figures

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