On the surface, Myanmar’s democratic transition is developing rapidly, but in terms of deep structure, there are two major problems that Myanmar cannot get around. One is the construction of national consensus and the other is the lack of civil society. The two major problems had cost Myanmar’s neighbor, India, a great deal of money. It is difficult to guarantee that these two problems will not be repeated in Myanmar.
In March of this year, I visited Yangon for the second time, about 11 months after my last visit. Both visits brought me into contact with fellow local journalists, democracy fighters, senators and officials, as well as some young people from non-governmental organizations. Though both were rushed trips, they were impressive enough to provoke thought and constitute conjecture.
The South-East Asian region has been subjected to the impact of powerful foreign civilizations in its vicinity since ancient times, and in recent times has been reduced to a place of contestation by a number of Western colonial Powers, with the building of nation-States in the region itself almost as a by-product of that contestation. Inevitably, complex structural problems arose after the independence of the region’s nation-states, leading to the diversification of the political ecology. In this region there are authoritarian and democratic, Lenin-Stalin socialist and constitutional monarchies. In Burma, there was a long period of military rule and civil war, a rarity after 1945.
The dense distribution of political ecology appears interesting to those who love to examine the recent modernization of late-developing countries. Myanmar, on the other hand, is the focus of attention because of the size of the country and its newly democratized transition.
At the same time, Myanmar’s neighbor, India, offers a successful experience of democratization in a latecomer country that can serve as a comparative reference. In my humble opinion, it would be strange not to think of India when looking at Myanmar’s democratization transition. Moreover, Myanmar’s modernization was originally closely related to that of India. When the last Burmese dynasty collapsed, it was the Indians who ran the affairs of Burma for the British. General Aung San, on the eve of his trip to London to negotiate independence, made a special stopover in Delhi to study the management experience. Aung San Suu Kyi’s childhood was also spent in India, and there is a logic of larger history behind this.
The changes that have taken place in Yangon between my two visits are welcome and surprising. The roads and infrastructure seem to be much better, the cabs are newer overall, and the occasional flash of steel-framed glass buildings out the window symbolizes how quickly the country is trying to keep up with the times. And, it seems that even the power outages are much less frequent.
The news is that Myanmar’s trade volume increased by more than a quarter in FY2013, and that China, the United States, Japan, India and South Korea are investing more and more actively in Myanmar. Just walk around the streets of Yangon and ask around, optimism and anticipation can be seen everywhere. Yet, as Myanmar approaches a new round of elections, I remain skeptical that the current growth rate is simply the result of a thin base that has been closed for too long. Will the energy of change last, and will the novelty recede? Strictly speaking Myanmar’s structural problems remain; the political, security, economic, and industrial structure, and the intellectual outlook of the people still doesn’t look promising. Assuming that the military’s influence does diminish, and assuming that Burma’s democratic transition is largely successful, I remain more cautious about its development over the next few years, if not a decade or so. This is because some of its problems are really comparable to those of India in the middle of the last century. And the situation, and especially the problems, presented by Indian democracy are likely to be repeated in Burma. For example, the pace of development is slow, communication between socio-political groups is ineffective, and the central issue among political parties is how to divide up public resources rather than promote competition in the private market economy. Parties or political bigwigs will see public resources as a wallet in order to gain votes and buy supporters with public resources. General public utilities will in turn lack resources to invest and develop slowly. These problems are more or less common in the democratization of late-developing countries and are particularly acute in India. How will Myanmar meet the new challenges? It remains to be seen.
National consensus still needs to be consolidated
The first major challenge for Myanmar remains the construction of a national consensus and the realization of political unity across the map. It is clear that it is 100 times more difficult to build a modern national consensus in Burma than in India. The regions of Burma have been under one national umbrella for not much less time than India, but the idea and movement for independent statehood was extremely hasty. the last king of Burma was just ousted by the British in 1885 and was brought under the Indian umbrella until the eve of the Second World War. All the modern nationalists of the latter countries were learned in Western-style academies. There would have been no Indian National Congress without British colonization. in 1885, the Indian National Congress had already been formed and the first generation of Burmese elites who unfolded the modern nation-state movement had only begun to read English.
In a pre-modern agrarian Buddhist state, the cultivation of a new consciousness, like a new species, requires scale and generational transmission. The short period of British colonization meant that the history of Burmese immersion in modern national concepts was too short. India, up to Nehru’s generation, was already fully British, with a vision synchronized with the world. Objectively speaking, General Aung San’s pre-political education and social experience are not comparable to that of either Gandhi or Nehru. Behind this is the lack of conceptual and business skills of the elite leading the independence movement in Burma. One can imagine how weak and ambiguous the concept of the modern nation-state was among the people at the time of the founding of the State of Myanmar.
Moreover, India had social movement gurus like Gandhi, who integrated traditional peasants, who had no modern conception of the nation-state, with the elite Congress class to nurture the concept of a modern Indian state. Such quantum figures and social movement processes could not be produced in Burma. For the vast majority of ordinary peasants living in the river valleys of Burma, the so-called independence was nothing more than the removal of outsiders. The joining of Nehru and Gandhi symbolized the combination of India’s modern-minded upper class elite and the wider pre-modern world to usher in the Indian state. Myanmar lacks this combination.
But that’s not the biggest problem in constructing a national consensus in Myanmar; the divisions between regional ethnic groups are clearly more problematic.
During the British rule, the British tended to use ethnic minorities such as the Karen to manage the majority ethnic group, the Burmese. During the Japanese occupation, the reverse was true: the southern Burmese were used more often. So the pattern of civil war in Burma today has its roots at least as far back as the British and Japanese occupations. All sides have grudges and suspicions against each other. The seeds of independence claims in some areas have been planted long ago, and not even unjustifiably so. General Aung San was originally the fragile consensus of all sides. After his assassination, the forces that were already only allies could no longer coalesce. Myanmar’s military junta came to power in the 1960s and, to this day, has not ended its civil war with the ethnic regions. The seeds of the extreme mismatch between the country’s centralized power system and its mapped borders were planted during the British occupation.
Those who initially staged the coup with Ne Win were the military men around Aung San who wanted to construct a modern nation-state, and it cannot be said that they were without sentiment. Some scholars have shown that in post-1945 history, military governments have been the most unstable compared to one-party dictatorships and one-man dictatorships. The fact that the military government in Burma has been able to sustain itself for a long time is a miracle in itself. But the result of the dictatorship of the military government in turn inevitably creates a divide between the intelligentsia and power, radicalizing or even cutting off the channels of inter-ethnic elite exchange. Thus, without authoritarianism, the national consensus is incapable of being reached, and with authoritarianism, the national consensus is even more sharply divided.
The next question then is when the war can no longer be sustained. When the minority regions give up their independence, what will the central government do to attract and promote the building of a national consensus to integrate the minority regions into a coherent political system? Last summer I met with a couple of northern minority MPs in Naypyidaw. What they all had in common was that they cried poverty and asked for financial support from the center.
Obviously, this is something that a post-democratic Burmese government will have to deal with. Conversely, democracy may be the best way to extinguish civil war. India is a good example. India’s ethnic, sectarian, and regional civilizational divisions are so many and so complex that they far exceed those of Burma. But it is a miracle that civil war has not broken out. From this perspective, although democracy in India does have the problem of consuming political resources and greatly reducing the efficiency of communication on public political issues, it avoids the much more costly civil war.
Happily, after the democratic transition, private intellectual elites were able to participate in the process of national consensus building, such as the establishment of the Peace Center, which allowed scholars to establish channels of communication between the central government and the elites of ethnic minority regions. Civil society exchanges have also been able to take place. As far as I know, there are non-governmental organizations like White Handkerchiefs in Yangon, where young people who have the resources and knowledge to take advantage of Yangon go to the northern mountainous regions to assist the ethnic minorities, and there are also private private news agencies like the MYITMAKHA MEDIA GROUP, which trains its own journalists and correspondents in the ethnic minority areas. Although their power is still small, they have an advantage in building mutual trust that the military government cannot match. Indeed, in China, the website Uyghur Online, established by Mr. Ilhamu of the Central University for Nationalities, shares both functions and values.
Democracy is here, but citizens are not.
The second problem in Myanmar is almost a common problem of nationalization in late-developing countries, both democracy came and citizens did not. Generic statistics put India’s rural population at 70% and Myanmar’s at 70%. Comparatively speaking, India had both a Green Revolution movement in the 1960s and has industrialized its agricultural production more than Myanmar, but there are many problems. Some scholars have examined that due to India’s rural tradition, the land in certain areas of India tends to be dispersed rather than centralized, and the advantages of industrialized production cannot be brought into play, such as fertilizer inputs to raise the cost, but it is not possible to circumvent the uncertainty of output brought about by the monsoon climate. As a result, a large number of farmers or agricultural workers have committed suicide, which is not even news in India.
The Burmese countryside, like the monsoon, has little difference in farming methods from a century ago. As a result, the Burmese farmer, who is more accustomed to wearing the traditional sarong and going to temples or churches to worship the gods, does not have the spirit of contract, the sense of rights and responsibilities of a modern business civilization. After democratization they will get votes, but they will not become citizens of Paris or London. Of course, I am not saying that the Burmese peasants do not have a sense of democratic consciousness and will not pursue the fight for their rights.
India’s post-democratization history is replete with lessons and examples of how to win over populations with a weak sense of modern citizenship (mainly peasants and urban slum-dwellers, i.e., informal sector practitioners). One of the lessons is that isolated individuals remain unable to stand up to the powerful. Incidents of police bullying of the general public occur from time to time, while the cost of defending the rights of the aggrieved is so high that just going through the litigation process can drag you to death. Thus, the people can only attach themselves to the group identity and form social pressure through the group. Most of the groups that are most likely to form collectively are traditional views of community, such as tribal, regional, religious, etc., but there are also relatively new concepts, such as class, triad, or community identity.
These phenomena can occur in Myanmar as well, especially when the population has one person, one vote, and the political game is decided by the ballot box through elections, an interesting situation arises – market-oriented politics. With a majority, if not an overwhelming majority, of voters who are not included in the process of modernization and industrialization, politicians’ campaign approaches are tilted towards welfare distribution, promising all sorts of subsidies, the right to education, the right to health, and so on. Aung San Suu Kyi, at the launch of her Su Foundation a few days ago, made it clear that the function of her foundation is to promote education and health for Burmese. This is right. There is no market for Margaret Thatcher-style political advocacy in Myanmar.
The vast majority of politicians or parties do not dare to cut their finances and can only add more to them one by one. Once elected, public welfare and public financial resources are quickly divided up, such as credit union farm loans, which of course will be prioritized by supporters of their own party. And those parties are often tied to political pressure groups. The question is where the money comes from.
It was this kind of fiscal addition that eventually bankrupted India and led to reforms in the early 1990s that led to a market economy. In this respect the crisis was not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that when the reformist Congress party failed, the leftist bigwigs, after some soul-searching, concluded that it was the tightening of finances and the fostering of self-interested businessmen that led to the downfall of the Congress party.
The pre-modern minded vote can’t afford to be offended, so even staunch reformers like Singh have to go out in traditional clothes. I went the year before and interviewed his chief think-tank during the ’92 reforms, Shankar Acharya. He wore traditional clothes in his office as well.
And last year in Naypyidaw, watching the Burmese parliamentarians meeting, except for the military representatives, they were all sarongs and waistcoats. I wonder what Ito Hirobumi would have felt if he had seen this scene during the Meiji Restoration period in Japan.
On the eve of Myanmar’s parliamentary passage of the Media Law, Aung San Suu Kyi mentioned in her public speech that journalists need training and that newsmakers need to learn how to be responsible while enjoying freedom of expression. After all, Myanmar’s current civic media people are still too young, with editors-in-chief under the age of 30 abounding. On the other hand, young people’s ideas are not necessarily worse than those of the old school. Young people are more open and receptive to modern ideas. When I look closely, the streets are almost entirely filled with young people wearing pants, long skirts and other modern clothing.
Ms. Aung San’s speech was not without merit. The journalism profession is one of the elements in the development of modern citizenship. The fact that citizens are underrepresented in absolute numbers and relative to the population as a whole is a huge challenge for post-democratization Myanmar. It is not too much of a stretch to see this problem as a legacy of the military government. Authoritarian societies do not have the breeding ground and space to produce citizens, which is why democracy has to be achieved without citizens, or else there is even less hope. Authoritarian societies only fool and create more submissive citizens. Absolute power not only leads to absolute corruption, it also leads to absolute ignorance and creates more ignorance. Because centralizers hate free will, the latter is not easy to manage.
In conclusion, Myanmar’s democratization certainly deserves recognition, but it still has a long way to go from a failed state to a successful one. Based on two major structural problems, I am afraid that it will be difficult to avoid a scenario in which Myanmar follows the same path as India. All that is feasible is to learn as many lessons as possible and to make the path shorter, rather than being like India, which started reforms only after its establishment in the late 1940s and the late 1980s.
P.S. View of urbanization in Yangon
Yangon’s urban ghettos will grow in size, much like Mumbai’s. Under the military government, Yangon was virtually uncontrollable. Under the military government, Yangon was virtually uncontrollable: in 1983 it was less than 134 square miles; in 2005 it was nearly 307 square miles. In fact, the rate of expansion was almost parallel to the gradual decentralization of the military government.
Frankly, the city is not very urbanized, and in 1991 only 37% of the housing stock in Yangon had access to electricity. As you can imagine, in areas where electricity is available, the wires must stretch like a spider’s web, a phenomenon that in other late-developing countries is usually found in slums.
Where there is no electricity, it is not possible to speak of a village or a city. The inability of utilities and piped electricity to reach the population makes their living conditions as bad as can be imagined.
Another interesting feature of Yangon is that there are two types of buildings in the city, those with elevators and those without. Under the government’s restriction, buildings without elevators can only be built up to 8 floors. As far as I can see, most of the buildings on the market have 5 or 6 floors. Without an elevator, it would be very costly for people living on the top floors to climb up and down. Therefore, in front of these buildings, you can often see long ropes hanging down from the windows of the upper floors, with clips tied to the ends of the ropes. I’m sure this is a great way for upstairs residents to communicate with downstairs vendors or community managers.
Of the country’s population of more than 58 million, Yangon has a concentration of nearly 6 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population. If you take away 70 percent of the rural population, there are not many people left in Mandalay, the second largest city, or in Naypyidaw, the capital. After democratization, the government’s coercive power will surely be weakened, and the tendency of the residents of other regions and the rural population to concentrate in Yangon will only increase. The official population growth rate in Yangon is now said to be 3%. The national average is 1.9%.
In general, rural-urban convergence is a common phenomenon in late-developing countries, and Myanmar is no exception. In the past, some ethnic minority populations in the northern mountainous areas, too divided and with too few resources, chose either to stay in the countryside and cultivate poppies or to go to the centers of civilization of their own ethnic groups. But after the peaceful transition, it is feared that the trend towards big cities like Yangon will be more pronounced.
The vast majority of new immigrants are unable to find work in Yangon’s modern industries because of their lack of modern knowledge and skills, and they are forced to do manual labor. Those who know how to use a calculator or a scale and can do the math will naturally work on street stalls. Such work does not involve much investment and does not pay much. Similar vendors can be found all over the streets of Yangon, and are most prevalent along Chinatown, where the inner side of the street is lined with stores and the outer side with rows of stalls, some facing the sidewalk and some facing the road. To walk from the street to the end, you have to squeeze through the crowd. Perhaps this has something to do with the Chinese tradition, in Southeast Asia, Chinese neighborhoods have been hubs of commerce and trade for centuries.
There are not many beggars on the streets, except for Aung San Market, which is a popular tourist attraction and shopping place for foreigners. I guess this has something to do with Myanmar’s Buddhist tradition. People who are unable to make a living can get some space in the temples, and they can also go out to beg for fasting food, the input and output is not much worse than being a beggar.
New immigrants always choose to live in concentrated areas. This is especially true in the periphery of cities, in the case of India, in the form of open spaces for development. Within a few years, such places naturally become slums. Slums are to some extent the equivalent of settlements in cities. I understand that this is an inevitable step in the modernization of late developing countries. The good thing is that slums will become a channel for dialogue between traditional rural areas and modern urban civilization, and screen out the best talents from rural areas. Although they are poor in knowledge and concepts, they are much more industrious and ambitious than the urbanites. It must be made clear that the consequences of urban-rural household segregation and urban governance are socially polarizing and pose risks that are feared to be increasingly higher than tolerance of slums.
The disadvantages of slums are obvious: they hide dirt, they cannot be integrated into the public management system, and their property rights are unclear. It is a headache for all administrators. In January this year, the Yangon government is said to have forcibly evicted an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 unlicensed occupants from three areas, namely Laidaya, Tin Yan and Tak Kung New Area.
Such a management approach was probably learned from China. But if the democratic transition succeeds, it will not work well. In India, Indira Gandhi’s youngest son, Feroz Gandhi, who was a powerful man at the time, did something like evicting people and forcing them to demolish buildings, but it was difficult to institutionalize.
From the outside, Yangon’s class division is not obvious. The middle-class neighborhoods in the city look similar to slums, with mottled walls, houses that are basically over 3 or 40 years old, and old electricity meters that are hard to see in second- and third-tier cities in China. In comparison, the middle-class neighborhoods probably have relatively secure electricity. The availability of running water is still a problem. To be mean, the difference between Yangon and the countryside is not much different from the difference between a town and a village.
The difference is not great, and the Burmese desire for the modern city has not yet become a trend. In a cab in Yangon, I watched a few clips of popular MTV, a local specialty, featuring a man and a woman singing a love song, not nearly as well filmed as the Cantonese-style MTV movies that were common in Chinese KTVs a decade or so ago. There are basically no cities on the screen, not to mention the fact that they don’t go to Greece or Paris for location shooting like the Indians do. Instead, it’s all about handsome guys driving cars, and at the lower end, it’s all about guys with guitars picking up girls at the entrance of villages and in the woods. Obviously, the director’s imagination is constrained by the real conditions. The good thing is that class differences are not seen, and the guests sitting in the car will not feel inferior for not being foreign and high class enough. I was under the impression that none of the actors seemed to be wearing traditional costumes, but modern pants and shirts.
The distribution of different classes is also shown in the transportation. Yangon has a ring of railroad around the city, which is about 46 kilometers long with 39 stations, and it takes more than 3 hours to travel around the city. It is said that there are 130,000 passengers a day, or 48 million a year. On both sides of the railroad, there is a combination of urban and rural areas. The railroad’s target group corresponds roughly to Yangon’s marginalized population.
In the city, the modes of transportation that operate are tricycles, cabs, buses, minibuses, and very much like minivans converted into transporters that look a bit like miniature versions of troop carriers, with a large canopy in the back that can squeeze a dozen or so people in two rows inside. I noticed a neatly dressed fat girl sitting in the back of the caravan on the street, talking on the phone at ease. It looked as if riding in this kind of vehicle was commonplace for ordinary city civilians.
Last summer, you could still see dilapidated second-hand cabs on the streets of Yangon, very much like those popular in war-torn countries like Lebanon and Iraq, and each one of them was at least 30 years old. This year, however, the majority of the cabs are new and white, with Japanese stickers and maps of Osaka and Yokoka on the car’s GPS. These cars were probably newly assisted by the Japanese.
Accordingly, the face of the city has changed. In the cab, I was stunned to see brand new steel-framed buildings with glass walls. Some of the old buildings on the streets have had their fronts repainted and look a little more vibrant. Probably the most valuable evidence of this is the electricity supply. In three or four days in Yangon, there was only one blackout, so it’s clear that progress is being made at a rapid pace.
These are certainly optimistic changes. Then there is the shock of meeting Aung San Suu Kyi, who is surprisingly capable of losing her temper in public. I originally thought that she actually did not have enough political experience, and I was afraid that she was only suitable for being an idol, not a politician. Now I see that she still has quite an aura, so perhaps she can really play the game.
One last observation about temples. I’ve been to quite a few religious occasions in the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia, but I’ve rarely encountered temple churches where people are still allowed to casually stay or pray at night. On that note, the Buddhist temples in Myanmar seem very open. There is a small temple next to the Daikin Temple, which also has a pond. I noticed people praying in the temple at night, while young people gathered around the pond to talk and eat snacks and play with their cell phones.
It is evident that this religion is so closely embedded in its daily life that I am afraid it is not even comparable to a mosque.
There’s one thing I haven’t figured out when it comes to the Daikin Monastery. Yangon became the capital in the 1880s, but the Daikin Monastery is much older. The level of sophistication of this temple really startled me. It’s rare in East Asia and comparable in the Middle East. Generally speaking, this kind of temple is a landmark of the city, and its size probably symbolizes the status of the city. With this in mind, Yangon should have had its share of glory in Myanmar’s pre-modern history.
This article appeared in the Eastern Historical Review
コメント