Southeast Asia (Page 157)

MANILA – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to China, the first in half a decade by a top US official, raised widespread hopes of a rapprochement between the world’s two leading and increasingly opposed powers.

Blinken’s visit was supported by many regional states, especially in Southeast Asia, which has become a theater of competition between the two superpowers in recent years, most heatedly in the contested South China Sea.

Yet just over a week later, the South China Sea remains a tinderbox amid a dearth of military-to-military diplomacy between the two superpowers, rising anti-China sentiments in certain parts of Asia and beyond, and growing US domestic skepticism about the desirability of a Sino-American détente.

Heading into an election year, US President Joe Biden is in no position to appear weak in his dealing with China, which is now firmly in the firing line on both sides, Democratic and Republican, of the US political divide.

Meanwhile, anti-Western hawks in China are demanding nothing less than a reversal of US sanctions, including those imposed on Defense Minister Li Shangfu, as well as withdrawal of the Pentagon’s assets from the Asian power’s peripheries to resume regular military communications.

There is no sign any of that is about to happen. Meanwhile, China was particularly irked by the visit of a US aircraft carrier to Vietnam’s Da Nang Bay, the first such docking since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sensing a long-term showdown between the two superpowers, China skeptics and nationalist elements in the Philippines are agitating for a harder policy line, including a proposal to take their South China Sea disputes with Beijing to the United Nations General Assembly.

Indonesia, the current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is leading the way in holding the first-ever joint ASEAN naval exercises in September, though Jakarta recently shifted the proposed area for the drills outside of waters claimed by Beijing under its nine-dash line.

Although reviving a semblance of diplomatic engagement, Blinken offered no concessions to China during his trip. If anything, top US officials have reiterated their commitment to continuously push back against Beijing’s wide-reaching maritime claims and rising naval assertiveness in the adjacent waters.

In response, ultranationalist elements in China have openly warned of military confrontation unless the US radically alters its ways in the region.

The Global Times, a state-backed nationalist mouthpiece, recently warned, “military tensions between China and the US have yet to see an immediate de-escalation after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China,” since “both countries’ warships and warplanes, including aircraft carriers, spotted operating in sensitive waters in the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea on China’s doorstep over the past few days.”

The USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier recently conducted drills with French, Japanese and Canadian warships in the Philippine Sea and East China Sea before crossing into the South China Sea for a port call in Vietnam, only the third since end of hostilities between the one-time adversaries.   

“If the US really wants to control risks of accidents or seek dialogue, it should stop saying one thing and doing another, and stop making military provocations around China,” Chinese experts told the Global Times, referring specifically to the USS Ronald Reagan’s week-long deployment to the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, pro-Beijing analysts such as Mark Valencia have warned of structural challenges for any sustainable Sino-American thaw, since “even if better military-to-military communications are reestablished, dangerous incidents will still occur…because they do not stem from misunderstandings and miscommunications but are rooted in deeper differences regarding the international order and strategic interests.”

To be sure, there is not much domestic support for a US-China détente in America. The Pew Research Center’s latest poll shows historic levels of mistrust toward China – as well as doubt in the Biden administration’s ability to deal effectively with the rising superpower. More than four out of give Americans expressed unfavorable views of China compared to just over 50% a decade earlier.

As many as two-thirds of Americans see Chinese military power as a “critical threat” in the coming decade, while a significant plurality expressed fears of a potential war over Taiwan. The poll shows public skepticism about Sino-American cooperation even supersedes early-Cold War era mistrust towards the Soviet Union.

Crucially, as many as  65% of Americans were either “not too confident” or “not at all confident” in the Biden administration’s ability to strike a favorable deal with China.

Heading into a tough and polarizing re-election campaign in the coming months, with the next presidential poll held in November 2024, Biden is in no political position to offer any meaningful concessions to China, even if he meets President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of summits in Asia (G20) and the US (APEC) later this year.

Rising anti-China sentiments are mirrored in America’s former colony, the Philippines. Latest surveys show that the Asian superpower is mistrusted by as many as seven out of 10 Filipinos. Sensing an opportunity for a more confrontational policy, nationalist elements in the Philippines are upping the ante in the South China Sea.

Former Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio, who played a key role in his country’s historic arbitration award victory against China in 2016 at an arbitral tribunal at The Hague, is pushing for new diplomatic measures to deter China in the contested sea.

In particular, he has called on the Philippine government to take the arbitral award under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which China has duly ignored, to the UN General Assembly.

“That will be put to a vote. I think we will win there [since] the majority of the members of the [General Assembly] are coastal states. They are afraid that their big neighbors might seize their exclusive economic zones,” the former magistrate said in a forum last month.

With the Ferdinand Marcos Jr administration largely dispensing with its predecessor’s pro-China policies and instead expanding defense ties with the West, a number of senators have publicly backed Carpio’s proposal.

Leading opposition Senator Risa Hontiveros recently filed a resolution that calls on the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) to seek the UN General Assembly’s support against China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea.

“It’s also based on my belief that the UN must be able to tell China to ‘stop what you’re doing and start behaving properly,’” Hontiveros said, emphasizing the need for soliciting “meaningful political weight” against Beijing in global platforms.

Crucially, even staunch allies of former president Rodrigo Duterte, who actively courted China and soft-pedaled the two sides’ maritime disputes, are also now taking a tougher stance.

Senator Francis Tolentino, Duterte’s former political adviser, has  called for the formation of a “new Quad” with allies the US, Japan and Australia to counter China, while also backing Caprio’s proposal for a more aggressive diplomatic offensive against China.

“I think Carpio is right to elevate this to the consciousness of the member states of the [UNGA] since China has been disregarding the arbitral ruling,” declared Tolentino, who specializes in international law.

“But we have all the documents, not just the arbitral ruling, but also [the reports on] the bullying and other violations that China has been committing in the West Philippine Sea,” he added.

Follow Richard Javad Heydarian on Twitter at @Richeydarian

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The ASEAN Summit in Indonesia in May 2023 saw, once again, the problem for Southeast Asian leaders seeking better outcomes to Myanmar’s political and humanitarian crises. 

Pleas for giving greater attention to the fading Five-Point Consensus from 2021 jostled with growing disdain for the self-destructive tendencies of Myanmar’s military leadership.

Part of the deal for respectability in ASEAN is to focus on practical and reasonable steps to achieve agreed outcomes. Myanmar now fails every time.

Such failure means Myanmar is a problem for China’s leaders too, who have been watching closely since the 2021 military coup. China’s foreign policy establishment and analysts think deeply about the opportunities and risks of future scenarios across Southeast Asia.

It should not be forgotten that former leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s deposed government in Myanmar was in key respects a useful partner for China’s regional ambitions. The coup was probably judged an unhelpful complication.

For Chinese strategists, a primary consideration is access to the Indian Ocean. That access made it possible for China to import around US$1.5 billion of natural gas in 2022 from the Rakhine State coast, across central Myanmar, up through Myanmar’s mountainous Shan State and to Yunnan province in China. 

In a future regional security crisis, where maritime access was in doubt, Myanmar might also allow valuable “back door” access for China to friendly ports on the Bay of Bengal.

With such scenarios in mind, the economic relativities of the Myanmar–China relationship are worth considering. According to 2021 World Bank data, Myanmar’s nominal GDP was $65 billion ($1200 per capita), while China’s was $17.73 trillion ($12,200 per capita). 

To put Myanmar’s poverty in perspective, if it were a Chinese province, its economy would be the third smallest. It would only best two of China’s remote landlocked regions, Tibet and Qinghai — which are both still at least five times richer per capita.

Yunnan — the Chinese province neighboring Myanmar, and with many geographical and cultural commonalities — has a GDP of around $430 billion a year. This is over six times larger than Myanmar’s, and around nine times more on a per capita basis.

With such incredible disparity in wealth, anti-Chinese politics in Myanmar, while usually only a fringe issue, can ignite quickly given local resentment against Myanmar’s commercially successful ethnic Chinese minority.

This old story, replayed around Southeast Asia over centuries, is a fact of life for Chinese diplomats seeking to build relationships that offer mutual benefit.

With China a significant supplier of weapons and training to Myanmar government forces, and also to some ethnic armies, it is entangled in the country’s politics in ways that are both profitable and problematic. Exactly how much of this involvement is centrally planned in Beijing is an open question. Yunnanese authorities have a habit of seeking local solutions through the often unruly borderlands.

Under President Xi Jinping, Chinese diplomacy has yet to get much momentum for its “peacemaking” activities in such a contested environment. More than two years after the coup, China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang recently met with Myanmar Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, becoming the highest-ranking Chinese official to meet with the coup leader.

With more high-level engagement likely soon, the question of how China can encourage positive outcomes for Myanmar requires a focus on its core interests. While Myanmar’s economic growth until the coup was advantageous, the fact that the coup leaders are almost friendless — and despised even in ASEAN — offers a different upside.

For now, China can harness the Myanmar military’s appetite for attack aircraft, heavy weapons and constant resupply of ammunition and technical equipment to bolster its role as the patron-in-chief.

Russia has traditionally taken a similar approach. For Beijing and Moscow, Myanmar is part of a convenient global constellation of countries pushed to the outer edge of the international system.

Whatever its short-term strategy, it would help China’s standing in ASEAN, and even in countries like Australia, if it showed a creative instinct to use its wealth and influence to broker better outcomes for the people of Myanmar.

The fear is that China will instead continue to manipulate Myanmar’s impoverished and downtrodden status while fuelling, through its lucrative weapons exports, some of the most atrocious violence seen in Southeast Asia for generations.

When the dust finally settles in Myanmar, its people will rightly ask who sustained the reviled military regime. Right now, the answer is that Beijing offered “friendship” to the coup-makers, an irony for a Communist Party so committed to regime and institutional stability.

Yet with the right attention to China’s role and self-interests, it is still possible to imagine shifting positions where Chinese institutions eventually work out how to negotiate a more peaceful settlement. 

At a time when China talks regularly about peace in European, Middle Eastern and African conflict zones, a positive contribution in Myanmar would be welcomed by all.

Nicholas Farrelly is Professor and Head of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. From 2015–18, he was the ANU Myanmar Research Centre’s inaugural Director. He has researched the country’s politics for over 20 years.

This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.

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There will likely be few public celebrations of World Drug Day today in northern Shan state, home to one of the world’s most rampant and lucrative narcotics production zones. But there may be some smug satisfaction expressed among the region’s assorted gangsters and others cashing in on the post-coup disorder in Myanmar.

This year’s theme for the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking is “People first: stop stigma and discrimination, strengthen prevention.”

Myanmar’s coup-installed military regime, the State Administration Council (SAC), and the Myanmar Police Force (MFP) revel in these opportunities to promote their domestic drug suppression efforts and exaggerate their commitment to international cooperation.

In a post-truth Myanmar, the promotion of fallacious seizure statistics has been the methodology for years to fool the world into believing central authorities are serious about drug eradication.

The Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control (CCDAC) of the Ministry of Home Affairs claims that since the February 2021 coup d’etat, seizures of narcotics including opium, heroin, stimulant tablets (ya ba), crystal methamphetamine, marijuana, kratom and kratom powder have all increased.

The regime claims it nabbed US$462 million worth of narcotics in 2021; $533 million in 2022; and $179.53 million up until end of May this year. These are exacting figures: in 2021, the security forces claimed to have seized 198,188,715.5 ya ba tablets, precise right down to the half of a pill.

But exactly what is the scale of drug production in Myanmar? The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that opium cultivation has increased 33% in its 2022 Opium Survey, with an alarming increase in potential yield of 88%, potentially producing 790 metric tonnes.

Whilst the obvious conclusion is post-coup uncertainty and insecurity driving expanded cultivation, these upward trends may have preceded the coup. UNODC regional director Jeremy Douglas claimed at the launch of the survey in January that “the Golden Triangle is back in the opium business.”

The borderlands of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand have never been out of the drug business. Crystal methamphetamine production has surged over the past decade to an estimated $50-60 billion.

From unreliable but indicative seizures data, East and Southeast Asia seizures in 2011 amounted to 20,000 kilograms, reached a record of 172,000 kgs in 2021 and fell to 151,000 in 2022. Yet the price for methamphetamines has reduced across the region despite the higher seizures.

The UNODC and many international states and actors are stuck on the manta that that is all mostly the fault of transnational criminal organizations partnering with armed groups opposed to central authority in Myanmar. This is accurate and has been for decades. But it omits key partners in the drug consortiums: the Myanmar military and police.

The 2023 UNODC survey did note that; “A small number of methamphetamine laboratories have been detected in drug-producing regions under the regime’s control. However, there is a sizable discrepancy between Myanmar’s seized methamphetamine laboratories and the total supply of methamphetamine, with the only laboratories seized by Myanmar authorities between 2022 and early 2023 being smaller tableting operations in South Shan, near the Thai border, which does not reflect the reality of the market.”

The drug trade in Myanmar thrives because of the complex network of security arrangements between the Myanmar military, its local militia allies, ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), the hosting of transnational criminal actors and an entrenched culture of corruption and entwined criminal industries.

The post-coup descent into internecine chaos and increased illegality is simply a contemporary chapter of decades-long dynamics that have made domestic production unproblematic. But exactly how much is being done to stem drug production and how much is the international community cooperating with this charade?

In Myanmar, access to drugs has surged since the coup, with police seemingly spending more time on extortion rackets than genuine drug suppression. Drugs are reportedly openly offered and consumed at karaoke joints (KTV) throughout major cities. The powerful drug ketamine is supposedly readily available, but to what extent is hard to measure.

The SAC Minister of Home Affairs who has the CCDAC in his portfolio, the army Lieutenant-General Soe Htut marked this year’s World Drug Day with a statement pledging to be more people-oriented.

“Reviewing the current drug problem, law enforcement and judiciary measures could not separately solve the problem. A balanced approach also requires a focus on public health care, improving living standards, promoting humanity, supporting development, and protecting basic human rights. Instead of punishing drug addicts as criminals, the government and civil society organizations have worked together to amend laws and regulations to promote drug addiction as a health issue rather than a crime.”

Yet that has been the main deficiency of Myanmar official approaches for many years, giving syndicates almost free rein to establish production zones while cracking down on small-scale producers and punishing drug users with long prison terms.

The 2018 National Drug Policy is actually an effective approach to the challenges of drug use, but has not been in line with repressive drug laws first drafted in the early 1990s under a previous military junta. Nevertheless, Soe Htut claimed the SAC is instructing regional and state authorities to “draft action plans consistent with their localities to implement drug control activities in a practical manner.”

Given the general breakdown in law and order across Myanmar, drug suppression will either be an extremely low priority or else officials will use it as an extra feature of control to combat armed and non-violent resistance.

World Drug Day also provides a platform for the military to signal its cooperation with the United Nations, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), regional law enforcement bodies such as the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Thai Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB).

Much of this cooperation hums along in a depoliticized environment of professional niceties, never mentioning that some of the worst offenders in protecting the drug trade that floods the region with crystal methamphetamine are Myanmar security officers who have a long and sordid lineage of double standards. Nevertheless, regional partnerships are a necessary fiction.

ASEAN’s Narcotics Cooperation Center’s (with the delightful acronym of ASEAN-NARCO) “Golden Triangle 1511 Operation” involves China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand and has been cooperating since 2019 on intelligence-sharing on drug precursor flows and drug shipments.

Yet taken over a longer time frame, it’s evident that Myanmar gains some measure of legitimacy for regional cooperation while not having to do much to crack down on production zones in Shan state. It’s one of the Myanmar regime’s diplomatic “bait and switch” tactics, in which it crows over joint drug suppression efforts while rebuffing ASEAN’s Five Point Consensus to address its political crisis.

The Australian Federal Police continues to liaise with the MPF on drug trade intelligence-sharing. In Senate Estimates hearings in November of 2022, AFP Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney told the committee:

“There has been engagement with Myanmar police, not in relation to training and capacity-building, but in relation to matters of interest to the AFP, particularly in relation to drug trafficking. In terms of context, 70% of the methamphetamine that ends up in the streets of Australia comes from Myanmar. So there has been some engagement. It’s been restricted. It’s been under the auspices of an agreement that we’ve entered into with DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) to ensure that whatever engagement is strictly restricted to those issues.”

In the decade spanning 2012 to 2022, Australia seized 9.9 million tons of crystal methamphetamine, most of it sourced from Myanmar’s Shan state. Taking stock of the production timelines and the surge in output over the past decade, it’s obvious that the Myanmar drug trade grew during the decade of conditional civilian government, when the world was supporting a so-called “democratic transition.”

Given the current post-coup disorder, what hope is there that regional cooperation will have any positive effect? And how much is international assistance, even intelligence-sharing, assisting the SAC with domestic control while it maintains complex relations with multiple armed and illicit actors involved in the narcotics trade?

As Christopher Hitchens once remarked of the American “war on drugs,” “this isn’t a war, it’s a misuse of the word, it’s an apparatus of control.” Any credible or humanistic drug reform from the SAC is highly unlikely, condemning another generation of Myanmar people to cheap and easily available drugs with few harm reduction programs and continued punitive sentencing approaches.

David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar

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