The contrast between the way the governments of China and Myanmar have handled the natural disasters that have struck their people this month could hardly be greater. While the generals of Myanmar’s secretive ruling junta seemed paralyzed by the catastrophic results when Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy Delta ten days ago, within hours of Monday’s devastating earthquake in a remote region of Sichuan province, the Chinese government had sent in thousands of troops to help with rescue operations.
Equally stark was the response to international offers of help. Beijing immediately welcomed aid from the world community, including the arrival of specialist search teams to seek victims trapped alive beneath collapsed buildings. The Myanmar regime, by contrast, has actively resisted rescue and aid efforts from abroad, severely limiting the issuance of visas to disaster relief experts from the United Nations, the EU and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Yesterday there were reports that soldiers were now operating checkpoints on roads leading to the stricken delta region and turning back international relief personnel who had been allowed into the country. While China’s response has been swift and humane, the Myanmar government — which boasted of its isolationist policies that it alone could take care of its citizens — has demonstrated a callousness and ineptitude that is barely credible. Diplomatic sources suggest even the severely restricted international help that has been allowed into Myanmar only arrived thanks to pressure on the junta from Beijing. There is a deep irony here. China for its own good reasons has chosen to support in Myanmar and North Korea, two of the world’s last brutal dictatorships. Yet China’s emergence as an economic and political superpower is, whether Beijing likes it or not, edging it toward a different diplomatic reality. Just as 20 years ago, the world rightly condemned Washington for supporting unscrupulous and vicious Latin American dictatorships, so China’s leaders will come to ask themselves if the reputational damage of sustaining North Korea and Myanmar is outweighed by the advantages of having these two countries as dependent client states.
Meanwhile, though there is much international admiration for the speed and effectiveness of China’s response to this latest earthquake disaster, it is already clear that many of the victims perished because they were in buildings that contravened construction regulations but had been approved by corrupt officials. Such disastrous payola is not unique to China. The 1999 Izmit earthquake revealed similar wrongdoing by contractors and venal Turkish regulators. The few criminal prosecutions that followed turned out to be mere tokens. It must be hoped — and indeed may be expected given their constant anti-corruption drive — that the Chinese authorities will come down very hard on those suspected of corruptly contravening building regulations. Many of the structures including large schools, were reportedly relatively new and their construction ought by law to have reflected the fact that China is highly prone to powerful earthquakes. None of Burma’s generals will be punished for their heartlessness. China’s jerry-builders and bent bureaucrats are unlikely to be so fortunate.
