Myanmar

After a decade, in the 2000s, in which China aggressively pursued warmer relations with many Southeast Asian nations, using a combination of diplomacy, aid, and soft power to woo its neighbors, the past five years have seen a significant chill in China-Southeast Asia relations. First, Beijing’s more aggressive pursuit of its claims in the South China Sea led to heightened tensions between China and other claimants---most notably Vietnam and the Philippines, but also increasingly Indonesia, where the armed forces are trying to rapidly modernize Jakarta’s naval capacity in part out of fear of China’s actions in the South China Sea. However, even as China alienated countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, it had until recently maintained relatively warm relations with several of the other leading Southeast Asian states, including Thailand, Myanmar, and Malaysia. These countries were either not involved in the South China Sea dispute or, like Malaysia, they had less at stake in the dispute than the Philippines or Vietnam. Thailand and Malaysia also historically have maintained close links to China for decades. In Myanmar, China’s investment and aid had become so important that, even as Naypyidaw attempted to boost relations with leading democracies, Myanmar leaders rarely offered public criticism of Beijing. After the May 2014 coup, Thailand’s military leaders apparently came to see the kingdom’s relationship with Beijing as even more important than in the past. Unlike democracies that withheld aid or publicly criticized the Thai junta, Chinese officials offered rhetorical support for the junta government and continued several high-profile joint infrastructure projects. But even in these countries, leaders and officials have become more willing to openly criticize Chinese foreign policy, as shown by events in Malaysia and Myanmar over the past week. In Myanmar, where talks over a permanent peace deal between the government and numerous ethnic insurgencies only resulted in a deal involving about half the insurgent armies, government officials this week openly blamed Beijing for meddling in the peace process. According to Reuters, one of the Myanmar government’s top peace negotiators announced that Chinese officials had tried to persuade several of the most powerful insurgent armies, including the Kachin Independence Organization and United Wa State Army (UWSA), not to sign the peace deal. Why exactly Beijing would try to get the groups not to sign remains unclear, but Beijing’s relationships with the UWSA and other groups give China a degree of influence over its border region, and perhaps Chinese leaders fear that a peace deal might undermine that influence. (A permanent peace agreement might stabilize the border and reduce the possibility of refugees fleeing into China, to be sure.) Meanwhile, in Malaysia some senior government officials have lashed out at what they perceive as an inappropriate intervention into domestic politics by China’s ambassador to Kuala Lumpur. As weeks of protests and counterprotests in Kuala Lumpur have taken on a racial tinge, China’s ambassador, Huang Huiking, visited the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown and warned that China would oppose any efforts by protestors to target any racial or ethnic groups. ‘We will not sit by idly” if demonstrators target ethnic Chinese, the ambassador said in a statement.“We sincerely hope that Malaysia will maintain its social stability.” Although the ambassador’s sentiments were certainly understandable---protests at times had involved ugly anti-Chinese incidents---some nationalist Malay politicians reacted to Huang’s statement with anger. Malaysia’s deputy prime minister, a fierce nationalist, called on Huang to offer an official explanation, or apology, for his statement. The ambassador must “lay to rest claims that the Chinese envoy had intended to interfere in local affairs,” said deputy prime minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Will Chinese leaders now respond in ways that ameliorate concerns about Beijing’s forceful regional diplomacy? China can ill afford to alienate Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia, who have served as effective mediators in the past and often sided with China’s interests within ASEAN.

This past weekend, the Myanmar government announced that it will sign a permanent cease-fire deal with seven or eight of the ethnic armed insurgencies in the country. This will be a permanent peace deal, not a temporary cease-fire like some of those arranged between the insurgencies and the government in the past. As such, it could provide a measure of stability before the upcoming national elections, and it includes some of the longest-fighting insurgent groups, like the Karen National Union. (Some version of the Karen militia has been battling the central government almost since Myanmar gained independence more than six decades ago.) The deal will potentially end decades of war in some areas of the country, and allow for development and investment in those areas. The groups that signed onto the permanent peace deal were not a surprise---they had already signed earlier agreements with the government that were frameworks for permanent deals. Government ministers and peace negotiators are cautiously optimistic that the deal will allow for people in some ethnic minority dominated areas to vote more easily, making the November elections more representative of Myanmar’s entire population. However, the peace deal includes only about half of the ethnic insurgencies who were negotiating with the Thein Sein government, and about a third of the armed insurgencies overall. The government was negotiating with fifteen armed groups; as many as eight signed, and there are at least twenty-one armed groups in the country, if not more, according to Myanmar observers. Most notably, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), one of the largest and best-armed groups, did not sign the deal. In addition, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), probably the best-armed and largest of the insurgencies---a group allegedly linked to massive narcotics production and shipment---did not sign the agreement. The United Wa State Army has operated its territory, historically home to the Wa people, as essentially an independently functioning state for nearly two decades now. With the UWSA’s arms and money, it will be very challenging for any government to get them to give up control of their territory. Although the UWSA and many of the groups that did not sign the deal have not had any recent major clashes with the Myanmar army, a future war is not out of the question, and the KIA has had numerous recent battles with the military. The government, and the peace negotiators, may be hoping that, once the other armed groups see the stability and development that comes to areas like the Karen homeland, the rejectionists may be tempted to sign on as well. This may happen, although it would be too late to help the ruling party. As the Myanmar Times notes, “The presence in Naypyidaw on October 15 of only seven or eight ethnic groups [to sign the deal], with a small minority of combatants between them, is unlikely to give the president and the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party the boost to their credibility they sought before the November 8 vote.” In addition, despite the government’s denials that the army intends to target rejectionists, it remains possible that, after the election, the Myanmar military will attack some of the holdout groups, seeking to apply more pressure on them---and potentially precipitating wider conflict. And any conflict that drew in the United Wa State Army, whose leaders reportedly have grown worried about their control of the Wa regions following brutal fighting between the military and Kachin and Kokang rebels, would be disastrous for Myanmar’s nascent political reforms.

Last week, Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) party leader Thura Shwe Mann, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, was abruptly removed as party chief, only months before Myanmar’s much-awaited national elections. The USDP is the party of President Thein Sein and is currently in control of government, although it is expected to suffer massive losses in the November election, provided the polls are held freely and fairly. According to multiple reports, late in the night last Wednesday, security forces suddenly surrounded USDP headquarters, stopped some party members from leaving for a time, and may have detained Shwe Mann, at least for several days. (Later in the week, Radio Free Asia reported that Shwe Mann’s son said that his father was not under house arrest.) The party released a statement saying that Shwe Mann was no longer the acting party leader, because he was “too busy” to perform his duties. Myanmar President Thein Sein and former USDP vice chairman Htay Oo will now be leading the USDP into campaign season. On Monday, some reports suggested that Thura Shwe Mann would this week be removed from the party’s seats in Parliament completely. The fact that Shwe Mann was ousted as party leader is not, in itself, necessarily an ominous sign for Myanmar’s political future. In parliamentary democracies, ambitious members of any party are often scheming to remove party leaders and replace them with allies or themselves. Before the last Australian national election, members of the Labor Party unceremoniously dumped Julia Gilliard as party leader and prime minister, replacing her with Kevin Rudd, who ultimately led Labor to defeat in the election. However, after significant intraparty scheming, the final decision on Gilliard ultimately came in a vote within the caucus for leadership, which she lost to Rudd. A vote---not a midnight scheme involving armed men. What’s more, penultimate leaders of political parties, like presidents, are often trying to silence unruly party members in all sorts of unique---but democratic---ways. The New York Times last week speculated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose up-and-coming Likud politician Danny Danon to be Israel’s new ambassador to the United Nations in part to temporarily remove Danon from domestic politics. The rising Danon had been an irritant and a potential rival to Netanyahu within the Likud. It is how the USDP moved out Shwe Mann that is the problem, and that bodes poorly for Myanmar’s transition to democracy. The rank and file of the USDP was not apparently involved in the ouster; even some USDP members of parliament seemed to be caught by surprise, although they must have sense that Shwe Mann’s increasingly warm relationship with Aung San Suu Kyi was not viewed so positively by Thein Sein and his allies. It appears that President Thein Sein and several of his allies in the party’s governing council engineered the ouster with little input from most USDP members. (It is now an open question whether President Thein Sein, who previously said he would not be serving more terms, is open to serving another term as president, potentially as a compromise choice selected by Parliament, since Aung San Suu Kyi cannot be president.) The use of security forces surrounding Shwe Mann also brought back ominous memories of Myanmar’s past, and put another hole in Thein Sein’s image as a reformist leader seeking to oversee a break from the past fifty years of authoritarian rule. And the secrecy and lack of initial clear information about what had happened to Shwe Mann also harkened back to the information void of Myanmar’s authoritarian era; after the purge of Shwe Mann, several Myanmar news outlets known for their favorable coverage of Shwe Mann were suspended by the government. It is unrealistic to expect that Myanmar, after five decades of military rule, would quickly shed authoritarian political habits. But how each party’s candidates for Parliament and leaders are chosen will play a major role in determining public enthusiasm for the election, and possibly in determining voter turnout as well. Even the National League for Democracy (NLD) has faced criticism from some of it party members for the way in which it has picked its candidates for Parliament. The NLD’s executive committee chose the candidates, and many members of the younger “1988” generation of democracy activists were not selected; some younger NLD supporters argued that the executive committee should have canvassed a wider array of NLD members before deciding who to put up for parliamentary seats.

Ashlyn Anderson, Rachel Brown, Lincoln Davidson,  Lauren Dickey, Ariella Rotenberg, and Gabriel Walker look at the top stories in Asia today. 1. China’s central bank allows currency to devalue. The renminbi (RMB) declined by more than 4 percent this week as the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) set the currency’s daily benchmark lower for several days in a row. The drop may help strengthen the domestic economy, which has faltered in recent months; the PBOC’s willingness to allow the currency’s market rate to drop may suggest that the Chinese economy is doing even worse than some indicators suggest, which could spell trouble for countries that rely on China’s commodity imports. Declines in the currencies of neighboring economies and rising wages in China have damaged the competitiveness of the country’s labor-intensive manufacturing sector, a central pillar of the economy. While foreign critics have charged in the past that China manages its currency to strengthen its export industry, earlier this year the IMF dropped its claim that the PBOC deliberately undervalues the RMB. This week’s drop instead may be a sign that the Chinese government is willing to be true to their claims that they intend to give the market a deciding role in the currency’s value. However, it’s unclear whether the PBOC will stick with moving the currency in the direction of the market, or have a change of heart when the market value of the RMB inevitably moves back up again; regulators’ mixed response to last month’s stock market drop suggest the latter. 2. Worst flood in decades hits Myanmar. While Myanmar is used to flooding during monsoon season, recent floods were made worse by cyclone Komen, causing mudslides that wiped away homes and infrastructure. At least 103 people have been killed and more than one million critically affected by the flooding, making it the most devastating natural disaster since cyclone Nargis in 2008. President Thein Sein visited the areas hit hardest by flooding, declaring four areas as disaster zones amid rampant criticism from the media for his failure to mobilize sufficient relief efforts. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi took a different approach, using a wooden boat to travel the flood areas outside of Yangon as she handed out donations of rice and potable water. The Red Cross and United Nations have also scaled up their aid efforts to provide emergency food assistance. 3. Deadly explosion at a container port in Tianjin, China. Early Thursday morning in the port city of Tianjin, several explosions rocked the city killing at least fifty people and hospitalizing more than five hundred with dozens of firefighters still missing. Official reports say that the explosion occurred in a warehouse for toxic chemicals. According to one firefighter who was among the first responders to what was initially a small fire, they had not been told it was a chemical fire; it has now been uncovered that some of the stored chemicals produce flammable gas when wet. The quoted firefighter is currently hospitalized, and twelve of his colleagues were killed by the blasts that occurred after they had rushed to respond to the initial emergency call. Rescue operations have been temporarily suspended until chemical teams are able to understand the extent to which any remaining toxic chemicals may cause more damage as well as the potential impact of airborne toxins. The Chinese government seems to be closely controlling media coverage of the accident by deleting social media posts that criticize the government and showing Korean soap operas on the city’s main news channel. 4. Indonesia’s president reshuffles cabinet. Indonesian President Joko Widodo changed six positions in his cabinet on Wednesday in an effort to improve Indonesia’s economy by introducing new leadership. Widodo’s political party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, has been encouraging Widodo to reshuffle his cabinet and remove poorly performing ministers since May. Four ministers were removed from the cabinet entirely and two were placed in lower positions. The new appointees include Darmin Nasution, a former governor of Bank Indonesia who will serve as the economy minister, and Thomas Lembong, a former private-equity executive who will serve as the trade minister. Following his inauguration in October, President Widodo was hailed as a reformer who could address corruption and reinvigorate his nation’s economy, the largest in Southeast Asia. However, this year Indonesia’s GDP growth has fallen to a six-year low and the changes to the cabinet occurred on the same day that the Indonesian currency, the rupiah, fell to its lowest level against the dollar since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. 5. Japan ends de facto freeze on nuclear power. On Tuesday morning, less than a week after the seventieth anniversary of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a reactor at the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant became the first to restart operations after more than four years of inactivity following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Although Japanese public opinion on abandoning nuclear power completely has been mixed, and demonstrators gathered around the Sendai plant earlier this week, the pro-nuclear Abe administration supports restarting reactors that meet updated safety standards as part of a broader push to improve the country’s lagging economy. Since the temporary shutdown of nuclear power plants began in 2011, Japan has become the world’s largest importer of liquefied natural gas and the second-largest importer of coal behind China, and power generation costs have risen trillions of yen. Although reactivating Japan’s forty eight nuclear power plants would dramatically cut these costs, only five have been declared safe under new safety standards and some are too old to consider retrofitting. Bonus: China steals The Bean. China just unveiled a knock-off of the famous bean-like sculpture that reflects the Chicago skyline to the dismay of sculptor Anish Kapoor. Chinese officials dispute the copycat accusations, pointing to the main difference between Chicago’s “Cloud Gate” and China’s “Big Oil Bubble”: the Bean reflects the sky, while “Big Oil Bubble” reflects the ground. The Chinese sculpture also features LED lights underneath the structure. Kapoor intends to sue the responsible parties in China, although the Chinese artist is currently a secret.

Ashlyn Anderson, Lincoln Davidson, Lauren Dickey, William Piekos, and Ariella Rotenberg look at the top stories in Asia today. 1. Former Hu Jintao aide arrested on corruption charges. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo announced on Monday that Ling Jihua, a former high-ranking official in the Hu administration, had been expelled from the party and placed under arrest. He awaits trial on charges of giving and receiving bribes, illegally obtaining state secrets, and violating party discipline rules. State media also noted that Ling “traded power for sex” and “should bear major responsibility for his family members” using his position to personally profit—although that hasn’t spared his relatives from also coming under investigation. Ling has been the target of a corruption inquiry by the CCP’s graft watchdog since December 2014, but he first came under public scrutiny in 2012, after he tried to cover up the fact that his son had died while driving his Ferrari through the streets of Beijing with two scantily-clad women. The arrest is a “shot in the arm” to Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, which some say has slowed in recent months. 2. Myanmar sentences illegal loggers to life in prison. A court in Myitkyina, capital of Kachin state in northern Myanmar, has sentenced 153 Chinese nationals to life in prison for illegal logging. In response, the Chinese government lodged a diplomatic protest with Yangon, urging the government to “take China’s concerns seriously, take all the factors into account, and properly handle the case.” China’s demand for raw materials has fueled the illegal timber trade along Myanmar’s porous border and led to a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in the border region. In the past, Chinese found guilty of illegal logging were repatriated rather than imprisoned. The Chinese state-owned newspaper Global Times deemed the sentences too harsh and argued for bilateral consultations to find a “justified solution.” 3. Indian politician argues in favor of reparation payments from the UK. A YouTube video of a speech at the Oxford Union by Shashi Tharoor, an Indian diplomat and former Congress Party government minister, went viral this week, garnering over one million views. In the video, Tharoor argues, “India’s share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23 percent … by the time the British left it was down to below 4 percent.” He continues by asserting that this is due to the fact that Britain de-industrialized India to fuel its own industrial revolution. Some historical research supports Tharoor’s account of the economic toll of British colonial rule. The crux of his argument, however, is not how much money should be given in the form of reparations, but that there is a moral obligation for those reparations. Tharoor’s side won the debate with 185 votes to 56. The distribution of the video sparked an enthusiastic conversation on social media for several days, particularly in India. 4. Japan calls out China in annual defense report. The Japanese government’s defense white paper emphasized the growing security threat of China. The paper pointed to China’s land reclamation activities in the South China Sea and the development of gas platforms in the East China Sea, saying that the country “continues to act in an assertive manner, including coercive attempts to change the status quo, and is poised to fulfill its unilateral demands high-handedly without compromise.” The foreign ministry also released photos of the gas platforms. Although the structures are on China’s side of the line equidistant from the two countries, Japan is concerned that some of the platforms could be siphoning gas from Japan’s sea territory. Furthermore, Japan and China agreed in 2008 to jointly develop gas fields in the East China Sea, but China has gone forward with unilateral construction. China’s foreign ministry responded to the paper asserting its activities in the East China Sea are “justified, reasonable, and legitimate,” and that the paper deliberately plays up the threat from China. The report comes as the Japanese legislature considers a bill to expand the role of the country’s military. 5. Taiwan considers legalizing gay marriage. The Taipei city government announced Thursday that it has asked judicial authorities to review the constitutionality of Taiwan’s marriage law. Its civil code states that “an agreement to marry shall be made by the male and the female parties”; city officials argue this violates constitutional provisions on freedom and equality. Should Taiwan adopt a new interpretation of the law, it would be the first government in East Asia to recognize gay marriage. In recent years, public opinion on the island has tipped in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. An online poll last year found that 68 percent of citizens support legalizing same-sex marriage, and hundreds of LGBT supporters gathered in the streets of the southern city of Kaohsiung two weeks ago to celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court’s recognition of the right to marry for same-sex couples. The Taipei city government also recently announced that it would allow same-sex couples to participate in the city’s mass weddings starting in October. Bonus: Foreign salad Spartans arrested in Beijing. Nearly one-hundred foreign men dressed as Spartan warriors paraded across Beijing Wednesday promoting a salad delivery service. The startup Sweetie Salad hired the men as a publicity stunt, perhaps inspired by the success in China of other promotions featuring topless foreign men. A large crowd gathered when the semi-clothed men stopped in Beijing’s Sanlitun shopping district—which, coincidentally, made news recently after a video of a couple having sex in a changing room at a nearby Uniqlo went viral on the Chinese Internet. The Spartans were a bit too popular for their own good, however, and attracted the attention of the city’s police, resulting in the arrest of the models  and an apology by Sweetie Salad.

Last week, Myanmar announced that its much-anticipated elections, the first free national election in twenty-five years, would be held on November 8 of this year. With the election’s date finally set, after months of rumors, the country’s political parties---and there are more than eighty of them that may run in the election---can begin campaigning in earnest. What should we expect on November 8, and the days immediately after? For one, the actual Election Day will likely proceed relatively smoothly and fairly. During the last truly free national election, in 1990, the actual Election Day was orderly and the vote was free, even though after Election Day the junta never recognized the results. This time around, Myanmar’s election commission has already established itself as a relatively nonpartisan operation, overseeing by-elections three years ago that were considered free and fair, and resulted in an National League for Democracy (NLD) landslide. Myanmar politicians I have spoken with, from several political parties, do not expect the kind of massive fraud or overt army interference on Election Day that has characterized elections in many countries transitioning from authoritarian rule, like Nigeria or Thailand, among others. (The government is also likely to allow in many foreign election observers; government officials have already said they would permit observers from the European Union and the Carter Center, among others.) In addition, the NLD will dominate the election. International criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi for her silence on Rohingya issues, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP)’s money and support from senior army leaders, the achievements of the Thein Sein administration, the NLD’s lack of experience in governing---though USDP politicians have been touting all of these factors as reasons why the NLD could lose, Suu Kyi’s party is likely to win big. Myanmar’s first-past-the-post system helps the NLD; a proportional representation system would have aided the USDP. Third, Myanmar will enter a dangerous period after the elections, one similar in some ways to the period following Indonesia’s parliamentary elections in 1999, the first after the end of the Suharto era and the first truly free elections in Indonesia since the 1950s. Then, as in Myanmar today, legislative elections were held, but the president was not elected directly, as it is in Indonesia now; Indonesia’s legislators chose the president. This created a scenario in which Abdurrahman Wahid was able to put together a coalition of legislators and to become the president, leaving Megawati Sukarnoputri and her supporters largely feeling robbed, since their party had taken the most seats. Lacking a strong personal mandate proved one of many obstacles for Wahid, who was ousted from the presidency by a special legislative session only two years later, and then resigned from politics. Since it appears impossible that, before the election, Myanmar will change its statute that bars Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president, even if the NLD wins a large majority in parliament, it will need to find some compromise choice for president. The likeliest candidate, it still seems, is the speaker of the lower house, former general Thura Shwe Mann. Thura Shwe Mann presents himself as a reformer, but he remains distrusted by many NLD politicians; the house speaker also has earned the enmity of some in the armed forces for supporting legislation designed to reform the military. (The legislation failed.) If he becomes president, Thura Shwe Mann will have to perfect his abilities to triangulate between the armed forces, still the most powerful institution in Myanmar, and NLD members of parliament who know they, and not the president, were elected by the populace, and who want to use their mandate to drastically limit the power of the army. Alternatively, President Thein Sein, who recently dropped his public commitment to serving only one term, could be the compromise choice. Yet while Thein Sein enjoys more support in the armed forces, he apparently has a worse working relationship with Suu Kyi and many other NLD politicians than Thura Shwe Mann. Either way, the period after the election will be perilous.

Over the past month, Myanmar’s multiple domestic crises have spilled over into the region, highlighting setbacks in the country’s reform process just before highly anticipated national elections. The outflow of Rohingya, fleeing violence and discrimination in western Myanmar against their ethnic group and Muslims in general, has attracted the most global news coverage. Yet the flight of the Rohingya is but one issue undermining Myanmar’s stability. Fighting has flared again between the Myanmar army and ethnic Kokang rebels based near the Chinese border, a group known as the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army. Last month, shelling from the conflict hit areas inside southwestern China. Since February, at least 200 people have been killed, and more than 50,000 driven out of their homes, by fighting between the Kokang and the Myanmar army. Many of those fleeing their houses have crossed into China looking for shelter. Meanwhile, in early June, conflict erupted along the Myanmar-India border as well, between ethnic Naga rebels and the Myanmar and Indian militaries. On June 4, Naga rebels ambushed an Indian army patrol, killing at least eighteen Indian soldiers in the deadliest single attack in northeastern India in two decades. For more on Myanmar’s domestic challenges, and how they are spilling across borders, you can read my latest article for World Politics Review.

So far, despite global coverage of Southeast Asia’s desperate migrants, Myanmar leaders continue to try to cast doubt on the idea that there is a migration crisis at all, though Myanmar officials attended the regional conference on the migration crisis held in Thailand in late May. Still, Myanmar officials reportedly refused to attend the meeting unless it was pitched as a broad discussion about migration, rather than a meeting to address the crisis of fleeing Rohingya. At the meeting, Myanmar “categorically refused to discuss its role as a cause for the crisis,” notes Matthew Davies of Australian National University, an expert on human rights in Southeast Asia. Yet a lasting, regional solution that stops Rohingya from fleeing Myanmar en masse, and that forces Naypyidaw to stop discriminating against Rohingya, is not impossible, although many Southeast Asian leaders appear to think the crisis unsolvable. For more on my recommendations for addressing the migration crisis, you can read my latest article for The National.

Ashlyn Anderson, Lincoln Davidson, Lauren Dickey, Darcie Draudt, William Piekos, and Ariella Rotenberg look at the top stories in Asia today. 1. China’s ex-domestic security chief Zhou Yongkang to serve life sentence. The former Politburo Standing Committee member was convicted of abuse of power, accepting bribes, and revealing state secrets and sentenced to life in prison Thursday, just shy of a year after his arrest. While officials initially suggested Zhou’s trial would be open and transparent, it wasn’t, with Xinhua adopting the amusing terminology “non-public open trial” (in Chinese) to describe the proceedings. Zhou is the most senior Chinese official to be convicted of graft in PRC history, but this isn’t likely to be the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign (tigers beware!). Some have suggested that Zhou may have been escaped the death sentence because the leadership hopes to use him as leverage against other corrupt officials, further consolidating Xi’s hold on power. 2. MERS fatalities in South Korea reach eleven; President Park cancels U.S. visit. As of Friday, eleven South Koreans have died from Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and the total number of people infected has reached 126. The fatalities have occurred in people with pre-existing medical conditions, such as cancer. Hospitals and schools are closing in response to the outbreak, and public panic has led to a measurable drop in spending at department stores and attendance to large public events like baseball games, amusement parks, and movie theaters. South Korean President Park Geun-hye was scheduled for a working visit to Washington next week, but amid mounting domestic criticism of her government’s handling of the outbreak on Wednesday she canceled the trip. The Park administration has previously faced criticism of her handling of the Sewol ferry disaster in April 2014. 3. Aung San Suu Kyi begins five-day visit to China. Myanmar’s opposition leader met with Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping, in Beijing in the hopes of building better ties with Naypyitaw’s most important neighbor and biggest trading partner. Relations have been strained in recent months by violence on the Myanmar-China border; government forces have been fighting ethnic Kokang rebels near the border with China’s Yunnan province. Though Myanmar’s democratic reforms have been lauded by the West, since Suu Kyi’s release from prison and rise as a politician, she has been largely silent on human rights issues, in particular the Rohingya migrant crisis. Human rights advocates hope that Suu Kyi will lobby for the release of Liu Xiaobo, a fellow Nobel Peace laureate and Chinese democratic activist who remains in prison. 4. Recovery in Nepal suffers setbacks from fresh tremors and landslides. Aftershocks from Nepal’s devastating April quake continue to inhibit recovery efforts. Now that it is monsoon season, Nepali citizens also worry about impending landslides that could prove more intense this year due to the recent earthquakes. This week, at least fifty-five people were killed, with scores still missing, in a dozen landslides in six villages caused by torrential rains in an area east of Kathmandu. Search-and-rescue efforts headed by security personnel and soldiers have been hindered by thick fog and intense weather, and authorities fear the death toll could rise. 5. Four nude climbers detained in Malaysia. Four backpackers who posed for nude photos on the top of Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia have been detained for public indecency. The four, who still remain in police custody, are a subgroup of the ten tourists from various Western countries who stripped naked for a photograph as a challenge to one another to see who could stand the cold longest without clothing. Although the photos were done in jest, many locals believe they are to blame for a 6.0-magnitude earthquake that left eighteen people dead on Mount Kinabalu last Friday. The locals believe the nudity offended the spirits of the mountain, which is considered sacred by various tribes in the area, and therefore drew the wrath of the mountain’s aki, or protectors. BONUS: Ai Weiwei holds—and attends—exhibition. The West’s second favorite Chinese dissident, who has been barred from leaving the country since he sparked the ire of the Chinese government in 2011, opened his first-ever solo exhibition in China this week. He was even allowed to attend the exhibit, which avoided the overt political statements for which he’s become famous. The world-famous artist and ersatz metal musician rounded out his week by sitting down with hacker Jacob Appelbaum to stuff shredded NSA documents into toy pandas.

For more than three years, as Rohingya in western Myanmar have faced violent attacks, seizure of their homes, and a growing climate of intolerance in public discourse, leaders across the Myanmar political spectrum have either remained silent or actually encouraged discrimination. The Myanmar government surely deserves much of the blame for this environment. Thein Sein’s government participated in last month’s regional crisis meeting in Bangkok on migration only reluctantly, and only after the scope of the meeting was publicly changed so that it addressed migration generally and not the Rohingya. At the meeting, Myanmar officials told reporters that “finger pointing” would not help resolve the crisis, and denied that Naypyidaw bore any blame for the conditions that led Rohingya to flee. However, the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), which is likely to dominate national parliamentary elections in the fall, has hardly been outspoken about the Rohingya. When the violence against Rohingya erupted more than three years ago several NLD members and other prominent democracy activists actually seemed to blame the Rohingya for the attacks. Ko Ko Gyi, a longtime democracy activist and former political prisoner, said in 2012 that “Rohingya [Muslims] are not one of the ethnic groups of Myanmar at all … genetically, culturally, and linguistically [these] Rohingya are not absolutely related to any ethnicity in Myanmar.” Since then, most of the NLD leadership has avoided any public criticism of the Rohingya, but also has not criticized attacks on the minority group or government policies that encourage anti-Rohingya discrimination. Aung San Suu Kyi has been notably silent on the issue. Other NLD leaders, like party vice chairman Tin Oo, also have had little to say about the Rohingya. The Nobel laureate was pointedly not invited to address a conference on the Rohingya crisis held in Oslo in late May; another Nobel laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, spoke to the conference and expressed despair at the plight of the Rohingya. (Another Nobel Peace laureate, the Dalai Lama, in May told The Australian newspaper, "It’s not sufficient [for Suu Kyi] to say: ’How to help these people?’") In the middle of May, however, the NLD seems to have shifted, at least a bit, on the Rohingya issue. On the sidelines of a meeting between political parties in Yangon, NLD spokesperson Nyan Win told reporters that the rights of the Rohingya should be protected, and that Naypyidaw should consider granting them Myanmar citizenship. "If they are not accepted (as citizens), they cannot just be sent onto rivers. Can’t be pushed out to sea. They are humans. I just see them as humans who are entitled to human rights," spokesperson Nyan Win told Agence France-Presse. Nyan Win then told The Independent, “The problem needs to be solved by the law. The law needs to be amended. After one or two generations [of residence] they [the Rohingya] should have the right to be citizens.” Nyan Win’s remarks were by far the boldest by the NLD; the government, and many NLD members, insists that the Rohingya are illegal migrants to Myanmar, even though many Rohingya have lived in the country for generations. Although this statement does not make up for Suu Kyi’s continued silence, and it does not change the situation on the ground in Arakan State, it is a small step forward for the NLD, and one that party members could build upon. To be sure, Nyan Win’s statement does not even have the force of an official change in policy position by the NLD leadership. Yet having spoken with many of the younger generation of NLD members and leaders, I know that there is a group of NLD members who want the party, and Suu Kyi, to speak out more boldly about protecting Rohingya rights. Perhaps NLD members who want to speak out about the Rohingya will do so now, and might even encourage Suu Kyi to take a stronger stance.

Over the past week, the worldwide news coverage of Rohingya migrants at sea in Southeast Asian waters has helped convince some of the region’s governments to take action to prevent an imminent crisis. Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia last week agreed to take in around 7,000 migrants, at least temporarily, and the Thai government is apparently considering taking in migrants as well. The United States and other donors apparently will cover some of the costs of providing shelter and care for the migrants temporarily. But the Myanmar government, the most critical actor in the entire crisis, has done almost nothing. Myanmar leaders continue to try to cast doubt on the idea that there is a crisis at all, or at least one involving Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, and putting themselves in the hands of human traffickers and dangerously shoddy boats. The Myanmar army’s commander in chief told the country’s state media that many of the refugees are just posing as Rohingya “to receive UN aid and that many had fled neighboring Bangladesh,” according to a Reuters report over the weekend. Naypyidaw also quickly moved to deport a group of migrants, some of whom apparently claimed to be Rohingya, and who were rescued at sea last Friday by the Myanmar navy. The Myanmar government vowed to immediately send the migrants to Bangladesh, and did no investigation of whether any of the migrants were actually Rohingya. The Myanmar government also seems extremely unlikely to take steps that might stem the outflow of Rohingya, leading to further crises on the seas; Naypyidaw refuses to admit that its own policies are a major reason why the Rohingya are fleeing, instead simply claiming that the migrants leave to pursue better-paying work elsewhere. The news coverage of the Rohingya, and the global pressure on Southeast Asian nations to address the migration crisis, does not appear to have had any impact on the policies of the Thein Sein government. Myanmar Muslim leaders repeatedly have accused Naypyidaw of taking no action against human traffickers who are taking advantage of fleeing Rohingya, and Naypyidaw has done little to either improve the condition of displaced persons camps in western Myanmar or to reduce discrimination and violence against Rohingya in Arakan State. The government’s policies, in fact, help create a climate that encourages discrimination against Rohingya, and a new law put into effect just last week may only further entrench discrimination. The Thein Sein government has consistently made it difficult for Rohingya to obtain Myanmar citizenship, and has branded most of the Rohingya community as illegal immigrants, despite significant evidence that many have lived in Myanmar for generations. The government also recently passed a family planning law that gives provincial governments the power to enact population control measures. Although the law is broadly worded, possibly on purpose, many Rohingya fear the legislation will be used, in western Myanmar, to restrict Rohingya births and to attempt to boost the percentage of Buddhists living in western states. (Muslims in other parts of Myanmar also fear that the new law will be used to limit Muslim birthrates, even if the targets are non-Rohingya Muslims.) Indeed, Rohingya leaders have little hope in Naypyidaw, which is why Rohingya men and women continue fleeing Arakan State, even though the conditions aboard the vessels they cram into are by now widely known. (Migrants questioned by the New York Times essentially said that conditions for them in Myanmar were so horrific that taking to the seas in unseaworthy boats was a better choice for them.) Will anything change Naypyidaw’s stance toward the Rohingya, making it possible for this embattled minority to remain in Myanmar---and reducing the threat of future crises on the seas? Although no one has taken a comprehensive poll of the Myanmar electorate on the Rohingya issue, many Myanmar politicians, including some in the opposition National League for Democracy, believe that the Myanmar public generally supports a tough, even brutal policy toward the Rohingya. Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who was already planning to be in Myanmar, used his visit last week to emphasize the need to change the conditions for Rohingya in Arakan State. But without exercising any leverage over Naypyidaw, the United States is unlikely to have any impact on Myanmar’s policies, and the crisis likely will continue.

As countries in Southeast Asia dither and argue with each other about how to handle the thousands of Rohingya migrants currently stranded on the seas, the migrants’ condition presumably is getting worse. Most of their boats are barely seaworthy, their conditions on board are often horrendous, and they frequently lack proper food and water. The United Nations has warned that the boats could become “floating coffins.” When a New York Times reporter came across a boat of migrants in the Andaman Sea last week, he noted that hundreds were crammed aboard the wooden fishing vessel, with no one to guide them. They “had been on the boat for three months ... The boat’s captain and crew abandoned them six days ago. Ten passengers died during the voyage, and their bodies were thrown overboard,” the Times reported. Southeast Asian nations and other regional powers can work together to ensure that Rohingya who are out at sea are not abused, sold into slavery, or left to die on the open waters. All Southeast Asian nations could immediately stop pushing boats carrying Rohingya back to sea. The United States, Australia, India, and Singapore, which have the best navies in the region, could work together to lead more comprehensive search and rescue operations in Southeast Asian waters, to ensure that boats carrying Rohingya are found. In addition, Southeast Asian nations could more effectively share intelligence to crack down on human trafficking, to prevent migrants out at sea from vanishing into traffickers’ networks. Currently, police and navies in the region rarely share information about trafficking. A second step toward addressing the crisis would involve all Southeast Asian nations coming together and adopting a plan that facilitates the resettlement of Rohingya currently at sea into other countries in the region. Not all countries would take equal shares of Rohingya. As Klaus Neumann, an expert on comparative approaches to refugees at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology, notes, the European Commission has recently proposed a strategy for dealing with migrants to Europe under which, he notes, “asylum seekers would be distributed equitably across member states, with each being required to accommodate and process a certain proportion. Neumann adds, “A complicated formula, which takes into account a [European Union] country’s economic performance, its unemployment rate, its population, and the number of asylum applications and resettled refugees would be used to arrive at these percentage figures” of how many migrants each EU member takes in. The numbers of Rohingya at sea now are far less than the numbers of refugees coming ashore in southern Europe, but the same general principles could be applied in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian countries each could take in a certain number of Rohingya, and that figure would be calculated from a range of factors. Although the European Union is far wealthier, overall, most of the countries in Southeast Asia, and outside actors, such as the United States, Japan, and wealthy Persian Gulf nations, could potentially donate to a fund designed to help pay for Rohingya resettlement, lessening the financial burden for poorer Southeast Asian nations or ones likely to take in the largest numbers of Rohingya, like Indonesia. Ultimately, an effective long-term strategy would be one that reduced the number of Rohingya setting out to sea in the first place. Such a strategy would require the cooperation of the Myanmar government, which has thus far denied that it is even to blame for the crisis currently unfolding; and, it would require significant change in the political environment in Myanmar. Right now, the threat of violence against Rohingya in Myanmar remains so severe that many seem to believe that getting on crowded and rickety boats and putting out into the open waters is a safer bet than staying in Myanmar and facing anti-Muslim violence. Unless the Myanmar government takes a tougher approach to the paramilitary groups targeting Rohingya, and accepts that many Rohingya families have lived in Southeast Asia for generations and have the right to live in Myanmar (rather than planning to deport them if they cannot prove decades of residence in Myanmar), it is likely that Rohingya will continue trying to flee.

In the wake of the latest horrific reports of Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, the United States government has called Southeast Asian nations to come together and adopt a region-wide strategy for addressing the refugee crisis. “This is a regional issue. It needs a regional solution in short order," State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters last week, according to the Associated Press. As of today, thousands of Rohingya reportedly remain at sea, off the coasts of Malaysia and Indonesia, on rickety boats, after human smugglers abandoned them; Malaysia and Indonesia refuse to accept any more of the refugees stranded at sea. Last week, Malaysia turned away two boats of Rohingya migrants. Meanwhile, Thailand continues to investigate the story behind a mass grave, found earlier this month, at an abandoned camp in southern Thailand known to be used by Rohingya traffickers. This regional solution is unlikely. The Rohingya crisis is, sadly, not new to Southeast Asian leaders, even though the discovery of the mass graves and the vivid reporting on the crisis by the New York Times has raised awareness of the problem in the United States and around the world. Rohingya have been fleeing Myanmar en masse for at least three years now, as the country’s increasingly open politics have also fostered rising Burman nationalism and a wave of attacks on Rohingya shops and homes through western Myanmar. At least 100,000 Rohingya, and probably many more, have fled their homes in Myanmar since 2012. Governments in the region have had ample time to respond, and have demonstrated little interest in doing so. The Myanmar government has taken no concrete action to stem the tide of refugees or help them be resettled safely. Bangladesh takes the position that the Rohingya are Myanmar’s problem. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have refused, over the past three years, to devise any comprehensive solution to the Rohingya problem; Reuters’ investigative reporting, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year, has revealed the cooperation of the Thai authorities in trafficking of Rohingya. (Indonesia, at least, has adopted a policy under which migrants who reach its shores are not sent back, a policy not unlike the United States’ longtime policy on Cuban migrants.) Only since the discovery of the mass grave has the Thai government arrested police and other authorities for allegedly being involved in human trafficking. Whether any of these suspects will be tried and potentially penalized remains an open question. In addition, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has once again shown itself incapable of handling a real crisis. ASEAN’s Secretary-General has been all but mute. The ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, which has had three years to formulate a regional policy on Rohingya migrants in collaboration with Southeast Asian leaders, has declined to do so; Malaysia is the current chair of ASEAN, while Myanmar was the chair last year. Myanmar reportedly has blocked discussion of the Rohingya at ASEAN meetings for at least two years. Over the weekend, the Myanmar government blamed its neighbors for the migration crisis, with the office of President Thein Sein declaring that Myanmar’s leader will not even attend a proposed regional meeting to discuss the issue if the migrants are referred to as Rohingya. The Myanmar government prefers to call them “Bengalis,” a term that suggests they have no right to be in Myanmar. Major Zaw Htay, director of the office of Myanmar’s president, told the Associated Press over the weekend: "We will not accept the allegations by some that Myanmar is the source of the problem.” Given the lack of action by Southeast Asian (and South Asian) leaders, there is room for outsiders, like the United States, Australia, and Japan, to play a role. Other than calling for a regional solution, will the Obama administration do anything else about the Rohingya crisis? Will it provide naval ships for search and rescue missions, or increase aid to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, to help them take in Rohingya? Will the United States and Japan, which sees Myanmar as important strategically and is encouraging Japanese investment there, do more than express concern about the Myanmar government’s tolerance of Burman paramilitary groups that have stoked the violence against Rohingya?

In the end of October, Myanmar will hold what will be probably its first truly free national election in twenty-five years. Several reports released this week on the upcoming election suggest that, for all the problems with Myanmar’s reform process over the past five years, the actual Election Day is likely to be relatively fair. A new International Crisis Group (ICG) report on the upcoming election notes that the election commission has, thus far, operated transparently and consulted widely and that the government has reached out to credible international observers to help ensure Election Day is fair. Myanmar has a history of actually holding fair votes on Election Day, no matter the circumstances leading up to the vote. In 1990, after a brutal crackdown by the military on demonstrators two years earlier, the Myanmar armed forces allowed a free and fair election, which was won by the National League for Democracy (NLD). Of course, after the large NLD victory, there was no transition to democratic rule; the military came up with various excuses for not seating the parliament elected in 1990, and eventually made clear it would simply ignore the results of the election. This time around, after reforms initiated by the Thein Sein government, the military is unlikely to simply step in and just annul the results of the autumn elections. But once again, just because Election Day is free and fair does not mean Myanmar will make a transition to a democratic government. Although the NLD is likely to win a significant share of seats in parliament, the election may be contested by as many as seventy political parties. The vote may be splintered, with many small parties winning a handful of seats. Worse, as the ICG report notes, since Myanmar’s constitution still contains provisions that bar Suu Kyi from becoming president, even if the NLD wins a majority of seats in the election, it will have to find some other figure to take the presidency. This compromise figure could possibly be current speaker of the lower house Thura Shwe Mann. Yet such a compromise, which would be engineered in the three months between the election and the electoral college’s choice of a president, is likely to anger core NLD supporters, confuse some voters, and possibly lead to a power struggle between the president and NLD members in parliament unhappy that Thura Shwe Mann, a military man with no opposition credentials, had been handed the presidency. “It is unclear whether the NLD’s base fully understands likely post-election scenarios,” ICG writes. A relatively weak president, not chosen directly by voters, could struggle to get anything done. A similar situation occurred after Abdurrahman Wahid became the Indonesian president in 1999, following a lot of backroom dealing, despite the fact that his party controlled only a small percentage of seats in parliament, compared to Megawati Sukarnoputri’s PDI-P. Or, as a Financial Times report on the upcoming Myanmar election notes, a weak president---but one with military ties---may be confronted by a parliament full of MPs who want to pass laws to weaken the institutional power of the armed forces, which ruled Myanmar for nearly six decades and harshly repressed the NLD for more than twenty years. If the compromise president cannot stop parliament from passing such laws (the Myanmar president does not have veto power over legislation), the military may feel it needs to step in directly once more.