Myanmar

Sharone Tobias and Will Piekos look at the top five stories in Asia this week. 1. Li wraps up first foreign trip to India and Pakistan. Li Keqiang finished his first foreign trip as Chinese premier, where he visited India and Pakistan. The trip came only weeks after tensions had mounted between China and India over a Chinese military incursion into an Indian-controlled disputed border region in the Himalayas. Li was eager to focus on economic talks, but the governments continue to be wary of each other. Li then spent several days in Pakistan, where he offered assistance to end an energy crisis that has led to major power cuts throughout the country. Chinese state media highlighted China and Pakistan’s enduring “all-weather friendship and strategic partnership.” China has always been a staunch ally of Pakistan and suspicious of India, but choosing India as the site of Li’s first visit was a small step towards easing tensions between the two giants. 2. Obama welcomes Myanmar’s Thein Sein to the White House. President U Thein Sein’s visit to the Oval Office was the first by a Myanmar’s head of state in nearly fifty years, and President Obama praised Sein for “moving Myanmar down a path of both political and economic reform.” However, some experts, including CFR’s Josh Kurlantzick, fear that the United States has been too quick to embrace the new Myanmar, particularly in light of recent violence by Buddhist monks and others against Myanmar’s Muslim minority. The Obama administration must be careful not jump the gun; Kurlantzick argues that though Myanmar has taken important steps toward democratization, the United States should use its newfound influence to push for an end to the ethnic and religious attacks. 3. North Korean envoy visits Beijing. Vice Marshal Choe Ryong-hae, a top military official and confidante of Kim Jong-un, met with a number of senior Chinese officials this week in Beijing in hopes of mending fraying relations between the two historic allies. His visit included a meeting with President Xi Jinping, to whom Vice Marshal Choe handed a letter written by Kim. According to state media, Xi was blunt in his response: “The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and lasting peace on the peninsula is what the people want and also the trend of the times.” The envoy reportedly stated that North Korea “is willing to accept the suggestion of the Chinese side and launch dialogue with all relevant parties.” 4. Abenomics to the rescue. After decades of stagnated growth, Japan might finally be in the midst of an economic revival, thanks to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic policies. “Abenomics” calls for “three arrows”—monetary easing, government spending, and economic reforms—that have all been tried in the past but never with the current level of coordination and breadth. Consumers are splurging at expensive restaurants and shopping malls across Japan. Not everyone is optimistic, though—many caution that Japan’s bureaucracy and rigid labor market cannot be easily reformed, and Abe has yet to make the most difficult changes. Ending deflation could also spur investors to demand a higher risk premium for holding government bonds, making the market more volatile. Certain sectors of the economy have become more volatile already—Japan’s stock market dropped 7.3 percent on Thursday from an all-time high, before regaining somewhat on Friday. Some analysts blame the drop on weak Chinese manufacturing data and U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony before Congress that the Fed might slow its monetary policy. 5. Malaysia arrests opposition activists. The Malaysian government arrested three major opposition leaders and one student amidst disputes over the results of last month’s election. Activists have been staging large protests since the May 5 election, in which the ruling National Front party took 60 percent of parliamentary seats despite only winning 47 percent of the popular vote, thanks to gerrymandered districts. The four men will be charged under Malaysia’s Sedition Act, a colonial-era law that allows the detention of people trying to overthrow the government, which Prime Minister Najib Razak has promised to abolish. Bonus: Global Times claims American Indians descended from Hunanese: Du Gangjian, dean of Hunan University Law School, made a startling “discovery” recently following a trip to study Indian tribes in the United States—some people of China’s Hunan Province might have been ancestors of American Indians. “The history textbooks should be rewritten,” he stated.

On Monday, May 20, Thein Sein visited the White House, the first president of Myanmar to receive the honor in nearly fifty years. In his historic meeting, President Obama lavishly praised Thein Sein’s leadership “in moving Myanmar down a path of both political and economic reform,” before discussing joint projects that U.S. assistance will focus on in Myanmar, such as improving agriculture. Pleased, Thein Sein replied, “ I will take this opportunity to reiterate that Myanmar and I will continue to … move forward so that we will have—we can build a new democratic state—a new Myanmar...” While the country has taken important steps toward democratization, its opening has also unleashed dangerous forces that have led to scores of violent attacks against Myanmar’s Muslim minority, which make up about 4 percent of the country’s sixty million people. The attacks are destabilizing the country and creating the possibility of nationwide violence, upsetting Myanmar’s fragile transition and creating instability in the middle of the most important region in the world for the United States. (Already, militants in Indonesia, angry at the attacks on Muslims in Myanmar, allegedly tried to bomb the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta, a plot foiled by Indonesian security forces.) As Reuters has reported: “In an echo of what happened in the Balkans after the fall of communist Yugoslavia, the loosening of authoritarian control in Myanmar is giving freer rein to ethnic hatred.” In a new piece on Foreign Policy, I analyze why the U.S. rapprochement with Myanmar has moved too quickly, and discuss Myanmar’s serious problems of interethnic violence. Read it here.

Next week, Myanmar President Thein Sein will arrive in Washington, DC, for a historic visit and meeting with President Obama. It will be the first visit by a Myanmar president to the United States in nearly fifty years. Only three years earlier, nearly every top Myanmar leader had been barred from entering the United States (and most other leading democracies) due to sanctions on the country’s military-ruled government and on nearly all exports to and imports from the country. U.S. congresspeople regularly castigated Myanmar as one of the most tyrannical societies on earth, and when former president George W. Bush found himself in a room in the mid-2000s, at an Asian summit, with Myanmar’s then-leader, he essentially refused to even acknowledge the other man’s presence. Now, the situation had reversed itself so rapidly that many longtime Myanmar-watchers in Washington cannot even keep track of the changes. In these days before the visit, Myanmar is being portrayed positively by nearly every American official. While once American policymakers had blasted Myanmar and its government as a tyranny, now they paint it as a model of emerging democratization, a potential bright spot in a world where democracy has regressed for the past seven years, according to global monitoring group Freedom House. Yet as this incredibly well-researched new Reuters piece shows, Myanmar actually is poised on the abyss of implosion. A new kind of apartheid against Muslims is being instituted across the country, Reuters reports, leading to growing interreligious and interethnic violence. In some cases, this violence may be encouraged, or at least tolerated, by the state security forces, as Human Rights Watch showed in its own report last month. Will any of these serious, dangerous challenges be brought up during what is expected to be a triumphant visit by Thein Sein? Will President Obama even mention the exploding violence in Myanmar while the president is here? Don’t count on it.

On April 22, at a packed, black-tie ceremony in New York City, the Myanmar president, represented by minister Aung Min, accepted an award from the respected global NGO International Crisis Group for the "pursuit of peace." The award, given annually by the group, is meant to honor someone who promotes change and reform, and helps end violent conflicts, like the ones that have ranged along Myanmar’s borderlands for decades. Over the past three years, since Myanmar began its transition from one of the most repressive military regimes in the world to a civilian government, such honorifics—both for civilian President U Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, freed from house arrest and able to travel the world—have become common. While only three years ago, nearly every leading democracy maintained strict sanctions on Myanmar, and portrayed the country as an isolated land run by a thuggish regime, now foreign donors, investors, and officials are rushing into the country and portraying Myanmar as the next giant emerging market and example of democratic change. In its annual report on human rights, released last week, the U.S. State Department noted, "Burma [the old name for Myanmar] continued to take significant steps in a historic transition toward democracy … its democratic transition, if successful and fully implemented, could serve as an example for other closed societies." Yet neither the cartoonish portrayals of Myanmar in the past nor today’s idyllic pictures of Myanmar’s future are correct. While the country has taken important steps towards democracy, its opening also has unleashed dangerous forces that, in recent months, have led to scores of violent attacks against Myanmar’s Muslim minority. Overall, at least 100,000 Muslims have been made homeless in the past two years by violent attacks on them and their homes, and hundreds if not thousands have been killed. Left unchecked, with Myanmar attempting to make the transition to democracy from one of the most repressive regimes on Earth, this rising ethnic hatred and attacks could turn the country into at twenty-first century version of post-Cold War Yugoslavia. Read more of my new piece on Myanmar’s challenges here.

Sharone Tobias and Will Piekos look at the top five stories in Asia this week. 1. Earthquake kills scores, injures thousands in China. A massive earthquake in Ya’an, Sichuan, on Saturday left at least 193 dead, 25 missing, and 12,300 injured. Beijing poured one billion RMB into earthquake relief, but hundreds of victims still protested, claiming they had no shelter or food. Though devastating, the earthquake pales in comparison to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed 70,000. Activists in Hong Kong struck down a proposal to donate $13 million to aid victims, saying that most aid during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake was misused. A 2009 Tsinghua University study claims that 80 percent of earthquake relief funds in 2008 went to government officials as “extra revenue.” The state-backed Red Cross Society of China, which has been singled out for corruption by netizens in the past, has received fewer donations thus far, as the public is increasingly turning to private organizations. 2. Japan reignites passions over World War II shrine. Taro Aso, Japan’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, and another 168 parliamentary members visited the Yasukuni Shrine to honor Japanese war dead, who include fourteen of the country’s Class A war criminals. Soon after, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe implied that Japanese actions during World War II couldn’t necessarily be labeled an ‘invasion,’ saying, “things that happened between nations will look different depending on which side you view them from." In response, South Korea’s Foreign Minister canceled a planned trip to Japan, and South Korean officials summoned the Japanese ambassador to lodge a formal complaint. On the mainland, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated that "we feel it is in essence a denial of Japan’s history of militarist invasion." The visit furthers already fraught tensions between China and Japan over disputed islands in the South China Sea; it could also make it more difficult for Japan and South Korea to cooperate on a unified response to North Korea’s recent actions. 3. Twenty-one killed in Xinjiang violence. Fifteen police officers and civilian officials and six suspected gangsters were killed in a clash the western province of Xinjiang on Tuesday. The incident is the deadliest in the remote Muslim-dominated province since ethnic clashes in 2009. Chinese officials claim that the incident was the result of a “premeditated, violent act of terror,” and the Global Times says the group "was working on an elaborate attack plan and was involved in extreme religious activities." Uighur activist groups in exile dispute that accusation, asserting that violence broke out when Chinese forces shot and killed a young Uighur during a raid. 4. Human rights groups issue report on Myanmar. New York-based Human Rights Watch released a 153-page report describing attacks against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar as "crimes against humanity" and "ethnic cleansing." The violence has left tens of thousands of Rohingya homeless and over 200 dead in 2012, with government officials and Buddhist religious leaders sometimes supporting the attackers, according to the report. Despite the report, the European Union voted to lift all economic sanctions on Myanmar save the arms embargo, which will last at least another year; the following day, President Thein Sein’s government released ninety-three political prisoners. Myanmar is set to become chair of ASEAN in 2014. 5. Border incident strains China-India relations. Indian media reports that a Chinese People’s Liberation Army platoon of fifty soldiers crossed into Ladakh, a region next to Kashmir, and pitched tents ten kilometers into the Indian-claimed territory. Indian troops have been dispatched to the area in response. Beijing disputed the reports and played down the event, saying "India and China are in close in communication to resolve the differences over the issue." The two countries are holding talks to resolve the dispute, which some speculate was instigated by India’s construction of a road along the disputed Line of Actual Control. Bird flu update: the H7N9 strain of avian influenza has infected 108 people and led to twenty-three deaths in China in the last two months. A fifty-three year old Taiwanese man was diagnosed with first case of bird flu outside of the mainland this week and was likely infected while in Suzhou for work. Bonus: Miss Twilight Zone. It is already a well-known fact that South Korea has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita. But things may have finally gone too far: blogs across Asia have pointed out that this year’s Miss Daegu contestants all look eerily similar.

This week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a detailed, and devastating, report on abuses against Muslim Rohingyas in western Myanmar’s Rakhine (also known as Arakan) State. The report claims that the most heinous of all crimes—crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing—were committed against Rohingya last year. It conclusively shows that, contrary to the Myanmar government’s claims that the violence against Rohingya last year erupted spontaneously, monks and local political parties had been agitating for ethnic cleansing against Rohingya well in advance of last year’s violence, in some cases with local government complicity. It also reveals that once the violence started, local security forces in Rakhine State did little to stop the burning of mosques, evictions of Muslims, and killings of Muslims. In some cases, HRW shows, the security forces actively participated in the orgy of violence and then rounded up almost only Rohingya, while leaving Buddhist perpetrators untouched. Even now, it finds, in villages in Rakhine State where Rohingya have not been forced to flee, they are still being subjected to draconian restrictions by local officials and security forces. HRW probably released the report this week because they wanted to time it to a decision being made by the European Union on whether or not to lift nearly all remaining sanctions on Myanmar. The decision was supposed to be released this week, and indeed it was. Unfortunately, HRW’s report seems to have little impact on the EU—or on any other Western democracies, which have shifted 180 degrees, going from viewing Myanmar’s government as nothing but thugs to viewing it as unwaveringly set on reform. The EU still went ahead and lifted most sanctions. Still, HRW shows that, contrary to this new view, Myanmar still faces enormous hurdles, and the government is hardly comprised of simply technocrats and reformers.

Over the past three years, the Arab uprisings have created the idea that the climate, internationally, for democracy and human rights has been improving. As I write in my new book Democracy in Retreat, the Arab uprisings have been essentially canceled out by regression, over the past ten years, in parts of South and Southeast Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Africa. Many other reports have come to similar conclusions, including Freedom House’s annual report and the new Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) study of global democracy, released earlier this month. Now the U.S. Department of State weighs in. Its annual country reports on human rights are necessarily more politicized than Freedom House or the EIU—there is lobbying inside the State Department about the reports that never would happen at a nongovernmental reporter, and it is loath to condemn some of the United States’ closest allies. Still, its report notes similar trends as Freedom House and my book. Globally, civil society, the lifeblood of democracy, is being challenged more than ever, the report states. “Increased headwinds buffeted civil society in 2012, as governments continued to repress or attack the means by which individuals can organize, assemble, or demand better performance from their rulers,” it notes in the overview of the report. “From Iran to Venezuela, crackdowns on civil society included new laws impeding or preventing freedoms of expression, assembly, association and religion; heightened restrictions on organizations receiving funding from abroad; and the killing, harassment, and arrest of political, human rights, and labor activists.” Meanwhile, although reforms in Myanmar and some Arab countries appear promising, other once-promising young democracies like Sri Lanka, Kenya, Hungary, and many others continue to stagnate or backslide toward repression. Even in the Arab world, retrenchment by autocrats and cynicism by populaces about democratic governance already threatens hard-fought gains. And while I think it is highly doubtful that the change is Myanmar is due much to the “sustained U.S. and international pressure to reform [there]” that the report offers credit to, it is true that the country has witnessed dramatic shifts since 2010. Still, the possibility of Myanmar disintegrating into a failing state remains just as high as it prospering into a stable democracy.

On the CFR site, I have an expert brief up on the surge in ethnic and religious unrest in Myanmar. You can read the expert brief here. The anger seems to be building, despite some efforts by the government, Muslim leaders, and Buddhist leaders to cool tensions. (Aung San Suu Kyi, who had said virtually nothing about the violence for two weeks, did finally step forward and say that Myanmar needs to promote a stronger rule of law to prevent future violent outbreaks, a somewhat mealy-mouthed response.) One of the leading militant monks—a phrase that just sounds bizarre—this week gave an interview to the Irrawaddy in which he was essentially unrepentant about the attacks on Muslims. Other militant Buddhist leaders have been similarly unrepentant, and I would not be surprised to see a new wave of attacks after the quiet of Burmese New Year. It seems that the security thus far are primarily going to blame Muslims for the violence, having now arrested and charged the Muslim owners of a gold shop in Meiktila without doing much to investigate Buddhists involved in the violence there. In thinking about the role of foreign donors and investors in Myanmar, and how they could help reduce the violence, I had several other prescriptions beyond the expert brief. For one, donors should more thoroughly scrutinize the backgrounds of people who come to the numerous new mediation and peace-building efforts in the country that are designed to facilitate better interethnic and interreligious relations. Not a few times, religious leaders involved in these efforts have now turned out to be some of the same ones promoting violence, which delegitimizes the entire mediation/peace-building efforts. Second, as donors did with some success in Indonesia, major donors to Myanmar should shift away from military-military cooperation to focusing on rebuilding the Myanmar police force, including creating entirely new, effective units trained in the latest methods of nonviolent crowd control. Far too much time has been spent by U.S. diplomats and officials from other Western countries now engaging with Myanmar on military-military cooperation; the military is critical to the transition, but at this point close cooperation is not practical and risks supporting the most recalcitrant members of the armed forces. Instead, creating a better police force will reduce the power of the military and avoid the need for military-dominated martial law in conflict areas. This new police force should necessarily include recruits drawn from all of Myanmar’s main religions and ethnic groups. Finally, donors and investors are going to have to be more vigilant about where their funds go, to avoid perceptions that money is being directed primarily to Burman-dominated areas.

Sharone Tobias and Will Piekos look at the top five stories in Asia this week. China’s economy seems a little shakier. A surge in bad-credit loans within the country has China trying to clean up liquidity without slowing growth. China’s plethora of bad loans and unsustainable levels of debt has led Fitch to downgrade China’s yuan-dominated debt from AA- to A+. It is the first time since 1999 that China’s sovereign credit rating was cut. Part of the reasoning for the downgrade was low average incomes, poor standards of governance, and a rapid expansion of credit. Progress on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands… sort of. Japan and Taiwan agreed to allow Taiwanese fisherman access to Japanese-administered water near the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea. After seventeen years of negotiations, the accord allows Taiwan to fish within twelve miles of the islands. China is "extremely concerned" about the fishery agreement, fearing that the deal grants Taiwan nation-like status and that Japan and Taiwan will cooperate further in the East China Sea. In unrelated maritime news, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the navy’s South Sea fleet in Sanya in the largest display of military strength since he took office in March. The visit came after Xi met with fishermen who work in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Kerry visits South Korea. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry began his first official visit to Asia as Washington’s top diplomat; his first stop was Seoul, where he asserted that “North Korea will not be accepted as a nuclear power.” His visit comes as a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded, with "moderate confidence," that North Korea now has the capability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon to be delivered by a ballistic missile. Meanwhile, Pyongyang continued its bellicose rhetoric and is likely to test-fire a missile in the near future as the country prepares to celebrate founder Kim Il-sung’s birthday on Monday. Bird flu scare continues. Another person has died from the H7N9 bird flu virus, bringing the total number of deaths to eleven. A total of 40 people have been infected by the virus thus far. And a study by Chinese researchers on the first three patients to contract H7N9 is doing little to allay fears; it paints a grim portrait of the virus’ effects on the human body. Though many have praised China’s transparency and response to the virus, Caijing has reported that officials have detained at least thirteen people for spreading rumors about H7N9. Myanmar begins auctioning oil and gas exploration rights. For the first time since the junta took power, Myanmar opened bidding for thirty offshore oil and gas blocks for exploration for foreign companies. Oil and gas make up 34 percent of Myanmar’s exports and is expected to be a major contributor to growth as the country opens its economy to foreign investment. Gas will begin flowing to China through a new pipeline beginning next month, and an oil pipeline will begin operating next year. Bonus: ’Django’ rechained in China. The Hollywood hit Django Unchained was mysteriously pulled from theaters in China on opening day. Officials in Beijing claimed the film was pulled for unspecified technical reasons; some speculate that censors were offended by nudity and excessive violence in the film.

In recent weeks, the Buddhist-Muslim violence that last year seemed mostly confined to Rakhine State has been spreading across Myanmar, even entering Yangon and other large cities. Muslim leaders in some parts of the country are warning Myanmar’s Muslims not to leave their homes, while many mosques and shops owned by Muslims have shut their doors for now. The danger is that, in the vacuum created by the end of Myanmar’s highly repressive state three years ago—and abetted by a climate of hateful speech and xenophobia on Myanmar’s mushrooming Internet—these episodes of interreligious and interethnic violence are going to expand, consuming the country in chaotic violence before it has time to build democratic institutions and a capable police force. In a new CFR Expert Brief, I analyze Myanmar’s rising ethnic violence and offer prescriptions for cooling today’s violence. Read it here.

Over the past two weeks, anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, which last year had seemed confined to the western state of Rakhine where the religious conflict was intertwined with issues of residency and citizenship, has exploded across the country. Mobs of Buddhists, some with ties to the militant Buddhist group 969 Movement, have attacked Muslims in Miktila, Naypyitaw, Bago, and now in Yangon. Many Muslims in Yangon, Bago, and other large towns are afraid to go to the mosque, enter shops catering to Muslims, or show displays of their faith outside their homes or stores. Aung San Suu Kyi has been notably quiet, and she is rapidly losing much of the moral and political capital she amassed during her long years in detention. One of the most striking aspects of the recent anti-Muslim violence, which has seemed to take the government, the army, investors, donors, and Aung San Suu Kyi by surprise, is that many Muslim organizations and Muslim leaders in Myanmar had been warning of such attacks for months if not a year. Although the government had tried to tell donors, investors, journalists, and foreign diplomats that the anti-Muslim violence in Rakhine State was an issue localized to that area, in reality even last year there had begun to be attacks on mosques and some Muslim shops in other parts of the country. Not a few donors and investors believed this reassurance because of the enormous opportunities in Myanmar, which are chronicled thoroughly and with cutting insight in a new report released by Lex Rieffel of the Brookings Institution. Yet even if the Thein Sein government, the opposition, and outsiders had ignored the warnings from prominent Myanmar Muslim leaders, it should have been even harder to ignore the climate of hateful speech and anti-Muslim sentiment (and, at times, anti-Chinese, anti-Indian, and anti-anyone-who-is-not-ethnic-Burman sentiment) that has exploded in Myanmar over the past two years. The 969 Movement’s activities were not hidden; they have been giving anti-Muslim speeches, holding anti-Muslim rallies, and distributing DVDs full of vitriol for at least a year. Such paraphernalia was easy to buy when I was in Myanmar two months ago. Meanwhile, the Myanmar Internet, though only accessed by less than 5 percent of the population, already is overwhelmed by hateful screeds against Muslims, non-Burmans, Indians, and Chinese, among others. There are few Myanmar sites like the kind run in the West by groups such as Human Rights Watch and dedicated to exposing rights abuses and the real causes of inter-ethnic or inter-religious violence in any one case; on many Myanmar sites, Muslims or other “outsiders” are blamed for every clash that takes place across the country. Even in the pro-democracy National League for Democracy, I have found worrying levels of prejudice against Muslims and non-Burmans. It is time for the government, the opposition, and outsiders to wake up and realize that, while Myanmar has made great strides in the past three years, the country could as easily descend into chaos and violence as it could be an example of successful democratization.

Sharone Tobias and Will Piekos look at the top five stories in Asia this week. 1. North Korean belligerence: Kim Jong-un and his militaristic regime have ratcheted up tensions on the Korean peninsula (again), this time unilaterally severing the inter-Korean military hotline. The move comes along with increased rhetoric, as North Korea declared that its strategic rocket and long-range artillery units “are assigned to strike bases of the U.S. imperialist aggressor troops in the U.S. mainland and on Hawaii and Guam and other operational zones in the Pacific as well as all the enemy targets in South Korea and its vicinity.” The United States responded by flying two nuclear-capable stealth bombers over the Korean peninsula. And so the tit-for-tat continues… 2. Burmese military set to stay in politics: Myanmar held its annual military parade on Armed Forces Day, attended for the first time by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. More significant, though, was the statement by General Min Aung Hlaing: “While the country is moving toward modern democracy, our military plays a leading role in national politics.” Meanwhile, interethnic violence between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims increased in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, and Human Rights Watch recently warned of an impending humanitarian crisis in the coastal region. 3. Rare earths breakthrough or just sea mud?: Japanese scientists claim to have found a vast reserve of rare earth metals in their territorial waters, potentially breaking China’s stranglehold on the industry. However, some reports suggest that the valuable resources might be far harder to extract than first thought. Japan uses 60 percent of the global supply, and China has restricted rare earths trade (allegedly) in retaliation for a maritime spat in the past. 4. Economic stagnation in China: A recent study by the U.S. Federal Reserve cast further doubt on China’s prospects for economic growth. The report suggested that China’s GDP growth rate could slow to around 6.5 percent by 2030, or even as low as 1 percent should a “worst-case scenario” take place. In better news for Beijing, the U.S. Federal Reserve of San Francisco released a report stating that China’s “2012 reported output and industrial production figures are consistent both with alternative Chinese indicators of the country’s economic activity, such as electricity production, and trade volume measures reported by non-Chinese sources.” Experts commonly question China’s GDP figures, believing that Beijing inflates its economic indicators to make growth appear more robust. 5. China accuses Apple of “unparalleled arrogance”: CCTV launched a campaign against Apple on International Consumer’s Day, claiming that it is treating Chinese customers as second-class citizens. Netizens have accused the Chinese government of using celebrities to organize an attack against Apple on Weibo and other social media. Chinese editorials argued that Apple’s warranty policy is a violation of Chinese law and disputed repair policies.

The past weeks have seen a series of brutal episodes of ethnic violence in central Myanmar, between Buddhists and Muslims, as groups of Buddhists have attacked Muslim homes and villages and then murdered people who fled the homes in cold blood, according to multiple news reports. Many reports suggest that local groups of monks and some members of the security forces have been involved in instigating the violence. This year may well prove to be the critical year for Myanmar’s survival as a multi-ethnic state. Anti-Muslim violence has now spread beyond confined areas of Rakhine State, and could easily flare across the country; Myanmar has a history of attacks against minority groups, such as ethnic Indians and ethnic Chinese. The security forces are divided, unable to take the harsh anti-riot tactics of the past, but totally unskilled in nonviolent crowd control. Worst of all, when it comes to creating a more devolved, federal structure of government, there are almost no leading Burman politicians willing to aggressively enunciate this view, as Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, independence leader Aung San, once did. In addition, while ethnic minority areas are the most in need of aid and investment in physical infrastructure, players in Naypyidaw are already competing to channel new foreign aid and investment to Burman regions, which though needy are not as needy of roads, electricity, and other necessities. Instead, on trips to Myanmar I have found that there is minimal support among ethnic Burman leaders for a truly federal state, with the kind of devolution of economic and political power that Indonesia has attempted during its period of democratization. In addition, nearly all of the senior officials in the president’s office, the National League for Democracy (NLD), and civil society remain focused on national-level politics, and particularly on the upcoming 2015 national elections, which are seen as the polls that could consolidate Burma’s democracy. However, there is almost no brainpower being spent on developing ideas for devolution, for local level elections, and for state executive elections. Within the top ranks of the NLD, Suu Kyi’s party, nearly all senior leaders do not support significant federalism, despite the fact that they have few other concrete proposals for how to handle Burma’s vast ethnic diversity and ethnic minorities’ deep distrust of the national government, due to years of repressive centralized rule. Although Suu Kyi herself has publicly advocated for a new federal model, and has paid homage to her father’s vision—which was enunciated at the Panglong Conference and Agreement in 1947, and though she is probably the only Burman trusted enough by ethnic minority leaders to preside over a new federalism, she has not made it the centerpiece of her politics since joining parliament last year. She, too, has focused on the 2015 national elections almost exclusively. Given that she remains relatively weak politically, she also has been wary of taking on tough ethnic minority issues that could cost her Burman support before she and the NLD actually control parliament. In addition, even at the highest levels of the NLD many senior leaders exhibit worrying racism and hostility toward numerous ethnic minority groups. Not a recipe for cooling violence any time soon.

About a week ago, the National League for Democracy (NLD) held its first national congress, a kind of meeting of all party activists from across Myanmar. In theory, many activists hoped the congress would work together to set a policy agenda—like a Democratic or Republican convention—that the party could use and build on for the planned 2015 national elections. In addition, many party activists believed, the NLD would broaden its senior leadership, currently centered around Aung San Suu Kyi, to include younger leaders. As I have written several times before, one of the biggest challenges that Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD face is that the president’s office (Thein Sein) and several affiliated think tanks have monopolized much of the best policy talent in the country. However, it’s pretty unlikely that Thein Sein’s party is going to win the 2015 elections, given the enormous popularity of the NLD, its long credentials in fighting the military, and the still strong appeal of Suu Kyi, despite some recent missteps by her. Yet at the same time, many NLD activists will not want to draw upon some of the talent used by Thein Sein, because of its links to the military. So the NLD needs to develop its own policy specialists, import more of them, or bring back more exiles with extensive policy knowledge. At the congress, there was almost no discussion of policy. Zero. This was a huge mistake, according to many younger NLD activists, a point on which I completely agree. The lack of policy substance made the NLD seem like it was still only Suu Kyi’s party—that whatever she decides on economic, social, and constitutional policy in the run-up to the 2015 vote will simply be the NLD’s policy. It also made the congress seem like it had no interest in new blood in the NLD leadership. Suu Kyi has drawn criticism on a lot of different fronts in recent weeks—her comments on her relationship with the military, her handling of the Letpadaung Inquiry Commission, and her too-quiet stance on violence in Kachin and Rakhine states. Some of this criticism is warranted; some is probably not, given that she has always spoken of her admiration for some in the military, even when she was under house arrest. But it is the lack of commitment to policy specifics, and to changing the NLD, that will be the most harmful in the long term.