The Irrawaddy Magazine

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• China’s New Economic Priorities Offer ‘Exit Strategy’ on Myitsone Dam
• Rangoon’s Salvage Divers Brave Risks for Meager Rewards
• Van Sui Chin and Myanmar’s Lost Generations

China’s New Economic Priorities Offer ‘Exit Strategy’ on Myitsone Dam Posted: 30 Apr 2014 08:00 PM PDT Burmese living in Malaysia display placards in protest against the China-backed Myitsone dam project, outside the Burmese Embassy in Kuala Lumpur in September 2011. (Photo: Reuters) New financial constraints imposed by Beijing to deal with China's bloated economy could lead to the controversial Myitsone hydroelectric dam project in northern Burma being quietly abandoned. The Naypyidaw government has been under pressure from China Power Investment Corporation (CPI) to lift a suspension of construction imposed in 2011 by President Thein Sein, but new Chinese financial priorities could deal the dam a death blow, analysts suggest. "Until recently China Development Bank and to a lesser extent China Export Import Bank were the best friends the emerging markets ever had," said London's Financial Times. "They lent money to companies and governments in places where the availability of capital was low, the tenure short and the cost high. But the two Chinese policy banks are now stepping back. "As the Beijing government puts pressure on its banks generally, mainland credit is being tightened both at home and abroad. While speculation about credit tapering continues in the US, it is already happening in China big time." Analyst Sean Turnell, an experienced Burma watcher, thinks it highly possible that Beijing's lending curbs could lead to a quiet ending for the US$3.6 billion Myitsone project on the Irrawaddy River in Kachin State. "The Myitsone dam is such an irritant to the bilateral relationship," said Turnell. "As it stands, one side must lose face. [However] the pressure within China for banks to rein in lending is surely the solution to the Gordian knot." President Thein Sein has ordered work on the dam to remain suspended until the end of his presidency in 2015, while CPI has been making noises about restarting work sooner. Turnell, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and co-editor of Burma Economic Watch, said a Chinese curb on loans for overseas investment by state-owned enterprises offered a "highly plausible exit strategy" for the problem. "The Burma government can breathe a sigh of relief that this highly symbolic sign of reform [suspension of the dam] can remain so, and China can exit the project without losing face. Everybody wins, seemingly." The tougher financial policies emerging in Beijing possibly also explain why Chinese investment in Burma has slowed down. In early April, China Radio International reported that investment in Burma in 2013 had "plummeted" to only US$20 million or 5 percent of the value invested in 2012. The 2013 figure was only 1 percent of the value of Chinese investment in Burma in the peak year of 2010, the radio station said. The China Business News newspaper said China lost the leading position among foreign investors into Burma for the first time in four years and dropped to around 10th place. "It is important to be realistic about the risks now confronting emerging markets in general now that China is focusing much more on its own internal problems and needs," commented John Richardson, an energy analyst writing in the industry magazine ICIS. Cutbacks will affect infrastructure developments funded by China, notably hydroelectric projects in Cambodia, Laos and Burma, Richardson said. Three Chinese state-owned companies—Sinohydro Corporation, China Three Gorges Corporation and China Southern Power Grid—were reported to be planning to finance and build several hydroelectric dams on the Salween River in eastern Burma. It is unclear whether any of these will now proceed. Analyst Yun Sun of the Washington-based Stimson Center said in February that since the suspension of the Myitsone dam development, China had "suspended almost all new major investment in [Burma]." "Beijing needs to reconsider whether it is wise to let the destiny of one commercial project sway and affect the future of broader Sino-Myanmar bilateral relations," she wrote. However, the much bigger issue of China's economic clean-up now seems to have dwarfed Myitsone. "Real GDP growth in China slowed to 1.4 percent quarter over quarter for the three months to the end of March, while imports rose a mere 1.6 per cent for the period compared to a year ago," the Financial Times said. "In the month of March, imports fell 11.3 percent compared to March 2013. "All this suggests China’s role as the engine of growth for the world, and particularly for emerging markets, is likely to diminish in the future." The post China's New Economic Priorities Offer 'Exit Strategy' on Myitsone Dam appeared first on The Irrawaddy Magazine.

Rangoon’s Salvage Divers Brave Risks for Meager Rewards Posted: 30 Apr 2014 07:24 PM PDT Divers work to salvage a sunken sand barge from the Bago River in Rangoon. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy) RANGOON — When the tide of the Bago River goes out, they jump on a wooden boat and head to the middle of the river to start their job. With the low tide, part of the cockpit of a sunken barge has become visible on the water. "We have to make the most of the low tide, if not it will be very difficult for us because the whole boat will be underwater," one of the men told me. There are six people onboard. They all are professional divers who have long made their living salvaging sunken boats and ships in the Bago and Rangoon rivers, which run around Burma's largest city. They leave the boat's engine idling near the sunken vessel, a sand barge that sunk one month ago. They are here today to retrieve the wreckage. Their gear is not sophisticated: a few flimsy masks, oxygen tanks, an air compressor, pumps and a few large empty drums. "First, the divers have to attach the empty drums to the side of the wreckage. They play a vital role in the salvaging process," the crew leader explains. After attaching the drums, the divers go down into the wreckage to pump out silt that has deposited inside the sunken barge. "By the time the tide is high, we pump air into the drums. When the drums are filled with air, the wreckage floats on the water," the leader said. Most of the crew earns the equivalent of about US$10 a day. But they all admit that they job is dangerous since they are at risk of suffocating if the oxygen supply onboard goes wrong, or if they get stuck in the wreckage. "Though our job is risky, we have no choice as we can't do any other job," one diver said. The post Rangoon's Salvage Divers Brave Risks for Meager Rewards appeared first on The Irrawaddy Magazine.

Van Sui Chin and Myanmar’s Lost Generations Posted: 30 Apr 2014 07:00 PM PDT Decades of government neglect have weakened Myanmar’s education system, with disastrous consequences for the nation. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy) PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Van Sui Chin, a teenage girl living in the Czech town of Stara Boleslav, just outside the capital Prague, is an exceptional student. At the middle school where she studies, the 15-year-old consistently comes at the top of her class in almost every subject. She has received several academic awards, and for two consecutive years has been chosen to travel to Italy on excursions with two other very gifted students. But Van Sui Chin is not Czech. Her family is from Hakha, the capital of Myanmar's impoverished Chin State. The story of how she ended up in the Czech Republic is a familiar one. In the mid-2000s, her father, Ngun Peng Siakhel, was arrested and sentenced to a week in prison for allowing an unregistered visitor to stay in his home overnight. He was released on bail, but decided then and there that he had had enough of Myanmar's restrictive and repressive rules. Deciding that it was time to leave the country for the sake of his family's future, he traveled to Malaysia. Three years later, when she was six years old, Van Sui Chin and her mother and younger sister were smuggled out of the country to join him. In 2010, after three years of living in Kuala Lumpur as refugees, the family was resettled in the Czech Republic. Despite the many hardships they had experienced in their young lives, Van Sui Chin and her sister, Sarah Mang Cin Tial, soon distinguished themselves as top students. Their story is one shared by hundreds of thousands of families in Myanmar. Driven out of their homeland by poverty, oppressive laws, human rights abuses and discrimination against ethnic minorities, they have been forced to make new lives in foreign countries. This vast diaspora—the product of half a century of brutal military misrule—has seen millions of Myanmar nationals flee to neighboring countries such as Thailand and India, as well as to other countries around the region and the world. Among them, there may be thousands or tens of thousands of students like Van Sui Chin who have benefited from a better education than they could ever dream of receiving at home. This is great for them, but a tragedy for our country, because it means that we have lost so much of our enormous potential to the neglect and misguided policies of the past. Kyaw Zwa Moe is editor (English Edition) of the Irrawaddy magazine. He can be reached at kyawzwa@irrawaddy.org. Soon after President U Thein Sein assumed power in 2011 and began introducing reforms, he invited Myanmar citizens living abroad to return and help rebuild the country. Many, including political exiles and well-educated professionals, did come back to see for themselves how much had changed. Most were unimpressed. The most common complaint I've heard from many of these returnees is that the government continues to exclude them from the reform process. Instead of sugar-coated words, they say, they want to be able to play a clear role in shaping the country's future. Unfortunately, it seems that old mindsets among the former military rulers die hard. Rather than embrace well-educated returnees, the authorities prefer to keep them at arm's length. This is, no doubt, a legacy of the days when students were seen by the ruling generals as adversaries. Since 1962, when the armed forces first seized power, students have been at the forefront of efforts to restore civilian rule. After 1988, when a nationwide, student-led pro-democracy uprising nearly toppled the former dictatorship, this animosity became even more intense, resulting in the closure of colleges and universities across the country. They were reopened only after new campuses were built far from the city centers. It seems that at least some in the current government—which consists largely of former generals, including some who were directly or indirectly involved in cracking down on student demonstrations—still regard students and the university-educated with suspicion. This is a shame, because the country desperately needs all the help it can get from its best-qualified citizens. If U Thein Sein is indeed a reformist, he must do more to eliminate such thinking within his government. And the best place to begin is by seeking out and seriously listening to some much-needed input on education reform. Despite calls from academics for bottom-up reforms, the Ministry of Education continues to believe that it must remain firmly in control of any future changes to the education system. But this top-down approach is at odds with what the country really needs—a reform process that includes a variety of stakeholders working together to achieve a greater degree of autonomy in the country's institutions of learning. One group that is actively pursuing such changes is the National Network for Education Reform (NNER), which brings together leading voices on education, including teachers unions, ethnic education groups, independent educational organizations, the 88 Generation Students group, the opposition National League for Democracy's education network, and Buddhist monks and Christian churches. The NNER has conducted dozens of seminars across the country since it was formed in 2012, and in June of last year, it held a national conference attended by 1,200 participants. That gathering produced a report with recommendations on how to create an inclusive education system that was submitted to Parliament and a committee overseeing the government's Comprehensive Education Sector Review. Despite meeting with Education Ministry officials three times last year, however, the NNER says that the government has so far shown little interest in its ideas on reform. The problem, according to two active members of the NNER—Dr. Arkar Moe Thu, chairman of the Dagon University Teachers' Association, and Jimmy Rezar Boi, a director of Mustard Seed Myanmar—is that the two sides have fundamentally different ideologies. While the NNER's philosophy is to cultivate free thinking, the ministry believes its goal is to produce "right-thinking" students. "When they talk about 'right thinking,' we need to ask how they decide what's right and what's wrong," Jimmy Rezar Boi told me when I met with him and Dr. Arkar Moe Thu recently. "What we want is an education system that allows academics, teachers and students to think freely on their own and allows them to choose what they want. That is their right," he added. When opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi visited the Czech Republic late last year, she met some Myanmar nationals here, including Van Sui Chin and her sister. The democracy icon told them to study hard so they could contribute to the development of their homeland in the future. But until the government learns to stop seeing students as a threat, and instead recognizes them as individuals whose minds are the nation's greatest treasure, Myanmar's future may not be much better than its past. Kyaw Zwa Moe is the editor of the English-language edition of The Irrawaddy. This article first appeared in the May 2014 print issue of The Irrawaddy magazine. The post Van Sui Chin and Myanmar's Lost Generations appeared first on The Irrawaddy Magazine.

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