China has forced two powerful armed rebel groups in north Myanmar to start negotiations with the Burmese military junta and call off the 1027 offensive they started October last year.
Experts say this might well be the most decisive Chinese intervention to stop a conflict in its neighborhood and might well set the tenor for a more proactive future policy on such issues.
The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDDA), which represents ethnic Kokangs, recently agreed to engage in talks with the State Administrative Council (SAC) under Chinese mediation.
This is the second Three Brotherhood Alliance member to offer to negotiate to the junta after the Ta’ang National Liberation Army made a similar move last week. The MNDAA, the TNLA and the Arakan Army are part of the three-group Brotherhood Alliance which started the 1027 offensive in October last year.
But the Arakan Army which has liberated much of the coastal province of Rakhine (formerly Arakans) has refused to stop fighting and this week captured a key border outpost in Maungdaw district bordering Bangladesh. That may worry China because the deep-sea port of Kyaukphyu it funded on the Rakhine coast may come under attack. Kyaukphyu sits at one end of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor that connect its southwestern province of Yunnan with the Rakhine province on the Bay of Bengal .
Other ethnic rebel groups like the powerful Kachin Independence Army have also continued their armed offensive against the junta alongwith by majority Bamar armed groups like People’s Defense Forces owing allegiance to the National Unity Government (NUG). The Burmese army has suffered huge loss of territory to the rebels.
The Kachin state borders on China and is hub of the burgeoning rare earth’s mining hub of Pang War, which is now in the hands of the KIA. The devout Christians that the Kachins are, their rebel group has been uncomfortable with China’s expanding economic and strategic footprint in Myanmar.
Fifteen years ago, the KIA and other Kachin organisations forced the Myanmar military junta to stop work on the 6000MW Myitsone hydroelectric project on the upstream of Irrawaddy River in the Kachin state. The huge 6 billion US dollar project, the Kachin feared, would submerge huge swathes of fertile lands and the electricity generated would be totally exported to China without any benefit for the local economy.
MNDAA, TNLA Announce Ceasefire
“We will cease fire immediately and will not actively attack the Myanmar army from today onwards,” the MNDAA said in a statement last week.
It also promised to “firmly safeguard Myanmar’s sovereignty and territorial integrity as a unified country and will not split the country or seek independence”.
“Under the mediation of China, we are willing to engage in peace talks with the Myanmar army on issues such as Lashio,” the MNDAA statement said, referring to the town in northern Shan State it seized in August along with the military’s North Eastern Command.
Reports from Lashio say that Myanmar national flags were hoisted along with MNDAA flags in several places in the city.
The MNDAA also said it’s “willing to send a high-level delegation” to hold talks with the regime aimed at “resolving conflicts and differences through political means”.
However, the group also called on the regime to stop its “aerial attacks and ground offensives across the country”, and claimed that it’s preserving its right to self-defense.
The MNDAA decision to start negotiations comes amid reports that Chinese intelligence had placed one of its top commander under house arrest in Yunnan capital Kunming to pressure his troops to withdraw from Lashio.
MNDAA’s Commander Detained
MNDAA’s top commander Peng Daxun (aka Peng Daren) has been in China since his meeting with Chinese special envoy to Myanmar Deng Xijun in Yunnan Province’s Kunming city in late October. The Chinese said he was undergoing medical treatment but a senior member of the Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee (FPNCC) claimed that Peng Daxun had not been allowed to return to Myanmar because he had resisted Chinese pressure to withdraw his fighters from Lashio. The FPNCC is an alliance of seven ethnic armed groups including the MNDAA.
“I can confirm that he has been detained, but I can’t provide details. We’re facing challenges and pressures,” the FPNCC member said last month, insisting on anonymity.
Other sources in the resistance say China was alarmed when the National Unity Government ( NUG), which claims to be the “real government” of Myanmar, offered to make Peng Daxun its vice-president in an attempt to integrate the ethnic armed groups including a broader national coalition against the junta.
China sees the NUG as pro-western and inimical to its extensive interests in Myanmar.
Junta’s Lashio Loss Rattled China
The seizure of Lashio marked the loss of a capital city and a regional command headquarters by the Burmese military to anti-regime forces, which dented the junta’s image and raised serious questions over its ability to defeat the rebel offensive 1027. It emboldened the anti-junta resistance forces to encircle Myanmar’s second biggest city Mandalay where the army’s Central Command is headquartered.
China was rattled by the fall of Lashio and the encirclement of Mandalay because it put at grave risk most of its mega projects on the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor ( CMEC) funded under President Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt & Road Initiative ( BRI).
That included the oil-gas pipeline and the railroad connecting Yunnan with the China-funded deep seaport of Kyaukphyu on the Rakhine coast in the Bay of Bengal, where rebels of the Arakan Army has notched major success in recent months. Mandalay is not only the hub of the lucrative Burmese gems and precious stones that is largely controlled by Chinese traders but also sits on the Kunming-Kyaukphyu oil-gas pipeline. Two years ago, the PDF rebels had set off explosions on an offtake station of the pipeline in Natogyi township of Mandalay and caused considerable damage.
China’s Multi-Pronged Myanmar Strategy
China has for long played all sides in Myanmar, cultivating both the military junta and the ethnic armed groups active near the its border with Myanma , including the MNDAA. Realising the threat to its economic and strategic interests, Beijing lost no time in decisively intervening in the Myanmar conflict.
It not only pressurised the MNDAA and the TNLA to withdraw from Lashio but also forced the United Wa State Army (UWSA) to cut off the supply of food, fuel, medicines and other resources to the two ethnic armies, driving a wedge between it and the other two groups.
The UWSA is Myanmar’s most powerful ethnic rebel army with nearly 30000 fighters heavily armed by the Chinese and its coffers bolstered by the synthetic drug trade. The Wa tribe formed the bulk of the combat elements of the once-powerful but now-defunct Burmese Communist Party before their leaders broke away to form the UWSA, which has been in effective control of the Wa Autonomous Region in the northern Shan State. The junta has practised live-and-let-live with UWSA, which has been supplied.
Beijing Hosts Junta Supremo
Following the fall of Lashio, the Chinese not only hosted junta supremo Senior General Min Aung Hlaing in Beijing to boost his legitimacy, the first time since the Feb 2021 coup, but also backed his plans to organise nationsl elections in late 2025.
According to latest reports, Chinese intelligence is trying to coax another powerful ethnic armed rebel group in the north to announce a ceasefire and stop fighting the Burmese army.
Sources in the powerful Kachin Independence Army (KIA) have confirmed the Chinese push for a stop to its offensive which has led to loss of much territory by the junta in the Kachin state.
The KIA in late October overran the Pang War township and huge areas around it that is considered the hub of Myanmar’s rare earth mining industry which almost wholly supplies China.
Despite Chinese pressure, the KIA has so far not only refused to stop its offensive against the Burmese army but it has also shut down the most important border crossing with China, sending its rare earth companies in a tizzy and shares of its companies in a free fall in the country’s stock markets.
“While China continues to pay lip service to ASEAN centrality and leadership on the Myanmar issue, it has emerged as the dominant external actor pushing to shape developments to its advantage,” says Myanmar expert Jason Tower in one of his recent publication .
“In many respects,” writes Tower, “Myanmar is emerging as a test case for more robust Chinese security involvement overseas. Everything is on the table, from deploying Chinese police, to using technology to monitor and surveil activities beyond China’s border, to rolling out new approaches for overseas security on Belt and Road Initiative projects, to gaining a strategic advantage in platforms such as ASEAN.”
In stark contrast, India has broadly followed a policy of “wait-and- watch”, reposing its hope on the ASEAN to break the deadlock with its Five-Point Consensus in Myanmar. It is now waking up to the need to deal with other non-state actors to address its connectivity and security concerns, but its actions have been limited to covert exploratory contacts.
Subir Bhaumik is a former BBC and Reuters correspondent and author of books on South Asian conflicts.
