Nationalism and anti-ethno-politics: why ‘Chinese Development’ failed at Myanmar’s Myitsone Dam

Abstract

In 2011, the Burmese military-backed government stunned global audiences by unilaterally suspending the construction of the Myitsone Dam, the cornerstone of China’s largest hydropower project abroad. This prominent failure of China’s “Going Out” investment strategy reverberated globally. Both Western and Chinese accounts frame the event as a pivotal moment in Myanmar’s celebrated reform process, the cooling of China–Myanmar relations, and US–China geopolitical rivalry in the Asia-Pacific. However, my ethnographic field and media research from 2010 to 2015 reveals that the mega-project’s failure does not originally stem from inter-state geopolitics or contested economics and ecology. Through chronological narration, I show how the Myitsone Dam is primarily the casualty of a distinctly ethno-political causality, whereby three nationalisms clashed and the replication of China’s “anti-ethno-political” model of development failed. Though no monolithic Chinese state directs “Chinese Development” overseas, individual Chinese entrepreneurs nonetheless draw from the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) anti-political and state-centric paradigm when facing foreign social worlds. In the particular case of Myitsone, Chinese proponents drew from PRC’s state-nationalist heuristics of “national minorities and state-led development” and “Western anti-China conspiracy,” when facing Myanmar’s ethnic Kachin and Burman nationalisms. State ideological subjectivities of these developers seemed to blind them to the weakness in their own anti-ethno-political strategies, even when those collapsed publicly. I conclude that the Myitsone Dam’s construction will likely not be restarted, despite the hydropower company’s efforts. The Myitsone case also exemplifies how China’s previous historical entanglements in its neighboring regions uniquely disrupt the progress of “Going-Out” in Asia.

Keywords:

• “Going Out”
• anti-politics
• nationalism
• state-centrism
• Kachin
• ethnography

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Erratum

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to Kachin, Burmese, and Chinese friends and colleagues, thanks to whom this study became possible, and to Karin Dean, Catherine Earl, Eric Glickman, Julian Kirchherr, Kevin McLeod, Emily Yeh, Sun Yun, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. As the PRC economy’s need for electricity has rapidly grown, the country’s hydropower lobby has successfully argued that dams offer a clean alternative to carbon-belching coal plants, most famously embodied by the grand Three Gorges Dam. In 2000, Beijing launched the policy of “sending electricity from west to east,” pushing for new dams on rivers in Tibet, Sichuan, and Yunnan to provide for the country’s industrialized eastern coast. The Irrawaddy mega-project, even though across the Yunnan province’s border in Burma, serves this policy (Higgins 2011). Crossing this inter-state border made sense for the Chinese companies because in 2004, under pressure from environmentalist campaigners, the PRC government suspended a hydroelectric mega-project on the Nu River in China, right next to the Kachin border (see McDonald 2007). In Myanmar, as well as across mainland Southeast Asia and the Himalaya, there are contested damming projects, which are similar to but mostly in smaller scale than Myitsone, proceeding on almost every major river. Thai or Chinese companies usually lead these projects. Increasingly, Chinese state-owned companies have become major dam promoters globally, facing controversies in many places (McDonald, Bosshard, and Brewer 2009). In Asia-Pacific, some of the most controversial Chinese hydropower projects have been on the upper reaches of Mekong River, accompanied by considerable protest from downstream Southeast Asian countries, where large populations depend on the Mekong.

2. See a chronology of events around the Myitsone Dam, from its start to current suspension, in Anonymous 2012b.

3. Kachin society was made famous in Social Anthropology by Leach’s 1954 classic Political Systems of Highland Burma (see also, Sadan and Robinne 2007). The contemporary pan-ethnic identity of “Kachin” in Myanmar includes six, seven, or more distinguishable ethno-linguistic groups, which have gone through a gradual historical process of social and political integration around the somewhat hegemonic ethnic Jinghpaw center (Sadan 2007, 2013). Besides Jinghpaw, the other “Kachin” peoples are Zaiwa, Lachid (Lachik), Lhaovo (Lawngwaw), Rawang (and Nung Lungmi), and some Lisu.

4. The film has since been removed from the company’s website, but is available with English subtitles at http://vimeo.com/33389414.

5. For a more detailed picture of the first years of renewed Kachin conflict, see the compilations of reports and media analyses in Project Maje (2011a, 2011b, 2013).

6. Many of these are collected on a website set up by the Upstream Ayeyawady Confluence Basin Hydropower Co., Ltd. (UACHC), as part of an ongoing effort to promote the Myitsone project to Burmese and other audiences (http://www.uachc.com).

7. For instance, on its project website, CPI refers to seismic safety studies that it commissioned from institutes in China. It argues that the seven dam sites “are located in the relatively stable area against the background of intense regional tectonic activity, and none of the project dams crosses any active fault. The dams are safe.” (UACHC 2011).

8. Two Chinese studies concluded that Western-funded environmental groups are “irresponsibly attacking Chinese investors and misleading local communities with biased reports” to limit China’s economic influence. The studies argued – in line with the Going Out model – that the green groups “bear Western ideology and are deeply influenced by Western politics […] and tend to over-emphasize the significance of environmental protection, while ignoring Mekong countries’ demand for economic development, threatening the sovereign rights of these countries.”