Who the hell is Aung San Suu Kyi?
In the last couple of days I’ve had the privilege of discussing the extraordinary Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in some of my classes. Sadly, although not surprisingly, not a single student recognised either her name or the picture that I used at the beginning of the lesson.
Myanmar’s (Burma) internationally recognised and respected prime minister-elect is a mystery figure to the people of China. And I don’t mean that they find her to be a strange individual given to dabbling in the occult; I mean they don’t find her at all. Not in textbooks, not on television, not in the newspaper; and certainly not in the politics classroom. After all, she’s not the type of girl that Beijing has any interest in providing information about.
After Suu Kyi was democratically elected in a general election in 1990 by an overwhelming margin, the military junta decided that she belonged under lock and key rather than acting out her rightful place as head of government. The people’s choice has since spent the majority of the intervening years under house arrest, where she continues to fight with grace and determination for democracy and justice in Myanmar.
I’m prepared to concede that a significant percentage of 20 year-old university students around the globe may also be unaware of the existence of Aung San Suu Kyi. But in their cases (DPRK and a few others excepted) it’s because they’re not inclined to pick up a newspaper, whereas in China the reason is that the information is simply not available. It’s not that Myanmar is never in the news, as witnessed by the recent coverage of the cyclone disaster (a favourable comparison in relief efforts for the CCP). Rather, as one might suspect, it’s because China does a lot of business with the military dictatorship and has no material interest in altering the status quo. The argument that China doesn’t interfere in the internal affairs of other countries is not valid here; it’s certainly not interference to provide factual information about the nature of Myanmar’s regime and the suffering and death they have caused.
In fairness, China is not alone in supporting Myanmar’s despots, as this article from last year indicates. But it is certain that as long as China refuses to acknowledge the military junta as violators of human rights, they cannot seriously be considered either globally or regionally responsible.
Bear in mind that Beijing has no problems when it comes to reporting on the domestic policies of other countries. Not all other countries, of course; Zimbabwe would be another example of conspicuous silence, but then Mugabe and Myanmar’s military junta have a lot in common. Leaving aside that particular comparison, Myanmar is China’s neighbour and should have a flourishing economy founded on tourism, vast natural resources, and a rich cultural heritage. Instead, the people have suffered violence and economic catastrophe under the junta’s restrictive and vengeful regime.
China didn’t invent a foreign policy based on self-interest; recent history can provide countless examples of the transgressions of other nations. But this is happening in China’s own backyard. And they are interfering in the internal affairs of their neighbour when they actively support a regime that undermines the most basic of its people’s human rights and dignities. If China wants to be respected as a responsible world power then it must show the kind of moral leadership that has too often been lacking in those that came before. All Hu Jintao and company need do to signal the end of oppression in Myanmar is to pull the plug. Do they have the humanitarian backbone necessary to do this? Somehow I doubt it.
Before responding, please consider that last sentence carefully. I’m going to delete any knee-jerk responses along the lines of “yeah, but look what your/that/XXX country did…”