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Burma After the CrackdownWaiting for the military to turn on their generals.

By Gwynn Guilford
Posted Monday, Oct. 15, 2007, at 12:21 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

China is Burma's second-biggest trading partner after neighboring Thailand, according to Burma's Ministry of Commerce figures from last year. Some Burmese I talked to resented China for exploiting Burma's vast natural resources, which include huge gas and oil fields and extensive teak forests to the north. Others welcomed the economic benefit of trade with China. "I like China," said 20-year-old Ko Aung Zaw*, who had protested in Mandalay the week before I met him in his hometown of Bagan, where he had returned after universities had been shut down due to the demonstrations. "Their motorbikes are cheap," he said, referring perhaps to the shiny black Yinxiang that he drove.

His Chinese wheels also get good gas mileage, which is important these days. In mid-September, the government doubled the price of gas rations, making even bus travel prohibitively expensive. "Some people [have] quit their jobs because their salary … is not worth the commute," said U Soe Thein.

While the government is infamous for its criminally inept fiscal mismanagement, this jacking up of gas prices wasn't mere whim. More than a year ago, a division of the government formed an independent panel of former academics and diplomats to assess the feasibility of using price hikes to underwrite a salary increase for Burma's 1.5 million civil servants. One-time U.N. economist U Myint, who was on the committee, said he and his colleagues roundly rejected the idea. "This thing is rubbish,' I said. 'It's going to hurt people, not solve anything.' "

U Myint says the price increase was motivated by the SPDC's 2005 relocation of the nation's capital from Rangoon to the drab inland town of Naypyidaw, which is both expensive and unpopular with civil servants. The panel rejected the plan and had nearly forgotten about it when, two months ago, they found their names signed to an endorsement of the price hike. Despite their protests, the measure was implemented a month later.

The resulting demonstrations could hardly have come as a surprise to the government—protests spurred by high commodity prices pepper Burma's history. The move suggests an urgency to placate its administrative foundation, if not its citizenry, which can "easily be stopped with bullets," as U Soe Thein put it.

Economist U Thaung says that the rank-and-file military is unsettled by having to kill civilians and monks. "Maung Aye told them to shoot, and they didn't do it for a long time," he said, referring to the second-in-command general about whom little, aside from a weakness for neat cognac, is known. If change is to come, says U Thaung, it will come from within the military itself—probably from a "young Turk" who will channel popular discontent into support from the military for the ouster of top general Than Shwe.

"I'm counting on the military to get rid of [Than Shwe]," said the professor. "Even colonialists never shot a monk," he said, referring to Britain's harsh colonial occupation of Burma that lasted until the late 1940s. "They don't say it, but [the military is] deeply unhappy," U Thaung said.

*Names changed because they spoke on condition of anonymity.

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Gwynn Guilford is a Beijing-based journalist and editor at China International Business magazine, who worked as a reporter in Rangoon at the Myanmar Times in 2004.
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