Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U Page A

Burma just a few years back. One had several floors, all air-conditioned and connected by escalators. On the top floor, past the clothes shops and food court, there was an internet café (Net Addict) where I was able to check my emails and catch up on the news. And on the ground floor was a very well stocked and brightly lit supermarket. In a country where most people have no electricity or running water and for whom shopping is a trip to an open-air market, these are novelties. The supermarket was like any normal supermarket in the US or UK, with many brands of cereal and canned soups to chose from, a large section for fresh meats and vegetables, and even a corner selling books and glossy fashion magazines. Unlike any supermarket in the US and UK, however, there was also a section selling monks’ robes, neatly folded and wrapped into little wicker baskets. Monks themselves don’t come in to buy these robes (they are not supposed to handle money at all, much less spend their days at the mall); they are meant for ordinary Buddhists who want to make an offering at a monastery. I saw one being sold, together with a six-pack of Diet Coke.
    It was at a small café next to the supermarket that I had arranged to meet one of the older Chinese residents of the city, born in Burma to Chinese parents, a slender soft-spoken man in tortoise-shell glasses, and a distant relative by marriage. He was a doctor and had been in Rangoon at the time of the 1967 riots. He feared a backlash:
     
    I would guess that Mandalay is at least a third Chinese now. [Mandalay has a population of about a million.] Twenty years ago we were perhaps 5 per cent of the population at most, and our families had been here for generations. We have close Burmese friends and relatives and love this country. Some of the new Chinese come from the border towns, others from inside Yunnan. Many others come from further away, from the southern provinces like Fujian and Jiangxi, but they come overland, not by sea like in the old days. A lot of the small factories are now owned by them, making sugar or pots and pans, you know, very basic things.
     
    He smirked to suggest that there were none of the factories making robots or supersonic planes.
     
    Many others are involving in logging and mining. The newcomers, from inside China, especially the ones here with proper papers, they don’t really mix with us, let alone with the Burmese.
     
    We ordered cappuccinos instead of the ‘Iced Coffee and Blueberry Cheesecake’ that was the $2 ‘special of the day’.
     
    In Mandalay some of the top businessmen are still Burmese, not Chinese. One for example owns the two big hospitals here. There are also several important Indian businessmen, some Marwaris and Punjabis, and Tamils from South India whose families have been here for over a hundred years. But I think that will change; there is more and more money coming from inside China. And the new businessmen from China, they know how to work the system, because the system here is now almost the same as there. The Chinese like to say that we and the Burmese are pauk-phaw , cousins, descended from the same ancestors. But I’m not sure we are acting like good relatives. I worry that something will happen, and that the Burmese will turn against us.
     
    Even our cappuccinos would have been beyond the means of ordinary Burmese in Mandalay. $2 was about the average daily wage in Burma and though my friend the teacher made more than that, a visit to a new café like this one would have been an unimaginable extravagance. The new Mandalay was an unequal place, with the new Chinese immigrants at the top of the pyramid.
    It was also a mix of old and new. That evening, walking back to my hotel, I passed a brightly lit Nokia mobile phone shop, filled with Chinese punters carefully examining the newest models. But just a few feet away the paved road turned to a dirt one, and any signs of the twenty-first century disappeared amongst the