positions politics

praxis   episteme   eikon   paideia

subscribe   about us   journal    

Author: positions politics editorial group

Posted on

Ping Sun, From Platform Economies to Platform Justice

Translated by Shiqi Lin

Translator’s notes: This essay was originally published in Chinese for the “Trading Thoughts” column of thepaper.cn (澎湃思想市场) on May 23, 2021. Upon consultation with the author and the positionspolitics editorial team, this English version has been edited for length and has added explanatory contexts to theoretical and popular lexicons such as the “poverty of meaning” and “involution” (内卷).

With the rise of Chinese technology firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and Meituan, the past few years have witnessed the explosive growth of platform economies in China. However, much is still under-examined about the complexities of platform ecologies within China: How has China grown to be one of the largest players in platform economies in the world? How are platform economies entangled with and how do they exacerbate existing problems of migration, labor, inequality, relational poverty, and technological governance? What is the everyday experience of living in platform economies, negotiating with it, and searching to break the systemic impasse? Ever since the publication and wide circulation of an online journalistic article, “Delivery Workers, Trapped in the System” (外卖骑手，困在系统里) in September 2020, these questions have become centers of public and scholarly concern in China. In this article, Dr. Ping Sun, a leading scholar on digital labor and platform studies, offers her observations on this digital crisis. Just as the world is going through the acceleration of platformization during and after COVID-19, Dr. Sun’s words are both timely and prescient for and beyond China.

 

After a car accident some time ago, a rideshare driver took stacked orders to make up his deficit. In order to complete the orders in time, he took a shortcut which set off an alarm. The location alerts sent by the rideshare system triggered panic in his female passenger, which eventually led to her tragically jumping from the moving car. In the ensuing investigation report, one line stands out in particular: “From the investigation on its own, this is apparently a story of mutual destruction about two people living hard lives.”

What is disheartening in this story of mutual destruction is that there was no dispute, only silence. Both the driver and the passenger chose to trust the rideshare system instead of each other. Therefore, the guidance of the system replaced human communication and, ultimately, human trust. The problem is: when we get in a rideshare such as Didi, we have no interest in knowing who the driver is; just as when we order take-out, we have no clue how the food delivery man arrives at our door; or when we get a house cleaner, we have no idea where the auntie[1] comes from and where she is going.

Technological systems have trapped us all in a dilemma. Technology has lost its order and direction on its way to advancement, a technological “disorder” that, to a large extent, has become a condition of the “disorder of meanings” in modern societies. When humans are locked by automation technologies in relationships of specific settings and chances, and when they can do nothing but play the roles assigned to them, what comes after is not a longing for relation building, but repulsion.

According to political theorist Langdon Winner, the process of technological development is autonomous. It can break free from human control and become self-determining through “technological drift.” Unfortunately, with today’s platform economies, Winner’s statement is becoming reality. As digital platforms are developing at full speed, we seem to have lost our control over the pace of technological development. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are gradually “disembedding” our social lives, hijacking, alienating, and eroding the existences and lives of human beings.

The Loss of the Meaning of Labor

Karl Marx wrote that labor is a basic characteristic of human beings. However, in the context of platform economies, the meaning of labor is called into question. “Who would want to do this job if not for survival?” This sentiment came up repetitively from the platform workers my team interviewed.

Interestingly, none of these workers has real difficulty making ends meet, but almost everyone feels very poor. This kind of poverty is not really a form of economic poverty defined by the struggle for food, housing, or basic needs; it is a form of relational poverty, emotional poverty, and communication poverty. To put it differently, this is what anthropologist Biao Xiang calls the “poverty of meaning” (意义贫穷), a crisis in economic structure that alienates workers from the meaningfulness of their own labor.

We can hardly find joy in labor anymore. Perhaps we miss the feeling of fulfillment experienced by workers in the Socialist period of industrial mass production, who sweated but smiled. That sense of fulfillment and enthusiasm appears to have been replaced by a social perception of “no future” and what is commonly called “Sang culture” (丧文化), a societal mood of languishing and apathy contagious  among young people in China today.

Why labor has lost meaning is complex, but the reasons have a strong relationship to the stigmatization of platform labor, whose workers are constructed by social discourse as the “Other.” The “Other” here refers to not only the blue-collar workers working for digital platforms, such as couriers, food delivery workers, and porters for bike-sharing companies, but also to the programmers, coordinators, operators, managers, and designers in big corporations, Internet companies, and platform businesses. The logic of “othering” is simple: the current discourse on platform labor is constructed around “consumption” and “exhaustion.” This commercialized logic of platform development has transformed the entire society into a crucible, turning every individual into a piece of firewood thrown into the pot for burning and exhausting.

“Silky Service” and the “Cultivation of Laziness”

An important feature of the platform economy is its reorganization of social relations. This reorganization includes two levels: first, the identity of platform participants is redefined and divided into consumers and workers; second, the existing social networks of platform participants are expanded into new relationships and contracts that did not exist before. For example, on ride-hailing platforms, those who send and receive orders are divided into “passengers” and “drivers” with respective duties and responsibilities. Through the mediation of technology, “random encounters” between people may happen anytime and anywhere, but long-term relationships are harder to maintain.

At the same time, in such a multi-party chain relation, human relationships are unequal. Although everyone is a platform participant, “client orientation” is always the chief principle for platform development. Improving the clients’ experience and attitude about consumption has become a core factor for platforms to seize market share. The client is an important prerequisite for platforms to make profits: platform algorithm design and platform management are all built around the client, so meeting the needs of users has become the top priority for platforms. For this same reason, platforms demand that their workers provide impeccable “silky service” (丝滑服务).

When those who are often seen as “vulgar people” set foot in platform economies from sweatshop factories, construction sites and farmlands, what comes right away are an overwhelming number of detailed work requirements. For the first time in their lives, they have to learn how to manage their facial expressions and body language, how to communicate in proper Mandarin, how to “read the room,” and how to be soft to please customers. 

“(When I work for others) I never go to the bathroom. Nor do I drink any water. If I drink too much and go to the bathroom, my clients will be unhappy.” This is Mrs. Li’s secret to being a star cleaner, which is to endure. Sometimes she drinks nothing for eight hours straight, so that she can keep mopping the floor, doing the laundry, and cleaning the windows.

When technological systems favor one side over the other, an unequal relationship emerges. A systemic “disorder” becomes inevitable. The existence of “full-score service” and “on-call” has led to the “cultivation of laziness” (惰性养成) in the public. As a result, if a food delivery worker arrives a few minutes late, a client may get angry; if a package is delivered to the wrong place, the client may get irritated; if a cleaning lady forgets to clean a piece of furniture, she may receive a customer complaint.

Unreasonable “indulgence” has cultivated the customers’ laziness. In the long run, the effect may be negative. The cultivation and maintenance of social relations is a long-term process. If we lose our patience and trust, what comes after will be the other end of the systemic impasse—we may easily lose basic trust, amity, and tolerance among each other.

What lies behind these conflicts and discordances is a systemic problem of the model of platform economic development. The disorder of the rules of systems has led to frequent conflicts between individuals. We probably have heard this claim more than once: “The development of technology will clear up today’s worries in the end. Platform economies are no exception.” However, in the face of the big revolution Chinese platforms are going through today, I would rather be a conservative a little longer. Technological solutionism may sound quick, easy, and enticing. However, it is problematic to reduce complex social phenomena and ecosystems to simple, quantifiable processes. If we do so, we might only see the need to perfect the order of systems, but we will lose sight of the meaning of social relations.

The disorder of the system is a matter concerning data responsibility, social governance, labor dignity, and emotional ethics. It is a complex issue. When digital platforms come to today, there are too many problems to address. What is the most urgent for now might be a reflection of and improvement on the model of platform development.

Platformization: A Model in Question

The platform economy, to put it simply, is a new economic form supported by digital technologies, enabling multi-party transactions. It is made up of a series of data-driven, algorithm-based, and networked economic activities. Our lives are surrounded by platform economies: when we scroll on our cell phones, almost all the apps related to food, clothing, housing, and transportation can be considered “digital platforms.”

In their paper, legal scholar K. Sabeel Rahman and political scientist Kathleen Thelen suggest that an important feature of twenty-first-century platform capitalism is a paradigm shift of management from “control” to “connectivity.” Put differently, the business model of platform economies is no longer the old factory, Taylorist style of making money through controlling manpower, but a model that makes profits by connecting all parties. In this process, manpower comes and goes freely, but every person who enters the digital platform will be turned into data, and contribute to the profit of the platform. The existence and accumulation of platform big data lays the foundation for ”connectivity,” while the development of algorithms makes “connectivity” possible.

In my conversations with friends, one question that came up was why platform economies today could be so powerful, attractive, and destructive like the demon child Nezha.[2] The reason is simple: every platform extant today is a victor that survived multiple rounds of industry reshuffles, subsidy wars, price wars, and merger wars. These platforms carry a strong sense of crisis and a strong desire to survive. For them, survival is the top priority.

After all, digital platforms in China are going through serious “involution” (内卷), a process of incessant cut-throat competition that has not yielded proportional outputs for the participants. In the past decade, the cash-burning process of gathering funds, offering subsidies, seizing market share, and then raising the price has become the norm. In this survivalist process, consumers and workers have all become targets of platform competition.

Then, why are we so skeptical about today’s digital platforms?

In addition to the problems of commercialization and capitalization mentioned above, it is largely because platform development today has departed from its original vision. As a new form of production and labor model, the platform economy is characteristic of its ability to lead the new wave of technology. It is a “newborn” of the Internet industry, and a representative of technological innovation. To a large extent, it inherits our imaginations about Internet technologies: democratic participation, individual autonomy, equality, and progress.

In our mind, the platform economy should be similar to the Internet in its early days, full of openness and benevolent intentions—it is supposed to be an effective realm enabling peer-to-peer, permission-free innovation and open participation. In our imagination, everyone could join or quit a platform with no barriers, while sharing information, experiences, values, and ideas. It was supposed to be open and fair, with no suppression or mandates.

These ideals are beautiful, but the realities are chilling. 

Platform economies have forged ahead through the glory technology brings, huge investments, and a swarming labor force. With the logic of commercialization and privatization, they have plunged headlong into the ocean of capital without looking back. The principles of “equality” and “fairness” promised by the Internet have disappeared; individual, subaltern, and marginalized discourses are entangled with consumerist desires, being ignored, annihilated, and no longer present.

The last time I saw Ma Ting was in a small restaurant. In the summer of 2018, she told me shyly how she came from a small town and eventually settled in Beijing to do food delivery, because she thought she could make more money that way. A few months later, she had lost two electric motorcycles in three days and could not take it anymore. After she called the police, she squatted on a street corner, and cried. “I heard the GPS alert of my electric motorcycle (when it was gone), but I was delivering food on the twentieth floor.”

Such stories from the lower classes are often left unattended, but their discursive invisibility should be taken more seriously.

Our research team conducted a project on the Internet discursive power across different social classes in China over the past ten years. Our finding shows: From 2009 to 2019, there was significant stratification of discursive power among Chinese netizens on social media. 60% of the population account for only 1% of online expressions, whereas 6.3% of elites account for over 70% of online expressions. The lasting process of commercialization and capitalization has become a key approach for social elites to take over online discursive power, while decimating the discursive expressions of the lower class on the Internet.

As another challenge, artificial intelligence technologies today have not only replaced mass human labor, but also taken over much of humankind’s decision-making and discursive power. Technological abuse of power is becoming the norm in our society, not only in the settings of platform labor but also in daily life. For example, we ought to be more critical about why the autopilot system of Boeing aircraft is configured in a way that disallows human interventions.

Chinese society has rich textures of life, with vibrant forms of platforms growing there. If there is no effective way to amend the model and logic of platform development, the inverted pyramid structure of imbalanced development will expand to all aspects of social life. 

Is the Reconstruction of Meanings Possible?

The rise of platform economies is leading to another great shift in the Chinese labor market. In China’s Reform period [1990s-2000s], the phenomenal scenes of peasants migrating to factories are still in our recent memories. However, when it comes to today, “factories” are in the past, with the “gig economy” as the new future. The platform economy is producing a huge Siphon Effect, absorbing populations from traditional industries.

This is a colossal project of demographic “relocation.” According to “China’s Sharing Economy Development Report 2020,” the number of platform workers in China reached 78 million in 2019 and will hit 200 million within five years.

We are living in an era with a strong sense of “public commons.” Every day there are massive topics and problems coming to the surface of everyday life. However, in some public discussions we lack an attentiveness to “big questions.” The future direction and development model of platform economies is an example.. The specialization of technologies and labor division has divided platform systems into countless individualized, tiny “frames,” leading to hastily-fashioned responses to countless scenarios and problems when they come up. Time and space are compressed, meanings and relations are neglected, individual expressions are not validly heard, and the meaning of labor in the digital age is not effectively constructed by society. This is also where the loss of joy in labor is manifested.

In the past year, we have had big successive discussions about “work” and “labor.” A series of discussion topics has shown us the public’s engaged reflections on what decent work should look like. The rapid development of platform economies has rendered our theories and capacity for thinking outdated. We need more people to join in the reconstruction of the meaning of platform development, to think about some more sustainable forms of co-creating discourse and relationships, and to participate in the process of dialogue and reconstruction.

We need to establish a new form of digitized relationships, through which we need to consider the possibility of collaborative production, enhance the accessibility of technologies, and maintain long-term reciprocal relationships.

The platform economy is becoming a vehicle for the meanings of our lives. “Random encounters” are entering our lives as a form of normalized, everyday rule. This type of economy relies on a logic of “connectivity,” but under the current development of platforms, this form of “connectivity” excludes the establishment of meaningful relationships and the maintenance of decent labor. Consumers are prioritized, while workers are devalued. As a result, there are no trustworthy, sustainable, and respectable social relations created between the two ends of the platform.

We met a delivery worker in our fieldwork. Her name is Ma. Two years ago, her husband gambled online, and lost 1.5 million RMB. She went from being the owner of a hair salon to a delivery worker with nothing. Every day when she returned home, she would park her electric motorcycle one kilometer away from her neighborhood, take off her uniform, and then walk home. As she said, “I don’t want my neighbors to see and laugh at me.” One day, when Ma was waiting for an order on the street, she ran into a previous client of hers. She lowered her head, waiting to be ridiculed. The client spoke to her instead, “I didn’t expect that a boss like you would come to do delivery as well. In fact, I’m a rider, too, but I was embarrassed to let you know every time  I went to get my hair cut.”

There is a large number of low-barrier jobs in the current stage of platform labor. People in these jobs are struggling to identify themselves. In our fieldwork, we met many people like Ma, who were reluctant to reveal their jobs as couriers, delivery workers, or domestic workers. The model of platform development has reinforced the logic of treating digital labor as an underclass. How could the relationships established by algorithms and artificial intelligence move from “bias” to “justice”? This task will be an important precondition for the reconstruction of meanings and relationships.

The disorder of meanings is becoming the norm of our life. On one end of the disordered platform is the social system shared by all; on the other end are the micro-ecosystems of individual lives. The starting point for reconstructing meanings is to identify the ground of living together, on the basis of recognizing our mutual equality and equal right to share technological development.

Ping Sun is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Journalism and Communication, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Her research interests concern information and communications technology, social class, and platform media. Shiqi Lin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine.

 

Notes

[1] In China, food delivery workers and house cleaners are highly gendered professions:  90% of food delivery workers are male and 90% of house cleaners are female. This may have to do with Chinese societal expectations that see food delivery as masculinized labor and domestic services as feminized labor of care.This translation preserves the gendered language in the original text to highlight the gendered connotations of labor, yet it is crucial to interrogate this gendered framing and pay attention to the more marginalized workers who do not fit to these gender stereotypes.

[2] In Chinese legend, Nezha (哪吒) is a mischievous prodigy who was born to a military commander but perceived by his father as inauspicious. After killing the third son of the Dragon King, Nezha was pressured to take his own life to repay his debt and bring his town peace. Here, the author is referring  to the reincarnation of Nezha in a 2019 Chinese animated blockbuster, “Birth of the Demon Child Nezha.” The analogy between platform economies and Nezha points to the immense but disastrous social changes that could be created by platform economies.

 

Bibliography

Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Beacon Press.

Rahman, K. S., & Thelen, K. (2019). The rise of the platform business model and the transformation of twenty-first-century capitalism. Politics & Society, 47(2), 177-204.

State Information Center Sharing Economy Research Center. (2020). China’s sharing economy development report 2020. Beijing. Retrieved from http://www.sic.gov.cn/News/568/10429.htm

Sun, P., Zhao, G., Liu, Z., Li, X., & Zhao, Y. (2020). Toward discourse involution within China’s Internet: Class, voice, and social media. New Media & Society, 1461444820966753.

ten Oever, N. (2021). “This is not how we imagined it”: Technological affordances, economic drivers, and the Internet architecture imaginary. New Media & Society, 23(2), 344-362.

Winner, L. (1978). Autonomous technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought. MIT Press.

Xiang, B. (2021, February 3). Biao Xiang on 996 and alienation: the new urban poor are not economically poor, but poor in meanings [项飙谈996和异化：城市新穷人不是经济穷人，是意义贫困]. Youthology [青年志]. Retrieved from https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/I-Fbl6AYCZOXFSMcdky5gg

Posted on

Sigrid Schmalzer, Beholding Yuan Longping in the Light of Recent Chinese History

The death last month of renowned Chinese rice geneticist Yuan Longping offered an opportunity for US media to say something positive about China and science: the story of the humble but brilliant Chinese scientist whose invention of hybrid rice saved countless peasants from starvation has been a refreshing break from news of the escalating US-China conflict. Still, the outpouring of grief and gratitude in Chinese social media may be hard for people in the US to fathom: Yuan Longping undoubtedly enjoyed more fame than any living scientist in the US, a mark not only of his accomplishments but also of the status of scientists, and science itself, in recent Chinese history. 

And yet, Yuan Longping’s death has also generated some undercurrents of doubt and criticism not entirely masked by state efforts to clamp down on negative portrayals. These rumblings recall something of the public response to the awarding, in 2015, of China’s first Nobel Prize in science to the pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou for her malaria research. In both cases, the reasons for the ambivalence lie in the complex politics of science in China today, which in turn owe a great deal to unresolved tensions about the meaning of the Mao era—when both Yuan Longping’s and Tu Youyou’s research came to fruition.

In its obituary of Yuan Longping, the New York Times hewed closely to the narrative established in Yuan’s own memoir: his parents were teachers who valued education; he studied genetics despite political pressures to embrace Lysenkoism; he was inspired to pursue rice breeding after witnessing people dying of famine; he “plowed on with his research even as the Cultural Revolution threw China into deadly political infighting”; and his achievements should be considered alongside those of US scientist Norman Borlaug as two parts of the so-called “Green Revolution.” In the US, this is a relatively familiar term for the set of technologies developed during the mid-twentieth century that dramatically increased crop yields. In China, it is a rarely used term and more likely to call to mind the “green” of environmentalism. In actuality, given the specific history of the term it is a highly ironic designation for research that arose in Mao-era China.

In 1967, USAID director William Gaud introduced the concept of Green Revolution as an alternative to “red revolution.” By sharing agricultural technologies that raised production and improved livelihoods, the US hoped to dissuade Third World countries from pursuing political, especially communist, revolution. This was a quintessentially technocratic approach that Mao and his followers explicitly rejected: rather, they insisted that technological transformation must not be divorced from social and political change. The technology for which Yuan Longping is famous emerged during the Cultural Revolution, the “reddest” period of Chinese history, out of a research program stamped with key characteristics of Maoist science.

Agricultural scientists had long recognized the phenomenon known as hybrid vigor: when two breeds of plants or animals are hybridized, the first generation of offspring is typically more robust than either their parents or subsequent generations. The trick was to create a technology that would produce first-generation hybrids on a large scale every year, which was particularly challenging with a self-pollinating plant like rice. In a backwater college in rural Hunan, Yuan Longping worked to overcome these obstacles with a team of peasants studying to become agricultural technicians. Once the technology had been developed, the elaborate infrastructure of Mao-era agricultural research and extension came into play: young peasants from rice-growing regions throughout China travelled to Hainan Island where they received intensive training, and then returned to their villages to teach others and begin local seed production. Mass participation, cultivation of rural youth talent, local self-reliance—all were hallmarks of Maoist red-revolutionary science.

And yet, if it is ironic to associate Yuan Longping with USAID’s technocratic vision of Green Revolution, it is also (ironically) fitting. Just five years after the hybrid rice field experiments began showing promise, Deng Xiaoping launched a dramatic transformation of China’s political economy. The red-revolutionary values in which hybrid rice had been embedded fell to the side, replaced by the production and marketing (including international marketing) through the China National Seed Corporation. Instead of valorizing Mao’s red revolution and facilitating local self-reliance, the success of hybrid rice came to validate a technocratic vision very similar to that of the Green Revolution, and arguably helped achieve the Green Revolution’s goal of making the developing world safe for capitalism.

Yuan Longping’s story thus straddles contradictory historical periods and raises uncomfortable questions about the meaning of the past and the legitimacy of the present. Since Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power, the Cultural Revolution has been portrayed as a ten-year catastrophe for science. Celebrating Yuan’s research within this narrative requires emphasizing the ways Yuan supposedly bucked Maoist pressures and achieved success in spite of the radical politics of the Cultural Revolution—hence the repetition of slim anecdotes testifying to Yuan’s resistance to Lysenkoism, the quintessential example in post-socialist memory of “leftist error.” Yuan, like all scientists, certainly faced his share of political struggles, but his research was nonetheless a product of red-revolutionary science. Some of those values continue to resonate to this day, and a large part of Yuan’s popular appeal owes a great deal to the way he embodies the Maoist ideal of the scientist who is simultaneously a peasant—who is humble and does not fear getting his hands and feet dirty. Indeed, as his biographies and obituaries frequently highlight, Yuan actively identified as an “intellectual peasant” (有知识的农民) or a “muddy-legs” (泥腿子), and is now remembered fondly by the Mao-era term of respect “old peasant” (老农).

But celebrating an individual scientist on the basis of this earthy ideal produces a paradox, because it runs counter to the values of humility and collectivism. Mao-era articles on hybrid rice avoided mentioning Yuan’s own contributions, instead highlighting those of the peasant-technician Li Bihu or, more often, emphasizing the broader “mass hybrid breeding scientific experiment movement.” It was during Hua Guofeng’s brief administration (1976-78) that Yuan Longping himself began to be recognized: Yuan’s achievements in Hunan shone a welcome light on Chairman Hua himself, who had directed agriculture in Hunan during those years. Even so, Hua-era reports on the research continued to emphasize the priorities of mass participation and local self-reliance. In the very different climate of the reform era, the glorification of individual elite scientists became the new norm, and Yuan increasingly became the unambiguous hero of the story. And yet, Chinese online discussions today continue to probe the question of whether Yuan himself should be credited with the invention of hybrid rice, or whether that honor belongs to his peasant-assistants or even to a larger, collective effort.

The current politics of food in China also produce a somewhat thorny context for the celebration of Yuan Longping. The state celebrates Yuan for his role in establishing China’s food security, which strengthens China’s position geopolitically. But an increasingly powerful consumer class worries more about food safety, and Yuan’s association with biotechnology companies that develop GMOs is a mark against him for some—while those favoring GMOs have objected to Yuan’s expressed doubts about some GMOs. Meanwhile, the food sovereignty movement has called attention to the ways in which hybrid rice and GM technologies prevent farmers from saving seeds for next year’s crops: farmers are required to purchase seeds every year from the seed companies, eroding peasant income while threatening China’s diverse agricultural genetic heritage. Netizens can still read the renowned rural reformer Li Changping’s impassioned 2011 letter to Yuan Longping, which has been recirculated after Yuan’s death by proponents of organic agriculture. In the letter, Li decried what he called “death-without-progeny” seeds, denounced the “geneticists and seed-industry capitalists” who had created them in pursuit of “monopolistic profits,” and begged Yuan to “climb down from the speeding chariot of commerce” and “give back the peasants’ right to freely select their seeds.” Mao-era anti-capitalist politics are thus still very much with us and will continue to haunt the memory of Yuan Longping.

Finally, the meaning attributed to Yuan Longping’s life in 2021 cannot be disentangled from China’s position on the global stage. As Foreign Minstry spokesperson Zhao Lijian proclaimed, “Yuan Longping belongs not just to China, but also to the world.” Throughout the ruptures of recent history, the PRC state has sought to play a prominent role in global science and technology, and also to use science and technology to further its global position: from the Mao-era days of international solidarity when Chinese agronomists promoted anti-colonial self-reliance in Africa, to the early Deng Xiaoping era when the Chinese National Seed Corporation struck a deal with the US company Occidental Petroleum (exchanging hybrid rice for hybrid cotton), to the current Belt and Road Initiative which supports the extension of agricultural technologies to countries around the world. In the end, whether Yuan Longping’s research will promote self-reliance or dependency, cooperation or capitalism, sustainability or ecological degradation, will depend less on the technologies themselves than on the political and economic structures that govern them.

 

Sigrid Schmalzer is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she has written extensively on Yuan Longping in her 2016 book Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (U. of Chicago Press, 2016).

Posted on

Jeongmin Kim, What can we learn about anti-Asian racism and gender violence from the history of US militarism and overseas base workers?

On October 19th, 1951, 23-old Korean woman Lee Yong Soon landed in Seattle. [1] This Mrs. Blue Morgan, as she was known in America, was featured in the media as “the First Korean War bride.”[2] Sixty three years later, Life magazine revisited the story about her that it originally published in November 1951, and recalls it as “a wartime story that, at its heart, is less about warfare than about the simple, indomitable power of love.” Without telling us what Lee herself would say about her life after coming to the US, Lifecreates a seamless narrative that uses Lee as a symbolic figure of an American dream and successful romance. The fact that the Korean War was an ongoing hot war when she landed in the US served to emphasize America’s benevolence, not to remind American readers of violence committed by their own troops in the Korean peninsula. In the 2014 recollection of her story, there is no account of the struggles over racial and gender discrimination endured by generations of Asian immigrants, including Lee’s own. The erasures of Cold War projects of US military expansion and overseas occupation and their connection to Asian immigration in the United States are a crucial background for understanding the basis of ongoing contemporary anti-Asian violence and racism, especially against Asian women, in the US and globally.

Lee Yong Soon, as introduced in the newspapers, was a typist working on a US base in South Korea when she met her future husband. The particular pattern of migration via overseas bases exemplified by Lee’s story is a product of the post-WWII period. The War Bride Act of 1945 enabled soldiers who returned from their service abroad to invite their local partners to immigrate to the US through marriage. As the term clarifies, the Act was not a pro-immigration policy so much as the state’s recognition of its male citizens’ rights to bring back their female partners as their foreign “brides.”  The historical context of this Act was the global expansion of the US overseas bases over the course of WWII. In 1938, the US had 14 outposts abroad. By 1945, the number increased to more than 2,000 bases and over 30,000 military installations worldwide.

The expansion of overseas bases was a crucial element of US global domination during the decades of the Cold War. Yet, the base expansion did not go without interruption. By the late 1940s, many of the outposts the US had built or had taken over in the initial phase of the post-War period were closed down. It was only during the Korean War (1950- onwards) that the number of US overseas bases expanded by 40 percent again.[3] As David Vine points out, an important aspect that differentiates post-WWII bases from the ones in the earlier periods is their indefinite occupation of foreign territories. That is, in theory, the deployment of a base ought to be temporary. The troops would ultimately leave when their mission to “promote peace and security” in the region was completed. However, the vagueness of this mission during the Cold War and after has permitted the indefinite stationing of US troops around the globe to enforce various economic and strategic interests of the US state. Many places in Asia and the Pacific have experienced the re/growth of the bases as well as the militarization of the communities in proximity. These bases were from the beginning and have remained a major channel through which a gendered and racialized form of Asian migration has taken place.

US overseas bases are extraterritorial zones that impose international borders within the host country. They are akin to embassies in that regard. The arrival of a base creates unequal labor, social, and gender relations between soldiers, their dependents and local populations. On one hand, a hard border separates the military facility from civilian zones and yet the permeability of the border depends on one’s status, creating a multi-layered hierarchy between the occupying force, their families, and local civilians. On the other hand, a base officially belongs to the US military despite its physical location in a foreign territory. As a military installation in an area remote from the US, a base operates as a comprehensive living complex with facilities sufficient to meet all the everyday needs of its residents. Commissaries and on-base exchanges, for example, provide food items and other daily necessities, and the items are available at a subsidized rate as part of benefits that compensate soldiers’ salary, exclusive to the troop members and their dependents. Aside from subsidies from the occupying government, concessions from the host government, importation of food and other necessities, and the underappreciated use of natural resources and local labor, base economies are self-sufficient.

At the core of the US military’s dependency on the local population is the recruitment of women’s and gendered labor as support staff. The jobs offered to local women were and remain largely service or unskilled labor and perpetuate the extant local gendered division of labor. For example, on base, the military hired local women as typists, janitors, house girls, cashiers, laundry ladies, and singers. Female labor was undervalued, with women paid less than men even for the same jobs. Towns formed around the bases containing a cluster of local restaurants, clubs, bars, and various other services catering to (mostly male) troops. These base towns are extensions of the bases in the sense that their economies are contingent upon the presence of the foreign military camp. One crucial feature of the extended base is the sexual economy, namely military prostitution. With the military’s hands-off attitude toward GIs’ involvement in such practices, a base both encourages gendered and racialized relationships between the occupying force and local civilians and also excludes female soldiers (and male soldiers’ accompanying female partners) from being full members of the male-dominant institution. To be clear, not all of the intimate relationship developed on base or in base towns are transactional sexual relations. Nor are all military brides from camptowns. But, no matter how individual relationships started, the accessibility of the sexual market has contributed to the perception of Asian women as sexually available and also submissive to US servicemen. Women from Korea and other parts of Asia have immigrated to the US and made lives in this country as “military brides” in this context.

Many of these brides have filed for divorce. Of the many Korean women who married American soldiers, some named domestic violence and financial hardship as reasons for divorce. Others suffered racism in both visible and invisible forms, with social biases that easily associate military brides with camptowns and thus marketized sex and language barriers (and their husbands’ lack of interest in learning Korean) leading to feelings of isolation. . Many of these women continued working after they moved to the US. The economic and symbolic power that their GI partners had in the base country was temporary and situational, and, once back in the United States, their husbands’ income was often not enough to get by. Many women found themselves in a situation where their education and previous work experience were not recognized and they had to take mainly service and menial jobs unrelated to their talents and training to earn an income.

For many Korean women, one great incentive to marry a US soldier was “Adikal,” the local name for a dependent “ID card,” which would give them commissary and exchange privileges. With legitimate access to the base, they could shop at on-base exchanges and sell the goods off-base to ‘PX Ladies,’ intermediaries who would resell the items on Korean black markets. This side job was a main income source for many women. For them, marriage was a form of employment. In the base towns in 1960s-70s South Korea, it was not an uncommon practice that women married their GI patrons before the soldiers left for another base area (e.g, Vietnam), so that they could use PX privileges as a legitimate dependent while their “husbands” were gone. These women often never immigrated to the US. GIs were active participants in the marriage-PX contract in exchange for caring, sexual, and emotional labor. This exchange was usually activated when soldiers on leave would visit their local partners.  Even if they never moved to the US, women’s intimate labor as base wives was crucial to sustaining US overseas military operations and became entrenched as a symbolic “fact” of Asian women’s submission to the US military might.

The unequal labor and social relations created on these overseas bases traveled across the Pacific as the GIs returned home with their Asian brides. It is true that through marriage and migration, the women gained a certain degree of mobility, yet they were also dogged by expectations that they fulfill a projected role of Asian women as obedient servants to imperialist masculinity. As Asian military spouses in America, they were/are expected to perform the same roles that they had in the base context. These features of US overseas military expansion have helped produce and embed stereotypes of Asian women – and especially of first-generation immigrants from the Asia-Pacific region.

We can recall the targeted murder of Asian women in massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia on March 16, 2021, and we can think about the specific ideas of Asian woman as docile and hard-working yet sexually consumable that have pushed groups of these women into jobs and social positions that meet these discriminatory expectations and ultimately that can subject them to racialized and gendered violence. To address these injustices requires attention to the manifestations of prejudice against Asian women as well as attention to the ways in which these domestic ideas are shaped and perpetuated by the US military activities abroad.

[1] A portion of this essay was originally published as “When A Base Leaves: Seeing Military Withdrawal from Local Labor Perspectives,” a Commentary for Critical Asian Studies, on March 1, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/UAPM8979. I thank Critical Asian Studies for permission to reuse it.

[2] “Korean War Bride,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagles, 19 Oct 1951.

[3] In 1947, the US had 1,139 overseas base sites of which 446 sites were located in Asia/Pacific. The number reduced to 582 by 1949 and again increased to 815 by 1953. The number continued to rise until the Vietnam War, and by 1967, it reached 1,014 again. See James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990), 33.

Posted on

Indrė Balčaitė and Khine, The Parallels of Two Crises: Stifled Revolutions in Myanmar and Belarus

Presenting the crisis in Myanmar (formerly Burma) following the military coup of February 1, 2021, as unique feeds the media’s hunger for sensational stories. Yet focusing on individual cases blinds us to global, regional, and transnational patterns. The global background of the Myanmar coup d’état is democratic decline. Regionally, the online democratic solidarity movement called the Milk Tea Alliance uniting the netizens of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Myanmar points to the common struggles to exercise democratic rights in China’s neighbourhood.[1] However, the national contexts with which the situation in Myanmar is compared usually do not stretch beyond Asia.[2]

Few Burmese people are familiar with Eastern Europe, yet some fascinating parallels can be drawn between the Spring Revolution ongoing in Myanmar and the continuing pro-democracy protests in Belarus[3]. The latter captured the global media’s attention in 2020, after Alyaksandr Lukashenka[4], the country’s long-serving president, was declared once again winner of the August election. Vilnius – the capital of neighbouring Lithuania – has sheltered Belarusian opposition members for years. In a parallel use of neighbouring countries as refuge for opposition, Mae Sot and Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand had been hubs of Burmese exile activity over decades of Burmese military regimes after 1962. Neighbours of both countries were resigned to the lack of political change – until the nominally civilian government started reforms in Myanmar in 2011 and Belarusians poured out on the streets in 2020.

To help bridge the analytical gap between these two regions facing a common challenge, we talked to participants of recent protests in Myanmar and Belarus. In late March, Khine, a Bamar Buddhist who witnessed the Spring Revolution in Yangon, interviewed Nhkum Nan Nan (pseudonym), a young Kachin Christian protest participant. Around the same time, Indrė Balčaitė, a Lithuanian originally from Vilnius, obtained interviews with Belarusian political activists Jauhien Hladki, still based in Minsk, and Volha Pavuk from the Homel region, who fled to Lithuania late last year. Below we discuss the Burmese and Belarusian uprisings according to the themes emerging from those interviews and from Khine’s own experience: an allegedly or certainly rigged election, a (no longer) “pure” leader, a leaderless resistance movement followed by a ruthless crackdown, and what to expect from outside actors.

Protests in Yangon (credit Khine)

An (allegedly) rigged election

Even in this small little district [Uzda, 20-25,000 voters], Lukashenka did not win in the first round. […] it was completely falsified.
Jauhien, activist who observed the elections in Uzda, Belarus and collected evidence of electoral fraud

The first parallel between Belarus and Myanmar is the theme of a stolen important election, yet its respective role differs immensely in the two political contexts. While it is a focal point of the popular protests demanding change in authoritarian Belarus, in Myanmar the notion of a stolen election represents a reactionary narrative that hardly anyone but the military takes seriously. In Belarus, the rigged 9th August 2020 presidential election led to a three-month uprising across the country. In Myanmar, the alleged irregularities in the November 2020 general election provided the pretext for the military takeover before the newly elected Parliament convened.

The decade of relative political openness under nominally civilian governments in Myanmar (2011-2021) became possible only at the mercy of the army. The National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory in the 2015 election. Given the power sharing with the military, however, her government failed to end ethnic conflict and discrimination or to prevent the military’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya in 2017 in an ethnically and religiously diverse country dominated by Bamar Buddhists. Last year’s elections delivered a decisive NLD win again, but the Rohingya were disenfranchised and voting was arbitrarily cancelled in multiple constituencies. The military and its proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, unsuccessfully demanded a recount, although it would not have changed the overall outcome.

More homogenous Belarus[5] has been known as the “last dictatorship in Europe.” Regular elections since 1994 – most neither free nor fair – legitimised Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s long presidency. He started as a young popular leader but stayed on, thanks to a (purposefully) fragmented opposition, rigged results, and subsidies from Russia. Occasional protests were dispersed. In 2020, however, an economic downturn exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the candidacy of a single opposition contender, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya,[6] mobilised even previously apathetic voters. When the official results claimed she had won only 10% of the votes, people poured out onto the streets. According to a survey of Belarusian Internet users conducted in January 2021, 61% of respondents believed the official election results were fraudulent.

A (no longer) “pure” leader

I believe that despite her unexpected role, Svetlana [Tsikhanouskaya] does an excellent job [in] the role of a national leader and a symbol of life without dictatorship.
Volha, Belarusian activist now in exile in Lithuania

When you see a politician, you know they’re fighting for power, but she is fighting for something else, which is greatly admirable. And therefore I have no expectations of her. […] she is more like a symbolic leader, she is not like a real centre of the protests.
Jauhien, Belarusian activist, about Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya

She didn’t say arrogant words like “I’m the leader”
She didn’t say words like “I know everything. I can do everything. You only do what I say”
She didn’t say she will be the only one who will rule the country
Part of an anonymous poem about Aung San Suu Kyi shared in the aftermath of the coup, translated by Khine

We don’t want to work with Aung San Suu Kyi. We feel paralyzed, we don’t feel like we want to work with her anymore. The way she treated ethnic groups. The way she ignored us. We were quite badly hurt.
Nhkum Nan Nan, Kachin protester in Yangon, Myanmar

Another common theme is a female leader standing in for a male relative and appealing to national unity. This phenomenon has been studied in the case of the South and Southeast Asia’s elite political dynasties that produced Sri Lanka’s and Pakistan’s prime ministers Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Benazir Bhutto, amongst others. They came to power not because of women’s emancipation but because each was the daughter or the wife of a prominent male politician who had been assassinated (or imprisoned). Their gender and lack of previous experience in politics allowed them to position themselves as incorruptible in military- and male-dominated regimes[7]. Both Myanmar’s former State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and the Belarusian president-elect in exile Tsikhanouskaya were raising families before entering politics in 1988 and 2020 respectively, which helped them to distance themselves from partisan interests associated with authoritarian regimes.

Killed before he could become the first prime minister of independent Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father Aung San turned into a symbol of a country that could have been. The student leaders thus asked his daughter to head their movement – the NLD. The 1988 uprising against military rule was brutally suppressed and Aung San Suu Kyi spent fifteen years under house arrest before finally ascending to power – and has been confined again since the February military coup. Now seventy-five years old, the NLD leader remains a popular symbol of defiance in the face of  dictatorship but her time in office alienated ethnic minorities. As they are not content to simply return to the pre-coup “Bamar democracy,” the National Unity Government of Myanmar is promising federalism but no specific reforms.

Tsikhanouskaya stood in for more prominent male opposition contenders – Viktar Babaryka, Valery Tsapkala, and Siarhei Tsikhanouski – who were not allowed to register. With video blogger Tsikhanouski imprisoned on politically motivated charges already in May 2020, his wife Sviatlana registered instead and led huge opposition rallies where she would state: “I don’t need power, but my husband is behind bars.” Similarly to her counterpart in Myanmar, Tsikhanouskaya’s political agenda has been vague, promising to organise free and democratic presidential elections. The fact that she was able to register shows that the regime did not initially consider her a threat. Soon after the election, however, she had to flee to Lithuania.

A leaderless protest movement and a ruthless crackdown

[…] there is no centre, there is no so-to-speak conventional leader. The field is open to anyone who is willing to take initiative and take a charge and offer it to other people, so it’s [a] really really interesting grassroots, bottom-up kind of initiative.
Jauhien

We are all self-governing […]
Within 24 hours my neighbourhood set up leaders and patrols […]
We also stopped paying taxes 
So grocery stores like the convenience stores and restaurants no longer charge you for tax
Khine’s messages to Indrė from Yangon, 14-15th February 2021

Both protest movements have been formidable, yet leaderless. In August-October 2020, when mass rallies and strike actions even at government-owned factories gripped the country, Belarus seemed to be on the verge of turning the tide. Jauhien, who joined the protests in Minsk, described the time as “really fantastic and I’d never felt so good in my life,” comparing the atmosphere to that of a rock festival. With Tsikhanouskaya providing the symbolic leadership, it was an open grassroots movement. Jauhien talked “of taking back your house, your street, your block,” refusing to pay taxes and utility bills or buying from government-aligned businesses. The role of social media, especially Telegram, was crucial for self-organising. In Volha’s words, the protests in her native town of Akciabrski “were supported by entrepreneurs, businessmen, young parents, workers of the local ambulance station, representatives of religious denominations, high school students and [university] students, drivers and retirees.” The survey of Internet users suggests that 45% of urban Belarusians remained more passive “observers” nevertheless.

In February 2021, the protests in Myanmar were also colourful and cheerful, even cheeky. Burmese people flooded the streets across the country in costumes, with posters and ever-changing performance initiatives.[8] Like in Belarus, there were day-time mass demonstrations, noisemaking from homes in the evenings, and an extremely vibrant social media scene, with Facebook still ruling supreme. Protesters demanded that China stop all cooperation with the junta. Shoppers boycotted military-owned businesses. A notable civil disobedience movement developed, with employees refusing to work under the military government. However, multiple defections from the army and police have not been  sufficient to flip the balance of power. Most soldiers still see the military as the only institution able to bring order and consider the protestors criminals.

With movements unable to sway the mainstays of power in their respective countries, brutal crackdowns followed in both countries[9]. The authorities first tried to identify and arrest the ‘leaders’ of protests and social media activists and used Internet shutdowns to prevent mass demonstrations. Later they would mete out indiscriminate violence to intimidate the population: not just with water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets but also sound grenades, street shootings, arbitrary raids and arrests, prosecutions, and physical torture and sexual violence in detention. 

Expectations from the international community

The non-recognition of the elections in Belarus as fair and transparent, the non-recognition of Lukashenko as the President of Belarus helped a lot. The sanctions make Belarus an inconvenient and expensive ally for Russia. 
Volha

I don’t expect anything. I mean apart from basic decency, let’s say police were using Polish bullets, like Polish rubber bullets – stop selling them, they’ve been using Czech flash grenades – stop selling them, they’re using Canadian water cannons – stop selling them. They are using the French and German light armour for riot police… 
Jauhien

If the UN needs more bodies to take action, shoot me!
A poster held by a Myanmar protester urging a humanitarian intervention in Myanmar

Some people expect so much. For me, I don’t want them to expect so much. Why? Because receiving help from the international community is a far-fetched goal. I think we need to focus internally. We have to work ourselves.
Nhkum Nan Nan

Pro-democracy movements in both countries have appealed for international support, but expectations differ wildly. Myanmar’s deep ethnic fault lines come into play. The Rohingya, Kachin, Karen and other ethnic minorities who have previous experience of the brutality of the Myanmar military are more realistic, as the above quote shows. Meanwhile, many protesters and even the spokesperson for the ousted civilian government Dr. Sasa have demanded “R2P” (responsibility to protect) – a humanitarian intervention by the United Nations. It is an unrealistic (and risky) demand under any circumstances, let alone in a divided Security Council amidst a pandemic. Such wishful thinking suggests that, as with the situation under the earlier spell of military rule, Burmese people and the National Unity Government do not see a clear way out of  this crisis that has turned into a bloodbath[10].

In contrast, Belarusian activists hardened by decades under Lukashenka’s rule were articulate in their demands rather than expecting a foreign saviour. They spoke of non-recognition of the election results, sanctions that make doing business with the Belarusian regime and individuals involved difficult, and embargoes on the imports of gear used to commit human rights violations. They were appreciative of the governments of neighbouring countries championing their cause in the European Union and offering asylum to people fleeing persecution.

***

Citizens worldwide fight for democratic rights with little awareness of similar struggles beyond their region. Seeing protest movements and crackdowns as part of a broader global trend removes the impression that they are isolated and inconsequential flashes of human agency. Instead of being sensationalised or normalised, these stories need to be placed in a historical and transnational perspective and used for learning and building connections.

A superficial comparison revealed important differences: the role of the rigged election narrative, of the arrested/exiled leader, the societal cleavages that contributed to both revolutions being stifled, the proportions of the crackdown as well as the specificity of demands made of foreign actors. Yet both countries were electoral regimes with limited freedoms before the current crises mobilised previously divided populations. The similarities of symbolic leadership, a powerful grassroots movement against dictatorship, and the willingness to build a new kind of society are striking. Despite the meddling of more powerful neighbours and deep economic turmoil resulting from the political crisis and the pandemic, there is no going back to “Bamar democracy”  or Lukashenka’s “electoral democracy.”

Khine (pseudonym to protect the author’s identity given the deteriorated situation in Myanmar) is a PhD candidate at the University of London.

Indrė Balčaitė is an independent researcher based in London. Her PhD at SOAS University of London focused on ethnicity and labour migration from Myanmar to Thailand.

The authors thank Jauhien Hladki, Volha Pavuk and Nhkum Nan Nan for sharing their experiences, Vadzim Vileita for help in sourcing Belarusian interviewees and Daw Sandar Lwin for help with transcribing.

Notes

[1] Parallels between the praetorian regimes and challenges for democratic consolidation in Thailand and Myanmar are particularly poignant.

[2] E.g. Syria or Afghanistan are mentioned in discussions of dangers of an international intervention that Burmese protesters have been demanding.

[3] Also compared to those in Russia and Ukraine but not beyond.

[4] Also spelt Alexander Lukashenko.

[5] The main cleavage in Belarus has been the linguistic division between speakers of Russian (the majority) and Belarusian, both official languages.

[6] Alternative spelling Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

[7] We thank Gustaaf Houtman for this point. See also Ben Anderson interviewed by Ben Abel on [email protected], 12 July 1996. Cited in Angus McIntyre, 2000, “Megawati Sukarnoputri: From president’s daughter to vice president”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 32:1-2, p. 105.

[8] Notably women were very active protesters in both countries, spotlighting the misogyny of the army in Myanmar and of Lukashenka’s regime in Belarus

[9] As of 4th May 2021, the death toll in Belarus was 8 and 769 in Myanmar.

[10] For a description of fantasies of a US invasion in the aftermath of Nargis, see Emma Larkin, 2010. Everything Is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma. New York: Penguin Press, p. 46.

Posted on

Carlos Sardiña Galache, The all-out war of the Burmese military against its own people

The coup staged by the Burmese military on February 1, 2021 is plunging the country into an all-out war waged by the armed forces against virtually the whole of the population, as a massive civil disobedience movement is preventing the generals from taking full control of the state. In this lopsided war, the junta led by the Commander in Chief, Min Aung Hlaing, is using all the instruments of violence at its disposal with maniac relish. Soldiers are shooting unarmed civilians–more than 500 killed so far, including children as young as five; they are mercilessly beating up protesters and torturing jailed dissidents to death in a rampage of blind brutality designed to terrorize the entire nation into total submission.

Such brutality can be seen as the desperation of a cornered beast unleashing its fury in all directions.  The need for this violence to enable the Tatmadaw (as the Burmese military is known) to stay in power betrays a lack of popular legitimacy that the violence is doing nothing to remedy. Quite to the contrary. Whatever the outcome of the confrontation, the army is more hated now than ever, and such hatred will endure for years to come. This ends the brief and rare moment in which the army enjoyed popular support for its genocidal “clearance operations” in 2016 and 2017against the Rohingya, a beleaguered Muslim minority indigenous to the western state of Arakan. Because many Burmese despise the Rohingya as a demographic threat and wrongly regard them as “illegal immigrants” from what is now Bangladesh, many Burmese had approved of the military’s actions against them.

With the elected leader of Burma (officially known as Myanmar),[1] Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest and isolated from the world, and with most prominent politicians in her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), arrested or on the run, large swathes of the population quickly decided to take matters into their own hands. Shortly after the coup, Burmese citizens from all walks of life launched a spontaneous and peaceful civil disobedience movement that has been surprisingly resilient in spite of, or perhaps due to, its lack of a centralized leadership. Doctors and nurses, civil servants, bank employees, garment factory workers, students, dock workers and many others have brought the economy to a standstill for several weeks, taking to the streets almost daily, and managing to make the country ungovernable for the State Administration Council (SAC) led by military commander Min Aung Hlaing.

Meanwhile, a group of lawmakers elected in the November 2020 elections has created a civilian government, the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), which is trying to gain international support while also negotiating a common front with the ethnic armed organizations that had been fighting the central state for decades, demanding autonomy for their regions in the borderlands of the country. These lawmakers escaped the capital at the coup and are now in an undisclosed location.  There are already talks to form a unified “federal army” to fight the Tatmadaw. Such a unified force would be extremely difficult to assemble, given the deep distrust among some of those armed groups, but many of them have expressed their solidarity with the civil disobedience movement, and some have renewed their attacks against the military.

In short, the takeover has united in unprecedented fashion a country deeply divided along ethnic, religious, and class lines. The Tatmadaw has always portrayed itself as the sole guarantor of national unity and the coup is paradoxically proving the point in an unintended way: with few exceptions, the whole country seems to be united against it.

AN ESCALATING CONFRONTATION

The takeover seems to go against the Tatmadaw’s own interests and the system that worked well for them since 2011, when the junta that ruled Burma since 1988 decided to embark on a transition to a “discipline-flourishing democracy,” whose terms were dictated by the generals with no input from the old pro-democracy camp. The Constitution drafted by the military gives the generals control over the three key security ministers—defence, home affairs and border affairs—as well as one quarter of all seats in Parliament, guaranteeing the military a central role in politics and freedom from civilian oversight.

The coup followed weeks of allegations, still unsubstantiated, of widespread electoral fraud, after the resounding victory of the NLD in the November 2020 election. These allegations were first made from Tatmadaw’s losing proxy party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), and then from the military itself. The Union Election Commission (UEC), appointed by the NLD government, rejected these allegations and eventually Commander in Chief Min Aung Hlaing decided to seize power hours before the parliament was due to convene and vote for the newly-elected government.

Meanwhile, ongoing developments in the war between the Tatmadaw and the Arakan Army (AA), a guerrilla faction fighting for autonomy for the Rakhine, the mostly Buddhist ethnic group dominant in the state of Arakan, also contributed to deepening tensions between the NLD and the military. Since late 2018, the war in Arakan had turned into the most violent conflict in the country and, a few weeks before the 2020 elections, the UEC decided to cancel the polls in most of the state for alleged security reasons. But shortly after the elections in November, conversations between the Tatmadaw and the AA resulted in an informal cease-fire, and the AA issued a statement calling for new elections in the whole of the state, an idea that the Tatmadaw supported. The NLD has little support in Arakan and was likely to lose to the local Arakan National Party (ANP), which is stronger than the NLD in the state. The civilian government ignored the demands of the AA and the Burmese military to hold elections in the Arakan, which undoubtedly further infuriated the Tatmadaw generals.

The military appointed some ANP politicians as members of the new military regime in Arakan, where the civil disobedience movement has not taken hold. This makes Arakan the only region in the country with no significant protest against the new regime, with the exception of some towns in the south of the state, where Rakhine nationalism is weaker and thus opposition to the junta is stronger. Meanwhile, the military removed the AA designation as a terrorist organization in March 2021. The armed group  remained largely silent after the coup, but it has recently announced its intention to join forces with other militias to fight the Tatmadaw. Nevertheless, the ANP continues its support for the military junta, making Arakan the only state where the divide-and-rule political tactics of the Tatmadaw seem to have succeeded to date.

Whatever the ultimate reasons for the coup (and given the opaqueness of the Tatmadaw leadership we may never know for sure), it doesn’t seem to have been very carefully planned. This is testified to by the defection of many diplomats, most dramatically the Burmese representative at the UN; in addition, the huge popular backlash against the coup appears to have caught the junta by surprise. The fact that the military didn’t manufacture a situation of instability strong enough to convince at least some sections of the population that a military takeover was necessary (as happened in Thailand prior to the coup in 2014, which came after months of street protests and political turmoil), demonstrates how ill-planned the action was.

Rather than the result of a conspiracy long in the making, the coup seems to be the Tatmadaw’s ‘solution’ to what probably was at first a manageable confrontation between the NLD and the generals that escalated as the latter became increasingly intolerant of the civilian government’s assertiveness while the NLD decided to defend to the last its electoral victory. Now, the claim made by Min Aung Hlaing and his henchmen that the takeover was constitutional and their promise to hold elections within one year both sound increasingly hollow. The coup means the effective dismantling of the 2008 Constitution.

AUNG SAN SUU KYI’S MISCALCULATIONS

The confrontation over the election results was the first time that Suu Kyi and her party openly stood up to the military since the beginning of the transition. The only precedent was perhaps the creation, after the NLD victory in the 2015 elections, of the position of “state counselor” for her, in order to circumvent the constitutional clause barring her from the presidency as the mother of two foreign nationals. But it’s very likely that the generals allowed her to get away with an arguably unconstitutional position that put her “above the President,” given that she had shown herself to be compliant and willing to collaborate with them.

Throughout most of the transition, Aung San Suu Kyi’s main, and perhaps unwitting, role was to provide legitimacy to the generals’ “discipline-flourishing democracy.” Her explicit objective was to change the Constitution to put the military under civilian control, but that was an almost impossible task under the rules she implicitly had accepted, given that any amendment requires at first the votes of more than 75% of seats in Parliament. The presence of soldiers occupying 25% of the seats makes such an amendment all but impossible without the assent of the military.

Throughout the transition she has behaved more often as a partner of the military than as a political rival; she has partnered with them in the name of “national reconciliation,” meaning a pact between the military and the old pro-democracy elite of which she is the figurehead. Such partnership may have been due at times to strategic calculations and to the fear of confrontation with the men holding the guns, but at many other times the NLD has shown itself to be more aligned ideologically with them than was apparent before. This was never more clear than when Suu Kyi decided to lead Burma’s self-defense two years ago at the International Court of Justice against the accusation of genocide brought because of the brutal operations of the Tatmadaw against the Rohingya in 2016-17.

The Tatmadaw and the NLD share indistinguishable racialist ideas on national identity, according to which only the members of the so-called “national races” are to be regarded as bona fide members of the Burmese nation. This most tragically excludes the Rohingya through a mendacious official historiography. The NLD government has also shown little sensitivity to the grievances of other ethnic minorities. Its handling of the peace process with the ethnic armed organizations has been an abject failure, perhaps unavoidably given that the military was never under civilian control, but compounded by the rejection of all political concessions to the minorities.

Meanwhile, Suu Kyi has proven to be almost as authoritarian and distrustful of people’s involvement in politics, beyond voting for her, as the generals; this is shown in her dismissal of mass protests and her disregard for the lively Burmese civil society. Participatory politics are simply too unpredictable and risky for her strategy of rapprochement with the military. Also, Suu Kyi shares with the generals a similar neoliberal project, which the previous junta had tried to launch in the 1990s, but that couldn’t take off in the context of the international isolation imposed upon Burma at that time. The Suu Kyi government has not made any attempt to implement any kind of redistributive policy to address the country’s huge economic inequalities. Instead she has wooed the ‘cronies’, a few unscrupulous businessmen who made enormous fortunes during the dictatorship through their contacts with the junta,  admonishing them to “work for others in the future” without touching their own material interests.

THE ‘FATHER’ OF THE TATMADAW

The Suu Kyi/military rapprochement seems to have been based on the assumption that the Tatmadaw was somehow “redeemable.” Suu Kyi has often expressed her “fondness” for what she likes to describe as the military of her father, Aung San, the hero of Burmese independence, who created the military to fight British colonial power and who was killed by political rivals in 1947. But that is a gross misconception. Aung San indeed founded the military, but today there remain few traces of the anti-colonial force he assembled or of his vision of a Tatmadaw subordinated to a civilian government. The Tatmadaw, in its present form, has other parents, whatever use it may make at times of the figure of Aung San for propaganda purposes.

The main architect of the Burmese Tatmadaw was General Ne Win, Army Chief since 1949, and the man who led the country’s first two coups d’état. His second coup, staged in 1962, put an end to Burma’s experiment with democracy and inaugurated twenty-six years of dictatorship under the rubric of the “Burmese way to Socialism.” Even before taking power, Ne Win began to build the Tatmadaw as an autonomous force, a state within the state that took shape in a context of external threats—the infiltration in the early 1950s of Kuomintang troops from China, after their defeat by Mao Zedong’s troops in the Chinese civil war —and, more crucially, permanent civil war—against the insurgent Communist Party of Burma, which wouldn’t disappear until 1989, and several ethnic guerrillas such as the Karen National Union, the Kachin Independence Army, to name just two that remain active to this day. Most of those ethnic minorities had never been under the direct authority of the central Burmese state for long before the British unified Burma; they had little reason to feel they were part of a common national project basically imposed by the Bamar majority after British colonialism was defeated.

These protracted wars against internal political enemies and minorities turned the Tatmadaw into an occupation force in the rugged borderlands of the country, where it made use of brutal counter-insurgency tactics that made little distinction between enemy combatants and civilians. Similar tactics occasionally would be deployed in the urban centers whenever Bamars rebelled against military rule, as in 1988, when a popular uprising put an end to Ne Win’s rule only to be replaced by the military junta that drafted the current constitution.

Ne Win not only sought to subdue the ethnic minorities to a Bamar-centric nation-building project, he also tried to get rid of putative foreigners, such as either the descendants of Indians who migrated to Burma during the colonial period, or the Rohingya. He also had a deep distrust of democracy that stemmed from an utter contempt towards the Bamar majority itself, to which he belonged but which he regarded as too immature to rule itself. Thus, he instilled a sense of mission in the Tatmadaw as the only institution capable of ruling the country and keeping it together.

Ultimately, despite his claims of working “to give back Burma to the Burmese,” what Ne Win accomplished was to give it solely to the Military. Already before his first coup, he began to make the Tatmadaw financially self-sufficient, establishing autonomous companies that are the precedents for the gigantic conglomerates that now dominate the country’s economy. Ne Win and his heirs turned the military into a warrior caste, in many respects isolated from the rest of the population. Officers enjoy privileges beyond the reach of most Burmese and live in a world largely cut-off from Burmese society at large; they and their families have their residencies in isolated compounds, attend their own schools, are treated in their own hospitals, and socialize almost exclusively with each other.

After Ne Win’s downfall in 1988, the military’s esprit de corps survived basically unadulterated, replacing the socialist leanings of Ne Win’s regime with a neatly capitalist outlook. Corruption and economic plundering reached never before seen heights after the end of his rule.

The Tatmadaw claims as one of its missions the “protection of the people,” and there is some twisted truth in that: it could aptly be described as a protection racket, and as is often the case with such organizations, Burmese people have to pay primarily to avoid the violence of the protection racket itself.

The caste mentality and social isolation go a long way towards explaining the brutality of the Tatmadaw against its own people. It also serves to explain why defections so far are limited to a few low- and mid-ranking Police and Army officersand why no one in the higher echelons of the military is breaking ranks with Ming Aung Hlaing. This was always a distant possibility that is becoming ever more distant by the day, as more officers share a common responsibility in mounting crimes against the population.

PROSPECTS FOR A NEW BURMA

The coup and the repression have fully revealed the utter futility of both Aung San Suu Kyi’s attempts at “national reconciliation” and the policies of engagement with the generals carried out by many Western countries after the beginning of the transition. But the Rohingya and many members of other minorities like the Kachin already knew from recent memory what she was refusing to see: the Burmese military is an unredeemable criminal organization.

Burmese are suffering now a repression in cities of central Burma that surpasses that of the “saffron revolution” in 2007 or even the bloodbath with which the Tatmadaw reasserted its power in 1988. In this context, many Burmese are doing some serious soul-searching and expressing their solidarity with minorities who have continuously suffered such abuses for decades. A new interethnic alliance is emerging. This solidarity is even reaching the Rohingya, with some Burmese expressing regrets for not condemning the recent crimes against the Rohingya and representatives of the CRPH reaching out to Rohingya leaders.

These expressions of support for the most widely despised minority in Burma might have been unthinkable only a few months ago, and they are encouraging. But it is difficult to assess how widespread they are or to what extent the CRPH is sincere or merely using an international cause célèbre to garner support abroad. Also, most contrite voices put all the blame for the plight of the Rohingya on the Tatmadaw, but racism against Rohingya infects even peoples who have staunchly opposed military rule for decades, such as the NLD leaders. The racism goes much deeper than mere “brainwashing” by a hated military whose propaganda virtually nobody in Burma ever believed—except when it came to the Rohingya. And the reality in Arakan is that Rakhine politicians known for their hatred towards Rohingya are now members of the state government.

Building a multi-ethnic democratic Burma, where all communities can reach an agreement to coexist peacefully and freely without being oppressed by a Bamar-dominated government after decades of conflict, will take much more than getting rid of the murderous Tatmadaw. This is a necessary condition, yet not a sufficient one. It will take a measure of political imagination, generosity, and boldness that the old pro-democracy forces led by Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD have utterly lacked. For now, the uphill battle is to defeat Min Aung Hlaing and his military junta; the alliances being forged in order to accomplish that will be the basis for the future rebuilding of the country once such struggle is over.

Carlos Sardiña Galache is the author of The Burmese Labyrinth: A History of the Rohingya Tragedy, published in 2020 by Verso.

[1] There has been some controversy about these terms since the previous military junta changed the official name of the country in 1989. The change only affected languages other than Burmese and was based on two misconceptions: that ‘Myanmar’ is somehow more inclusive to ethnic minorities and that ‘Burma’ is a colonial name. But both names refer historically to the Bamar-dominated kingdoms of the central lands in the country and when the British used ‘Burma’ they just translated from the original Burmese name, they didn’t impose a new name on the country as, for instance, the Spaniards did in the Philippines. I use the old nomenclature throughout this text, as a matter of personal preference and also because I think it sounds better in English.

positions politics

© 2024 positions editorial collective. all rights reserved.