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Quake disaster has exposed a Trump-sized void on the world stage. China is stepping in
If you follow money to find true sources of power, you discover China and Russia behind the brutal regime that has for four years presided over Myanmar’s collapse into civil war.
The two countries have sold weapons to the junta that seized control in February 2021, so it was natural for them to answer the call when Senior General Min Aung Hlaing asked for international help after the devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar on Friday.
A Buddhist monk walks near a collapsed pagoda in Mandalay after the Friday’s earthquake.Credit: AP
China and Russia got boots, medical kits and sniffer dogs on the ground, along with India, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. Meanwhile, the United States was struggling to get its boots on.
The world’s richest country was the largest provider of foreign aid until the return of Donald Trump to the White House. But thanks to the sudden dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Trump has left a void on the world stage.
China is already showing itself willing and ready to step in, not only in Myanmar but elsewhere.
Perhaps the first sign of the region’s increased willingness to collaborate with China since Trump’s re-election came in Thailand at 2.14am on February 27. Several trucks with windows covered in black tape left Bangkok’s Suan Phlu immigration detention centre. After 11 years of detention limbo, 40 Uyghur were put on an unscheduled China Southern Airlines flight that left Don Mueang International Airport before dawn and landed six hours later in China’s Xinjiang region, notorious for its “re-education” camps.
Barely a month into Trump’s second term, the Thai government of Paetongtarn Shinawatra calculated that its interests lay in siding with China, which has been accused by human rights groups of persecuting the mainly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority group. Beijing denies the allegations.
Myanmar under Min Aung Hlaing did not even wait for Trump. Since taking control from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and leading a crackdown that is estimated to have left at least 70,000 dead, it has looked to repressive governments that are willing to overlook human rights abuses.
Long before the earthquake, China and Russia were places the regime sourced weapons from. Sydney academic Sean Turnell explained that the military’s reliance on foreign exchange to buy munitions from Russia and China was “a real key vulnerability”.
Turnell, who was Suu Kyi’s economics adviser and was jailed for 650 days on dubious espionage charges, worries that international aid will fall into the regime’s hands and will be used as a weapon to punish those who oppose the junta.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. A previous Myanmar junta shut the country to the outside world after Cyclone Nargis in 2008, a disaster that led to almost 140,000 deaths, mainly in the Irrawaddy Delta.
“People who had been stranded in the delta region just died,” says Phil Robertson, the director of the Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates consultancy, who has long lived in South-East Asia. “This is a junta with a long track record of bad-faith efforts and politicisation of aid.
“If it was a normal government and a normal country, there would be support provided in a fairly quick way.”
Robertson said at the weekend that people were digging through the rubble with their hands looking for loved ones, and the true scale of the disaster remained unclear. The epicentre of the quake was also the main battleground. “Those areas are war zones,” he said.
The US is sending help in the form of a three-person USAID assessment team, but it is not expected to arrive until Wednesday.
The US has not been perfect in its application of soft power over the years, but diplomacy and aid are preferable to war and weapons. As the world is watching, China has stepped in.
After those who are buried are found, after the full scale of the tragedy is known, after the shock wears off, the lasting legacy of the Myanmar earthquake may be the US abdicating its role as a force for good in the world.
Michael Ruffles is a senior editor who has worked in Thailand.
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