Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Some Burmese feel that international sanctions were the triggering factor, impoverishing the country and isolating its rulers. As Myanmar became noticeably poorer than neighbors such as Cambodia and Laos, and dramatically more so than Thailand and Singapore, its leaders lost face, and their choke hold on the country became less attractive even to them. Many people were chronically malnourished; according to UNICEF, one in four Burmese children is underweight and about a third have stunted growth. Many lack reliable access to clean water. The crushing of the Saffron Revolution of 2007 was widely covered by the foreign press, blackening the junta’s already dismal international image.

Perhaps most significantly, global isolation had made the country dangerously reliant on China, which in a long and contentious mutual history has never prioritized Myanmar’s interests. One government official complained to me of expectations that the Burmese would supply their Chinese overlords with drugs, prostitutes, and a venue for gambling. The Arab Spring had been instructive, too, and the junta may have thought it better to initiate concessions than to wait until the restive population became ungovernable. Members of the junta and their “cronies”—the corrupt businessmen, many ex-military, who have profited under the regime—had witnessed the pathetic demises of Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein; they apparently preferred to go the way of Suharto’s circle in Indonesia, who had retained their wealth and influence even after he finally ceded power in 1998. No military regime goes permanently unchallenged, and a gradual exit can forestall a harrowing one. As the writer Pe Myint drily put it, “The leaders know that the people can lose several times, but the ruler can lose only once.”

Myanmar’s isolation, though it has come at a steep price, has preserved the mystical inwardness of the country’s Buddhist majority. Shwedagon Pagoda is among the holiest sites in the land, and people come from near and far to worship at it. The generals are said to have embellished the central stupa with many tons of gold—not gold leaf, but thick plates of solid gold—and receptacles full of jewels hang near its apex. Many Burmese maintain that the pagoda is worth more than the Bank of England. Incongruous in the modernizing city of Yangon, it stands momentous and transcendent, the St. Peter’s Basilica of Theravada Buddhism. Golden stupas glitter in the sun wherever you go in Myanmar. In the shadow of these hallowed towers, peasants labor in rough conditions. One local mordantly remarked to me that the country is rich, but the people are poor.

For many, life seems to have gone on largely unchanged for centuries: peasants, oxcarts, the same staple diet and simple clothes, the same glittering pagodas, gilded in the richer towns, merely painted in the poor ones. Nothing ever happens when it should; it’s amazing that the sun sets on schedule. The country strikes an uneasy balance among this past way of life, still extant in the present; a present life of nascent contact with the outside world and the stirrings of reform; and a fully imagined future of democracy and prosperity about which many people spoke as though it were both incomprehensible and inevitable.

Tourists, who bring in a large share of Myanmar’s official revenues, come to marvel at historical relics that its citizens often undervalue. Thant Myint-U observed that no one in Myanmar had ever had a pleasant experience living in a building over thirty years old. Some seven hundred significant structures have been demolished in the historic center of Yangon over the past fifteen years. Many of the grand colonial buildings that remain belong to government ministries, but in 2005, the government decamped to Naypyidaw, leaving their fate uncertain. Those that are privately owned are often encumbered with lawsuits, rent-controlled tenants, and nonresident rights holders (including defunct government agencies), creating a legal mess for any prospective preservationist.