Eurasian Geography and Economics ISSN: 1538-7216 (Print) 1938-2863 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rege20 Nationalism and anti-ethno-politics: why ‘Chinese Development’ failed at Myanmar’s Myitsone Dam Laur Kiik To cite this article: Laur Kiik (2016) Nationalism and anti-ethno-politics: why ‘Chinese Development’ failed at Myanmar’s Myitsone Dam, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 57:3, 374-402, DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2016.1198265 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2016.1198265 Published online: 22 Jun 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1192 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 24 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rege20 Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2016 Vol. 57, No. 3, 374–402, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2016.1198265 Nationalism and anti-ethno-politics: why ‘Chinese Development’ failed at Myanmar’s Myitsone Dam Laur Kiik* Asian Studies, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia (Received 2 July 2015; accepted 2 June 2016) In 2011, the Burmese military-backed government stunned global audiences by unilaterally suspending the construction of the Myitsone Dam, the cornerstone of China’s largest hydropower project abroad. This prominent failure of China’s “Going Out” investment strategy reverberated globally. Both Western and Chinese accounts frame the event as a pivotal moment in Myanmar’s celebrated reform process, the cooling of China–Myanmar relations, and US–China geopolitical rivalry in the Asia-Pacific. However, my ethnographic field and media research from 2010 to 2015 reveals that the mega-project’s failure does not originally stem from inter-state geopolitics or contested economics and ecology. Through chronological narration, I show how the Myitsone Dam is primarily the casualty of a distinctly ethno-political causality, whereby three nationalisms clashed and the replication of China’s “anti- ethno-political” model of development failed. Though no monolithic Chinese state directs “Chinese Development” overseas, individual Chinese entrepreneurs nonethe- less draw from the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) anti-political and state-cen- tric paradigm when facing foreign social worlds. In the particular case of Myitsone, Chinese proponents drew from PRC’s state-nationalist heuristics of “national minorities and state-led development” and “Western anti-China conspiracy,” when facing Myan- mar’s ethnic Kachin and Burman nationalisms. State ideological subjectivities of these developers seemed to blind them to the weakness in their own anti-ethno-political strategies, even when those collapsed publicly. I conclude that the Myitsone Dam’s construction will likely not be restarted, despite the hydropower company’s efforts. The Myitsone case also exemplifies how China’s previous historical entanglements in its neighboring regions uniquely disrupt the progress of “Going-Out” in Asia. Keywords: “Going Out”; anti-politics; nationalism; state-centrism; Kachin; ethnography The 2011 halting of China’s Myitsone Dam construction in Burma remains a stunning failure amid the rise of Chinese developmental mega-projects across the world. At the time, Myitsone was China’s largest hydropower project abroad ever proposed. When Myanmar’s reformist President Thein Sein shocked both Chinese and global observers by announcing this multi-billion dollar project’s unilateral suspension, he unleashed a diplomatic scandal, marking a momentous geopolitical shift in the Asia-Pacific. His decision heralded Myanmar’s globally noted partial transition from military dictatorship to quasi-civilian democracy, in which the global democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi took official leadership in 2016. *Email: [email protected] This article was originally published with error. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2016.1208390). © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Eurasian Geography and Economics 375 I build in this article a three-sided history that traverses the Myitsone controversy chronologically across the social worlds of the ethnic Kachin population, of Lowland Burma/Myanmar, and of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). My narrative addresses the two following questions. First, what caused this unique failure? Most previous analyses have prioritized eco- logical, economic, civil-democratic, or US versus China geopolitical roots. I build an alternative explanation based on a focus on social history and ethno-political causality. I demonstrate how the multi-billion dollar project collapsed due to the clash of three nationalisms: Kachin, Burmese, and Chinese. Telling this history, I draw from four ethnographic fieldwork sessions, altogether 10 months long, conducted from 2010 to 2015. Fieldwork took place primarily within northernmost Burma’s Kachin society and more briefly in Lower Myanmar. It involved conventional ethnographic methods: participant observation within relevant social cir- cles; taking notes on everyday life; semi-structured interviews (approximately 100, aver- aging 2–4 h); and numerous everyday casual conversations. Demographically, the people I spent most time with and discussed issues with include students and young people; anti-dam, environmental, and other activists; and religious, educational, business, and other social leaders, as well as individuals from a wide range of other backgrounds. Second, I ask, how does the prominent failure of Myitsone elucidate the logic of “Chinese development” globally? To answer, I first consider the political effects of what I call the Chinese anti-(ethno)-political model of development. Among other things, a Chinese company’s promotional film will help us visualize how the entrepreneurs’ “anti-ethno-political silences” clashed with Kachin nationalism. I proceed by investigating how Chinese dam proponents publicly responded to their Burmese mega-project’s unexpected suspension and how they analyzed the reasons behind this. My analysis here remains necessarily partial (cf. Kirchherr, Charles, and Walton 2016) because I have not been able to interview company representatives due to their relative inaccessibility, the secretive and military-oppressive conditions of my field- work in the Kachin region, and concerns about putting my interlocutors at risk. Instead, I analyze public statements and media coverage, which the project leaders intended for Burmese and Chinese audiences in an ambitious, Chinese state-supported effort to revi- talize the mega-project. I show how the logic of those pro-dam discourses emerges, to the companies’ strategic detriment, from the PRC’s domestic social worlds, including anti-political state-nationalism. In the final section, I explain why this replication of Chi- na’s anti-(ethno)-political development failed. China’s anti-politics on an “Isolated Island” The proponents of “Going Out”–the Chinese Government’s outbound foreign invest- ment policy – conceptualize the PRC’s investments overseas as developmental aid that is a-political, compared to Western-originated aid practices (Yeh and Wharton 2016). The PRC model is to cooperate with foreign governments primarily in mutually benefi- cial natural resource extraction, offering much-needed infrastructure and livelihood improvement, while not interfering in the domestic politics of those sovereign countries. Consequently, the model’s proponents criticize Western interventionism, which purports to evaluate developing countries and push them toward democratization, human rights improvement, fighting corruption, and other liberal-democratic end goals. PRC actors often call such Western practices, at best, counter-productive to economic development, 376 L. Kiik and at worst, neo-imperialist. Those criticisms follow the broader anti-interventionist foreign policy doctrine of the People’s Republic. Focused primarily on obtaining natural resources for expanding domestic industries, Chinese state enterprises generally adapt to whatever political realities exist abroad and pursue pragmatic mercantilist policies (Hol- slag 2011). From the perspective of the now-institutionalized world of international aid, many projects which pro-Beijing accounts discuss as contributing to development abroad would be classed rather as for-profit private investments (Nyíri 2006). Critics charge that such development-investments are not truly “mutually beneficial,” but rather “Sino-centric” (Ping 2013). The Myitsone project – launched in the mid-2000s as China’s largest ever hydro- power project proposed abroad – follows the Going Out model closely. Thus, the story of the Myitsone Dam begins when a large Chinese state-owned hydropower corporation accepts an invitation to invest by the Western-sanctioned junta of neighboring Burma/ Myanmar. The company’s goal is to generate massive volumes of electricity, transport these across the two countries’ border, and feed the growing demand in China. During the 2005 Asian–African Summit in Jakarta, a bilateral agreement for this strategic mega-project receives highest level governmental endorsement from Chinese President Hu Jintao and the leader of Myanmar’s regime, Senior-General Than Shwe.1 The hydropower mega-project envisions constructing a cascade of altogether seven large dams on the Mali and N’Mai rivers of northernmost Burma’s sub-tropical Himala- yan foothills. This cascade of dams would culminate with the largest and most impor- tant