Of all my world travels, never I was so relaxed, quiet and near to full happiness then travelling in Myanmar. The thousands of gold painted pagodas, already welcoming you from the plane view, the magnificent river Irrawaddy, flowing as a majestic aristocrat through a spectacular nature for 2200km full of ships, the romantic lakes, everything is taking you to a magic happy sense of living. People are even increasing this state of mind, because they live buddhism, unique country, once with Tibet, where you can understand a path to nirvana. George Orwell living here for three years wrote Burma, a novel of dilemmas of a western man in front of oriental philosophies, fascinated from local people and the country. Among the thousand temples of Mandalay, looking at enormous sun going to sleep in the forest, you can’t believe that this is one of the most wars suffering country of Asia, fact much more easy to feel in Laos or Vietnam then here. From the USA general Stilwell pushing Chiang and Chinese nationalist to enter in Burma in 1944 to fight Japanese army occupying half of China, until today the country has been involved in international and intestine wars, due also to its complex ethnic structure. Men who generally stay monks for 24 months and go to ask rice to families for its monastery, are pushed to internal wars any years, more and more in the interest of China in the last twenty years. Military dictatorship acting as a puppet in Chinese interests it’s conflicting any day with minorities of the mountains trafficking drugs, muslim villages, young fascinated by USA and so on.
The result is a GDP per capita of 4000 $ in PPP, for a population of 59 million, in a country very rich in green type of minerals, but more then all open on Indian Ocean, overcoming the Malacca sea strait, real nightmare for Chinese commercial dynamics and military strategy. So for the Silk Ways initiative Myanmar is a key, like the Pakistan corridor. Connected by oil and gas tubes to China, the project is now of a railway from Kunming in China to Indian ocean harbours, to open the route for Chinese export to Europe. Going around in hotels, you can see military people together with Chinese mission to eat and drink and business planning for the future. Of course also USA are pressing, always looking for new poor people available to fight instead of their weak infantry, in the containment strategy of China. Japanese activities are also present in this magnificent country in tourist area, hotels and resort. Also the British heritage is not totally disappeared in business and military assistance.
The short period of apparent democracy of USA tutored Aung San Suu Kyi, who by the way deported Rohingya muslim people, did not eliminate the military influence, supported by China, which needs internal peace to pursue their economic and infrastructural objectives, related to harbours property, oil pipelines and road and railways projects. China has a tradition of manipulating all the neighbours with diplomatic arts, not being obsessed as Russia from encirclement fears. And their plans are always of long terms, about 30 years of planning. So Myanmar will remain with this enormous dichotomy between nature and beautiful historical heritages versus social and geopolitical problems pushing to conflicts. Hoping in a buddhist nirvana for this poor and beautiful country.
