Why Is China Blaming America for Its Flawed Dam Project?

The Upstream Ayeyawady Confluence Basin Hydropower Co. (ACHC) issued its first social responsibility report in late December on the Myitsone dam, which it is building in northern Burma. Activists immediately—and accurately—called the report “propaganda.” 

In 2009, ACHC, a Sino-Burmese consortium controlled by a Chinese state-owned entity, began work on Myitsone, located at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River. It will be the first dam on that vital waterway and a part of a seven-dam cascade, a $20 billion undertaking.

Myitsone has been called Beijing’s attempt to export the Three Gorges Dam, and it is even more unpopular in Burma than that massive project is in China. The Burmese version has been called “a showcase” for the country’s former military government, which signed the deal with China without public consultation. Therefore, those who disliked the junta—an overwhelming majority in the country—came out against the dam. And to make matters worse for Myitsone’s Beijing backers, the project became a symbol of Chinese exploitation of Burma, which the junta renamed Myanmar. It does not help that, in a power-starved nation, 90 percent of the dam’s electricity will be exported to southern China.

ACHC’s report painted the dam as good for Burma, but that’s not how the Burmese see it. The dam is located in Kachin State, and the Kachins, the ethnic minority in the area, have been uniformly against it, not just the tens of thousands of them who have been or will be forced to move to avoid the rising waters. The dam will flood historical and cultural sites, including what is considered to be the country’s birthplace. The area that will be lost has been called one of the world’s “top biodiversity hotspots and a global conservation priority.” Downstream rice farmers expect that Myitsone will rob the river of crucial sediments. The dam is about 60 miles from a major fault line, and a dam failure would flood Myitkyina, the largest city in Kachin State. Says Ah Nan of Burma Rivers Network, an environmental group, “People across the country have already clearly spoken, and said that the Myitsone dam is unacceptable.”

It would be hard to design a project less popular than Myitsone, and so it should be no surprise that on September 30, 2011, President Thein Sein, deferring to “the aspiration and wishes of the people,” issued a statement in Parliament suspending work on the dam.

Burmese across the country were relieved at news of the suspension, but official China was angry. Within days Beijing found someone to blame: the United States. People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship publication, started the attack by implying that the US and other Western nations pressured the Burmese government to stop work on Myitsone. Barely a month after the suspension, Yun Sun, now at the Stimson Center in Washington, observed that “China has viewed anti-China sentiment bubbling in Myanmar as a conspiracy stirred up by the West and pro-Western nongovernmental organizations to undercut China’s national interests.”

Unfortunately, the Chinese government has not changed its views since then. “Following its opening up, Myanmar has become a main battleground for the world’s major powers, and the Myitsone project has become a bargaining chip in the resulting geopolitical struggle,” stated People’s Daily last September. “Some analyses point out that Western countries, like the United States and Japan, will first have to ruin the Sino-Myanmar relationship in order to expand their influence in Myanmar and demonizing the Myitsone project is an opening.”  And what is Washington’s crime in the eyes of People’s Daily?  Providing support to nongovernmental organizations concerned about Burmese society.

The Chinese, says Kelley Currie of Project 2049 Institute, “still haven’t really figured out that they are operating in a new context” in Burma. They see the US lurking in the shadows and believe it is determined to undermine their plans. “The Chinese,” she points out, “are still holding on to this idea that we’re stirring up trouble and causing problems for them and if they can just get to the right people and throw money at the problem they can fix it.” 

The perceptions of Beijing officials show how much they misperceive what is happening just next door to them. There has indeed been a change in context, and they have failed to take into account “local sensitivities” in Burma and have instead fixated on the United States as if Washington was the cause of their misery. Beijing’s views show how out of touch authoritarian systems can be.

Of course, China’s Myitsone problems, despite the determined efforts of People’s Daily to redirect blame, are not America’s doing. What is important for us, however, is that Beijing’s first instinct was to hold the United States responsible for its own failings in Burma. That certainly affects us and is a warning sign that we may never have good relations with China as long as the Communist Party rules.

In short, the Myitsone fiasco suggests that China’s problem is not just water; it is also its authoritarianism.

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