Introduction

This chapter shows how the patterns and practices of Chinese investments in Philippine mining differ from conventional multinational mining investments. While Ching Kwan Lee has previously argued that there are different practices between Chinese and multinational mining companies in Zambia, the author suggests that Chinese investment in the Philippine mining sector presents an analogous case. First is the method of production. Multinational mining companies focus on large-scale mining (LSM), but Chinese investments tend to gravitate towards artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) to evade scrutiny from national authorities and hostile reactions associated with current territorial disputes between the two countries. Second is the method of accumulation. While multinationals use capital-intensive infrastructure and formalized ways of pursuing extraction, ASM capitalizes on multiple methods and ways: labour-intensive extraction, communitycentred and house-driven support, and flexible infrastructure. And last are the host country linkages. While multinational mining companies need the support of national government agencies to pursue resource extraction, Chinese mining relies more on connections with overseas Chinese communities in the Philippines to access subnational political elites, such as regional politicians, governors, and local officials.

Introduction

When the Philippine Supreme Court issued a Temporary Environmental Protection Order (TEPO) against ninety-four “small-scale mines” in the Province of Zambales in 2013, the media touted the decision as anti- China, rather than pro-environment or anti-mining. Many of the big small-scale mines enjoined by the TEPO to “perform or desist from performing an act in order to protect, preserve, or rehabilitate the environment” are reported to be dummies of Chinese firms. The case was filed by concerned members of local communities of the province who complained that the mining operations were allegedly outside the designated allowable mining area, were polluting the environment, were unregulated and untaxed. Local and national government officials were also respondents to the case.

Mining in general in the Philippines has been controversial and divisive. On the one hand, mining operations have been described by civil society groups and the Catholic Church as destructive to traditional livelihoods. On the other hand, mining has also catalyzed vibrant economic activities through job creation, infrastructure works and business establishments in economically stagnating localities. Thus, government officials and businessmen tend to favour and endorse mining projects.

Introduction

Across Southeast Asia, the “rise of China” has inspired both anticipation and anxiety. A common aspiration throughout the region is that a strong China means economic prosperity for all. The prevailing wisdom is that the sheer size of the world's second largest economy and its demands for trade will translate into jobs, business opportunities, and economic growth for neighbouring countries. These aspirations have been bolstered by China's leadership in establishing the US$100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), as well as its ambitions to retrofit ancient trade routes with twenty-first century infrastructure as part of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Now with hints of American influence in decline, many eyes are looking to China as the region's new benefactor.

If anticipation has been fuelled by visions of economic splendour, the anxieties have been more polysemic. Influxes of Chinese investment have been accompanied with waves of Chinese companies, workers and migrants, whose intermixing with local populations has generated both enthusiasm and distrust. The Chinese knack for keeping costs low has come with familiar concerns about social and environmental management practices, exploitation of local labour, and networks of chronyistic corruption. China's territorial claims and expanding military installations in the South China Sea have only helped to heighten geopolitical tensions both within and among individual Southeast Asian nations. Hence, while Chinese economic influence has been welcome, a stronger political, military and socio-demographic presence has been met with more equivocation, if not outright consternation.

Amid these tensions, Chinese resource sector investments have emerged as flashpoints of protest and controversy. From government orders to suspend the Chinese-backed Myitsone dam and Letpadaung copper mine in Myanmar to national protests over Chinese resource sector investments in Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere, resource projects have come to be a “focal point” for tensions and anxieties surrounding China's rise in Southeast Asia. Indeed, resource development is an interesting angle from which to examine China's future roles in Southeast Asia precisely because it reflects the contested nature of development.

Resource development is contested development. From “conflict minerals” to “resource curses”, political economies of resource development have been known to incite inter- and intra-state conflict, hinder socio-economic development, and bind already poor countries and communities into dependent relations with other more powerful nations.

There are over 1 million Muslims in Rakhine State whose legal status is obscure. They are generally referred to as “Rohingya”, an ethnic designation unknown to the former British administration. Though the Rohingya are primarily located in the northern part of the state, there are many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Muslims of Chittagonian origin living elsewhere in Myanmar who are likely to be inhibited from claiming openly to be Rohingya. There are in addition another million or more Rohingya said to be living overseas, as refugees in Bangladesh and elsewhere, or as workers in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States.

For some time the international community has been urging the Myanmar Government to grant full citizenship rights to the Rohingya, and to review the controversial 1982 Citizenship Law in this context. But this is easier said than done as the extent of illegal immigration from Bangladesh into Rakhine State since independence in 1948 is difficult if not impossible to assess. I also argue that it is not so much the Law itself which is at fault as the failure to implement the Law in Rakhine State in a timely and responsible manner. The longer the government delays action to resolve the impasse, the more entrenched and potentially explosive the situation is likely to become.

Controversy surrounds the designation of some 1 million or more people of Islamic faith who live in Rakhine State in Myanmar. For some, this controversy is as unwelcome as it is unnecessary, since the issue at stake is the human rights, and especially the citizenship status of the people concerned. For others, the designation of the community as “Rohingya” is vital to their very survival and is not to be dismissed as a distraction.

The designation “Rohingya” is used, particularly by support organizations overseas, to refer to some reported 3 million or more Muslim residents and former residents of Rakhine State in Myanmar. These numbers should however be treated with caution. Tens of thousands of former residents of Arakan are said to have sought sanctuary overseas from the early 1940s onwards, not only in what is today Bangladesh but as far afield as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

After decades of authoritarian rule aimed at ring-fencing everyday people from contentious politics, Myanmar's November 2015 elections saw widespread popular re-engagement with party politics. With the shift from the spectacle of boisterous election campaigning to elite-level negotiation of national political transformation, expectations of what an incoming government can and will deliver for citizens — as well as the ethnic, religious and moral parameters of “the nation” — for many remain deeply rooted in notions of virtuous or moral citizenship popularized through the work of welfare groups and civil society permitted to develop during the dark days of military rule. In this chapter I explore the key social, political and moral ideas that animate people who offer their time, money and resources for these allegedly “apolitical” welfare groups that play an essential role in care for the needy throughout contemporary Myanmar.

Drawing on participant observation and interview research in central Myanmar conducted throughout 2015 with largely Buddhist welfare groups, their beneficiaries and their larger networks of donors, I challenge the fiction that these groups eschew “politics” or operate only in the allegedly “personal” domain of “religion”. Building on Andrea Muehlebach's (2012) exploration of citizenship and morality amongst volunteer welfare organizations in austerity Italy, I conceive of these notions, institutions and practices of non-state welfare provision in Myanmar as forms of “moral citizenship”. I argue that the exercise of this spiritually imbued citizenship is helping to generate political identities and frames of reference not just about entitlement to social assistance from the state but also about the need to assert and protect Buddhism at a time of rapid social and political transition in Myanmar. These ideas about compassionate citizenship become the basis for excluding minorities from foundational notions of “national values”, with virtuousness of their social work compared online and offline with the extremist violence committed by groups such as Islamic State in the Middle East and suggestively tied to Myanmar's own Muslim communities.

The chapter opens with a vignette of blood donations in central Myanmar, before then exploring how the scope of social action for others (parahita) in the Buddhist moral universe expanded significantly during the 1990s through the proliferation of Buddhist welfare groups. The notions of moral obligation and entitlement deployed by volunteers, beneficiaries and their extensive networks in contemporary Myanmar is then examined through ethnographic work with these welfare groups and their interaction with the state.

Introduction

Southeast Asia is one of the only regions in the world in which coal will constitute a greater share of the energy mix in the future. China is the world's top producer and consumer of coal, while Indonesia holds these same titles within Southeast Asia, producing 89 per cent of the coal in Southeast Asia. Indonesia is also the world's largest coal exporter. The coal industry has major political sway in both countries. China and Indonesia have become politically and economically entangled through coal trade and investment. For the past several years, their intimate import–export relationship has dominated global steam coal trade in both volume and market power. Although other regional partners, namely Australia, are major suppliers of coal to China, this chapter focuses on Indonesia due to the growing importance of the China–Southeast Asia relationship for global resource governance. Southeast Asia has a huge natural resource endowment, including biodiversity and carbon stocks in its forests, major fossil fuel reserves, minerals, and ores.

National identity can be complex in Myanmar due in part to the large number of ethnic groups in the country. Estimates vary, although official sources at various times have listed over 100 diverse groups having distinctive beliefs, customs and language. Members of ethnic groups generally have a strong affiliation to their group, especially so given the history of conflict between a number of major ethnic groups and the central government in modern Myanmar. As the restoration of democracy and the resolution of conflicts proceeds, Myanmar “citizenship” may best be viewed as a layered personal experience, involving both an ethnic and national identity. Some of the larger groups to that are well known are the Chin, Kachin, Shan, Mon, Karen — and the one of concern here, the Karenni.

ORIGINS OF THE KARENNI PEOPLE AND STATE

The Karenni people (also known at times as “Red Karen”) are believed to have descended from the Mongolian plateau at a time of food scarcity in the Gobi Desert, and as a result of oppression from other ethnic groups living in Mongolia. The Karenni gradually moved downward along the Yellow River and briefly settled in what today is the Chinese state of Yunnan. They continued moving down along Salween River and finally settled in Dee Maw Soe in 739 BCE (although some historians claim it was not until the early 800s CE). Where the Karenni live today is known as Kayah — formerly called Red Karen or Karenni.

Not long after having established their own Karenni nation, Yeun troops from the north attacked a number of times, finally overcoming them and establishing control of the area for almost a hundred years. During this time of being ruled by the Yeun king, Karenni people were treated as slaves, forced to work their own paddy fields for the benefit of the Yeun king, and taxed unfairly.

Finally, the Karenni people could no longer tolerate the Yeun king's oppression and taxation, and revolted. They collected all available arms, and began a war to expel the Yeun troops. One story from this time concerns the importance of “sticky rice”. The Karenni females who were left behind cooked and packed rice with leaves to be sent to the frontline as the main ration for troops in the battlefield. But the packed-rice did not last long in the hot climate, often rotting in one day, which slowed attempts to advance.

Since 2011, Myanmar has been going through a period of profound — albeit still contested — transition. Under the leadership of President U Thein Sein, the country experienced widespread if sometimes uneven reforms, including the release of most (but not all) political prisoners, a greatly improved environment for freedom of speech and association, a resurgence of the civil society sector, some economic reforms, and the start of a peace process between the government (and Myanmar Army, or Tatmadaw) and some two dozen ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) which had long been fighting for greater autonomy from the militarized and Bama-dominated central government.1 This has been an unprecedented period of transition, which continued following the November 2015 elections, and April 2016 formation of a government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD).

Four years into the reforms, in July 2015 Chiang Mai University organized a three-day international conference on “Burma/Myanmar in Transition: Connectivity, Changes and Challenges”, to discuss and assess the complex changes underway in Thailand's neighbour to the West. The conference was attended by more than 300 people, from inside Myanmar, from the border regions and Thailand, and from overseas. This book brings together chapters by academic experts, most of whom participated in a panel at the Chiang Mai conference convened by the editors. Additional contributions were elicited from colleagues working on issues of citizenship in Myanmar. The longer, analytical chapters are supplemented by six contributions provided by ethnic community and political leaders from Myanmar, including senior officials of EAOs, who discuss what it means to be an ethnic nationality citizen of their respective states and communities, and of the larger country.2 In the two years since the conference, authors have updated and refined their contributions, for the book to be as topto- date as possible.

Given the genesis of this book, and the breadth and complexity of the issues, we can offer only a partial account of citizenship in Myanmar. Citizenship encompasses many different concepts, including notions of participation in meritorious social activity, as discussed in Gerard McCarthy's chapter.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, we discuss the future integration options for ethnic armed actors in the Myanmar/Burma peace process, and link this to questions of citizenship and representation. The focus is not only on the future political positions of the ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) and their leaders, but also on the possible civilian roles for the many middle and lower ranks. The future positions of the latter have received scant attention in the nationwide ceasefire negotiations and in national media coverage of the peace process. Based on interviews in 2014, focused particularly on armed actor integration, as well as on qualitative research in 2016 on the provision of justice by the two main EAOs in Mon and Karen States, we explore a number of possible roles that EAO actors could assume. We focus particularly on their roles as security and justice actors, as civil servants, political party members, businessmen and members of civil society organizations. Many of these roles can draw on already existing experiences of the EAOs as de facto local government actors in the areas they control. In addition, the options we outline are inspired by the international literature on “Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration” (DDR) (Munive and Jakobsen 2012; Muggah 2005; McMullin 2013b).

Debating the future integration options — denoting a shift from “combatant” to “civilian” identity — for ethnic armed actors, we argue, are significant to create trust in the peace process as well as to ensure longer term sustainable peace. Without concrete livelihood options and forms of recognition, there is a real risk that armed actors will be unsupportive of the peace process (Muggah 2005). Simultaneously, integration of EAO personnel and ethnic minorities more generally, into state structures can be important for fostering notions of national citizenship in a way that is inclusive of ethnic minorities’ cultural, social, economic and political rights. This implies carefully linking ex-combatant reintegration with wider local governance and security sector reform as well as addressing how ethnic political representation by EAOs can promote de facto citizenship. Thus, we argue for the need to link EAO reintegration to questions of citizenship and representation.

In line with the critical literature on citizenship, we approach citizenship not only as a set of formal rights and status — i.e. as de jure legal citizenship — but also as a set of practices (Isin and Wood 1999; Isin and Turner 2002).

At its most basic the definition of citizenship is the rights and responsibilities that people have within a nation state. “Citizenship establishes the boundaries of the political community. It establishes that which is public and that which is private. It also tells us who is in and who is outside of the political community.” (Kivisto and Faist 2007, p. 13). Citizenship therefore denotes the membership to a polity — in this case a particular state and the membership involves a reciprocal set of rights and duties, sometimes described as a social contract. Generally politically motivated classes or elites decide who can access these rights, working in tandem with the state that has the monopoly on dictating who is in and out. As the introduction and other chapters discuss, there are other elements that are part of citizenship as well — they include identity, participation (see chapter by Walton in this volume) and an element of “moral citizenship” that includes working for the good of society that is expanded upon by McCarthy in Chapter 6. This chapter however focuses much on rights and responsibilities and how these relate to issues of belonging and identity.

Legal citizenship in Myanmar under military rule, as described in the Introduction, has always been defined from above. The 1982 Citizenship Act set out who was a Myanmar national, even if before the 2008 Constitution other rights and responsibilities were rather elusive. How the changes of citizenship were viewed by young people in light of political participation in the 2010 elections has been discussed elsewhere (Lall and Win 2013) This chapter seeks to elucidate views from below — specifically how young people across Myanmar define citizenship in light of the reforms and changes between 2011 and 2015. While few of the conclusions drawn from the survey would provide any great surprises, the aim of the chapter is to allow the voices of the young people who are experiencing the transition to express how they defined their relationship with the state and what underpinned their feelings of belonging in their own words. Beyond being legal citizens of the Myanmar state, how did they define their rights and responsibilities, how did this relate to their identity and what did they feel was important when defining citizenship as their country transitions from a military dictatorship to a more participatory system.

Introduction

Since market reforms in the 1980s, foreign investment has been and continues to be a driving force for Vietnam's economic development. Since normalization of bilateral relations in 1991, Chinese economic investments in Vietnam have increased dramatically. More recently, they have also shown a growing interest in Vietnam's rich mineral and energy resources. Geographical proximity makes Vietnam particularly interesting to Chinese resource companies, especially for minerals that have high transportation costs. Furthermore, shared histories, cultures and socio-political organizations have facilitated trade and business relations between these two nations.

On the surface of it, Chinese demand for natural resources and Vietnam's need for foreign investment is a perfect match. Yet one does not have to dig very deep below the surface to find a much more problematic situation. Recently, the General Director of the Department of Geology and Minerals of Vietnam publicly complained that up to 60 per cent of mineral licenses in northern Vietnam showed “Chinese traces”. It was as if, he suggested, “the Chinese were standing behind our back and controlling our own mining industry”. While the widespread opposition towards Chinese involvement in bauxite mining in the late 2000s was perhaps a first signal of unrest, the riots that targeted mainland Chinese workers at a Taiwanese-owned steel factory in Central Vietnam in 2014 demonstrated just how grave the matter can become.

Morris-Jung's introduction to this volume began with a macro analytical framework of China's resource encounters in Southeast Asia. It pulled together a wide diversity of issues covered in the individual chapters to introduce the central framework of this volume, which is a careful and detailed analysis of diverse issues centred on local and national development, environment, justice, power relations, territoriality, sovereignty and many others. Morris-Jung's chapter painted the complexities that all authors in the volume grappled with. How do scholarly works capture the highly-nuanced, contextual and complicated domestic and external factors behind the “new wave” of Chinese investments into the Southeast Asian region, which represents an interplay of both opportunities, challenges and risks? Morris-Jung correctly identified the multi-layered implications of these investments and subsequently each chapter contributor highlighted and surveyed these complex layers through case studies, local-area examples, contextual analysis and empirical data.

What Morris-Jung and the other chapter contributors have highlighted is the complicated ecology of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), private sector firms, local communities, regional elites, nationalpoliticians, Chinese diaspora and bureaucracies interacting with each other. In analysing them, we should not, as Morris-Jung reminds us, fall into a territorial trap of resource extraction based on unquestioned assumptions of (1) territory as geometrically bounded and inwardly focused and (2) the sovereign autonomy of the nation-state. This would unnecessarily delimit the imaginative as well as analytical spaces available, which the rest of the chapter contributors have explored with vigour and incision. Therein lies the most important contribution of this edited volume — a multi-perspective and multi-spatial analysis of the ecology of Chinese mining, resource extraction and investments in the diverse region of Southeast Asia.

Macro-regional Analyses

Philip Andrews-Speed, Mingda Qiu and Christopher Len's chapter “Mixed Motivations, Mixed Blessings: Strategies and Motivations for Chinese Energy and Mineral Investments in Southeast Asia” identified the specific motivations of Chinese enterprises and government in their engagements with Southeast Asia's energy and mineral resources, and examine some of their implications from their mix of corporate and state drivers. In this chapter, the authors argue that the increasing participation and investment of Chinese hydrocarbons, petrochemicals and commodities/resource firms may be showing differential outcomes in Southeast Asian countries due to varying incentives used, state priorities, global business experience, and sometimes less than optimal management. Although these firms attract Chinese funding to the region, it may also bring about negative impacts if project promises are not delivered.

INTRODUCTION

The story of rather chronic discrimination and persecution by successive governments of Myanmar meted out against Muslims — especially the worldfamous statelessness of the Rohingya — before and after transition started in 2010 is taken for granted. Questions relating to eligibility, recognition, and protection of Muslims’ citizenship have therefore been raised. Largely informed by a meta-narrative of the plight of the Myanmar Muslim minority, those questions have been answered by making generalizing arguments that governments and Buddhists in Myanmar discriminate against and/or persecute a Muslim minority. This tendency has unfortunately led to lack of sophistication and nuance in making academic and/or journalistic arguments about Myanmar's Muslims.

By conducting a case study of the Kaman that is now the only governmentrecognized Muslim ethnic group in Buddhist Myanmar, this article suggests that there are two or more Muslim minorities with different relationships with the state and society in Myanmar that have significant impact on their identity and citizenship in Myanmar. Attention to those intra-communal differences even within the so-called Muslim minority of Myanmar is expected to contribute not only to research on Muslims in the country but also to policy advice for betterment of diverse minority groups that constitute Myanmar's Muslims.

ANTI-MUSLIM VIOLENCE AS CHALLENGE OF TRANSITION

Myanmar's political and social liberalization post-2011 could be traced back to the sham general elections in november 20102 held by the previous military regime (state law and order restoration council/state peace and development council [slorc/spdc]). the quasi-civilian government headed by president u thein sein, ex-general and ex-prime minister during the previous military rule, came to power in late march 2011. after the election the government initiated a series of political reforms, including the release of nobel laureate daw aung san suu kyi from house arrest on 13 november (six days after the election, following a period of detention of fifteen years from 1989).

Introduction

In recent years, under the democratizing environment in Myanmar, civil society has mounted forceful campaigns against irresponsible foreign investment practices, which have included Chinese, Thai, Indian and South Korean companies. However, Chinese investments account for about a third of Myanmar's total cumulative foreign investment of US$62.6 billion, as of 2017. Most of the protest has been in the energy and natural resource industries, whose propensities for extensive socioenvironmental impacts have encountered the most resistance. Much of it has been labelled and, indeed, presented itself as “anti-Chinese”. As this chapter demonstrates, however, the causes of protest in Myanmar are multiple and complex.

Protests have played a critical role in compelling Chinese interlocutors — including state-companies, the embassy in Yangon, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, and Chinese scholars — to confront the demands of Myanmar civil society. This chapter will first provide a brief overview of Chinese investments in Myanmar, followed by an examination of anti-Chinese sentiments as they have emerged through complex historical relations, local politics and Chinese investment practices. It analyses how Chinese interlocutors, whose conventional diplomatic and business approach is to deal predominantly with host governments, perceive and interact with local civil society actors in Myanmar, especially as their protests make these interactions inevitable.

Citizenship is undoubtedly one of the more contentious issues in Myanmar today. Much of the discussion focuses on the boundaries of national inclusion, of deciding which groups are officially considered citizens, either according to the 1982 Citizenship Law or according to various other metrics. Most prominent in these discussions is the status of the Rohingya, but the subject is also relevant for other groups on the margins that might either be in danger of being excluded in the future or might be considered for inclusion in the future (such as some Chinese populations). While this is an important aspect of Myanmar's contemporary politics, this chapter focuses instead on an aspect of citizenship that is often ignored: its practice.

The practice of citizenship would include various perspectives on what citizenship entails (the different rights and responsibilities), the roles of state and civil society groups in fostering citizenship, and expectations of citizen participation. This latter category refers not only to ways in which citizens would expect to be able to participate in the political process, but also expectations of the state in facilitating that participation. A discussion of the practice of citizenship should also include attention to the many “skills” of citizenship that go beyond basic rights and responsibilities. While these are potentially applicable to all citizens, this chapter seeks to highlight the ways in which differently positioned individuals might be expected to develop and display different citizenship skills, especially government officials.

Developing a broader understanding of a diverse range of citizenship skills and practices is particularly important in the context of Myanmar's rapid political change. Since at least the 2008 constitutional referendum, the country's citizens have been expected to participate in politics in a variety of ways that were not only not available to them previously, they were actively denied by military-led governments. The result is a situation in which the meaning and content of citizenship is either limited among citizens or expressed in ways that do not necessarily accord with centralized notions of citizenship and participation in Myanmar or with international norms.

An instructive example can be found in a series of studies on citizenship conducted by the research and education organization Myanmar Egress. The researchers note that for field work in 2012 and 2013, they found it necessary to focus on educated middle and lower class respondents.

Most of the chapters in Citizenship in Myanmar: Ways of Being in and from Burma are based on papers presented at a July 2015 conference on “Burma/ Myanmar in Transition: Connectivity, Changes and Challenges” held at Chiang Mai University. Additional special contributions come from six community and political leaders from Myanmar, including senior officials of Ethnic Armed Organizations.

Until recently, Myanmar studies focused primarily on democracy and human rights. With the election in 2010, the government embarked on a series of reforms to direct the country towards liberal democracy, a mixed economy, and reconciliation, although doubts persist about the motives that underpin such reforms. This has led to a new democratic system, ethnic ceasefire talks, and the victory of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in 2012. These changes have ushered in a turning point in Myanmar studies — with the focus shifting to how the liberal government will deal with both the country's past as well as the present challenges of representation and the meaning of Myanmar citizenship and national identity for the various ethnic groups in Myanmar. This book examines the practices of citizenship and the role of state and civil society in the linkages between culture, religion, speech, access to land and, most importantly, access to opportunities. The government faces major challenges in trying to unite the various ethnic and religious groups in Myanmar behind its reformist agenda.

The research included here has examined the practices of citizenship in its various aspects — including educational, cultural, religious and ethnic — to investigate whether citizenship is a political instrument for national reform or a representation of national identity. I hope this book leads to a better understanding of our neighbour, including its sociopolitical transition and the implications for regional development — and helps us to further our cooperation with Myanmar.