The writer Joan Didion famously observed, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” So do nations. China, for example, invents stories to delete or rewrite uncomfortable history like the Tiananmen uprising (not unlike U.S. President Donald Trump trying to erase Jan. 6) or the horrors of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. On the global stage, China is telling the world stories about its vision for a post-American world order that bear little resemblance to its actual policies in Asia—especially, and most egregiously, in their war-torn neighbor Myanmar.
The Chinese story goes like this: America’s hegemony has been oppressive and unipolar; China’s rise will open up the world to a more just and equal order. Beijing has steadily developed its story of a wannabe post-American order with a spate of global initiatives and China-centric institutions such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to realize Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision: “a community of common destiny.” The lead mechanism designed to realize Xi’s ambitions is the Global Security Initiative (GSI), which Beijing says is “supported and commended” by more than 100 nations.
I’m guessing they would also support motherhood and apple pie as well. The GSI is mostly a repackaged version of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, a pillar of China’s official foreign policy since 1954. The principles include: a commitment to “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity,” “common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security,” following “the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter,” and “resolving differences and disputes through dialogue and consultation.”
Beijing’s actual behavior tells a different story. There’s maritime gray zone belligerence against the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Japan in the South and East China seas, and brutal clashes with India in the Himalayas. Yet it’s Beijing’s unilateral intervention to micromanage an outcome in the Myanmar civil war, which began in 2021 and has killed at least 53,000 people and left some 3.5 million internally displaced, that’s most emblematic of the pathology of China’s approach to Asia. Unlike cases like the South China Sea or border with India, where there are long-standing territorial disputes and Beijing might argue its coercion is enforcing sovereignty (albeit mostly based on dubious, discredited claims), there are no unresolved border disputes with regard to Myanmar.
To be fair, China borders 14 nations across Eurasia. Few of China’s borders are friendly, some are disputed and have led to military clashes, and some border states are unstable and/or porous. Even now-peaceful borders like Russia have seen major clashes in living memory.
So, with a brutal civil war raging along its 1,323-mile border with Myanmar, with some ethnic groups such as the Wa or Kachin split between both countries, and criminal gangs running scam centers that have routinely kidnapped Chinese citizens, it’s not difficult to understand why the foreign policy of a security-obsessed Chinese Communist Party might be preoccupied with Myanmar. The military junta has occasionally dropped bombs along its border with China hitting Chinese civilians across the border and China has fired warning shots at junta jets on the border as well.
While China preponderant is the most dominant power, Myanmar also shares a border with India and Bangladesh to its west, and Thailand and Laos to its southeast. Xi’s GSI principles should suggest respect for Myanmar’s sovereignty, along with cooperation and coordination with other front-line Asian states bordering Myanmar trying to cope with the impact of the turmoil of the civil war.
There has been a dearth of Chinese efforts to forge multilateral cooperation or diplomacy with other front-line states or with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the lead mediator with Myanmar, its wayward member. China’s strategic and economic interests are entwined in the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, a partially completed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project including a deep-water port on the Bay of Bengal, border trade zones, oil and gas pipelines to China’s Yunnan province, and an industrial park. If completed, the total investment could reach some $20 billion.
The port and pipelines are part of Beijing’s efforts to reduce vulnerability of energy from the Persian Gulf shipped through the Strait of Malacca. Most of the benefits accrue to China except for a yet-to-materialize industrial park, enhancing Beijing’s economic role in Myanmar. The conflict has set back these planned BRI projects such as the Myitsone dam—a Beijing priority—and disrupted cross-border trade.
Over the course of the war, Beijing has looked out for no. 1, concentrating its efforts on protecting its economic interests, ambitions, and security interests along its border. So much so that after Beijing proposed setting up a joint security company with the military junta to protect its assets in Myanmar, in February, the junta passed a law to allow Chinese private security firms to operate in Myanmar to protect their interests.
Still, China, playing all sides, has not formally recognized the military government, and there is no love lost between them, though some mutual dependence. Beijing has worked opaquely as a self-appointed power broker to reconcile its interests with ethnic groups and the military junta, pressuring both, tilting at times toward the opposition, various Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) such as the Arakan and Kachin national armies, and more recently toward the junta. China is now worried about the junta’s potential collapse, as the Myanmar military now controls less than half of the country—including key military bases and, at times, some key border trade centers.
Chinese weapons arm both the junta and EAOs, many of them distributed to other opposition groups by the United Wa State Army, one of the EAOs that maintains the closest ties to Beijing. China’s frustrations with the junta’s failures mounted as billion-dollar scam centers in Shan state and along the Thai border trafficked Chinese citizens to carry out scams global in scope.
Beijing’s angst about the situation across its border may help explain why China apparently gave tacit approval to an opposition offensive over the past 16 months that has been startlingly successful. On Oct. 27, 2023, a group of three EAOs formed the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BTA) and launched an offensive now called “Operation 1027” in Shan state adjacent to China. By the end of December it had seized control of some 7,700 square miles of territory. China, working with local groups and the Thai government and Myanmar junta, began to destroy the scam syndicates, though some moved south along the Thai-Myanmar border.
China brokered a temporary cease-fire and tried to work with both sides to reopen border trade. The cease-fire subsequently broke down. In the interim, a separate offensive was launched by the Kachin Independence Army. In any case, a subsequent cease-fire with the the MNDAA was reached in January 2025.
The upshot to all of this is that there is an array of EAOs, some fighting for decades to gain local control against the central government, many now aligned against the military regime. Growing Chinese fears of collapse or defeat of the military junta have animated Beijing’s effort to jury-rig a stable outcome protecting its interests.
Beijing has been trying to lure some EAOs away from a growing opposition alignment and toward working with the junta, pressing them to agree to November 2025 elections called by a weakened military regime. A violently contested 2024 census, needed prior to an election—opposed by many EAOs and the exiled National Unity Government (NUG)—was only completed in 145 of the nation’s 330 townships—may delay any elections. ASEAN has denounced what it fears would be sham elections, arguing peace should precede elections.
Though Beijing would prefer an outcome led by, or accommodating, the military regime, despite its discomfort with pro-democracy forces, it appears willing to live with an NUG-led government if it would bring stability. The problematic election efforts and China’s inability to herd cats appears to be raising doubts in Beijing that it can unilaterally orchestrate a stable, legitimate outcome between the complex and competing forces.
China has exaggerated fears of what has been only a modest U.S. role. The U.S. imposed financial sanctions on the regime after the 2021 coup and has had a humanitarian aid program (now frozen) in Myanmar, much of it to support Rohingya refugees. U.S. aid provided “technical and non-lethal support” to pro-democracy forces and has contact with the coalition of the elected democratic forces and several EAOs.
To date, Myanmar, more so than most other civil conflicts, has been impervious to international diplomatic efforts. To some extent, this may reflect the complexity of its ethnic diversity that the nation has yet to fully reconcile what appears to be an unsustainable stalemate. But China’s exercise of its economic, military, and monopolistic diplomatic clout in the service only of its own interests has been no small factor.
In an oft-cited 2014 speech to the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, Xi declared, “Matters in Asia ultimately must be taken care of by Asians, Asia’s problems ultimately must be resolved by Asians, and Asia’s security ultimately must be protected by Asians.”
But the fact of four other Asian states bordering Myanmar with a direct stake in the outcome suggests that in the real world, some Asians are more equal than others. As a practical matter, Xi’s ideals of the GSI and companion initiatives are routinely discarded in Beijing’s foreign-policy behavior with a hypocrisy rivaling that of the U.S. and its a la carte allegiance to the “rules-based order.” One difference is that while U.S. exceptionalism proselytizes universal values, Chinese exceptionalism emphasizes a superior civilizational, unique Chineseness.
Beijing’s actual policies may be best understood as an effort to reclaim the Middle Kingdom and a sophisticated 21st-century version of its tributary system, underpinned by its BRI loans and investments. China’s geopolitical and economic dominance of Cambodia and Laos are cases in point.
Against that backdrop, Xi’s idealistic initiatives seem like a replay of the failed League of Nations, or perhaps a high school model U.N. exercise. They assume there is no such thing as power, national interests, or ambitions, no conflicts of interest, singing “Kumbaya.” As historian E. H. Carr, one of the godfathers of foreign-policy realism, wrote in his classic study of the interwar years: “To attempt to ignore power as the decisive factor in every political situation is purely utopian.”
China’s actions with regard to the Myanmar civil conflict point to the limits of its hard and soft power, as well as the folly of a Chinese diplomacy that pretends to higher values. Beijing’s machinations may be more than just a cynical shield. China is frustrated by sclerotic post-World War II institutions that have not evolved to reflect a reemerging China’s economic and strategic weight. But its plans for a new multipolar order are Sino-centric overreach, discounting the interests of emerging powers such as Brazil, India, and Turkey as well as the West.
Neither ambitions of perpetual primacy nor China’s dreams of a post-American world are realistic or achievable. Myanmar’s fate and that of the world order writ large may hinge on the ability to realize a new balance of power that can give ballast to regional and global problem-solving.