Isolated from most of the western world by its behavior and by economic sanctions, Myanmar has been forced to rely more and more on its giant neighbor China. Beijing did its diplomatic best to support Myanmar in international fora and became Myanmar’s indispensable ally: the generals get all their weapons from China (which can set the price and the quality, in the absence of competition), do 35 percent of their trade with China, and have let Chinese firms build controversial dams in Myanmar to feed the Chinese appetite for hydroelectricity.
Chinese businessmen and traders have been flooding into northern Myanmar in recent years, and they are not popular with the local people. Indeed, the Burmese have long mistrusted China, and the military has not forgotten that it spent a lot of time, and lost a lot of lives, putting down a Communist rebellion supported by Beijing.
The Myanmar government appeared to decide that the only way to lessen its humiliating and debilitating dependence on China was to introduce a little competition from western nations. But to do that, they had to persuade Washington and the European Union to lift the economic sanctions imposed because of their human rights violations. The best way to do that was to launch a political opening, and persuade the world that Myanmar was on the road to democracy. Hence the elections.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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