Word: burma
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...thing. Fully Burmese himself, he is descended from courtiers, and grew up (in Riverdale, New York) in the same house as his maternal grandfather, U Thant, the onetime small-town Burmese headmaster who became the U.N.'s third Secretary-General. The author's first trip to Burma came in 1974 when, just 8 years old, he returned to help bury his grandfather. That visit set off confrontations in the streets between rebellious students calling for a state funeral and the hard-line government eager to downplay the event-eerily prefiguring the violence of 1988. But Thant was also educated...
...priests. To this day the highlands around the Irrawaddy Valley, crowded with minority groups, are "one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world." And as late as 1927, more immigrants streamed into Rangoon than into New York City. "For many Indian families," as Thant nicely puts it, "Burma was the first America...
...recent years, more and more books have tried to open the doors (or windows at least) of this hermit country. Amitav Ghosh's big novel, The Glass Palace, filled its pages with research about Burma under the British. Pascal Khoo Thwe, in his From the Land of Green Ghosts, offered a lyrical and inspiring look at life within a Karen Christian village (and the ongoing Karen insurrection), and of his own unlikely passage from guerrilla and waiter to Cambridge student. Even Amy Tan's last novel, Saving Fish From Drowning, is set in Burma, among American tourists who bat back...
...natural resources, so that its economy can sustain the growth that officials hope will keep a lid on unrest at home. That is why China has reached out to resource-rich democracies like Australia and Brazil as much as it has to such international pariahs as Sudan and Burma, both of which have underdeveloped hydrocarbon reserves. There's nothing particularly surprising about any of this; it is how all nations behave when domestic supplies of primary goods are no longer sufficient to sustain their economies. (Those Westerners who criticize China for its behavior in Africa might remember their own history...
This lack of leverage over Chinese behavior may make for an uncomfortable future. Mann sees a time when a powerful China not only remains undemocratic but also sustains unpleasant regimes in power, as it does today in such nations as Zimbabwe and Burma. Such behavior could make the world a colder place for freedom. Green, the former National Security Council staff member, agrees that China "wants to build speed bumps on the road to political globalization and liberalization" and is "particularly against any attempt to spread democracy." Sandschneider, the German China expert, says the Chinese "talk about peace and cooperation...