Blind men and an elephant: how the Indian and Chinese press cover Myanmar.

• Author: Fraioli, Paul
• Position: ANDREW WELLINGTON CORDIER ESSAY - Essay

The objective of this paper is to examine how patterns of Indian and Chinese reporting on Myanmar reflect the political climates of each country. A sample of 94 articles from Indian sources and 106 articles from Xinhua News Agency (English) was examined using content-analysis techniques. There is a clear divergence in the topics covered by the Indian and Chinese media during the time period reviewed, 3 November to 17 November 2010, which was selected to coincide with Myanmar's first nationwide elections in twenty years as well as the release of political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. The Indian press provided more coverage of Suu Kyi's release and of Myanmar political affairs than the Chinese press, but neither India nor China covered Suu Kyi's activities in the days following her release. The Chinese press provided mare coverage of economic affairs and the Myawaddy border crisis, which the Indian press ignored. Surprisingly, the press in non-democratic China attentively chronicled and promoted Myanmar's elections while the press in democratic India had very little to say about them. This suggests that on these issues, the press focus on what they perceive to be in the national interest of their respective countries.

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India and China are competing with each other for the spoils of a partnership with their mutual neighbor Myanmar, which has been tightly controlled by its military since 1962. (1) Each would like an advantage over the other in access to natural resources, bilateral trade and in expanding military hegemony in the region. Some observers have suggested that Myanmar is "the prom queen that both China and India want to dance with." (2) Myanmar, for its part, attempts to play one against the other. This study uses content-analysis techniques to examine how this struggle plays out in each country's day-to-day news coverage of Myanmar. Using news articles from a two-week time period in November 2010, this paper will

describe how national political priorities are reflected in which stories are covered and which are not. In addition, this paper will describe an interesting and unexpected outcome in which the press in non-democratic China attentively chronicled and promoted Myanmar's national elections while the press in democratic India had very little to say about them.

The elections of 7 November 2010 were a unique event in Myanmar's recent history and it is unclear how they will change the political dynamic in the country. (3) A general election has not been held in Myanmar since 1990, and the results of an election have not been honored since 1960. (4) The military first took control of the Burmese government in a 1962 coup, after which it installed a nominally civilian government. The generals seized direct control again in 1988 and annulled the results of the 1990 election in which a pro-democracy party won 80 percent of the seats in the legislature. (5) In the process, they disbanded political parties and arrested democracy leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi. (6) In 2003, it announced a "roadmap toward discipline-flourishing democracy" that would supposedly bring the country from military authoritarian rule to a limited version of democracy. (7) The junta drafted a new constitution--a deeply flawed document if one values government by consent of the people, since the military retains veto power over both houses of the National Assembly--that was ratified in May 2008 amid charges of widespread vote tampering. (8) In August 2010, the junta announced that nationwide elections would take place just a few months later. (9) The United States criticized the process as unfair and illegitimate, but China and India did not. Within a matter of weeks, junta leader Than Shwe traveled to both countries to secure regional support for the elections. (10)

After the generals seized control of Myanmar over twenty years ago, India condemned the government in more withering terms than anyone, including the United States, but reversed its anti-regime policy in 1993 almost entirely because of Myanmar's growing economic relationship with China. (11) The consensus among policymakers today is that India continues to lose access to resources such as oil, natural gas, coal, zinc, copper, uranium, timber, and hydropower to a growing China. (12) In response, India wants to swiftly improve its bilateral economic relations with Myanmar, which would also counter Chinese military expansion into Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. However, most observers have argued that "India has derived more frustration than success from its new 'velvet policy'" of engagement with the junta. (13)

China has fared better. Myanmar has had a close relationship with China since it gained independence from Great Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War, except for a brief period in which China supported a Burmese Communist party against the party in power. When Western countries and India disengaged following the 1988 coup, China was the last available business partner.

Military experts have written that China is pursuing a policy of "strategic encirclement ... to marginalize India in Asia and tie it down to the Indian subcontinent." (14) This is the so-called string of pearls strategy, in which China develops relationships with waterfront states along the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal and builds deepwater shipping and naval ports, thereby securing open sea lines of communication for trade and naval activities from the horn of Africa to the Strait of Hormuz, through the Strait of Malacca and finally to the South China Sea. New Delhi was alarmed at reports that China is constructing naval bases and intelligence colection stations in Bangladesh and the Andaman Sea. (15)

THE PRESS IN INDIA AND CHINA

India's major English newspapers were established during the colonial period and were heavily influenced by British journalism practices. As a result, many value impartiality...