ABSTRACT
In the years immediately after Burma’s independence, policy-makers, first in London and then in Washington, were concerned largely with the problems of regime stability stemming from conflict and economic weakness. Accordingly, the main features of Anglo-American policy – attempts to extend economic assistance through the Commonwealth loan, American technical aid or via the Colombo Plan, favourable treatment in military supplies, or political support for the government against Karen claims to autonomy, for example – were all intended to bolster the government’s ability to stave off economic crisis and maintain its capacity to resist its Karen and, in particular, communist opponents. Although planners acknowledged the more hazardous regional environment created by the emergence of the communist regime in China, the assumption remained that the primary threat to the Burmese government was domestic, not international. By the mid-1950s, it appeared that, in large part, the objective of stability
had been achieved. British officials in Rangoon were reporting the effective end of major Karen armed opposition in the delta.1 The communist insurgency, while undefeated, appeared to be in retreat, and the period ended with a series of mass surrenders in which perhaps 10,000 communist and PVO fighters laid down their arms.2 Burma’s third main source of instability – the KMT troops encamped on its eastern border – had also lost much of its venom following the evacuations of 1953 and 1954. Operations against the irregulars that remained, by now in tandem with the Thai armed forces, were making solid, if modest, progress, and American observers had concluded that the government in Rangoon no longer considered them a serious security threat.3 Politically too, Burma seemed to have reached a new level of maturity. The country’s second parliamentary elections since independence went ahead as planned in 1956. Although the AFPFL retained its hold on power, competing parties won about a third of the vote, suggesting that a constitutional opposition was beginning to emerge. These apparent improvements in the political and security spheres were
not, however, matched by comparable progress in tackling Burma’s economic problems, and the government’s primary source of weakness during the period remained its economic dependence on a single commodity, rice. When
Asian rice was in short supply, as it was in the early 1950s, prices were buoyant and the dangers inherent in this dependency were masked. By the mid-1950s, however, the rice market was turning against the Burmese. Traditional customers such as India were becoming self-sufficient, forcing down prices and leaving the Burmese with huge surpluses they could not sell. Unable to find customers in its old rice markets, the Burmese government sought out new ones, and a series of barter deals were agreed with China and the Soviet bloc in 1954 and 1955. Burma’s trade agreements were part of a pattern of Soviet and Chinese
diplomatic initiatives in the Third World in the mid-1950s. Similar trade and aid deals were concluded with India, Afghanistan, Egypt and Cambodia, all accompanied by a flurry of diplomatic activity as high-profile delegations streamed out of Moscow and Beijing, heading for Delhi, Kabul, Rangoon and Cairo. To analysts in Washington and London, accustomed to the belligerent diplomacy of the Stalin years, these overtures constituted an important and worrying change in communist foreign policy, and planners responded with a significant reappraisal of the nature of the communist threat, and of the significance of the countries at which it appeared to be aimed.4 The Soviet Union, officials concluded, was engaged in a concerted offensive aimed at displacing Western influence in the Third World. This broader analysis invested Burma’s trade ties with the communist bloc
with an importance that in themselves they perhaps did not merit, and efforts to frame a response constituted the defining factor in British and, especially, American relations with the country during this period. The rice deals, officials in Washington and London argued, were the thin end of a dangerous wedge, portending communist economic, and through that political, predominance. Apprehensions of a communist threat to the Burmese government had of course been central to British and American thinking about Burma since independence, but this threat had primarily been understood as a domestic one; although officials acknowledged the risks of Chinese subversion, and the lesser risk of Chinese invasion, the most urgent danger seemed to stem from the country’s home-grown communists. Burma’s independence from communist control no longer seemed to rest on its ability to counter the political and military challenge of its own communists, but on its ability to resist the economic advances of Moscow and Beijing. As Gore-Booth put it to the Foreign Office at the end of 1955: ‘The thing which hits one most forcibly is that whereas we in Burma were in the stalls watching a drama called the cold war, we now occupy a very small but active corner on that large stage’.5
