When I was a child (and much later than that, in fact) I loved to open up an atlas and look at all the different colored countries, dreaming about the different landscapes, cities and peoples that each map represented. This morning I’ve been moved to take down my map of the world from the shelf by this article in ATOL: China is actively seeking to develop the Irrawaddy river in Myanmar as a delivery route for oil – which would come by ship from the Bay of Bengal, upriver to the port of Bhamo (go look at a map – it’s a long way upriver) and then by road, rail or pipeline to China’s Yunnan province. It’s not the first article I’ve seen about this, but it’s the first to indicate that the plan is quite well advanced. It’s an interesting article that points out the advantages for China of this plan – lower costs and greater security. A number of pieces recently have mentioned how worried China is by the threats posed by potential piracy and terrorism in the Straits of Malacca.
Singaporeans will immediately see where that’s going, and this other article makes it explicit: If the Myanmar and Thai proposals do succeed, the one country that would be severely affected would be Singapore. China is one of Singapore’s most important oil trading clients, with a substantial proportion of China’s oil imports coming via Singapore. Alternative oil routes would undermine that special relationship. . I don’t have the figures for the oil trade but plainly the oil could be just the beginning – if this transport route is established then a lot of other traffic could shift from the ports of Singapore and Johore Bahru to Yunnan and Myanmar.
In the meantime, I’ll let my imagination mull over “Yunnan, situated in the southwest corner of China, borders Tibet, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam”. TOMA and I are hoping to go to Yunnan next year…
[...] A major influence on my thinking was an article by David Fullbrook in Asia Times, which I read in 2004 and wrote about then. It made such an impression that during my MBA, I persuaded my team in Global Risk Analysis to use Myanmar and China’s plans for the Irawaddy as our group case study. Everybody in the team and, later, our lecturer actually found it really, really interesting, partly because it was so unexpected, but everyone was fascinated by the implications. [...]
[...] Myanmar seem to have changed since I first wrote about them on the first incarnation of this blog, back in 2004. At that time, the idea was to re-open the Irrawaddy to ocean-going ships, including oil tanker, [...]