The pageantry in Beijing was for the cameras. The single sentence that mattered was a quiet confession that the man Beijing was hosting still does not have his own people’s consent.
Guest contributor
James Shwe
The optics out of Beijing on June 16 were unambiguous. A 21-gun salute on Tiananmen Square. An honor guard in the Great Hall of the People. A welcome banquet in the Golden Hall.
Eighteen memoranda of understanding signed in a single afternoon. By the time Xi Jinping had finished hosting Min Aung Hlaing — civilian president by way of a coup, an army-engineered election, and a parliament from which every credible opposition party had been excluded — Myanmar’s former junta chief had been handed everything a state visit can confer: protocol, photographs, and the implicit message that the world’s second-largest economy was prepared to deal with his administration as a full partner.
There was a multitude of news reports and articles on this. I managed to work through eight reports among them that — Chinese state readouts from Xinhua and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (via the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC); wire and regional coverage from Anadolu Agency, Turkish Radio and Television World, The Straits Times, Nikkei Asia and AsiaNews; and a Modern Diplomacy analysis.
Two of the eight are not journalism at all but Chinese government communiqués. One is open opinion. Five are news reports, three of them carrying the Reuters dateline. None of the major United States newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times — has run an original story.
The American press has effectively conceded the framing of this visit to Chinese state media and to a handful of regional desks in Bangkok, Singapore and Tokyo.
That silence matters, because the most important sentence of the entire visit is sitting in plain sight inside Beijing’s own carefully drafted readouts — and it is a sentence the military regime in Naypyidaw cannot answer.
President Xi told Min Aung Hlaing, on the record in Xinhua and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ own version, to “find a correct path of development that suits its national conditions and wins popular support.”
He added that China “supports all parties in Myanmar in advancing peace and reconciliation through dialogue.” Beijing reaffirmed its long-standing line about “non-interference” and a “friendly policy toward all the people of Myanmar” — not all the generals.
Read those phrases the way a Burmese diplomat would. They are not a blessing. They are a condition. Min Aung Hlaing’s most important international patron has just said in public, on state television, that he does not yet have popular support and that legitimacy still has to be earned.
The election the regime staged in December and January — the one that excluded every major opposition party, the one the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and most of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) refused to recognize — did not buy him legitimacy in Beijing’s eyes either. If it had, Xi would not have needed to ask for it.
Two other facts inside the same news cycle sharpen the point.
Days before the visit, Chinese security services in Kunming arrested Min Zin, an American citizen, the director of the Institute for Strategy and Policy (ISP-Myanmar), and one of the most respected scholars working on Sino-Myanmar relations.
The charge: espionage. The real signal: Beijing does not want independent analysts looking too closely at what it is doing in Myanmar at the very moment it is deepening its bet on the generals. A confident patron does not need to arrest its critics on the eve of a state banquet.
And on the day of the talks themselves, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) — one of the most powerful ethnic resistance organizations along the Chinese border — handed over 200 prisoners of war to the regime, almost certainly under Chinese pressure.
Beijing only leans on the ethnic resistance organizations because they hold real cards. You do not pressure the powerless. The resistance is on the battlefield ledger whether or not it is on the guest list.
So, what should the resistance — the National Unity Government (NUG), the ethnic resistance organizations, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF) and the diaspora that supports them — do with this opening?
First, make Xi’s own words travel. In Burmese, English and Mandarin. Ask, publicly and repeatedly, who exactly are “the people” whose support Min Aung Hlaing has yet to win. Every time the regime claims legitimacy from its rigged ballot, hold up Xi’s sentence next to it.
Second, fill the vacuum the American press has left. With no original reporting from the U.S. yet, the next 72 hours are an open field for op-eds, congressional briefings, and direct engagement with the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
The story to tell is not that China supported Min Aung Hlaing. It is that even China could not bring itself to call him popularly supported.
Third, open a quiet, serious channel to Beijing. Through Yunnan-based academics, through ASEAN intermediaries, through Track-2 diplomacy outside official government channels.
The message is concrete: the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor, the rare-earth supply chains in Kachin State, the pipelines through Shan State, and the security of Chinese nationals all run through territory the resistance shapes.
Any genuine “peace and reconciliation through dialogue” has to include the NUG, the ethnic resistance organizations, the SCEF and the CDM — not only interlocutors hand-picked by the generals.
Fourth, internationalize the Min Zin case. An American scholar detained on the eve of a Chinese state visit, on transparently political charges, is an academic-freedom story, a due-diligence story for investors guided by Environmental, Social and Governance standards, and a candidate for Global Magnitsky designations.
American editors will run it if the diaspora hands it to them clean.
Fifth, target the environmental, social and governance and sanctions pressure points the eight reports flagged: the mooted revival of the Myitsone Dam, heavy rare-earth mining in Kachin State, and the 18 memoranda of understanding signed on June 16.
Map the Chinese state-owned and private entities involved. Push European, British, American, Korean and Japanese buyers, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds to disclose their exposure to regime-linked supply chains.
Sixth, break the “stability” frame that runs through every wire story this week. A regime that controls only part of its own territory, has presided over more than 93,000 deaths and displaced 3.7 million people, cannot deliver stability to anyone — least of all to Chinese investors.
Only a settlement that includes the resistance can. That is the message Beijing needs to hear, not in protest chants but in the language of risk, return and strategic continuity it actually responds to.
President Xi Jinping gave Min Aung Hlaing the optics of legitimacy and withheld the substance. He told him, in front of the world’s cameras, to go and win popular support — knowing full well he cannot.
That is not an endorsement. That is an admission. Our job, in Naypyidaw, in Washington, in Brussels, in Tokyo, in Delhi, and in Yangon, is to make sure no one is allowed to forget it.
James Shwe is a Myanmar democracy advocate and writer based in California. His previous DVB analysis of Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to India appeared on June 3.
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