Nationalism and anti ethno politics: why 'Chinese Development' failed at Myanmar's Myitsone Dam
In 2011, the Burmese military backed government stunned global audiences by unilaterally suspending the construction of the Myitsone Dam, the cornerstone of China's largest hydropower project abroad. This prominent failure of China's "Going Out" investment strategy reverberated globally. Both Western and Chinese accounts frame the event as a pivotal moment in Myanmar's celebrated reform process, the cooling of China Myanmar relations, and US China geopolitical rivalry in the Asia Pacific. However, my ethnographic field and media research from 2010 to 2015 reveals that the mega project's failure does not originally stem from inter state geopolitics or contested economics and ecology. Through chronological narration, I show how the Myitsone Dam is primarily the casualty of a distinctly ethno political causality, whereby three nationalisms clashed and the replication of China's "anti ethno political" model of development failed. Though no monolithic Chinese state directs "Chinese Development" overseas, individual Chinese entrepreneurs nonetheless draw from the People's Republic of China's (PRC's) anti political and state centric paradigm when facing foreign social worlds. In the particular case of Myitsone, Chinese proponents drew from PRC's state nationalist heuristics of "national minorities and state led development" and "Western anti China conspiracy," when facing Myanmar's ethnic Kachin and Burman nationalisms. State ideological subjectivities of these developers seemed to blind them to the weakness in their own anti ethno political strategies, even when those collapsed publicly. I conclude that the Myitsone Dam's construction will likely not be restarted, despite the hydropower company's efforts. The Myitsone case also exemplifies how China's previous historical entanglements in its neighboring regions uniquely disrupt the progress of "Going Out" in Asia.