Can China Really Decide Myanmar's Fate?

The most consequential shift in Myanmar's five-year conflict isn't happening on the battlefield—it's happening in Beijing's corridors of power.

After three years of strategic patience following the 2021 coup, China abandoned its hedging strategy in late 2024. Faced with the Myanmar military regime's potential collapse, Beijing stepped in directly, pulling what appeared to be a decisive phase back into prolonged warfare.

This intervention has sparked a dangerous assumption: that China has already decided Myanmar's political future, and domestic actors are powerless to resist. But this fatalistic view fundamentally misreads both Myanmar's history and the current dynamics on the ground.

Why Myanmar Matters to Beijing's Grand Strategy

For China, Myanmar isn't just another neighbor—it's a strategic linchpin where economic interests, security imperatives, and regional ambition converge.

The country provides a vital overland corridor from Yunnan Province to the Indian Ocean, offering an alternative to the vulnerable Malacca Strait. Major Belt and Road projects, including oil and gas pipelines, supply nearly 10% of China's natural gas imports when operating at full capacity.

More critically, Myanmar is Beijing's primary external source of rare earth elements, supplying more than China's domestic output in 2024, and provides nearly 80% of China's tin ore imports. But beyond resources, Myanmar serves as a crucial buffer zone along China's "soft underbelly"—the southwestern frontier that Beijing views as strategically vulnerable.

Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized that "neighboring countries play a crucial role in China's broader development and diplomatic strategy." Like the United States' 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, China's "periphery diplomacy" aims to consolidate uncontested influence over its immediate neighborhood. A hostile foothold along its periphery would force Beijing to divert attention and resources toward defense rather than global power projection.

Beijing's Four-Pronged Intervention Strategy

China's intervention began with Foreign Minister Wang Yi's August 2024 visit to Myanmar and has followed a coherent four-part approach.

First, reinforcing regime survival through financial and material support. Second, coercing ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) to suspend offensives while facilitating selective dialogue with the regime. Third, sidelining pro-democracy actors viewed as aligned with Western interests. Fourth, endorsing the junta's staged elections as a mechanism for manufacturing stability.

The results have been tangible. China pressured the Kokang and Ta'ang armed groups to halt their offensives and facilitated negotiations to return resistance-held areas to junta control. Chinese Special Envoy Deng Xijun went so far as to state that the elections are the result of an agreement between Xi and junta leader Min Aung Hlaing.

Beijing must be fully aware that these elections are fundamentally a sham. Yet it has endorsed them nonetheless, calculating that even a manufactured civilian façade could produce a political order it can more easily shape and control.

The Fatalistic Fallacy

Against this backdrop, a dangerous fatalism has taken hold among international observers. The assumption is that Beijing has already decided Myanmar's political future, that the resistance will fail because China won't permit its victory, and that domestic actors possess little meaningful agency over outcomes.

This is a profound misreading of Myanmar. It underestimates the political aspirations of the population, the depth of determination that has sustained the Spring Revolution over five years, and the movement's proven ability to dictate the course of the country's future.

Myanmar's history offers a powerful rebuttal to this fatalism. Across decades of conflict, domestic actors have repeatedly demonstrated the capacity to outmaneuver the junta-China alliance to advance their own political objectives. The trajectory of the Three Brotherhood Alliance is instructive: despite significant Chinese pressure to halt offensives and enter ceasefire arrangements, the alliance endured, adapted, and continued pursuing its long-term goals.

The same dynamic remains visible today. Despite sustained pressure from Beijing, EAOs such as the Kachin Independence Army and the Arakan Army continue their struggle in effective—if not always overt—coordination with the broader resistance movement.

The Limits of Chinese Influence

China's intervention has undeniably changed the war's tempo and constrains the armed resistance. Several powerful EAOs have recalibrated their positions in response to Beijing's pressure. But China's influence is primarily serving to prolong the conflict, not end it.

This is partly because China lacks leverage with the Myanmar public, which increasingly despises Chinese interference. Beijing's intervention isn't weakening the fundamental factors that cause the resistance to persevere. Instead, the conflict has continued, intensifying in several areas and expanding in scope.

Beijing's expectation that stability could be restored through orchestrated elections reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Myanmar's political reality. The Myanmar people aren't vulnerable to fatalism—they continue to struggle to determine their own fate.

Global Implications

Myanmar's resistance to Chinese influence carries broader implications for Beijing's regional strategy. If domestic actors can maintain agency despite overwhelming external pressure, it suggests limits to China's "periphery diplomacy" that extend beyond Myanmar's borders.

For other Southeast Asian nations navigating Chinese influence, Myanmar's experience offers both warnings and hope. While Beijing's intervention capabilities are formidable, they're not omnipotent. Local political dynamics, popular will, and strategic adaptation can create space for domestic agency even under intense external pressure.

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