Background

Earlier research on religions and Chinese development projects has shown how religions first regained a public role in post-Mao China’s domestic politics, then in its foreign policy, and, more recently, in its expanding development investment abroad.

After Mao, Chinese Communist Party leaders began giving more space to religions, but aimed to institutionalize them under party guidance and ‘Sinicize’ them.Footnote ³ The party elites have favoured China’s ‘traditional religions and beliefs’—especially Buddhism and Taoism—to advance social welfare services and morality against corruption, while distrusting and disfavouring such supposedly ‘foreign religions’ as Islam and Christianity.Footnote ⁴ Beyond the central party’s changing agendas, the local revivals of Chinese communal religions and Buddhism have often resulted from specific local relationships, religious leaders, and devotees.Footnote ⁵

In recent decades, Beijing has incorporated a few religions—especially Buddhism,Footnote ⁶ but also Islam and Christianity—into its foreign policy and soft-power diplomacy. The goal has been to increase in other countries a sense of spiritual and cultural affinity with and support for China. This strategy has been relatively successful abroad, even while the Chinese Communist Party has ideologically opposed and repressed these same religions domestically.Footnote ⁷ In particular, Beijing has launched an ‘unprecedented’ global promotion specifically of Chinese Buddhism ‘as a form of soft power’.Footnote ⁸ This has come amid international competition, not least with India, and has aimed especially to weaken the Dalai Lama’s stature in global Buddhism.Footnote ⁹

Beyond general foreign policy, religions have increasingly come to matter for countless Chinese companies, investments, and infrastructure developments overseas, because Chinese projects have encountered societies that are largely religious. This has given Belt-and-Road projects reason to practise more religious diplomacy.Footnote ¹⁰ Especially in Theravada-Buddhist countries, such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, or Burma, Beijing has leveraged Buddhism to validate Chinese expansion, including through development investment. It has organized ‘Buddhist diplomacy activities specifically tied to the BRI’.Footnote ¹¹ This religious diplomacy can be mutual. For example, Chinese and Sri Lankan officials mutually use Buddhist narratives and history to advocate for and ease criticism of BRI projects.Footnote ¹²

Unlike much of the literature referenced above, my article moves from such higher-level strategies to somewhat more on-the-ground encounters and messy politics. It explores encounters and ‘sacred politics’ between Chinese developers and foreign religions, as well as between pro-Beijing infrastructure advocates and locally sacralized and contested landscapes.

In this case the locally sacralized and contested landscape is Myitsone. This Burmese-language word means the confluence where two rivers—the Mali Hka (Malikha) and N’mai Hka (Maykha)—merge into one, after they have flowed down from the Himalayan glaciers through hills and rainforests. This confluence marks the beginning of Burma’s great river, the Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady).

Chinese state-owned electricity companies arrived in Myitsone and Burma amid a brutal military dictatorship, ethno-political conflict, vast natural resource grabbing, and a decades-long war. Burma is an ethnically diverse country, where the majority group, the Bamars, comprise about two-thirds of the overall population. The ethnic Bamar nationalist and Buddhist military, state, and juntas have, since the Second World War, clashed with more than a dozen other peoples’ armed ethnonational movements.Footnote ¹³ Many of these non-Bamar peoples’ movements have evolved into ethno-national proto-states that govern certain territories and populations. The Myitsone project’s location on the rivers in northernmost Burma—between China’s Yunnan, Tibet, and India’s Assam and Arunachal Pradesh—is largely home to Kachin people, a multi-ethnic nation of below a million people.

Alongside ethnicity, competing religious beliefs and institutions shape Myitsone and Burma. Almost 90 per cent of Burma’s people are Theravada Buddhist, about 6 per cent are Christian, and 4 per cent are Muslim, including ethnic Rohingyas. Burma’s leaders have long elevated Buddhism as part of Burma’s nation-building project, subordinating other religions, largely seeing them as foreign intrusions from the British colonial era. Influenced by Western missionaries from that time, Burma’s Kachins are mainly Christians, unlike the neighbouring Tai (Shan) peoples or the country’s majority ethnic Bamars who are Buddhist. Indeed, religions and ethnicities tend to largely coincide in Burma, the Kachin areas, and at Myitsone. Around Myitsone, Kachin Christians are in the majority. Most of Burma’s Kachins belong to the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC), but a large minority are Roman Catholics. There are also various smaller churches. Entwined with these Christianities, diverse animist or native traditions, beliefs, and concepts are still part of Kachin political and religious worlds, as we will see below.Footnote ¹⁴

Since the early 1960s, people in Kachin areas have lived amid a grinding war between the Burmese military state and the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), both of which also seek income from the vast local natural resource economies. The KIO has been autonomously governing various borderland and remote territories and populations.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, most Kachins have, to varying extents, recognized the KIO as a legitimate government. After a 1994 ceasefire, the Burmese and Kachin militaries joined Chinese, Burmese, and Kachin companies to industrialize local rainforest logging and jade, gold, amber, and rare-earth mining as well as cash cropping, thus grabbing lands and resource wealth from countless local residents.Footnote ¹⁶ The Myitsone Dam project emerged amid these ceasefire-era natural-resource grabs. The dam construction and anti-dam resistance also coincided with growing tensions between the Burmese military and the KIO since the late 2000s, which led to war resuming in 2011.Footnote ¹⁷ Around 100,000 Kachin village people have had to flee their homes and have lived for years in displaced people’s camps.

The Myitsone project was ambitious, aiming to reshape these contested landscapes. Prepared since the early 2000s, the project envisions erecting altogether seven massive dams on rivers in northernmost Burma’s sub-tropical Himalayan foothills. The plan was for these dams to culminate in the largest one near the Myitsone confluence on the Irrawaddy River. This multi-billion dollar project began as a joint venture between the state-owned China Power Investment (CPI) as the main investor, the Burmese junta’s Ministry of Electric Power—which had first proposed this hydropower development—and the Burmese military-allied business conglomerate Asia World, founded by an ethnic Kokang (Han Chinese) military leader and narcotics tycoon. As usual, large bribes allegedly accompanied the project.

This was China’s largest-ever hydropower project abroad and its largest-ever investment in Burma. Together the seven dams were to have an installed capacity of around 20 giga-watts, nearing the world’s largest power station, China’s Three Gorges Dam. Ninety per cent of the electricity generated was to supply southern China’s power grid, while the Burmese government was to receive billions of dollars and some badly needed electricity. Moreover, after 50 years, the facilities would be transferred fully to Burma. The largest dam, the Myitsone Dam, was to be about 140 metres high and 1,300 metres wide. The seven mega-dams’ reservoirs would flood various lowland areas—including the Myitsone confluence—thus displacing tens of villages and about 10,000 people in a sparsely populated region. The Myitsone Dam was sited for construction about 40 km upstream from Myitkyina, the capital city of Burma’s Kachin state, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The location of Myitsone Dam, and the areas that the altogether seven dams of the Myitsone project would reportedly flood. Source: KDNG, Damming the Irrawaddy, p. 22.

Many observers, scholars, activists, and journalists have shown why and how the Myitsone project emerged, collapsed, and created international controversy. Research has shown how a risky underground anti-dam resistance began in local villages amid Burma’s military state repression in 2002–2003. As the project moved forward, resistance spread during the mid-2000s to broader ethnic Kachin society, and, finally, around 2009–2011, to lowland Burmese cities and its ethnic-majority Bamar publics. In 2011, snowballing anti-dam resistance led the Burmese regime to one-sidedly suspend the dam’s construction, surprising both the Chinese, Burmese, and worldwide observers and causing much speculation about international politics.Footnote ¹⁸

In this article, we will look beyond formal state-to-state politics, to ask: what role did sacred politics play in this infrastructure controversy?

Churches in the resistance

Religious institutions, leaders, and practices helped start the earliest resistance to the Myitsone Dam project and shelter those involved, but were also hampered by violent repression and fear. Local village leaders largely could not persuade central Kachin leaders to help them. Instead, they passed the torch to new local village activists and outside Kachin activists whose campaigning eventually snowballed into a Burmese countrywide public outcry. Church leaders continued guiding much of social life in the dam project’s resettlement villages.

All of Burma’s years-long and later widespread resistance against Myitsone Dam began in Tanghpre (Tang Hpre), a large Kachin farming village right next to the Myitsone confluence, known as the birthplace of the Irrawaddy River. In late 2003, Tanghpre’s political and religious leaders happened to find out about the junta’s unannounced plans to build a gigantic hydropower dam that would flood and displace their village and others nearby. Despite military-political repression and everyday fear, they began spreading information and trying to stop these plans. Later, in 2006–2007, the junta made its dam plans public. In late 2009, government officials came to a few villages near the confluence, including Tanghpre, to announce that all residents would be evicted and moved to two Burmese company-built resettlement villages.

Especially in the beginning, religious leaders both drove the rural resistance and protected those involved. As Hkawn Ja Aung puts it: ‘Church leaders initiated this movement even though they didn’t aim to start a movement but simply to support.’Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, throughout military rule, Burma’s various religious spaces, including Kachin churches, have served as relatively autonomous and safe spaces for gatherings and discussions which the junta would otherwise repress for being ‘political’. The majority church in broader Kachin society is the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC), but Tanghpre village has more Catholics than Baptists. A Tanghpre Catholic priest spearheaded the Catholic community’s resistance, while Baptist pastors led the Baptist resistance. Refusing to be resettled, the Catholic priest famously used to tell people that he would move only when the water level reached his nose: ‘Then, I will make a boat.’ In 2007, the junta arrested him briefly for collecting signatures against the dam. Before he died in 2013, he had ‘never set his foot into the resettlement village’. While the usual tensions between Kachin Catholics and Baptists remained, the struggle against the dam motivated much new coordination between them. Nevertheless, some church leaders remained ‘wary’ of such ‘political activities’, fearing that the military would increase its surveillance, harassment, and arrests.Footnote ²⁰

As direct protests were unthinkable under the brutal military regime, local church leaders held mass gatherings against the dam and village relocation. For example, throughout 2009–2011, both Catholics and Baptists held mass prayer ceremonies at Myitsone and in dozens of churches across the Kachin region, sometimes coordinating joint anti-dam prayers and fasting. As usual in Burma, such religious practices allowed the circumventing of the junta’s censorship and repression of public gatherings. For safety, one could pray for ‘the confluence to survive forever’, without having to risk the junta cracking down for mentioning the dam specifically, just as Burmese activists later came to praise the beloved Irrawaddy River without mentioning the sensitive dam issue directly.

Among the villages around Myitsone, mostly only Tanghpre villagers resisted openly, led by the village administration and church leaders, while other, smaller villages largely complied with the military regime’s demands.Footnote ²¹ Among the local-area religious leaders, too, those from Tanghpre led the resistance, with church leaders forwarding information to the other, relatively less-connected villages’ church leaders so that they could deliver the message to their congregations during their services.Footnote ²² Tanghpre church leaders and youths also began collecting signatures, for which the junta briefly arrested them. Despite the danger, some residents from other villages eventually signed petition letters and joined the anti-dam prayer services, where they could feel ‘safe in numbers’.Footnote ²³

During these early years, the Myitsone local anti-dam leaders struggled to ‘jump scale’—to get Kachin national leaders and a broader Kachin national public to help resist the emerging mega-project. After discovering the plans for the dam in late 2003, they reached out and wrote formal letters in early 2004 to the KIO, the Kachin central Baptist and Catholic church leaders, cultural leaders, as well as to the Burmese junta’s Northern Commander and others.Footnote ²⁴ However, the villagers received almost no support. This showed a local–central disconnect within Kachin society, including in Kachin religious institutions. As Hkawn Ja AungFootnote ²⁵ and KimFootnote ²⁶ also observe, local village leaders felt disappointed when some central Kachin leaders ignored them or told them to accept the ‘benefit’, resettlement compensation, and better transportation.

Fear and silence, including among the central church leaders, hindered the resistance from spreading during the mid-2000s. For example, an activist with whom I spoke recalled going with a Tanghpre pastor in 2006 to seek help from central Kachin Catholic and Baptist leaders. The plan was to sue the Myitsone project in the Burmese court for violating Kachin cultural heritage—but the church leaders were ‘too afraid’. Another activist suggested that the church leaders were ‘not afraid, but unaware’. They ‘did not know how much this dam will affect us’. In any case, church leaders had reason to avoid resisting the junta. One activist explained to me:

Over the following years, Kachin church networks did organize a few signature-collecting campaigns, but fear inevitably hindered those, too. For example, in 2009, a Christian fellowship of university students in the Kachin state capital of Myitkyina organized public prayer gatherings and collected signatures. Hkawn Ja Aung cites one of the organizers recalling why some student members felt a ‘dilemma’ and did not sign the petition letter: ‘If they signed, their mother churches would have been included’,Footnote ²⁷ which would endanger the students’ congregation, because all churches ‘were strictly monitored by the authorities’.

At the same time, connections gradually deepened between the local village resisters and various outside Kachin activists and civil-society groups, leading to the rise of new local village activists who took over from the religious leaders. Hong describes how an underground and exile Kachin activist group at first worked with Tanghpre village church leaders, but these leaders were ‘not always available for political action’ due to ‘their church duties’.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, the activist group helped pass the torch to two Tanghpre residents—one Catholic, one Baptist, both women—who for years have been speaking up and organizing locally against the dam. In 2009, with village church leaders’ backing, Tanghpre resisters formed another activist group, Zin Lum, which supported those families who kept refusing to leave Tanghpre.Footnote ²⁹ Based on conversations with a Zin Lum member, Hong discusses how the churches offered ‘a space of relative safety from the eyes and ears of Myanmar state forces’, thus helping to grow feelings of resistance:

As local village resistance and the broader Kachin resistance networks strengthened each other beginning in the mid-2000s, broader Kachin ethno-national alarm gradually grew over the Myitsone Dam. Diverse Kachin social networks actively spread anti-dam information and the wide-reaching church networks continued protecting, blessing, and driving the process. Kachin people mostly resisted the dam project because they saw it as a junta and foreign project damaging the Kachin national homeland, sovereignty, dignity, and safety. From a Kachin nationalist viewpoint, the Myitsone Dam was yet another part within a much broader complex of ongoing natural resource exploitation across the Kachin region—from jade and gold mining to logging and large mono-crop plantations. Resisting all these resource grabs was seen, in turn, as a natural part of broader social, ethno-national, and revolutionary work.

Especially effective in turning people in Myitkyina city against Myitsone Dam were warnings that a future earthquake might break the mega-dam and lead to vast flooding that would kill people in the city, only 40 km downstream. In 2006, two smaller dams had broken, resulting in deadly floods near Myitkyina and Myitsone, thus heightening such fears locally. Pointing to Kachin church leaders, Kim notes:

Kim also quotes a pastor: ‘I think, the government planned for the dam to wipe out Kachin people … If they open the flood gate, water can wipe out tens of thousands.’Footnote ³² Such suspicions—whereby the Burmese military might be conspiring to destroy all Kachin people—stemmed, not least, from people having experienced several decades of the Burmese military’s deadly repression.Footnote ³³

In 2010–2011, despite already widespread Kachin opposition, the military-backed dam project resettled around 2,000 people from five villages around the confluence into two newly built relocation villages. After a bomb attack on the construction site in early 2010, dam construction proceeded under military protection.

Yet, also in 2010–2011, a whirlwind of events in broader Burma led to the fall of the Myitsone project. Kachin activists connected with central Burmese activists who, in turn, spearheaded an unprecedented public outcry against Chinese ‘colonists’ and corrupt junta leaders hurting Burma’s mother-river, the Irrawaddy. The Irrawaddy is seen as sacred and life-giving to Burma because for many centuries this great river has provided for millions of people in its surrounding lowlands and cities. Thus, both Kachin and lowland Burmese opponents saw the mega-dam as an existential threat to the sovereignty of their respective nations. The difference between the lowland Burmese and the Kachin resistances against the Myitsone Dam project may be summarized thus: Kachins fought to ‘Save Myitsone’; Burmese fought to ‘Save the Irrawaddy’.Footnote ³⁴ The countrywide ‘Save the Irrawaddy’ outcry became possible due to Burma’s then liberalizing reforms and gradually freed media. Resistance against the Myitsone Dam briefly aligned many Bamars, Kachins, and other people of different ethnicities and religions who otherwise remained largely apart or at war. At the same time, in mid-2011, the war between the Burmese military and the KIO resumed, following a 17-year ceasefire. This made construction impossible, with Chinese staff evacuated, bridges blown up, and supply routes cut. As Burma’s anti-dam campaigning snowballed, in late 2011, the country’s new president—who was then head of the military regime’s transition to quasi-civilian rule—unilaterally suspended the Myitsone Dam’s construction, shocking Beijing and making international news headlines. After the project’s dramatic suspension, Burma moved forward with democratizing reforms and Kachin society struggled with war and the resulting massive displacement of people.

The 2,000 people who had already been relocated for the dam were left in limbo as the government did not allow them to return to their original homes. Living in the relocation villages, most families faced difficulties, having lost their farmland and other livelihood opportunities. Both resettlement villages comprise tight rows of identical wooden two-room houses, built shabbily and, more importantly, with no farmland. Many complained that they were never fairly compensated.Footnote ³⁵ In the years since the 2011 suspension, some locals have continued to demand that the project be fully stopped and that the people be allowed to return to their original homes and farms.

Thus, as Figure 2 shows, local resistance continued after the suspension of the project, especially in alliance with outside activists and media, but also some religious authorities. For example, an outspokenly anti-dam top Burmese Catholic church leader visited the Tanghpre village congregation. A local activist recalled meeting him:

The Cardinal said in his speech that if you have just a seed of belief you can ‘move’ the dam to China. We told him how we were forced to resettle. All the villagers were crying. I told him: ‘Here in Myitsone, we have Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists—we Catholics stand up for all people.’

Figure 2.

A prayer service in 2012 near the displaced Tanghpre village, held to protect the river against the dam project and to reject the authorities’ demand that the village take down its Catholic and Baptist mountaintop crosses, first erected a century ago. Source: KDNG.

The two resettlement villages merged a few different villages and placed all households side-by-side but preserved the ethnic and religious patterns of the local society. The relatively few Buddhists—mostly relatively recent migrants from lowland Burma—tend to live in a separate part of village from the Christian Kachins, who make up the majority of the local population. Among the Christians, in turn, the Catholics and the Baptists, as well as smaller groups such as the ethnic Lisu evangelicals, all settled around their respective churches.

Indeed, religion both unites and divides Kachins. As in any other village or town, Sundays at Myitsone bring local Kachins together, but denomination-by-denomination and church-by-church. Intermarriage between denominations is difficult.

When visiting Sunday church services in the 2010s, I observed that the church leaders of all denominations share concerns about the future of the family and the community, amid the resettlement’s social divisions, traumas, and developments. Major issues have included industrialized gold mining, out-migration, and narcotics addiction. As usual across Kachin churches, women, children, and the elderly predominate in the audience, with many young and middle-aged men having moved away from the village.

Despite some limits to their authority, the church elders have long guided their congregations on diverse affairs on different levels—from the family and village to the ethno-national, inter-national, and cosmic levels. Beyond the dam issue, they have had authority to speak up on the future of the village, but also on the larger social context. This includes the Kachin national revolutionary movement and the ongoing war between the Burmese military and the KIO.

Several years after the suspension of the dam project, I visited a Baptist church service in the original Tanghpre village where some people had been returning, in defiance of the authorities and company. A Kachin jade-mining tycoon had funded the building of a new church, using stones from the river at Myitsone. ‘We could have built a large modern church’, the pastor explained, but the village committee instead designed it to resemble the original wooden church—‘to preserve the memory for new generations’. The pastor pointed to the Burmese military checkpoint nearby:

To a dozen or so congregants, the pastor gave a sermon on how ‘everything depends on God’. He gave the example of an ousted former KIO chairman: ‘He lost power because he neglected God.’ Thus, the pastor concluded by connecting faith in God and the Kachin national revolution:

Indeed, Burma’s Kachin social life, politics, war, and national revolution are always more-than-human because the Christian God partakes in all of them in diverse ways, as mediated by different church leaders, different theological traditions, and the Bible. The Myitsone Dam is one among many urgent issues, alongside a decades-long war, displaced people’s suffering, general poverty, narcotics addiction, desire for healthcare and education, and much more. However, prayer sheets distributed in churches across the Kachin region sometimes still include a prayer to fully stop the dam project and protect the Myitsone area.

In their encounter with such religious worlds, how did the Chinese developers respond?

Companies address religions

Chinese state-owned companies have struggled with religions and have not achieved religious-diplomatic success. Sometimes, they signalled their affinity with local Buddhism over the local, widespread Christianity. They did so mostly to a Chinese domestic audience, however, not to Kachin or Burmese audiences.

Chinese media and researchers published many reports on the Myitsone Dam, especially in the first few years after the project’s dramatic suspension. Many articles reflect critically on the project’s demise. They suggest that the Chinese side communicated only with the Burmese government, and failed to understand and reach the people of Burma. In response to such domestic criticism, the Chinese dam company invested in positive press in China to try to shift the blame for such a billion-dollar mistake from the state-owned company’s Communist Party-appointed managers.

I have reviewed dozens of pro-dam Chinese media, company, and scholarly publications. Some simply suggest that the local residents do not oppose the project. The documents and articles on the Myitsone project’s website, too, barely ever mention local villagers’ opposition. In rare admissions of village-level opposition, some Chinese pro-dam advocates have depicted their opponents as illegitimate, ignorant, duped, or conspiring.Footnote ³⁶

In the Myitsone-area villages themselves, the project’s leading company—China Power Investment (CPI)—began persistent promotion of the project and outreach, including to the local religious institutions, but struggled to engage the Christian groups. For example, I have elsewhere quoted a Myitsone church elder sarcastically denouncing the Chinese company managers who began showing up at church events ‘pretending’ to enjoy the church songs.Footnote ³⁷ The company also could not find any pro-dam church leaders to quote in its promotional materials. Instead, the materials often emphasize local people’s ‘gratefulness’ for how well the project had rebuilt Catholic and Baptist churches in the two resettlement villages. The Chinese state-owned company financed building altogether four Christian churches and two Buddhist monasteries. The project’s promotional materials often include photos of both the old and the new religious buildings, showing the material improvement.Footnote ³⁸

A 2016 pro-dam article includes a rare detailed discussion of local religions from a company perspective.Footnote ³⁹ It portrays the company’s on-site manager as helping local villagers who suffer from poverty but are ‘difficult’ to ‘drive to develop’. The company’s ‘scientific reasoning’ can never convince the Christian villagers. Here, translated from Chinese, the article quotes the Myitkyina-based manager as saying:

The article reviews local faith leaders by religion and denomination, one-by-one. It expresses a Chinese state-owned company’s hierarchy of reason and religion: the patient, rational, and scientific Chinese developer allies with the tolerant Buddhist, but struggles with the blunt Catholic and is rejected by the rebel-tied Baptist. Here, again translated from Chinese,

While this Chinese article depicts Buddhism as ‘reasonably’ pro-dam, it should be repeated here that opposition to Myitsone Dam has been widespread not only among Kachin Christians but also among Burmese Buddhists. Moreover, during the ‘Save the Irrawaddy’ movement, certain anti-junta Buddhist monastery networks in lowland Burma helped the anti-dam campaigners by hosting anti-dam talks and disseminating anti-dam materials.

Another Chinese state-owned company promoted its works on the Myitsone project to Chinese audiences with a film that kept silent on the very existence of Kachin people and of Christians, portraying the mostly Christian dam-project region as a mysterious Buddhist land. I have discussed this Sinohydro film elsewhere as a kind of ‘anti-ethno-politics’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Woods identifies this film as an example of a pattern where, when Beijing aligns with Buddhism in a foreign multi-religious landscape, its projects can sideline other religions, such as Christianity or Islam, and thus increase existing local conflicts.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet, we must also consider that this film’s intended audience was domestic, not in Burma. Indeed, the film’s language was only Chinese, not Burmese or English, and it used Maoist tropes familiar to Chinese viewers. Thus, it was not meant as religious diplomacy towards Burmese Buddhists but instead to promote the state-owned company’s ‘heroic’ work to a Chinese public, most likely the company staff and the party-state authorities.

Alignment with Buddhism over other religions can express both Chinese state nationalism and ‘anti-ethno-politics’. For example, the Beijing regime now narrates the Silk Road’s history as a Chinese national story—especially to legitimate the BRI for the Chinese public; its ‘celebrated histories of Buddhism, the Han and Tang dynasties, and silk trade’ eclipse the ‘socio-cultural heritage of Islam’, the centuries-long history of Uyghurs in the Turkestani world, and the Uyghur claims to sovereignty.Footnote ⁴² Such examples call attention to how the BRI, and its predecessor, the ‘Going Out’ strategy, have remarkable continuity with Beijing’s ‘Great Western Development’ programme which has aimed to help western China catch up to the much wealthier eastern, coastal areas.Footnote ⁴³ Future research could compare Chinese developers’ encounters with religions across the world with how earlier Chinese projects in Mongol, Uyghur, Tibetan, and other non-Han lands encountered powerful religions there.

The dominant world views and attitudes back in China are most likely informing how Chinese companies react to different religions abroad, beyond any careful religious diplomacy. Indeed, ethnic Han-Chinese sympathy towards the relatively ‘familiar’ Buddhism may be heartfelt, as can distrust towards the supposedly ‘foreign’ religions—Christianity, Islam, animist traditions, and so on. Personal sympathy towards Buddhism may be important not only among the broader public but also within the Party. Indeed, the Beijing regime’s current autocratic leader Xi Jinping and his wife reportedly have Buddhist backgrounds.

That said, in one little-known way, the Myitsone project’s state-owned company did try to promote its project through the Buddhist religion not only in China but also in Burma. It implied that the construction of the Myitsone Dam is cosmically preordained. On a few rare occasions, it promoted the notion of a Buddhist pro-dam prophecy. The hydropower project’s website put it like this:

As told by the company, this prophecy echoes how the Myitsone Dam would connect Burma specifically to China. According to the prophecy, the widened and deepened rivers will grow navigable and lead from Myitsone to China, thus fulfilling both a spiritual and business connection between Burma and China. The new river path parallels how electricity would flow from the dam along powerlines to China. The story presents the Chinese as a Buddhist people akin to the Burmese—the Chinese long to come down to Burma for Buddhist worship. Quoting this prophecy, the company representatives indeed seemed to be trying to convince Burma’s people to see the dam project positively through the country’s dominant and defining religion. Here, the contemporary Chinese state belief in modern development integrated effortlessly with a religious cosmology, as the new Burma–China Buddhist rivers connection would lead to thriving trade and prosperity.

The prophecy connects Burmese Buddhism most directly to China by promising access to a Buddha’s tooth relic which is housed in a monastery near Beijing. For most Buddhists in Burma and worldwide, such relics of Lord Buddha are holy and inspire awe. Both in the 1950s and the 1990s, the Chinese government lent out the Beijing-based tooth relic for touring in Burma, thus marking an early example of the Communist Party’s Buddhist religious diplomacy. During the 1990s tours, the Burmese junta organized massive ceremonies, donation campaigns, and media coverage to legitimize its rule.Footnote ⁴⁵ A few months after the 2011 Myitsone Dam suspension, amid heightened anti-China views in Burma, Beijing sent the tooth relic to Burma again. Long queues of Buddhists waited to see it. However, the quoted prophecy is unusual: connecting the Beijing-based Buddha tooth relic to Myitsone as a place is itself a wholly new idea.

This prophecy comes from the local Myitsone pagoda. For example, it was told on a Burmese-language brochure that was handed out at a Myitsone pagoda festival in 1994. According to that brochure, the prophecy is longer and moves on after China—to South Asia, specifically Sri Lanka and Nepal, which is more typical for Burmese Buddhism. Some local Kachin residents whom I asked had not heard of this story. A few dismissed it, suggesting that the company or a Buddhist monk had made it up.

Quoting this prophecy is a forgotten and perhaps hopeless attempt at leveraging Buddhism to promote the Myitsone Dam, showing the limits of religious diplomacy. Engaging in more-than-human and sacred politics, the electricity company tried enlisting a local pagoda, the contested rivers, and Lord Buddha’s remains—the tooth having for decades been the core of Beijing’s Buddhist soft-power missions in Burma. As evocative as the story is, it was neither propagated particularly widely by the company nor gained any traction in Burma. Most people have never heard of it.

Sacred place

Asserting

The Myitsone confluence and its surrounding areas have long been important to many Kachins but also became increasingly sacralized (treated as a Kachin national sacred place) as the struggle over the dam project grew. Many Kachins might describe Myitsone as a national landmark or as part of an ancestral heartland but do not necessarily use words like ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’. However, during the Myitsone Dam controversy, a broader way of framing Kachins as an indigenous people that revere natural landscapes helped sacralize the confluence for Kachin, Burmese, and worldwide audiences.

Throughout my fieldwork, various Kachins brought up how the two rivers’ juncture—shown on Figure 3—is a Kachin national landmark. Many people had visited there and had fond personal memories. Indeed, at first, some Myitsone residents and Kachin people in other places reportedly could not believe that a dam would be built at this famous place. An educator told me:

When I first heard about Myitsone Dam, no one believed that it would become true. It felt like a rumour, just somebody talking. How could they do in such a good place where everyone is visiting! Many said that coming to Myitkyina without visiting Myitsone is meaningless. Slowly-slowly, the rumour became true—they started building in Myitsone.

Figure 3.

The Myitsone confluence. Source:  AP/Khin Maung Win.

One way in which the anti-dam campaigners raised a local-villages issue into an ethno-national issue was by asserting that the confluence area comprises ancestral national heritage. Indeed, the 2004 anti-dam letter by Tanghpre village residents to various Kachin institutions, mentioned above, warned that much Kachin cultural heritage would disappear under the dam reservoir. The letter thus tried to elevate the issue to a Kachin national level. The Kachin national movement has long cherished the lands north of the confluence as a cultural heartland. This large area’s deep rainforests host the ‘most traditional’ Kachin villages and are a long-time KIO stronghold. In Kachin oral literature, ancient ancestors once migrated through these lands. One pioneering Kachin anti-dam activist from Myitkyina was drawn into the resistance in the mid-2000s by a well-known Kachin Baptist church elder who encouraged him to investigate the secretive new dam project, in order to protect Myitsone as a Kachin heartland. That land has ‘our ancestors’ footprints’, the elder told the young activist.Footnote ⁴⁶ For patriots of the Kachin nation, the question of what happens to ‘our’ landmark, heritage, and heartland, and who decides and shapes its future, became a question of national dignity.

The Myitsone area is uniquely important for the Kachin Catholics. After the Second World War, Irish missionaries built some of the Kachin region’s most important Catholic institutions in Tanghpre village. A large Catholic church building still stands amid what remains of the village. Many Kachin catechists studied at the mission school in Tanghpre—the memory remains, even though the school moved elsewhere long ago. The area is cherished as a key site in the history of converting from animism to Catholicism. It has long been a place of pilgrimage.

Since the mid-2000s, a Catholic grotto cave with a statue of the Virgin Mary has stood on a small island in the river confluence. A Kachin Catholic from a village that is far from Myitsone told me how, once, a neighbour came knocking in the early morning. The neighbour could not sleep because a bright light in the shape of Virgin Mary had shone in the night sky. She felt scared. Fellow villagers responded sceptically at first, but soon it turned out that many people across the Kachin region’s towns and villages had seen the Virgin Mary appear that night. News came through the limited phone connections and through Catholic priests that this light had shone from the Myitsone area. Having seen this light, even some government officials, usually Buddhists, ‘converted to Catholicism’. In Myitsone, a Mary grotto cave was established, now often visited with a boat ride to the river island.

The dam ‘threat’ itself raised the confluence’s profile across Kachin society and beyond. One educator reflected: ‘When Myitsone was safe, Kachins rarely thought about it. But when they knew that they might lose it, they showed more attachment and care.’ In Kachin state today, images of the Myitsone confluence are commonly seen on posters, paintings, and designs. A Kachin person summarized:

Beautiful Myitsone is our Kachinland icon. When we see the sights of Myitsone, we tell the stories about where our Kachin history begun. If Myitsone is lost, we lose evidence of our history.

The idea of flooding this national symbol led some to suspect ‘yet another’ military state anti-Kachin strategy. One activist speculated:

At that time, the government was trying to destroy all the historical places everywhere. Like in Shan State, the last saobwa [feudal lord] palace [which the junta demolished]. In Mandalay, the Kachin manau festival poles [which the junta ordered demolished]. Well-known buildings in Rangoon. Because Myitsone represents Kachin, they want to erase it. They do not want anything to represent the Kachins or Kachin State.

Such conspiratorial analysis resonated with some Kachins, not least because Myitsone had become an ethnically and religiously contested landmark. That is, Myitsone is one of the places where Christian Kachins have asserted that the junta builds Buddhist stupas to lay claim to lands for Burmese Buddhism. Hkawn Ja Aung reports on how the junta built ‘a large Buddhist stupa, painted [with] gold, right on the bank of the river’:

It occupied a much nicer piece of land than the church and many Kachins were unhappy with such a visible Buddhist religious structure being built in an area imbued with deep traditional meaning for the local Christians.

Sabrié has discussed local Christians’ opposition to this stupa:

This Buddhist construction in the middle of a village whose population was then only Christian appeared absurd. [A village resident] says that when the Buddhist monks arrived in Tang Hpre, the Christians fed them, the village then having no Buddhists.Footnote ⁴⁷

The struggle over expanding stupas, church compounds, mountaintop crosses, and generally between Christianity and Buddhism has continued for years since, especially because the Myitsone confluence is a special place. At such locations—landmarks, sacred places, indigenous cultural sites, charismatic nature sites—different religious believers and institutions have for decades put up their own symbols and thus claimed the place. This itself is a long-term religious tradition. The religious competition over special sites overlaps with ethnic politics and war—especially because Kachins and the Kachin national movement are mostly Christian, and the Burmese regime and Bamar people are mostly Buddhist.

Involving more-than-human actors, some anti-dam Kachins also pointed to animist deities, namely, local dragon-kin as a confirmation of Myitsone’s special sacred status. The 2004 Tanghpre villagers’ anti-dam letter named two ancient deities—the brothers Hkrai Gam and Hkrai Naw(ng)—born of a human mother and dragon father.Footnote ⁴⁸ Kachin oral literature tells of these brothers as ancestral heroes.Footnote ⁴⁹ Their statues guard the gate of Myitkyina city’s famous Kachin traditional manau dance ceremony square. Following the Tanghpre letter, two major Kachin NGO anti-dam advocacy reports, from 2007 and 2009, mention these dragon-deities. The 2009 report opens with this quote:

According to Kachin legend, the confluence is where the Father Dragon as well as his sons Hkrai Nawng and Hkrai Gam were born. Tradition says that if the waterway is broken and the dragons are disturbed, there will be a natural disaster.Footnote ⁵⁰

The ancestral dragon-kin story expressed contemporary Kachin animist worlds. A Myitsone church leader originally told the Kachin activists to include this story in the abovementioned advocacy reports as a point about background history—for everyone to know how important the confluence area is and to educate Kachin young people. Other Myitsone elders also told the activists this story. Many contemporary Kachin Christians distance themselves from old spirit beliefs, condemning them as ‘un-Christian’ or ‘uncivilized’. However, variations of the story of these two ancient dragon-kin heroes do circulate, not least because parents and elders may tell these stories, and some church leaders may promote them not as ‘religion’ but as ‘history’ or ‘culture, tradition’. That said, most Kachin people would usually not associate these ancestral dragon-kin specifically with the Myitsone area. Some Tanghpre residents point to nearby place-names that fit with events in the traditional story of the two hero-brothers as evidence that the story took place in this location.

Some anti-dam activists personally considered dragons or spirits as relevant actors at Myitsone. For example, a key Kachin national-level anti-dam activist reflected on a nearby small-dam breakage:

My parents told me that when dragons get angry, floods happen. When the Chyinghkrang Dam broke and flooded in 2006, killing five people, many locals believed that a dragon was angry. Somehow, I believe. Actually, there is no dragon. But I believe that there is a spirit which protects the forest and the mountains. If the dam is built, this kind of spirits will have nowhere to stay and must run away. They will be angry and there will be disaster.

Invoking the ancestral dragon-kin also worked strategically to attract support for anti-dam activism. As more-than-human actors, the dragons helped to raise the confluence’s symbolic, cultural, and religious status—both for local and outside audiences, from Kachins to Bamars, from Chinese to Westerners.

The notion of a Kachin national sacred site, more broadly, resonated in lowland Burma and beyond. I have elsewhere reported how, in trying to make Chinese and Burmese understand and empathize, Kachin anti-dam activists compared the Kachin Myitsone to the Great Wall of China and to the Burmese ancient Bagan temples or Yangon’s great Shwedagon Pagoda—sacred national landmarks. Statements about protecting Kachin heritage were repeated and further spread by ethnic Bamar anti-dam activists, nationalists, and scientists.Footnote ⁵¹ As campaigners affirmed Myitsone as a ‘sacred’ place for Kachins, they compelled people far away to protect it from change. The Kachin sacralization of the Mali and N’mai rivers’ confluence worked symbiotically with lowland Burmese people’s long-term sacralization of their ‘national lifeline’, the Irrawaddy River.

In Burma, a prominent example of how Myitsone’s sacredness resonated were the articles written by an outspoken chief executive of a popular daily newspaper. During the height of the Save the Irrawaddy outcry in lowland Burma in 2011, this newspaper executive, a leading Burmese nationalist campaigner against Myitsone Dam, gave a speech. He framed protecting the Kachins’ sacred site as a Burmese national duty to create unity among the so-called ‘indigenous national races’ of the Union of Myanmar, especially as the Kachin war had resumed a few months earlier. The speech (here translated from Burmese) stated:

The Irrawaddy River is the symbol of the Union, and Irrawaddy Myitsone is the beginning of the Union. Loving the Irrawaddy is loving the Union …

No one can deny that Myitsone is the sacred region of the Kachin people. As a Buddhist country … Shwedagon Pagoda is the most sacred place for us … The same is true for the Kachin people, Myitsone is their most sacred place. [We] have a responsibility to preserve and respect the cultural heritage of our brothers and sisters, the Kachin people.Footnote ⁵²

In China, a prominent assertion of Myitsone’s sacredness is found in the early 2012 newspaper article by a Chinese public intellectual and professor. Visiting Kachin state, he observed (here translated from Chinese):

It seems that Myitsone here is like Mount Fuji in Japan, or Mount Kumgang in North Korea, possessing a sublime psychological status. …

According to local Kachin legend, Myitsone is the birthplace of the dragon father and his sons, Hkrai Nawng and Hkrai Gam …. […]

I once asked [a local writer]: … ‘If an artificial lake appears in Myitsone, will it cease to be a sacred place?’ … [The writer replied]: ‘[How about China’s] Great Wall, would you build a reservoir and submerge it? … Perhaps unlike Jerusalem and Mecca, we Kachins do not have human-made structures like the Holy Temple and the Kaaba as symbols of national faith. Myitsone is revered in its natural state …’.Footnote ⁵³

In the sections and quotes above, we can sense the more-than-human force—or ‘agency’—of the rivers, the confluence, and the natural landscape. Made by the two rivers, the confluence—a ‘naturally sacred’ place—has great power to charm people. The scenic landscape has captured people’s imagination and evoked magic. The dragons are more likely to be born or the Virgin Mary is more likely to appear in such a special place than in other rivers. The prevalent idea that the great Irrawaddy River begins precisely at the relatively large Myitsone confluence—rather than somewhere else upstream, for example—played a big role in Burmese people’s alarm at the prospect of the mega-dam.

This confluence’s charm contrasts with the lack of attention garnered by the Irrawaddy hydropower project’s six other planned huge dam sites. These other planned dams, upstream from the confluence, as shown on Figure 1, remained almost always elided by both the project proponents and opponents. The whole ‘Myitsone controversy’ has centred on the river confluence and birthplace of the Irrawaddy. Some Kachin activists and civilians have expressed specifically that they oppose flooding the site of the confluence, but do not reject all large-scale hydropower development.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 2011, the KIO stated specifically that ‘we have no objection against the other six hydro plants’.Footnote ⁵⁵ An activist reflected:

Nobody says anything about the other six dams upstream! We do not care. Nobody cares. Do whatever you want! But Myitsone is our culture—getting destroyed in front of our eyes. That made much more Kachins notice and get involved.

Throughout the now two decades of the Myitsone Dam controversy, diverse Kachin, Burmese, Chinese, Western, and other writers, journalists, and researchers have further sacralized the confluence. They have referred to Myitsone as a Kachin national symbol, to the dragon-sons’ story, and other similar legends. The powerful confluence itself has kept charming the people. How could the Chinese dam proponents respond?