Sunday, November 25, 2012 11:48 PM
When U.S.
President Barack Obama arrived in Burma on Nov. 19, locals lined the
streets, waving American flags that a couple years
ago could have landed them in jail. “For many years,
the U.S. flag meant defiance against the regime,” says Thiha Saw,
a newspaper editor in Rangoon, the country’s largest city,
where Obama spent six hours. “It meant democracy, freedom,
all those good things.”Two years ago, when China’s Premier
Wen Jiabao arrived in the country known officially as Myanmar,
there was no such spontaneous outpouring of goodwill from the Burmese
people. After all, China may be one of Burma’s top foreign investors,
but it was also one of the few nations to support an isolated military
government as it brutalized its people. Even as Burmese rely on
cheap Chinese imports, there is little love for their giant
neighbor to the north.China’s global outreach has been
spurred by its search for natural resources needed to power its
economy. Chinese state-owned companies have descended across
the globe, from Africa to the farthest reaches of the South Pacific,
bringing the kind of foreign investment that had dried up after the Cold War,
when the U.S. and the Soviet Union vied to woo governments to their
sides. But even as the Chinese have signed contracts with some of the world’s more
unsavory governments