Myanmar’s government makes life difficult for Western investors

IN A SPEECH last year, Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s president in all but name, laid out the many reforms her government had undertaken to attract foreign investors. In return, she went on, “we only ask our investors to ensure that their investments are responsible, by incorporating environmental, social and governance factors”. The subtext, although she did not mention it, was that the biggest source of investment in Myanmar, Chinese firms, have never paid much attention to such things and have stoked popular resentment as a result. When Ms Suu Kyi was still an opposition leader, she called for the scrapping of the biggest Chinese investment in the country, a huge dam to be built on its main river, the Irrawaddy, precisely because of misgivings about its environmental and social impact and the murky role of the Chinese state in the governance of the project. Yet since she gave the speech, Ms Suu Kyi’s government has been making life difficult for the sorts of firms she says she wants to attract, often to the benefit of their Chinese rivals.