Sacred Politics of Chinese Infrastructure: Christians, Buddha’s Tooth, and Dragons at Myitsone, Kachin, Burma

Watch the recording of the event HERE.

Abstract

How do ‘communist’ Chinese developers handle sacred politics? What role do religions and sacredness play in infrastructural conflicts? Discussions on Chinese investment and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) often highlight the failure of China’s largest-ever hydropower project overseas – the Myitsone Dam mega-project in the ethnic Kachin region of Burma (Myanmar). Public outcry against this multi-billion-dollar development pushed the Burmese regime to halt construction in 2011, shocking Beijing and causing an international scandal. Based on interviews, Chinese media analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork among Kachin people since 2010, my talk explores this infrastructural conflict’s religious, indigenous, and more-than-human politics. The talk focuses on the project site – the famous Myitsone confluence. There, local village church leaders led and sheltered the earliest anti-dam resistance. There also, the Chinese developers engaged with Catholicism, Baptism, Theravada Buddhism, and animist worlds. The more-than-human charms of this natural landscape helped create sacredness, which the Chinese dam proponents struggled to respond to. Throughout, this international infrastructural controversy always involved sacred politics. (The talk is based on a forthcoming article in the journal Modern Asian Studies.) 

About the Speaker

Laur Kiik studies nationalism, natural resources, wildlife conservation, and war in the Burma–China borderlands. He has done ethnographic research among Kachin people since 2010. He is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tokyo. 

Organizer

Global China Local Cultures (GCLC), ASIAR Research Cluster, HKIHSS, HKU