Bamboo Behind the Bamboo Curtain

This is a joke, an inside joke...with myself.
I was cleaning the house, moving the heavy glass vase with thick bamboo roots into my bedroom. As the sun set, the curtain was drawn...and this concept popped into my head.

The Bamboo Curtain was a term I first encountered in my studies of East Asia back in college.

According to Wikipedia:

The Bamboo Curtain was a euphemism for the east Asian version of the Iron Curtain. As a physical boundary, it was marked by the borders around the Communist states of East Asia, in particular those of the People's Republic of China that were shared with non-Communist nations, during the Cold War. As such, this term did not include the Chinese border with the eastern Soviet Union, North Korea, or Mongolia.
Today, the term is more often used to refer to the tightly-guarded borders of Burma.

The term came back to full force with Robert Kaplan's article for the Atlantic magazine in September 2008.

Lifting the Bamboo Curtain
Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic

As China and India vie for power and influence, Burma has become a strategic battleground. Four Americans with deep ties to this fractured, resource-rich country illuminate its current troubles, and what the U.S. should do to shape its future.

Here are some other things on my Burma Reading List:

Drowning: Can the Burmese People Save Themselves?

George Packer in the New Yorker

A Political Prisoner:

Hnin Se is tall and slender, with black hair flowing down her back; she cuts it short during times of crisis. She maintains the outward calm that is typical of the Burmese, but once, when I asked how the rule of the generals could ever end, she hissed, “Kill them all.” She grew up in a fishing village in the Irrawaddy Delta. Her mother was a teacher and her father owned an ice factory; he took to drink and left the family, but not before encouraging his daughter’s artistic temperament. By the age of six, Hnin Se had read “Gone with the Wind” in Burmese. At fourteen, she was sent to Rangoon to continue her education, and for years she picked up dried fish and rice sent by her mother to the Rangoon jetty and sold them in Aung San Market to support the family. She was in her third year at Rangoon University, and just beginning to write fiction, when the events of August, 1988, took place. She saw police driving students into Inya Lake—where many drowned—and beating and shooting others who tried to escape. “As a nineteen-year-old girl, I might not have any knowledge about democracy,” she said, “but I had the sense to distinguish right from wrong.” In 1991, she distributed poems protesting the government’s refusal to let Aung San Suu Kyi, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, travel to Oslo. Hnin Se was arrested and sent to Insein. When she first laid eyes on the prison, she smiled. “I was already a writer, and I thought this would be a new experience,” she said.

A Monastery:

On a hazy Sunday morning in February, at the beginning of the hot season, we drove out of Rangoon, across the wide, sluggish Hlaing River, into a marshy landscape dotted with low-slung industrial buildings. Just off the highway, down a dirt road lined with banana trees and palm groves, was a village of five hundred families. Next to a muddy lily pond stood a monastery—two stories, with a rusted metal pagoda-style roof and walls of reclaimed boards and woven thatch. In these cramped quarters, monks ran a school for three hundred students, including sixty orphans. Hnin Se and four friends from her book club were helping to support the school, and had raised about a thousand dollars.
....

A visitor arrived: a matronly woman from Rangoon with oversized glasses had come to pray, as she did every Sunday. Seeing us, she bowed obsequiously. The abbot told me that she was a member of the regime’s civilian mass movement, and that she was sent to keep an eye on him.

James Fallow's running blog on Burma...

My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die.

A minor illustration would be the decision that effectively bankrupted many Burmese people and helped bring on riots 20 years ago. This was the out of the blue decree that most denominations of Burmese currency, except those in "lucky" denominations like 45 and 90 kyat, would be valueless. The major illustration is of course its refusal to allow relief workers from around the world to spare tens of thousands of Burmese people disease and likely death in the wake of the cyclone.

...and vintage Atlantic, Burma: A Special Supplement , 22 articles, stories and essays about Burmese Entertainment, Contemporary Burmese Art, and the Concept of Neutralism, among others. As they self-describe, it is "a 70-page supplement on Burma—covering arts, culture, politics, and more—written mostly by Burmese and published by The Atlantic in 1958."

...and a quick (well-reported) doom and gloom, out on the streets piece from the Washington Post with no by-line from August 2008.

I try to keep up on Burma, since it is right next door to Yunnan. Perhaps these articles will satisfy some curiosities since it seems my next Southeast Asia border run will not take me southwestward towards the tropical mountain border to Burma.