NEWS - Citizens Fear N.E. Burma Wil

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Subject: NEWS - Citizens Fear N.E. Burma Will Become a Chinese Colony

Citizens Fear N.E. Burma Will Become a Chinese Colony

Rangoon Post - 9/18/1999
(collomated from various Reuters, AP and Border group reports)

  From overpopulated China come illegal immigrants seeking cheap land
and opportunity in a relatively empty country. Many are settling in
Mandalay, Myanmar's second-largest city, and alarmed citizens fear
northeastern Myanmar will become a Chinese colony.
  
  The border trade is needed by the government to raise money. It is
also a concession to China, which is Myanmar's biggest supplier of
military hardware.

But ordinary people openly express resentment at China for backing the
government and at the illegal Chinese immigrants they say are moving
into the country by tens of thousands.

In Mandalay, where ethnic Indians were the largest minority a few years
ago, Chinese letters on shops and restaurants line entire streets.

A police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says many
immigrant men pay local woman to marry them, gain residency and move
their whole families to Myanmar.

The ethnic Chinese tend to have more business skills. Their relatively
rapid accumulation of wealth breeds resentment in an area where ethnic
suspicions are never far below the surface.

The original inhabitants of the region, the Shan and other ethnic
minorities, have been decimated by decades of unsuccessful rebellion,
poverty, immigration to Thailand and the latest scourge, AIDS.

A bitter joke heard up and down the road goes: ``The Burmese son has
been adopted by the Chinese father.