FEBRUARY 19, 2015 4:13 AM February 19, 2015 4:13 am
A Red Cross volunteer was wounded this week in the Kokang region of Myanmar, where the army is fighting ethnic Chinese rebels. The conflict is a delicate issue for Beijing.Credit Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters
A photo of a young girl holding a Chinese flag is one of many that China’s online censors have deleted over the last few days in an effort to quell nationalist support for ethnic Chinese rebels in Myanmar.
Others have depicted looted storefronts and bodies of civilians, some dead, some wounded, seeking shelter.
Dozens of soldiers and rebels have died since fighting erupted in the Kokang region near the Chinese border last week, according to the state-backed newspaper Global New Light of Myanmar.
Tens of thousands of refugees fleeing into China and an appeal for help from the rebel forces in Myanmar have now turned the hostilities into a delicate matter for the Chinese government. The Kokang region is largely populated by ethnic Chinese.
Peng Jiasheng, an ethnic Chinese who was affiliated with the now defunct, formerly China-backed Communist Party of Burma, leads the rebel forces in Kokang, who call themselves the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army.
Mr. Peng ruled Kokang until his ouster in an attack by the Myanmar armed forces in 2009 and has since lived in hiding.
A day into an attack by his rebel forces last week that ignited the hostilities, the 85-year-old appealed for support from all those of “common race and roots,” in an open letter widely circulated on social media.
“How is it possible that more than a hundred years after the Opium War, there are still more than 200,000 Chinese suffering under ethnic discrimination?” he wrote. “Every time Jiasheng is reminded of this situation, he bursts into tears, and the pain is unbearable.”
Some Chinese microbloggers have responded to his call by likening his struggle to retake Kokang to the fight of Russian separatists in Ukraine, where Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula last year.
“Let us help Kokang,” one Weibo user commented, while sharing the photo of the flag-holding girl. “The beasts of the Myanmar Army are continuing to slaughter Kokang’s Chinese in Laukkai,” another one wrote, sharing a photo of corpses in the city that has seen most of the fighting. Both those posts and many similar ones have since been deleted from Chinese microblogs.
