2015-06-11
Aung San Suu Kyi meets with China’s president Xi Jinping in Beijing, June 11, 2015.
AFP
Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi should “talk democracy” to China’s leaders during her visit this week to Beijing, a former top Communist Party official said on Thursday.
The 1991 Nobel Laureate is visiting Beijing from June 10-14 in her capacity as chairwoman of the National League for Democracy (NLD), for inter-party exchanges with the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
China was a close supporter of the military junta that kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for near two decades, and Myanmar’s transition since 2011 to a quasi-civilian government and partial democratization has caused some wariness in Beijing.
Bilateral ties have been further strained by an ongoing ethnic conflict in the remote Kokang region of Shan state, near the Chinese border, which has spilled over into neighboring Yunnan on a number of occasions, causing civilian deaths and injuries.
The NLD has cited the border conflict and the need to cultivate “good relations with neighbors” as reasons to make the trip, which included a meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday.
But Aung San Suu Kyi’s status as an icon of the Myanmar democracy movement and Nobel laureate will inevitably call to mind China’s own jailed democracy activist and 2010 Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo.
‘World citizen’
According to former top Communist Party aide Bao Tong, who has remained under house arrest at his Beijing home since his release from a seven-year jail term in the wake of China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi should play her role as “respected world citizen” to the full, while in China.
“As an outstanding leader of the Myanmar democracy movement and a Nobel peace prize winner, she is the same as Liu Xiaobo,” Bao, a former top aide to late former premier Zhao Ziyang, told RFA on Thursday.
“She has been very successful at initiating the democracy movement in Myanmar, and I hope that she will … share those experiences with the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
“[I hope she will] talk about how Myanmar began on its path towards democracy.”
He said China’s ruling party could learn much from the democracy movement in Myanmar.
“There are lessons they could draw from it,” Bao said, adding that there are still “big differences” between the Chinese and Myanmar regimes.
“I hope they have a good talk, and that they will tell the Chinese leadership about Myanmar’s experiences with democracy, and that the Chinese leaders will listen to their views,” he said.
“Then they should think about what conclusions they could draw regarding China.This is more important than anything,” said Bao, who was recently forced to leave Beijing on an enforced “holiday” with state security police during the 26th anniversary of the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.
