EVENTS

Abstract

Situated at the crossroads between two Asian giants, China and India, and existing at the fringes of bipolar confrontation during the Cold War period, Burma, nonetheless, exercised a considerable influence on the general developments in the Southeast Asian region and in the context of China’s overall policies towards its southern neighbors. However, due to the general inaccessibility of documentary sources from the Chinese, Burmese and other archives, it has been rather difficult to analyze this issue outside the context of Burma’s internal policies and ethnic conflicts that have engulfed this country ever since independence. Even though the Sino-Burmese border problem was a kind of repetition for the Sino-Indian border conflict, having direct links to this larger issue, not much attention has been dedicated to the analysis of Sino-Burmese relations inside the larger Cold War context. Not only that New China maintained its ideological links with the Communist Party of Burma that was one of the main anti-government forces, but also Burma became a battleground between the CCP and KMT thus creating serious problems for both the PRC and Burma. Besides, the United States also wanted to use this country as a corridor for any possible subversive activity against China. Thus, not wanting to become a place for showdown between the Chinese Communists and Chinese Nationalists, but also striving to avoid being drawn into the bipolar confrontation, Burma became one of the pioneers of global nonalignment and it also had specific importance for China’s wider regional and global strategies. This presentation will be exclusively based on the new findings coming from the Chinese, Yugoslav, Indian, British, American, and Russian archives, but its strongest point will be the use of Myanmar archival materials that were made available only to this author for the very first time.

About the Speaker

Jovan Cavoški is an associated-researcher at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia in Belgrade, member of the Society for History of America’s Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and the Commission for History of International Relations. Currently he is engaged in his doctoral study on history of international relations at the School of International studies, Peking University, and his thesis deals with China’s policies towards nonalignment in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, he is also working on another PhD in history at the Department of History, Belgrade University and his thesis deals with Yugoslavia’s relations with Burma in the context of wider Cold War in the Third World. Currently he is an ICCR fellow at the East Asian Studies Department, Delhi University. He is conducting his research on India’s nonaligned foreign policy during Nehru years, focusing on India’s relations with China, Yugoslavia, and Egypt.