The latest phase of Myanmar’s civil war, the Rohingya issue, and the “Arakan Army” are the three greatest obstacles to closer Bangladeshi-Myanmarese cooperation.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry reported that President Xi Jinping and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Tarique Rahman discussed the creation of an overland trade corridor between their countries through Myanmar last month. The larger context concerns the return of nationalist rule to Bangladesh amidst its newfound “Pakistanization” that emerged after summer 2024’s US-backed regime change. Textile exports to its top market, the US, have declined over the past year as the industry suffers from blackouts and rising costs.
The past two years of Indo-Bangladeshi tensions that followed the ouster of former pro-Delhi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina excludes India from Bangladesh’s economic recovery, which is why Dhaka is looking towards Beijing, the goal being for China to replace the US as its top export market. Overland trade via Myanmar would be faster than by sea, thus enabling them to scale this much more quickly, plus it’s more reliable than going through the Strait of Malacca after the new US-Indonesian defense deal.
Myanmar is also a close Chinese partner, even hosting a top Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) project known as the “China-Myanmar Economic Corridor” (CMEC), which parallels an oil and gas pipeline too. Casual observers would therefore be forgiven for assuming that the expansion of CMEC to Bangladesh would be simple enough, but the reality is that this plan faces major challenges in Myanmar, not least of which is the latest round of its civil war that’s been raging since early 2021. Readers can learn more about it here.
It’s not a simple as its popular portrayal by the Mainstream Media and Alt-Media Community as pro-US rebels fighting a Chinese-backed junta, though there’s indeed some truth to that depiction due to their escalating critical mineral competition there over the past year as detailed here and here. Myanmar is friendly with China but fears becoming disproportionately dependent on it, ergo the country’s Obama-era pivot to the US, which could be replicated under Trump 2.0 if they reach a critical minerals deal.
Moreover, Myanmar and Bangladesh have been at odds for over a decade as a result of the Rohingya issue, which refers to the Bangladeshi-originating people who fled to Bangladesh en masse during a large-scale counter-terrorist operation that the West described as ethnic cleansing and even genocide. Complicating matters even further in the borderland Rakhine State, which is also the terminal point of CMEC and its two parallel pipelines, are the “Arakan Army” (AA) rebels.
They nowadays control most of the region through which any such Chinese-Bangladeshi corridor would have to transit and are even expanding operations into a neighboring Myanmarese region right now. So long as the Myanmar Conflict continues raging, and it appears to be very far from settled over half a decade after reigniting with gusto, then no overland corridor between those two is feasible. It might also not be viable even after the war abates due to the high risk of AA and other rebel banditry along it.
For these reasons, the plan that Xi spoke about with Rahman during the latter’s visit to Beijing won’t manifest anytime soon, if at all. What’s most important is the signal sent by disclosing that they discussed this, however, which shows that China envisages scaling bilateral trade with a focus on more Bangladeshi imports in order to help its partner’s struggling economy. More political and military influence could follow Chinese economic influence in Bangladesh and thus intensify its rivalry with India.
