Like the title says, the challenge is to make Myanmar, also known as Burma, as an developed country by modern times.
The POD is Burma's Independence from the British in 1948.
The POD is Burma's Independence from the British in 1948.
AHC: Developed Burma/Myanmar
- Thread starter EmperorBuaya
- Start date
Avoid the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia during WW2 and the flight of the Kuomintang warlords across the border into Burma.
Avoid Aung San's assassination. We will never know whether he would have made a good peacetime leader but he certainly had a prestige to keep the various factions of post-independence Myanmar in line for a democracy to eventually develop. Without him as a central figure, the newly independent Myanmar was perpetually unstable, which paved the way for Ne Win's dictatorship. His Burmese Way of Socialism was the single worst thing to happen to Myanmar after independence.
Aung San also had some cachet with the other ethnic groups in Myanmar. The jury is out as to whether he would have gone through with the promises made during the Panglong Agreement but he at least engendered more goodwill than both the military junta and the civilian government.
Aung San also had some cachet with the other ethnic groups in Myanmar. The jury is out as to whether he would have gone through with the promises made during the Panglong Agreement but he at least engendered more goodwill than both the military junta and the civilian government.
Honestly this. At independence, Burma was one of the most developed and wealthy countries in Asia (as a fun note, the World Bank released a report in 1950 saying that Burma and Ceylon were the shining stars of Asia, with (South) Korea being the regional failure; we know how that went). A firmer agreement to Panglong wouldn't have prevented the early crises with the CPB or the Karen rebels, but Aung San would likely have been able to present a stronger face and held the country together, particularly in dealing with the KMT in the north (given the Communists relatively inevitable win at that point, Aung San might have been more willing/able to integrate the KMT as a border force against Chinese aggression, maybe even using them against the CPB).
The main win though would be economic. An Aung San-government would likely have avoided the disastrous purges of the Ne Win era, leaving the capital of the Indian and Chinese business communities relatively intact, and keeping back any Bamboo Curtain. One imagines Aung San would've been more pro-Non Alignment than the OTL government, and it's likely Burma would've remained a less-than-democratic, vaguely lefty state in the region.
Of course, this leaves the question of whether the areas named in Panglong (Chin, Kachin, and Shan) would've broken away or not within the allocated decade...
This is something that I'm going to explore myself in a TL and I'm in the middle of researching it at the moment. As others have said Aung San is the POD that you are looking for and, given his personality I think it is likely he would have done better than the OTL. Which in and of itself is a particularly low bar.
Since Aung San was murdered before the established POD, how about preventing Ne Win's coup in 1962? His long tenure was nothing short of disastrous.
Agreed. There has been a flurry of activity by the World Bank in Myanmar since 2010, but their last project here was in the 1950's. While Thailand has not had the same meteoric rise as South Korea, they are still one of the most developed economies in South East Asia, more diversified than Indonesia and Malaysia and with a scale that Singapore cannot physically match.
From 1948, I would say you need to smash the Karen rebels before they get started in the early days. That instability made it clear the central government in Rangoon wasn't terribly powerful, and made it easier for ethnic groups to think that going by the gun would more or less work out. U Nu isn't a great leader, but there aren't many other options in the early days. Give him more cards to work with, and you never need to invite Ne Win to coup the government in 1960, which would likely avoid 1962.
As for being "anti-Communist", I would expect that would be worse for Burma, if anything. Unlike the ROK, Burma has a long border with China and plenty of KMT forces fled over that border in OTL. In a world with an anti-Communist Burma, the CPB and ethnic groups could expect more, and better armed, support from China, which would only entrench the centralized, unitary approach to Burma which proved problematic IOTL.
I could see a non aligned or neutral Burma quite easily during the Cold War. Whether they had the political talent to play both sides against each other is the defining question.
Not sure about Burma, but Ceylon, was a house of cards waiting for a small breeze to fall over when British washed their hands off it. They turned a once self sufficient country in to a commercial crop (Tea,rubber,coconut and cinnamon) farm. At 1948 about 2/3rd of countries rice which was then the staple food of people were imported. This imported rice was not sold at market prices. They were given as rations to people. This continued even after British gave self rule to a bunch of upper class lawyers rooted in racial politics, who had no idea how to govern a country in post WW2 world economy.
first government of Dominion of Ceylon fell in early 1950s because the Korean rice crisis. Rice prices skyrocketed due to Korean War. And Ceylon government couldn’t afford to give rice rations to people at the current subsidised prices as it will cost them more than entire earnings from exports. As lawyers who had no idea how economy or statecraft works, they went for the easy way out. Racial hatred. Drum up racial hatred so that people forget the real issues as focus on hating your neighbour. And blame all their misfortunes on each other. The rest is history. Wait. Not history. It is present. They still do that in Sri Lanka...