Myanmar faces dilemma to balance need for Chinese investment against voters’ desire for cleaner government

Doing business in Myanmar has never been a straightforward practice for Zhang Qiang, a jade mine investor from Yunnan province’s Ruili township, which borders the Southeast Asian country.

“Gratuity fees are usually a prerequisite,” Zhang said, referring to the money – often somewhere between a few thousand yuan to tens of thousands of yuan – he has paid Myanmese officials and middlemen in order to get business deals there.

Read more: Revealed: Myanmar’s US$31 billion jade mining industry and its ‘ties to country’s elite’

Like many other jade mines that have Chinese investment, Zhang said his operation in Myanmar’s northern Kachin state was causing problems as a result of lax government scrutiny.

“The Chinese mine jade is destroying the environment, and I have no choice but to do the same because everyone is doing it.”

This may soon change. A newly elected government – almost certainly to be led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which has just won a landslide victory– will seek to chart a different course from the ruling military proxy – the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), when it takes office next year.

However, an urgency to boost the country’s economy will pose the new government with a tough dilemma, forcing it to tread carefully between the interests of its major foreign investor, China, and the voters’ overwhelming desire for a cleaner and more transparent government, analysts say.