Burma: The Nexus of Socialism and Two Political Traditions

Author(s): John H. Badgley

Source: Asian Survey, Vol. 3, No. 2, A Survey of Asia in 1962: Part II (Feb., 1963), pp. 89-95
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3023680
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BURMA: THE NEXUS OF SOCIALISM AND
TWO POLITICAL TRADITIONS

JOHN H. BADGLEY

In the mid-nineteenth century King Mindon of Burma sent

a princely envoy to Europe to observe and study what would now be
called public administration. The envoy, U Gaung, returned with vol-
umninous notes, a fascinating diary, and an enthusiasm for a strong central
administration. He perceived that the system of traditional government
encouraged capricious leadership, that monarchs tended to appoint district
officials primarily because of their military capacity, and consequently
men who often were inefficient administrators under strong kings and
competitors for the throne under weaker personalities. U Gaung's first
reforms were introduced in 1861, their objective was to make written law
authoritative. Through the standard set of statutes, which were to gradu-
ally replace the imperial rescript, King Mindon hoped to develop a new
type of official, one whose primary function was to administer Burmese
public law rather than to protect the monarch's interest. But Mindon died
too soon to make his measures successful.
Following their conquest in 1886, the British introduced a thorough-
going administrative revolution whereby a bureaucratic system devised
in London and developed by the Indian Civil Service was adapted to fit
the customs of the several ethnic communities in Burma. British rule
created a second political tradition superimposed on the first. Its effects
were twofold: to stabilize racial divisions, thus delaying integration; and
to create a new indigenous elite trained in the law, humanities, and science
of the West and consequently a group culturally removed from the rural
population.
It was this westernized leadership who contested for independence and
who then attempted to modernize Burma by using the bureaucratic and
legal institutions of colonial rule. Their political power, likewise, was
founded upon a western institution, the party; and also their rationale
for governing, socialist democracy, was a western import. National leaders
popularized a Burmese vocabulary of socialism and district candidates
competed for parliament by claiming devotion to economic progress, social
welfare, and individual security. Socialist doctrine served as goal and
therefore sanction for political action.
The actual process of politics was, however, a severe compromise of
the rationale. The terminology of democracy and socialism became jargon,
a veil masking the dysfunction of both political parties and government
itself.' The goals of economic growth eluded the governing Anti-Fascist

'The best study of central leadership and party function in Burma is by Lucian
Pye, Politics, Personality, and Nation-building. Yale University Press, 1962.

89

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 90 BU RMA

People's Freedom League and their American economic advisers.2 The

effort was tragic, for the limited capital resources of Burma were inves
in a number of industrial projects not yet suited to the economy and, mo
significantly, the advisers' high standard of living came to symbolize the
growing disparity between the way of life of the national leadership and
that of town and village leaders. Communication between rulers and ruled,
a key function in any viable political process, became increasingly tenuous.
The result was the gradual collapse of the party system and then the over-
throw of the constitution by coup d'etat.

The Political Foundation of the Military

A century after Mindon's attempt to modernize Burma's government,
the Burmese fell back upon the operative system he thought to discard.
The will of the ruler once more was supreme and power within the
government again rests with military officers-cum-bureaucrats. The ruling
Revolutionary Council has ostensibly turned aside from the legalist, demo-
cratic tradition so laboriously nurtured by the British and the AFPFL
after independence. A legislative body, the old civil service, popular
elections, and a competing opposition are believed to be obstacles in the
path of modernization. Since the formal seizure of power, the Council
has ruled by decree and is unabashedly authoritarian. Nevertheless it
exercises surprising political power.
The depth of the military's political strength was first intimated when
the Council imprisoned U Nu and his cabinet with scarcely any public
demonstration. Subsequently General Ne Win, Chairman of the Council,
censored every potential opposition group within the society: administra-
tors, educators, politicians, religious leaders, and journalists; and still no
effective opposition was formed.3 Several months after these verbal at-
tacks, a student demonstration, not unlike a dozen similar events over the
past three decades, was transformed into carnage when army troops fired
automatic weapons into the students.4 Despite the blood-letting and subse-
quent closing of Burma's universities, the Council pressed on with its pro-
grams unchallenged by any other group or organization.
A major source of the army's power is its arms and organization, yet
such a radical series of attacks against other leadership elements obviously
has support from within the society. The strength flows from the Burman
rural ethnic group which numbers about 15,00090() or three-fourths of
the population. It is the culture of this Buddhist group that has dominated
the nation in the face of militant minority opposition, and it is upon this
culture that the military is attempting to found their own socialist revolu-
tion. The political process inherent in Burman rural life, and the values

2For a thorough description of the American advisers role, see Louis Walinsky,
Economic Development in Burmna, 1951-1960. Twentieth Century Fund, 1962.
' For an assessment of the military's first months in office see my article, 'Burma's
Military Government: A Political Analysis," Asian Survey, 11:6 (August, 1962) 24-31.
' The government reported 16 killed and 27 wounded, more neutral reports estimate
that 60 to 100 were killed and many more wounded.

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 JOHN H. BADGLEY 91

associated with tha

institutions utilized by the politicians. The present leadership, up to the
present, has been able to tap the dynamism of that process for its own
purposes. U Nu sought to accomplish the same end during his last
premiership by identifying with the religious feature of this older tradition.
Nu seemed to sense that of the two viable political traditions in Burma,
the monarchial pattern of power was exerting ever-greater influence, but he
was only able to amass personal support and not the kind of following that
would accept his lead if he introduced radical change. The military seeks
to aggregate its power by utilizing non-western secular symbols and
methods of rule.

The Political Goal of the Military

The proclivity of the Revolutionary Council to encourage a Burmese
way of life suggests a revulsion from western ways. Such a rejection b
nationalist leaders throughout the non-western world is indeed not unusual:
Nehru, Soekarno, and Mao Tse-tung have each suppressed features of
western culture in their own states. In Burma, perhaps more than in most
Asian states, the conflict of two value patterns is most sharply felt. Both
an agrarian Buddhist and an urban secularized way of life are traditional
in Burma in a political sense, for both ways are represented by a leader-
ship and a community. Both leaderships lay claim to a moral right to
guide the state toward modernity: the western-trained because they know
how modern institutions operate, the anti-western nationalists because they
have the confidence of the rural public.
The key leaders of the Revolutionary Council identify themselves with
the anti-western nationalists. The phraseology of their political goal is
socialist, even Marxist, but their actions are those of ardent nationalists
seeking to maximize the power of their state.5 From the Burmese view-
point, socialism denotes the good things of life, while capitalism, always
associated with colonial rule, denotes the evil qualities. These values are
easily ascribed because both socialism and capitalism are alien to the
fundamental economic and political processes of agrarian Burma. There-
fore, for the military, as for the politicians, socialist doctrine provides
the means, or rationale, to the goal of unity. But unity, the creation of a
single political community, is in itself only an intermediate step on the
road to modernization.
Although the creation of a single political community in Burma is only
an intermediate step for the military, it is the goal with the highest priority.
During the period of rule by the politicians, the culture of the Burmans
permeated into non-Burman areas through required use of the language,
the movies, newspapers, and migration by the majority group. The mili-
tary leadership, which has successfully unified its own multi-racial organ-
ization, seeks to speed this diffusion in a direct fashion, e.g., by settling

' The basic policy declaration of the Council is a seven-page document, "The
Burmese Way to Socialism," issued April 30, 1962.

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 92 BU RMA

veterans in "frontier areas," by sponsoring tours of central Burma by

minority school children, by requiring all private as well as public schools
to teach in Burmese. The military assumes that Burman culture will pro-
vide the cohesion for the unified state; however Shans, Kachins, and
Karens, who number about five million, do not find the military's com-
mitment palatable; therefore, it is essential to the military that their
effort be called "socialism" rather than "Burmanization."

The Council's Self-image

We have created a typology of the Burmese leadership, suggesting that
the AFPFL represented the westernized elite and that the military was
tied more closly to the agrarian Buddhist Burmans. This is an over-
simplification but does represent a significant tendency. Although there
are in both elites leaders who represent each type, the urban westernized
politicians were most powerful within the AFPFL during its period of
rule, while the agrarian type tends to dominate the Council. There is
abundant evidence for such a self-image.
(1) The careers of a majority of the Revolutionary Council have kept
them in closer touch with agrarian life than did the careers of the politi-
cians. A majority were not formally educated beyond the district high
schools, and because of the insurrection the senior commanders have
spent their mature years in the districts. Their personal ties tend to be with
rural leaders, other military officers, and comrades from the anti-British na-
tionalist period. Finally, their major function as commanders has been
the transformation of 70,000 farmers into soldiers.
(2) The military leadership attempts to rationalize its power with non-
western Burmese values. The army founded its own Historical Institute
and supports the Burma Commission in its group endeavor to write a
history of Burma based primarily on Burmese documents. During the
1958-60 period the military devised a massive anti-communist campaign
based on Pali Buddhist concepts of authority, power, and "the good life."
Following the 1962 coup the military released with its basic policy state-
ment an 80-page study of Burma's monarchial and anti-British military
history.6
(3) The Revolutionary Council governs Burma in a fashion reminiscent
of the monarchial system. Army officers are chairmen of Security Com-
mittees at each level of government and have tended to govern with more
autonomy than did the civil service. The tendency is to decentralize ad-
ministration.
(4) The military emphasizes the virtue of using scientific skills in a
Burmese context. Education officials, the universities, and writers are
urged to think in terms of the Burmese Way and diminish the importance
of non-scientific aspects of western education.
(5) Foreigners have been removed from positions of influence in

6 U Ba Than (Retired Colonel), The Roots of the Revolution. Dep't of Inform

Rangoon. 1962.

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 JOHN H. BADGLEY 93

government and education. American economists and engineers departed

in 1958; the Ford, Fulbright, and Asia Foundation activities were ter-
minated in 1962. Only governmental and multi-state organizations are
allowed to send technicians to Burma or train Burmese abroad. This aid is
approximately balanced between the Chinese and European communist
states; and the Japanese, Israeli, United States, United Nations, and
Colombo Plan programs.
(6) Budget priority is now given to agricultural rather than urban pro-
grams. Key officers with agrarian interests have leftist "men of the people"
who opposed the AFPFL government serve as advisers. One, U Saw Oo,
publishes a government periodical, Forward; another U Ba Nyein advises
on financial affairs; and a third, Bo Htein Lin, heads a political organization
supported by the Council. All these men are Burmans who generally avoid
contact with westerners. Each has publicly supported emulation of Chi-
nese methods of modernization.

The Council's Basic Policies

Do07estic. The fundamental administrative policy of the Council is to
simplify methods of production and commerce, a policy based on the
assumption that greater production can be achieved through efficient
mobilization of human and natural resources. This policy, of course, grows
from the commitment to aggregate the power of the state as rapidly as
possible. To implement simplification, the Council has placed officers in
directive positions both in the districts and in key governmental agencies.
Other officers have resigned their commissions to assume managership of
the quasi-public firms within the Burma Economic Development Corpo-
ration.
The military's commercial and industrial program is now nearly a
decade old and has developed rapidly, first from within the military as a
logistic base, and since 1958 as a nation-wide project. The BEDC en-
courages combined public, private, and foreign investment in stock com-
panies which operate autonomously with managers appointed by the execu-
tive council of the BEDC. Other government as well as private institutions
compete with BEDC firms but all are now dwarfed by the capital base of
the central body, which functions like a cartel. Brigader Aung Gyi, Acting
Chairman of the Revolutionary Council in Ne Win's absence, and two
close associates, Colonel Khin Nyo and Captain Bar Bar, are most responsi-
ble for BEDC's aggressive development.
The military's agricultural program is less than a year old and has yet
to be defined. Both Japanese and Israeli technicians have been used
in pilot projects over the past decade but no major commitment has been
made to methods used in their parent states. Most of Burma's productive
land is privately owned and is farmed in plots of twenty acres or less. The
sale of rice is state-controlled and there has been no price incentive for
farmers to improve the quality or quantity of production. In 1962 the
Council allowed private rice millers to charge higher prices to government
agents for high-quality rice; also the government's export monopoly was

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 94 B U RMA

broken to allow private firms to sell low-grade rice abroad if they could
obtain higher prices than those received by government agents. Burma's
1962 sales exceeded predicted levels, possibly because of the new policy,
and the acreage sown for the coming year will exceed that of any post-war
year. However rice exports have yet to equal the level attained under the
British in the 1930's.
The army's efforts to mobilize power in economic fields have been
duplicated in the realm of political organization, but with little success.
The Council seeks to equal the achievement of the AFPFL in its earliest
days when it represented the nationalist movement; therefore, Ne Win
requested all political and communal leaders to join one unified league
sponsored by the army. Only agrarian-based leftists stepped forward and
the small cadre of the military's Burmese Socialist Program Party, headed
by former insurgent leader Bo Htein Lin, is publicly opposed by both
the AFPFL and U Nu's Union Party.
The Council's emphasis upon aggregating power has infringed upon civil
liberties. The International Commission of Jurists condemned the govern-
ment in early September for its extended confinement of political leaders,
its attack on the students, and its tendency to forego due process of law
procedures. Both foreign and domestic journalists have been jailed, mostly
for short periods, for "incorrect reporting." Despite these tendencies, the
government's policies are not markedly more severe than those practiced
by U Nu during periods of crisis.
Foreign Policy. Burma's neutralist position between the East-West
blocs and also between China and India has been affected by the domestic
changes. Since 1958, concurrent with the military's rise to dominant
influence, Burma has had amicable relations with China while India, of
course, has experienced a steady erosion of the spirit of Bandung. Burma's
border problem was settled in 1959 and formal agreement was reached in
1961. Trade between China and Burma has increased following agreement
on an $84,000,000 loan, primarily in the barter of rice for technical aid.
During this period the Chinese have assiduously cultivated the Burmese,
while India has done little to improve relations between the two states,
other than continue the customary aid through the Colombo Plan. Besides
the large loan, China has sent both trade and entertainment missions, and
treated the military government as equals in the "spirit of revolution."
However the relationship under the "spirit of revolution" is paradoxically
very traditional, for Burmese monarchs regarded China with respect and
occasionally sent tribute to the imperial court. The Communist's successful
show of force against India verified the military's assumption that Burma
must live with China, at least for the present.

Conclusion
The revolution sponsored by the Revolutionary Council is founded upon
the traditional political process and tends to be supported by those opposed
to western influence. The goal of the regime, to maximize the power of the

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 JOHN H. BADOLEY 95

state, is very rational in the face of the gigantic population thrusts from
India, China, and Pakistan. To prevent Burma from dissolving as a
sovereign entity, the Council seeks to create a single political community
based on a Burman culture.
It is open to doubt -that the regime will succeed in their effort to main-
tain Burma's integrity if China's influence spills over into non-technical
areas, or if China chooses to over-run the country. The latter alternative
is unlikely as long as Burma gives China the economic advantages of her
export surpluses, and as long as Burma maintains a neutral policy in
world affairs. For the moment, therefore, Burma's range of policy alter-
natives are narrow.

Selected Reading
Badgley, John H. "Burima's Military Government: A Political Analysis," Asianl. Survey,
11:6 (Atugutst, 1962) 24-31.
Byles, Marie. Journ-ey Into Burmnese Silence. London: Allen and Unwin, 1962.
Pye, Lucian. Politics, Personality, and Nation-buildinb. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1962.
Rose, Jerry A. "Burmia and the Balance of Neutralisms," The Reporter, XXVIII:1
(Jan. 3, 1963).
Walinsky, Louis. Economic Development in Burrma 1951-60. New York: Twentieth
Century Fund, 1962.
Woodman, Dorothy. The Making of Burma. London: Cresset, 1962.

JOHN H. BADGLEY is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Po

Science at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

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