Dr Peter John Perry is an unusual, serious writer on contemporary Burma/ Myanmar. He is unusual for he is neither an ‘old Burma hand’, those who have followed that country for decades, nor a member of the younger generation of scholars who have often been attracted by the bitter failure to realise the potential of that unhappy land. As a geographer (former professor, Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand), Professor Perry has brought a different and welcome perspective and emphasis to the problem of the Burmese political economy under military rule.
Perry's critical and useful volume is divided into four analytical sections: four chapters on the political economy and development under Ne Win and the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) regime; four chapters on production issues (rice, timber, minerals); three chapters on the ‘distribution catastrophe’ (p. 109), including the informal sector and drugs; and an afterword.
As Perry states (p. 181), ‘Burma is the least known, discussed and understood middle sized state in the contemporary world.’ Writing before the ‘Saffron Revolution’ of 2007 and the Nargis cyclone of 2008, he notes that ‘One of the regime's great successes has been to keep a very low profile.’ As a result of these recent events, the economic, political and administrative ineptness of the present government has now been brought to the world's attention. If his comment that ‘Burma remains an economic mess in its fifth decade of army rule’ (p. 181) was accurate before the recent tragedies, it is even more apt today. It is a state encased in production and distribution (as well as political) problems even before the 2008 cyclone rendered much of its fertile rice-growing delta region, at least temporarily, badly crippled.
In discussing the BSPP period (1962–88), Perry notes the problem of the role of foreigners, who were suspect to the regime. This resulted in retardation of modernisation. ‘At the heart of the culture of anti-modernization resided the colonial experience, an exercise in modernization that was practically effective while yet ideologically unsound and dubiously sustainable. Ne Win's programme possessed the second and the third of these attributes without the first’ (pp. 44–5). Perry argues that the most effective of the production programmes of this period was in timber, where modernisation had taken place in the colonial period and foreign advice was not necessary. Perry sums up the population's response to the BSPP era by delineating four avenues of response: ‘acceptance and resignation [also discussed, quoting Fink, as “learned helplessness”]; adaptation; circumvention; and protest, separately or in combination’ (p. 46). The demonstrations of 1988 brought an end to resignation for a period, but it seems to have reappeared once again after the Saffron Revolution.
The strengths and uniqueness of this volume on contemporary Burma/Myanmar lie in his discussion of production issues. He sums up his two chapters on rice as follow (p. 79): ‘Forced to draw an overall conclusion it is that the regime sought not to modernize the rice sector but simply to capture its proceeds for the state and increasingly for privileged individuals in the system. Thereby it condemned the industry to decline.’
His discussion of the timber industry is especially important, for Burma in the colonial period had what was recognised as perhaps the best forest service in the world. ‘In essence the situation of the timber sector between 1962 and 1988 parallels that of the rest of the economy: state control as government policy; illegal production and trade on a large and growing but unrecorded scale as one of the bases of both widespread insurgency and individual wealth. Timber kept growing and going and in the process kept Burma going if not growing’ (p. 90). Perry closes his minerals chapter: ‘One final comment: Burma has not squandered its minerals, it has mismanaged, limited and thus deferred their exploitation’ (p. 107).
Although the SPDC points to its contribution to the country's development, and indeed the regime's political legitimacy in their eyes is in part based on its unappreciated (in foreign circles) infrastructure construction programme, these accomplishments are dwarfed by the sorry state of both production and distribution to its citizens of the resources of the state. Perry considers that ‘Burma is not simply an interesting phenomenon worth looking at. It is a tragedy of lost opportunity and waste on a national, regional and local scale, of public catastrophe and personal disaster’ (p. 2). He characterises the sorry state of affairs early in the volume: ‘The totality of the situation I would sum up in the word anti-development. As noted earlier the country has gone backwards, certainly relatively and in many ways absolutely. An opportunity has been at worst rejected and at best mishandled or misappropriated, resources have been neglected or squandered, and the reason for this is the position of the regime, its ideology, its inflexibility, its greed and its incompetence’ (p. 3). The author recognises that solutions to the issues raised will have to be internal, not externally imposed.
This volume would be useful supplementary reading in any course on Burma/ Myanmar, and also sections of it could serve as a negative case study in a course on economic development. There is less on politics in the volume than might have been desired, given, as the author notes, that politics has often driven economic positions, but one cannot ask the author to write a different book. As in any volume on Myanmar, sources are an issue, and although the writer effectively uses some specialised trade and sectoral sources, there is considerable reliance on journals and the press, which are often less reliable even though they may be the only ones available. The style of writing is clear and lacking the jargon that obfuscates, rather than clarifies, analysis. There is, however, sometimes a disconcerting lack of commas that could have eased the reader's approach.
This volume is recommended to those with serious interests in that country, and taken together with a variety of other contemporary commentaries, it has helpful perspectives on the sorry state of affairs in Myanmar.
