A prominent politician before the military took over his country, completely, in 1962, we had had long talks in my periodic visits to Burma. He had once been a dedicated Marxist although a believer in representative government, and we discussed how his views had been changed over the years by his country’s notoriously disastrous experiments with what was called, often sarcastically, “the Burmese road to socialism”. It had led to stagnation, total corruption, near collapse, and finally one of the most brutal tyrannies the world has seen, even with all the horrors of the 20th century. Burmese prisons, even by the standards of other torture chambers, are almost indescribable.

This is written with the verdict still out on how the present largely unforeseen revolutionary situation in Burma will play out.

There are more questions than answers.

Is there some rudimentary organization behind the mass demonstrations led by Buddhist monks against the utterly ruthless and corrupt thugs who lead the present regime? Or is it, as seems, a grassroots explosion of popular discontent on many scores, with improvised if any leadership, occasioned as often happens in history by the seemingly trivial increase in fuel prices for the few in the country’s 55 millions who use engine-powered transportation and an increase in the price of cooking oil in Burma's shortage and rapidly inflating economy. [A decade or so ago when I was last in Burma, the diplomats and the few tourists permitted into the country were buying the marvelously hand-carved wooden axle couplings created out of the country’s still vast teak reserves as lamp bases – a comment on the Burmese economy and their skills at improvisation.]

President George W. Bush and Mrs. Bush are right to be giving full press to the current conflict in Burma. Hopefully, if there is such a thing as world public opinion, it will have an effect on supporting the brave Burmese who have undertaken a peaceful movement to overturn the present tyranny. In 1988 when another version of the current military scoundrels controlled the regime, more than three thousand Burmese students and demonstrators were shot down with little recognition or sympathy from the outside world. This time, however, perhaps technology will help make the difference. Even from isolated and backward Burma cell photos and e-mail messages appear to be making it out, cut off as the country is by sealed borders for the foreign media.

Like so many smaller and unanticipated events in our globalized world, the overthrow of the current Burmese regime would have enormous implications for its Asian neighbors.

China, which has snuggled up to the criminals running Burma, would be embarrassed. It seems hardly likely that a successful popular movement in its small southern neighbor would have any effect on Beijing’s own continued suppression of all organized opposition. But it would be a reminder to a growing clutch of pariah regimes – Sudan, Zimbabwe, and perhaps North Korea – that China’s blessing and even financial aid is not enough to stave off the anger of a population however humiliated and intimidated.

Still, it is worrisome for the tatters of Communist “democratic centralism” left to the Beijing regime. The Chinese have for years puzzled over the mysteries of the sudden fall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania as a case study to instruct in what a Communist regime should do to prevent its implosion.

It is that time when the conniving minds of Chinese elite turn to such thoughts. Going into the 17th national congress of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] due to begin on October 15, such overthrows of dictatorial regimes is not an academic subject in Beijing. There are signs of the usual factional maneuvering intensifying and unexplained sudden changes in the military leadership.

Just before he set off for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation [APEC] summit in Australia in early September, Chinese Communist Party Chairman and chief of state [in that order of importance] Hu Jintao bumped the all important minister of state security Xu Yongyue who had been there for a decade. Hu also removed finance minister Jin Renqing, personnel minister Zhang Bolin and Zhang Yunchuan, minister of science, technology and national defense industry. He also bumped the head of Xin Hua, the official news agency which doubles as the cover for much of China’s spying. In late September Liberation Army Daily reported a Ugandan visitor meeting with of General Chen Bingde, described as chief of the general staff of the People's Liberation Army, the first indication in any of the Chinese media that the crucial post no longer belonged to one Liang Guanglie. True enough, Liang is approaching retirement age, but Chen is only one year his junior and therefore longtime Forbidden City watchers considered it a strange choice for a successor. The chief of the general staff is the key officer in charge of military modernization, one of the highest strategic priorities for Chinese economic development as well as a player in the directing the skyrocketing military budget.

Although the whole international ideological contest is obscured – by an American political scene saturated in a conflict of personalities anticipating a new president and the nihilistic nature of its Islamofascist enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan who have no real ideology in modern terms – it is an important part of the current world scene. Drowning in the usual overblown French rhetoric, the newcomer to the world stage, President Nicolas Sarkozy made that point at the United Nations annual clambake in late September.

The fall of an anti-democratic regime anywhere in the world at a moment when the U.S. leadership, rightly or wrongly, has emphasized the ideological struggle implicit in its difficult mission in Iraq and Afghanistan, is an event with enormous portent.

That is particularly true since Chinese leadership has identified with the Burmese military, and, in fact, has been virtually the only major international voice not calling on the junta to give way to more representative government. [One must just ignore the idiotic statement of the Singapore government, in their pomposity always ready to make a fast buck in Southeast Asia, which called on “both sides” to make concessions.]

Beijing has supported the Rangoon regime as a customer for weapons and for access to its raw materials – hoping eventually to corner Burma’s huge but largely unexploited offshore gas [and perhaps oil although its fields are currently depleted by their long history and lack of state of the art technology], food, and other raw materials.

The Chinese strategists have also seen Burma as their backdoor into the Indian Ocean and have begun to set up a port, probably destined to be a submarine base, on the Bay of Bengal at Sittwe near the border of Bangladesh. The Chinese have proposed to build oil and gas pipelines from Sittwe to refineries under construction in Kunming in southwestern China to move Burmese gas and transshipped oil and gas from Africa and the Mideast.

Although it would be exceedingly ambitious for the Chinese, even given their growing industrial backup and their escalating expenditures on military hardware, some observers see the Chinese mapping “a string of pearls”, strong points across the Indian Ocean. This would be an effort to secure their access to their new equity investments in oil in Africa and their growing attempts at least commercial alliances with the oil producers in the Persian Gulf.

The Chinese may have made a good bet. The good guys may not win in Burma this time. The story of Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of one of the leaders of the independence movement, himself a victim of assassination in the early days of post-World War II regime, now almost 20 years in confinement, is a lesson in how brutal regimes can survive if not thrive. But there is little ambiguity in the contest. And the world – and Burma’s Southeast Asia neighbors will continue to ignore it as they have done for so long – at their peril.