DECEMBER 28 — South-east Asia’s eastern continental flank — running from China’s Yunnan province through Myanmar to the Bay of Bengal — is no longer merely unstable. It is structurally broken. Yet starting today elections in Myanmar will begin although the junta controls less than 50 percent of the country. In 330 townships under it's control, questionable elections would be held in 265 townships.

At any rate, what appears on official maps as a sovereign state has, in practice, become a lattice of armed enclaves, negotiated corridors, and externally managed dependencies. 

Myanmar today is not a country moving toward reunification; it is a geopolitical hinge whose fragmentation has become strategically useful to outside powers, above all China.

The scale of China’s dependence on Myanmar reveals the depth of this transformation. 

In 2023, Myanmar became China’s largest external supplier of heavy rare earth elements such as dysprosium and terbium—critical inputs for electric vehicles, advanced electronics, and modern weapons systems. 

China imported roughly 41,700 metric tons that year, accounting for more than 90 percent of its heavy rare earth supply. 

Yet these minerals do not come from areas controlled by the central government in Naypyidaw. 

They are extracted almost entirely from territories governed by ethnic armed organisations in Kachin and northern Shan States.

This is the first hard truth of Indochina’s broken east flank: sovereignty no longer determines access to strategic resources.

Control does. Beijing understands this reality with unusual clarity. 

It does not secure its supply chains in Myanmar by choosing between the junta and the resistance, or by waiting for an elusive national peace. Instead, it works with whoever governs the ground that matters. 

In Myanmar’s fractured political landscape, legitimacy is secondary to functionality.

The same logic drives China’s push for maritime access to the Indian Ocean through the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor. 

The corridor links Yunnan to the Chinese-backed Kyaukphyu deep-sea port in Rakhine State, allowing China to bypass the Malacca Strait — a narrow maritime chokepoint vulnerable to blockade in a regional conflict. 

From Beijing’s perspective, Kyaukphyu is not simply an economic project; it is an energy security and strategic autonomy imperative.

Formally, the port operates under Myanmar’s central administration. 

In reality, it is surrounded by territory controlled by the Arakan Army, whose influence also stretches along critical pipeline routes linking the Bay of Bengal to China’s interior. Physical control rests with an armed organisation at war with the state. 

Financial control, future investment, and strategic direction rest with Beijing. Legal authority resides, tenuously, in Naypyidaw.

This three-way dependency is not accidental. It is the core of China’s approach.

China has learned that transactional deals with local armed groups are unavoidable in fragmented states — but also that such deals are too fragile to underpin long-term investments.

Pipelines, ports, and mineral supply chains require standardised contracts, national permits, and legal guarantees that only a central state can provide, however weak or contested it may be. For this reason, Beijing has not abandoned the junta. Nor has it relied solely on it.

Instead, China binds the junta and ethnic armed organisations into a system of mutual reliance. Central authorities need revenue from mining and infrastructure.

Armed groups need national-level approvals that signal Beijing’s recognition. 

China uses procedure — contracts, permits, future financing — as leverage to ensure compliance from both sides. 

What emerges is not peace, but managed coexistence. This is power arrangement, not conflict resolution.

Attempts to forge a unified national coalition in Myanmar have repeatedly failed because power is too dispersed and mistrust too entrenched. Beijing no longer waits for reconciliation. It works around it. 

By assembling a patchwork of localised bargains, China stabilises the corridors it needs while leaving the rest of the country in a state of chronic uncertainty. Stability, in this model, is selective by design.

China’s own bureaucratic architecture makes this strategy possible. 

Central institutions in Beijing handle formal diplomacy, sovereign agreements, and military-to-military ties with 

Naypyidaw. At the same time, provincial security and intelligence agencies based in Yunnan manage relations with ethnic armed organisations along the border. These local agencies possess decades of experience, granular intelligence, and practical leverage that central ministries lack.

Operating quietly, they regulate trade routes, fuel supplies, electricity, currency flows, and logistics. They broker cease-fires, pressure armed groups, and reopen or close economic lifelines as needed. 

This localised Chinese statecraft mirrors Myanmar’s fragmented political order, allowing Beijing to engage both sovereign authority and de facto power holders without forcing either into dominance. Yet this strategy carries grave risks. 

The more China relies on armed groups to secure its interests, the more it erodes the authority of the central state. 

If Naypyidaw weakens beyond a critical threshold, Myanmar could slide into total state collapse. Such an outcome would not serve China’s interests. 

It would unleash refugee flows, transnational crime, and uncontrolled violence across the borderlands that Beijing depends on for minerals and strategic access.

China is therefore engaged in a delicate balancing act: weakening the state enough to ensure compliance, but not so much that it disintegrates. It is betting that permanent fragmentation can be managed indefinitely.

For South-east Asia, this is a sobering lesson. Indochina’s eastern flank is no longer simply contested by great powers; it is being reorganised around corridors, commodities, and controlled disorder. 

Traditional notions of sovereignty and non-interference are increasingly misaligned with realities on the ground.

This fragmentation also creates space for others to act. 

India and Thailand remain deeply engaged along Myanmar’s western and southern borders through security coordination, trade, and humanitarian access. 

Asean, if it resists the temptation of grandstanding, can still facilitate quiet dialogue without aligning with any single faction. 

External partners can reinforce humanitarian corridors and local administrative capacity beyond China’s immediate zones of control.

Myanmar’s tragedy is no longer only a domestic crisis. It is a structural fault line in South-east Asia’s strategic geography. 

The real question is no longer who will rule Myanmar — but whether the region can prevent fragmentation from becoming the default model of order.

If it cannot, South-east Asia’s broken east flank may harden into a permanent feature of the Indo-Pacific landscape — managed by external powers, endured by its people, and destabilising for the region as a whole.

* Phar Kim Beng, PhD is the Professor of Asean Studies at International Islamic University of Malaysia and Director of Institute of International and Asean Studies (IINTAS).

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.