Reuters

“FEAR”, the lady used to say, “is a habit.” This week, inspired in part by the lady herself, Aung San Suu Kyi, partly by the heroic example set by Buddhist monks, Myanmar's people kicked the addiction.

Defying the corrupt, inept, brutal generals who rule them, they took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to demand democracy. They knew they were risking a bloody crackdown, like the one that put down a huge popular revolt in 1988, killing 3,000 people or more. In 1988 Burma's people were betrayed not just by the ruthlessness of their rulers, but also by the squabbling and opportunism of the outside world, which failed to produce a co-ordinated response and let the murderous regime get away with it. This time, soldiers are once again shooting and killing unarmed protesters (see article). Can the world avoid making the same mistake twice?

In New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Western leaders, led by George Bush, harangued the junta, and threatened yet more sanctions. They have probably already shot their bolt. Western sanctions have been tried and have failed, in part because Myanmar's neighbours have for years followed a different approach. Its fellow members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations waffled about “constructive engagement” while making economic hay in Myanmar from the West's withdrawal. India, too, anxious about China's growing influence, and hungry for oil and gas, has swallowed its democratic traditions and courted the generals.

Comrades-in-arms

China itself has built an ever-closer relationship. The two countries, after all, have a lot in common beyond a shared border. Since the 1980s a wave of “people-power” revolutions has swept aside tyrannies around the world. Mercifully few regimes, and few armies, are willing to kill large numbers of their own people to stay in power. Two big exceptions have been Myanmar and China, whose government in 1989 likewise stayed in power through a massacre.

Yet it is China that now offers the best hope the outside world has of changing Myanmar for the better. Admittedly, it is a thin hope. There are plenty of reasons to doubt China's willingness to upset Myanmar's generals. China's traditional posture, heard again this week, is to oppose any “interference in the internal affairs of another country”. It trots out this formula so often when foreigners criticise its own behaviour that, even if it supports change, it is hard for it to utter more than platitudes, as it has this month, about the desirability of a “democracy process that is appropriate for the country”.

China has also been the chief beneficiary of the partial Western boycott. Myanmar offers two of the prizes China values most in its foreign friends: hydrocarbon resources and a friendly army, willing to give it access to facilities on its coast on the Bay of Bengal. China has become the junta's biggest commercial partner and diplomatic supporter.

Nevertheless there are two reasons why China might now see its own interests as best served by assisting a peaceful transition in Myanmar. The first is that China wants stability on its borders, and it is becoming obvious that the junta cannot provide it. The generals' economic mismanagement has helped reduce a country blessed with rich resources to crippling poverty. Fleeing economic misery as much as political oppression, up to 2m migrants from Myanmar are in Thailand. And it was an economic grievance—a big, abrupt rise in fuel prices—that sparked the present unrest.

The junta has at least succeeded in cobbling together ceasefire agreements with most of the two dozen armed insurgencies lining its borders. But the price has been lawless zones where banditry and illegal-drug production are rife. Myanmar's slice of the “Golden Triangle” on its Thai and Lao borders was for a while in the 1990s the world's dominant heroin producer. It has been largely priced out of that market by Afghan competition. But it has successfully diversified into methamphetamines. The business relies on precursor chemicals coming from China, but, just as heroin from Myanmar brought China addiction and, through shared needles, HIV and AIDS, so “ice” can wreak havoc. Nobody expects any transition to democracy to be trouble-free. But, Chinese leaders must be asking themselves, can it be any worse?

Appealing to the Olympic spirit

China must also be wondering nervously how all this will affect next year's Olympic games in Beijing. Already, protests about China's support for the government of Sudan, larded with comparisons to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, have shown that its foreign policy as well as its human-rights record at home is under scrutiny. Myanmar is justifiably a popular cause in the West. If China proves actively obstructive to international efforts to bring the junta to book, it may provoke calls for a boycott of the games.

It is of course wrong to assume that China can dictate to Myanmar. In the generals' deluded world-view, only they can preserve Myanmar's independence. They will take orders from no other country. China's role is crucial, nonetheless. It must not blunt the impact of measures taken by other countries and provide the junta with a shield to fend off demands to do what it should.

That, at least, is easy to prescribe. It should stop shooting protesters; free all political prisoners, including Miss Suu Kyi; scrap the constitutional guidelines drawn up by its farcical “national convention”; and start serious talks with all groups, including Miss Suu Kyi and her party. The aim of those talks should also be clear: to arrange a transition to civilian, democratic rule. For their part, provided free and fair new elections are held, Miss Suu Kyi and her party should not insist on the results of the election they won in a landslide in 1990 being honoured. And, unpalatable as it is, they should offer the generals whatever incentive they need to go quietly. This all sounds a pipedream. It will certainly remain so if the outside world does not unite around a set of demands, and agree on the sticks and carrots that might make deaf old soldiers listen.