KEY POINTS:
Will China do in Myanmar what it did this year in Sudan - send a special envoy to ease political tension in the country after calls by international activists to boycott the summer Olympics in Beijing next year?
Or will it heed a call last week from Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont to join and perhaps chair a regional forum on Myanmar that would include Southeast Asian nations as well as India and Japan?
The proposal for a forum appears to be similar to the format of the six-party talks set up to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions. China hosts these negotiations. Other participants include the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States.
While the talks focus on the nuclear issue, they also deal with North Korea's political and economic relations with the outside world. Of all Myanmar's immediate neighbours, China has the most influence with the military regime. Beijing is in a similar position in Sudan and North Korea.
Hopes for a more activist approach by China towards Myanmar have been raised by the Chinese decision to support a United Nations Security Council statement last week strongly deploring the Burmese regime's violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators last month and calling for political dialogue.
Although Beijing insisted on watering down the UN statement before the final version was agreed, it was the first time the Security Council had taken official action on Myanmar. It also marked a shift of position by China, which had previously used its veto to shield the Burmese junta from harsh criticism, as well as sanctions sought by the West.
After the Security Council meeting, Ibrahim Gambari, the UN envoy to Burma, is visiting Southeast Asian countries, Japan, India and China to try forge a regional consensus on how to deal with the junta. He hopes to return to Myanmar this month or in November to continue the UN effort to start substantive negotiations between the military government and opposition groups.
However, Beijing's priority in Myanmar is stability, not political reform leading to democratic rule. As China seeks international status as a rising but responsible global power, it has been embarrassed by its close association with the Burmese regime, as it has by links to three other pariah states - North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
But the consistent Chinese line has been that resolving internal political problems is up to locals, not outsiders. China and Burma grew close in the early 1990s, when both were shunned by the West for crushing pro-democracy protests; in 1988 in Burma and in 1989 in China. Since then, China has become a leading arms supplier, trade partner and investor in Myanmar with increasingly important strategic and energy interests in the country.
As China's long-standing ally, Pakistan, struggles to contain Islamic extremism and political unrest, Myanmar has become the most promising gateway to the Indian Ocean for the land-locked western areas of China.
Not long before the pro-democracy protests were crushed in Myanmar, the junta declared its intent to sell a huge amount of natural gas to China from two offshore fields, even though they have been developed by Indian and South Korean firms.
This supply of gas is the key to China's plan for an energy and transport corridor linking Kunming, capital of southwestern Yunnan province, to the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean through Myanmar territory. Stretching for nearly 2000km inside Myanmar, the corridor would include oil and gas pipelines running alongside a highway to deepwater terminals and ports on the coast.
The gas would come from Myanmar and most of the oil would be shipped in from the Middle East and Africa, enabling China to reduce its dependence on Southeast Asian straits for its vital supplies of imported oil.
As ties with Myanmar are tightened in this way, it would be unrealistic to expect Beijing to displace the regime that is serving as guarantor of China's access to the Indian Ocean.
* The writer, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a security specialist at the Institute of SouthEast Asian Studies in Singapore.
