Best Laid Plans

Best Laid Plans is a unique first-hand account of the radical economic reforms implemented in Myanmar under the ill-fated civilian government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. These reforms, designed both to turn around Myanmar’s dire economy and lay the economic foundations for democracy, were brought to a dramatic end following the military coup in Myanmar in February 2021. Written by one of Suu Kyi’s key economic advisors who was imprisoned alongside her in the wake of the coup, Best Laid Plans explores the nature of the reforms, the resistance they inspired, and the events that brought this all-too brief era of change to its catastrophic conclusion.

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Epigraph

The best laid plans of mice and men
Go oft awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy.
Robert Burns, To a Mouse (English trans), 1785

Anyone can turn a fish into fish soup, but it is much harder to turn fish soup into a fish.
Michael Zantovsky, Havel: A Life, 2014

Chapter one: The best laid plans

‘The Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan . . . is founded upon the objective of giving coherence to the policies and institutions necessary to achieve genuine, inclusive, and transformational economic growth.’
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counsellor of the Union of Myanmar, 2018

From 2016 to 2021, Myanmar underwent a period of profound economic reform. Driven by the National League for Democracy (NLD) government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, this reform program aimed to lay the economic foundations for liberal democracy, as well as reverse Myanmar’s five-decade retrenchment into oppression, disorder, and poverty. Hitherto an outlier among the economic growth that has otherwise characterised the region, by 2021 Myanmar seemed at last to be on the cusp of following its fast-growing peers and neighbours.

As ‘Special Economic Consultant’ to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, I was both a witness to and participant in this bold experiment. Lest this suggest otherwise, however, it is important to stress right from the get-go that the intellectual forces behind the economic reforms of this era were overwhelmingly local in source and inspiration. Led by a small cohort of relatively young and unambiguously brave deputy ministers, Myanmar’s economic reforms were ideologically centrist within the broad frame of liberal democratic capitalism. Traces of the Washington Consensus – that standard set of market-oriented policy recommendations for developing countries promoted by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and US Treasury – were certainly visible, but arguably no more so than policies yielded from the success of Myanmar’s neighbours. Pragmatic but principled, Myanmar’s economic reformers knew that implementation would be more important than inspiration.

Time was in short supply for Myanmar’s elected civilian government and its reform-minded advisers, as was authority. Authority over a bureaucracy designed decades ago to serve a military-socialist state – top-down, sclerotic, and decidedly unfit for purpose. And authority over Myanmar’s military, particularly its purse, its personnel, and its actions.

Meandering, with intent, would be the reformers’ order of business. Ducking and weaving, finding progress in the cracks. As the great philosopher of economic development Albert Hirschman once put it, ‘progress can at times meander strangely through many peripheral areas before it is able to dislodge backwardness from the central positions . . .’

The coup that returned Myanmar to the rule of a military junta in February 2021 brought about an end to economic reform, and with it the prospects of another generation of young Burmese escaping the poverty and despair that military rule had bestowed upon their parents and grandparents. To the reformers themselves, who throughout this book I will often simply refer to as ‘we’, the coup brought about immediate suffering – at best dismissal, usually imprisonment, torture, sometimes exile, even death. Denied any influence over an economic catastrophe their talent might have averted, and locked away from the world, the story of what Myanmar’s reformers attempted has yet to be told. It is my intention in this book to at least partially remedy this omission, as best I can.

As a participant in the story that follows, I bring certain advantages and disadvantages to the role of commentator. On the one hand, I know much about what happened behind the scenes. This is important in the context of Myanmar, where much was, and remains, opaque. The phrase ‘You had to be there’ came readily to mind as I contemplated so many events here, good and bad. On the other hand, I confess I am not an entirely objective observer, and nor did I see everything that went on. I try hard in these pages to be fair, and I believe I bring a critical eye even to policies and programs that I championed. Nevertheless, as my great predecessor in Myanmar Louis Walinsky once wrote in his own account of economic reform in the 1950s, ‘on this score . . . the reader is entitled to approach the work with some doubt.’

The reader will also see that this book is concerned with Myanmar’s economic reform journey, and not that of its political trajectory more broadly. Of course, economics and politics can never really be separated, so politics shares the stage throughout. But economic reform, especially in its financial and institutional aspects, is very much my focus. This concentration reflects whatever expertise I brought, the principal areas in which I worked, as well as my conviction that Myanmar’s financial dysfunctions were central to its broader miasma. In doing so, I trust I’m not engaging in excessive economic determinism, but simply recognising a truth with long legs in experience: a healthy economy is not a sufficient condition for a healthy society, but it sure is a necessary one.

Beyond some of the major participants, there is an under-representation of Burmese names in this book. This is deliberate, and tragic. This book is the story of countless people in Myanmar who, day by day, toiled to deliver the reforms described, and to create the democracy for which they had sacrificed much. Alas, my identifying – my rightful celebration – of such inspiring people will do them no favour. Indeed, it will bring them retribution from the regime that now rules over them, and which has taken Myanmar into a new darkness. Nameless they are for the moment, forgotten they are not.

The opening line of my 2009 book on Myanmar’s monetary and banking history contains a declaration that Burma, as the country was then known, had begun the 20th century as the richest country in Southeast Asia, and entered the 21st as the poorest.⁵ Of course, GDP numbers are notoriously unreliable, not least in Myanmar, but there is little doubt about this trajectory. Throughout the 20th century, Myanmar’s economy, especially as it was lived by the ordinary person, slid relentlessly down the league tables of national wellbeing.

The cause of this descent was clear to all but the most obdurate of military-regime apologists. It was politics pure and simple. But not just politics of the pedestrian, prosaic variety, the sort that disappoints daily. No, this was politics at the ragged edge; politics of the sort practised only by regimes cursed to be without checks and balances. Politics, shorn of euphemism and jargon, of the mad and bad.

For followers of Myanmar, the story of the country’s economic dystopia is a familiar one, but it is a tale that should not be forgotten, not least to provide context to the events covered in this book: independence from the British Empire in 1948, a mildly socialist parliamentary democracy for a decade or so, some missteps, and a familiar misplaced faith in economic planning. Yet in this era, economic foundations were laid in Myanmar that would have seen it adequately placed to benefit when Southeast Asia’s other economies started to roar.

Alas, Myanmar did not become like its neighbours. In 1962, a military coup dragged the country into some of the worst excesses of state control seen anywhere. Under the regime’s slogan of the ‘Burma road to socialism’, enterprises large and small were nationalised and farmers’ output expropriated while the state became little more than a vehicle for patronage, corruption, and erratic policymaking on an epic scale. To outsiders, this was only occasionally noticed, as when, in 1970, orders were issued that Myanmar’s right-hand drive cars henceforth be driven on the right-hand side of the road, with all the attendant mayhem and traffic-related deaths. Then there were currency note demonetisations, notably in 1987, which temporarily substituted the decimal system for one based on the number nine, regarded as auspicious for the country’s then dictator, General Ne Win. All darkly comic in its way, unless one had to live under it.

Matters came to a head in 1988, when Myanmar was convulsed by demonstrations against the ruling military by a people who had had enough. As was characteristic, then and later, the regime responded with deadly force. Thousands were killed, many more imprisoned, while a substantial cohort of Myanmar’s youth – among them the country’s best and brightest – fled abroad. In 1990, in a bizarre episode of hubris, Myanmar’s rulers conceded to present themselves to an election. They lost in a landslide to the newly formed National League for Democracy (NLD) and its charismatic leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The military then stopped pretending. The results of the election were annulled. New oppression followed. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and most of her fellow NLD members were arrested and incarcerated. Daw Suu, as I always called her, would be imprisoned for most of the following two decades, during which time she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1991).

Myanmar stagnated anew. Twenty years passed before a cohort of military leaders emerged who, though neither liberal nor democratic, began to understand the depths to which Myanmar’s economy had sunk. Some recognised that reforms were needed, others understood that the appearance of change was at least necessary. In 2008, a new constitution was drawn up, from which would come the ‘semi-military’ government of President Thein Sein. The military would continue to hold all critical powers: complete discretion over their own budget and total control over the Ministry of Home Affairs, the security services, the police, and border affairs. The Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces also held a variety of reserve powers. He (and it could not be imagined it would not be a ‘he’) could intervene in the governing of the country at any time, declare a state of emergency, and take charge. There were some supposed safeguards against misuse of these powers, but they were not perceived to matter and, when it came to the test, they did not.

Nevertheless, from 2010 a program of economic reform that accompanied these political moves seemed to flourish. For a while. Much of this was superficial, the appearance of reform, often for international consumption. It was what people in Myanmar call ‘Shwe Ye Same’. Form substituted for function; ‘looks like’ for ‘does’.

Yet one must not be too churlish about this period. Superficial or not, the depths to which Myanmar had sunk meant that for a while even mild changes had an impact. From 2010, economic growth in Myanmar rose steeply off its low base, before just about reaching the point where broader change to the country’s political economy would be necessary to drive further growth. Technocratic change had reached its limit. Elections were scheduled for 2015, with the quasi-military government expecting to win. Enough change, or so they thought, to appease the people and an international community that was not demanding much.

Unfortunately for Thein Sein and his cohort, the people of Myanmar wanted more. Once again, the military and its proxies lost the elections in a landslide. Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD won nearly 80 per cent of the contested parliamentary seats. The 2008 Constitution, however, dictated that Suu Kyi could not be president. Her husband had been a British citizen, as were her two sons. According to Article 59(f), the president must be someone who ‘shall he himself [sic], one of the parents, the spouse, one of the legitimate children or their spouses not owe allegiance to a foreign power, not be subject of a foreign power or citizen of a foreign country’. No matter. Her brilliant legal adviser, U Ko Ni, who former officers of Myanmar’s military would assassinate in January 2017, found a loophole in the constitution, a legal space in which to create a role ‘above’ the president. As ‘State Counsellor’, Suu Kyi assumed the effective leadership of Myanmar’s NLD government when it was sworn in, in March 2016.

The Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan

The NLD had not spent decades in the wilderness, with many of its members in prison, to settle for an economic program that dealt with mere superficialities when it finally got into office. Accordingly, but after something of a slow start as it grappled with the change-resistant civil service, it began to roll out reforms of increasing boldness. These were given coherence early in 2018 when they were published

Podcast

To hear from Lowy Institute experts Sean Turnell and Lydia Khalil on hostage diplomacy, listen to our Lowy Institute Conversations podcast here.

Event (Sydney)

On Tuesday 3 September 2024, Sean Turnell spoke in conversation with Lowy Institute Research Director Hervé Lemahieu about his new book, Best Laid Plans.

Watch the event recording here.

Event (Canberra)

On Monday 14 October 2024, Sean Turnell was joined by the Minister for Foreign Affairs Senator Penny Wong and Lowy Institute International Security Program Director Sam Roggeveen to launch Best Laid Plans, at the National Press Club in Canberra.

Watch the event recording here.