In the magazine this week, I write about “The Burmese Spring” (available to subscribers), the startling and fragile turn toward a more open society in the country also known as Myanmar, which had proven to have one of the world’s most durable dictatorships. In the months since I began visiting Burma, going back and forth from Beijing, it has lurched between good news and bad, alternately mirroring and defying what we’ve come to expect about the way that authoritarianism evolves. (At the moment, the country is absorbed by the question of how to defuse tensions between between a Muslim ethnic group, the Rohingya, and local Buddhists.)
The story of why Burma began to change turns out to be as much about China and the United States as it is about the strange chemistry of autocracy—and I’ll be blogging about it this week. First, some suggested reading from some who know it well:
“Advancing Myanmar’s Transition: A Way Forward for U.S. Policy,” by Ambassador Priscilla Clapp, formerly the Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Burma, and Suzanne DiMaggio, a Burma expert at the Asia Society, two of the people who sensed change was coming.
“Living Silence in Burma,” by Christine Fink, is a ground-level view of ordinary lives under the regime.
“Burmese Days: A Novel,” by George Orwell. There is no better travel companion. The writer who goes by the name Emma Larkin took him on the road for “Finding George Orwell in Burma.”
“The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi,” by Peter Popham, is a rich new biography of Burma’s most famous dissident.
“Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know,” by David Steinberg, presides over the reference shelf.
“The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma” and “Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia,” two must-haves by the author and historian Thant Myint-U, an adviser to Burma’s President, Thein Sein.
Read Evan Osnos on the growth of democracy in Burma.
Photograph by Pietro Masturzo.