In dealing with racial and ethnic relations these interactions can take on a variety of dynamics. What all these relationships have in common is that they involve a dominate group asserting authority over one or more subordinate groups. These subordinate groups themselves react differently to their situation. These actions range from assimilating, passively resisting, and even violently resisting. While the United States and other industrialized nations do have ethnic issues, these problems do not normally include prolonged ethnic violence. Unfortunately, in much of the developing world ethnic tensions have evolved into warfare. One such example currently happening is in the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar. Aside from simply being a conflict between two antagonistic ethnic groups the conflict ensuing in Myanmar has garnered the attention of major global powers such as the United States and China, for political, social, and economic reasons.

Formerly referred to as Burma, Myanmar is home to a major ethnic group known as the Kachin. This group posses its own military, political leadership, and sub territory. In many ways the Kachin can be seen as secessionist minority given the greater political independence and the fact that the portion of the country they occupy is regarded separately from Myanmar. Ethnic tensions between the Burmese government and the Kachin disintegrated back in June of 2011 after a nearly seventeen year ceasefire was brought to end. One possible reason for this, according to some within the Kachin military leadership, is that the Burmese government wishes to have greater influence over the Kachin-occupied territory which has in recent years become an important resource-rich region.

Here is where the situation becomes complicated, and becomes an issue of interest for not only the people of Myanmar. The northern portion of the nation, where the Kachin mostly live, is rich in jade, gold, and timber, all valuable resources to the Chinese. The area also has rivers which serve as sites for major Chinese-backed hydroelectric power projects. Here is just one example of how racial and ethnic issues is directly influenced by real world issues, namely in the case of Myanmar, access to valuable resources. Normally, it is the unequal access to these valuables that allows for the majority group within any given society to continue to assert its dominance over other subordinate groups. However, in this particular example it is the minority group that has access to these resources, and in response the other group attempts to forcibly take it.

As for China and even United States, there is a desire to see that this ethnic conflict cease, though each nation has a preferred outcome they liked to see reached. The United States is namely interested in ending the accused abuses that Kachin civilians are suffering at the hands of the Burmese military, while China is mainly interested in bringing stability to back to the profitable region. The Chinese would also prefer dealing with the Burmese military, and would therefore prefer for the region to fall under their control. Here we see how economic and political issues have fueled ethnic tensions leading to an all out war, which has claimed responsibility for the death of at least 140 Kachin soldiers and the displacement of at least five thousand civilians on the Chinese border, and over ten thousand civilians live in camps under the control of the Burmese government.

This is merely one example of how racial and ethnic issues are interwoven and how seemingly simple things such as trees, rivers, and jade can cause such terrible conflict. This story has helped me in understanding how simple phrases like secessionist minority, and ethnic stratification, which I once viewed as merely vocabulary terms, are real problems that have dramatic consequences.

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