Dissidents face great border wall of China
China has begun to build a hi-tech wall topped with barbed wire and surveillance cameras on its border with Myanmar.
China has begun to build a hi-tech wall topped with barbed wire and surveillance cameras on its border with Myanmar in a suspected effort to stop dissidents from leaving the country.
Video of the new metal barrier on the Chinese bank of a river was posted by a villager in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan and showed Myanmarese homes a short distance away dwarfed by the fence.
Two recent pictures from the Burmese side showed barricades of barbed wire along the border. Burmese officials in Kokang claimed that the project was codenamed the “Southern Great Wall”.
They said it would eventually stretch the 2000km length of the Myanmar-China border and was aimed at preventing Chinese from escaping.
There has been no official announcement of the project in China’s state media but in September a report in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, said that about 9.5km of “barricading facilities” had been built in the town of Wanding, in Yunnan, including a 5km river “corridor” that “effectively stops illegal exit and entry at this border section”. The newspaper claimed that it was built to help protect China from inadvertently importing the coronavirus.
Myanmarese officials claim the project’s aim is to fence the entire border by 2022 but a police official in Wanding told the People’s Daily that this would be impossible owing to the topography, though he suggested that patrols would be stepped up instead. Currently there are several porous border areas between the two countries with no natural barriers, and numerous small paths connect their territories. “If we cannot do it with a wall or technology, we would increase manpower,” the police official said.
The People’s Daily article claimed that the border wall was equipped with surveillance systems and speakers capable of warning anyone not meant to be there to go away.
“We’ve built high barricades on the China side, complete with barbed wire and surveillance cameras,” it said. “Once you are near the barricade, a sound-and-light radar alarm will immediately send a voice warning, ‘This is a police area, please leave immediately.’” The article added that officers were patrolling the area with guard dogs.
Si Ling, an expert on Chinese-Myanmarese relations, told Radio Free Asia, a US-backed broadcaster, that the pandemic was an unlikely reason to build the wall. “It was not a fast decision to build a tall wall on the border as it had very serious planning,” Mr Si said. “In the past, it was very easy for anyone to cross the border. One purpose for the government to build the wall is to prevent the Chinese people from fleeing.”
Aside from migrant workers and gangsters, Chinese dissidents barred from leaving the country have taken advantage of China’s unmarked borders to escape to Myanmar or Vietnam before travelling on to the US or Europe.
In 2015 the teenage son of a detained Chinese lawyer unsuccessfully tried to flee via Myanmar. The teenager, whose passport had been seized by the authorities, crossed the border but was then taken away by uniformed men on the Myanmar side.
The Times
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