Revolution Song: Myanmar’s unending war

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Ore Ogunbiyi. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In 2 weeks, people in parts of Britain are going to the polls. But there are some new rules, and officials say that this is the biggest change to electoral laws in a generation. Are voters really prepared? And thanks to a rapidly growing franchise, there's been a real boom in the sales of Asia's favorite drink. And I hate to break it to you, but it's not coffee. First up, though—

These men in Myanmar, they sing about a revolution.

We're not naming our correspondent for her safety.

Many of them are students from universities all around the country and mainly from the cities. Myanmar had not a single conflict-free year since independence in 1948. And it's the home of the world's oldest insurgencies and some of the newest. Like this group, the PDF, the People's Defense Force. And it's currently in the midst of a civil war. With many factions and a lot of bloodshed. They are in the very inhospitable mountains at the border with Thailand, and I traveled very deep into the area. It's never been fully controlled by Myanmar's government, and it allows these men to fight against what they see as an illegitimate military coup. Which happened in 2021. It's very difficult to get into Myanmar as a journalist at the moment. The government won't let you in, so you have to go in another way. I was lucky that I had guide and protector, Tuzo, the captain of the Albino Tigers, one of the several people's defense forces, which are armed fighters, very active in that area. [SPEAKING BURMESE] Well, I really wanted to see what was happening there with my own eyes. The Burmese journalists, they do a real good job. But the problem is, is that they are not seen as impartial by some of the international publications. And I thought if I can go myself and just report on what I see, I could actually see how people live. When that happened, so this was the biggest engagement happening in the area. So very close. Yeah, very close. Like military troops even reached here. So we have to, me and my soldiers, like me and my company have to, you know, follow We actually based on the front line, could see in the distance the Asian Highway, which is one of the disputed areas for a long time. And we were in a camp under mango trees just a couple of miles from that front line. [SPEAKING CHINESE] So he showed me a number of active engagements. His company had had with the military. [SPEAKING ARABIC] And Tuzol became my host and protector for these days I was in the country. He kept a close eye on me and did not leave me one moment out of his eyesight over the next days that I was there. They don't have a safe base. The fighting in this area has actually intensified like it does in all the dry seasons. It's easier for the air force to bombard when there are clear skies, and recent airstrikes carried out by these fighter jets had left very clear scars on the landscape. You could see the mature trees just snapped in half like matchsticks, and a lot of holes in the earth were pockmarked with small craters. And the young soldiers seemed to be very used to it. They even were using an old bombshell to put their vegetables in. They surprisingly went very calmly about their daily business, like chopping onions for dinner and cleaning and oiling their guns. And of course, these guys had never held a gun in their lives. It's just all very new for them. Some swung in their hammocks reading books or even watching movies on their phones. But at the same time, there was a real feeling of tension I could feel in the air. It was after our dinner that Tuzo fetched his guitar and he started to play "Kabá Ma Keyubú." It's "The End of the World." It's a very famous song. It's a revolutionary song set on the tune of "Dust in the Wind" and became the anthem of an uprising in 1988 that shook the country but was bloodily repressed by the government. And it had been a song from their grandparents and parents and uncles and aunts, and they had heard this their whole life, and they are using it again. Although their previous revolutions had failed. It was forbidden during the decades of military dictatorship. And they are singing, "Do not waver, just like our fallen heroes who fought for democracy. Let us stand strong in the revolution and resist." The blood in the streets has not dried. For Burma's Gen Z, the Gandhi-inspired nonviolent resistance preached by Aung San Suu Kyi, the incarcerated former leader of Myanmar, is not an option anymore. They produce a lot of raw, angry, vengeful rap music in contrast to this song. Is a call for war. [MUSIC] The coup has turned their lives upside down. It abruptly ended a decade of democratic transition and relative freedom. Because the universities, they were opened again after many, many years of closure in previous juntas. And there had been hope for the future. And the soldiers I spoke with were very angry. The young people had no other option than to rise up and protest after the coup. [APPLAUSE] PDFs sprang up all around the country to protect the protesters, and tens of thousands of young men and women joined them. Well, I stayed in the camp. There were a few moments that it was feared that mortars would hit. And one evening we heard some strange sound in the distance, and Tuzo, the commander, he stood up and said, 'Shh.' But then it turned out to be just a thunderstorm. You can hear the sound of that. And you can hear— Captain Tussaud explained via my translator that you hear the boom sound when it launches. [NOISE] And then a whiz for a mortar in the air and that you have about 30 seconds to find a bomb shelter. And my arrival coincided with a thunderstorm, which he said was a good omen. As it was much less likely they sent mortars or bombard us from the air. The situation in Myanmar is such that the junta does not have control over the whole country. It actually has about 19% of the country. A large part of the country is under ethnic group control. The resistance army also has a large part. So together with the ethnic allies, they have about 50%. And in those areas, they use homemade bombs to attack convoys on the road. And they even have some technicians who are making drones and bombard convoys from the air. So it's very difficult for the military to move overland into these resistance areas. So they have bought new fighter jets from China and Russia donated some helicopters. This year, it's really obviously increased the air bombardments in those areas. [NOISE] And in April, 130 people, most civilians, including 30 children, were killed in an attack in a village in Saigaon in the northwest of Myanmar. And the junta just said, well, these are not civilians. These are all terrorists. To break the resistance, the junta leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, is starving the community of food and medicine and blocking communications and funds and has basically told his troops to kill, torture, behead, rape, burn, dismember, disembowel in the most barbaric manner. I was curious what drove these young men to place themselves in so much danger on the front lines. And they are not military men. They were not trained ever. And so I spoke to many of the young soldiers in the camps, men as well as women. And one of them A lieutenant called Moustache, it's a nickname given by his comrades. He trained as a barista and worked in a trendy coffee shop and dreamed of a nice home and earning enough money to raise a family. And of course, the coup shattered that dream. And he told me, I have no choice but to fight. And another soldier called Coup agreed. He said he was fighting not for himself. He was fighting for the next generation. In the beginning, they had a strong hope that the world would see what was happening there, that they would recognize the shadow government they had set up. And they were so disappointed that nobody really, apart from the European Union, parliament had given them any, any attention or spoke seriously with their shadow government. When I left them, I wasn't sure whether I would ever see them again. They were pulled out of that area on the day that I was leaving. They heard from their commanders they had to pack up and move to a new area. The bigger plan dream of their commanders is to have a huge assault one day, all at the same time, everywhere in the country. Most of them also know that it's a high, high risk that they won't survive this war. But then they said to me, well, if we die, our death will be for the greater good. And so it was quite difficult to say goodbye.

For years, voting in Britain has been a rather relaxed affair.

Strict rules to prevent anyone from voting twice, or from voting where he's not entitled to.

As each voter comes in, His name is checked on the register of people entitled to vote in the district.

Those strict rules for voting, which have been in place for decades, involved voters stating their name and then just getting on with it. But that gentle approach is no longer. Last year, the British government introduced new voter identification rules that are actually strict. Voters will need documents such as passports, driving licenses, and travel passes when they turn out for local elections in England on May 4th. But the people running the polls worry that the electorate is not quite ready for the changes. So why now?

So last year when the government passed this bill, the thing that they talked about the most was election fraud.

Sam Westron is a senior producer on The Intelligence.

The bill is rooted in a particularly bad example of election fraud. It was in 2014 in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. That election was voided on the grounds of a number of electoral offenses. The judge that was presiding in that case said that it ticked pretty much every single box of electoral offense. There was a big report into that. That report turned into some recommendations, and those recommendations eventually became this bill, which was passed last year. So the government say, and they've argued, that this bill is about election security, making sure that the vulnerabilities in that kind of softly, softly approach of just turning up get tightened up. But that isn't necessarily the entire picture.

So what is the whole picture then?

The first thing to point out with these voter ID rules is that they only tighten up a very small part of the entire spread of electoral offences that can happen when voting takes place. Impersonating someone at a polling station, that type of offence is incredibly rare. In the 8 years up to 2021, there were only 3 convictions for that offence. And even in that 2014 case, the case in Tower Hamlets, that was a much more complicated affair. It involved postal votes, it involved coercion within the borough. It wasn't just a case of people turning up to vote pretending to be other people. So it doesn't necessarily solve electoral fraud. In and of itself. And that's where critics say that, you know what, this is actually just about making it less appealing for certain groups to vote.

Okay, so the voting process is going to go from something much more relaxed to something a lot more rigid. Could these new, more rigid rules affect who actually shows up to vote?

I think we probably will see some voters put off by this. It is a mixed bag. Northern Ireland, for example, they've had voter ID rules for about 20 years, but there it's had a pretty much overwhelmingly positive impact on confidence in elections. That's also a byproduct of the fact that before voter ID, there was not that much confidence in elections. But then you have places like the US where states have latitude to set their own rules. Voter ID rules there are super contentious. They're very often seen as a means to stifle certain groups and their access to the vote. But In terms of studies and definitively being able to show causal links between something like a voter ID law and a certain group being suppressed from the vote, that's very difficult to do. One example, a new study in the States this year showed that in fact, when a group felt like they might have been targeted by a voter ID law, for example, they were actually more likely to turn out to vote rather than not vote.

And who are the groups we're talking about here? Who tends to feel most targeted by these new voter ID rules?

So in America, with the examples that we just talked about, those are mostly in reference to the experience of Black Americans. In the UK, there's a whole range of groups that are particularly vulnerable to these changes. If you look at something like having a driving license, one of those key pieces of ID that you would need to vote, a report that was produced when the changes were first put forward found that over 75% of white British people hold a full driving licence. And when you compare that to the Asian population in the UK, only 38%, or the Black population in the UK, less than half, 48%. Younger voters also have fewer ID options from the new list that's available. And then, for example, the Electoral Commission, the independent body that looks after elections in the UK, they've flagged a number of people in the disabled community, people with visual impairments, people with learning disabilities, they all face multiple barriers to engagement. And the multiple barriers to engagement is an important part here because it ties into other barriers that people have when it comes to democratic participation. You know, voter registration for Black and Asian people is significantly lower than the rest of the population. So all of these things will play into one another.

But the UK has elections coming up just around the corner on the 4th of May. Do you think these officials are prepared?

Yes and no. There's a big effort to get prepared for those elections. The big challenge has been timing. Details of the new requirements, they weren't finalised until December 2022. It's left them not that much time to get the message out, prepare people, prepare staff. I've spoken to poll workers who say that they're quite concerned that if you get an irate electorate who's turned up who expects to be able to vote as usual and they're not allowed to do so, the responsibility falls on them to turn them away, and that's quite a daunting challenge.

And what about voters? Do they know what they need for election day?

The rules aren't necessarily straightforward. For example, when it comes to older persons' travel passes, if you're in London or if you're in Wales or if you're in Northern Ireland, you can use an over-60 travel pass. But for the rest of the country, you have to use your older persons' travel pass, which you can get at the state retirement age. However, there are local authorities dotted around England where you can get an older persons' bus pass when you're 60, as well as another one. So you have a situation where, you know, you've got a group of perhaps elderly voters with two bus passers who think, you know what, I've got my bus pass, I'm going to turn up to vote, and they won't be able to use it. I spoke about this with Craig Westwood. He's the Director of Communications for the Electoral Commission, and he's looking after the messaging around the election. And we talked about the challenges of getting that message out. Just making sure that all of the people are able to be aware of this. That's a massive hill to climb, trying to raise awareness amongst the whole electorate. Of what for some people is quite a complex change. If people are needing to apply for the free voter ID, there's quite a complex message to communicate there. But we're making really strong inroads into that. So in that clip, he's talking about the free voter ID that people can get if they don't already have one. He's definitely right that more people are applying for them in the weeks leading up to the vote. At the moment, only about 70,000 people have applied. But to put that in context, there are some estimates which suggest that as many as 2 million eligible voters don't have an acceptable form of ID. So that's the size of the gap that they're trying to make up.

Wow. So what could all this mean on Election Day?

I think what it could mean is that on Election Day, there's a risk that these new rules do the opposite of what they're intended to do. If people turn on the news and see droves of people getting turned away from the polling station because they didn't have ID, that's not going to help convince people that elections have become safer. And that question of confidence, that's something that I spoke about with Craig Westwood. Confidence is always going to be central to our role and is a key indicator around elections. It's incredibly hard to build it up and it's very easy for it to be lost. Ultimately, though, I think the big test will be coming next year. It's expected there'll be a general election. You'll have millions more voters and they'll come from a much more diverse pool as well. So, for example, this election, London isn't voting. It's the most populous, diverse part of the UK. It's got some of the highest levels of deprivation as well. That's not voting. When they do vote next year, these rules could be even more decisive then.

Sam, thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much.

Bubble tea is a Taiwanese drink consisting of milky tea and tapioca balls, and it's very, very popular in Asia.

Su Lin Wong is our Southeast Asia correspondent.

Over the years, people have gotten very creative and come up with all kinds of new versions and things they put in the drink that aren't necessarily tapioca balls. It's considered very trendy. It's associated with youth culture. Often when I'm in Asia, my friends and I will go out and get bubble tea in a way that in America or the UK, you might go out for a drink with friends at the pub. It's a huge part of social life in many parts of Asia. In China, the market for these flavored teas was actually twice that of coffee in 2021. So that just shows how popular it is. And there's one particular brand that's really taking full advantage of the drink's popularity.

And which brand is this?

Mi Shui is a Chinese firm started in 1997, and its owner actually originally started out by just selling shaved ice and drinks at a roadside stall in the central Chinese province of Henan. And it was only a few years ago when videos of its mascot, which is a chubby snowman singing the Mi Xue theme song, went viral on Chinese social media that the firm really took off and the brand became a household name in China. Videos of the theme song have actually now been viewed more than 17 billion times on Douyin, which is TikTok's sister app in China. The song's been translated into 20 languages. Here it is in Vietnamese. And in English. Now, Misha has nearly 22,000 franchise stores worldwide, and it's replaced shaved ice with bubble tea and ice cream. No bubble tea brand in the world has spread faster than Misha, and it's now actually the 5th largest fast food chain in the world by outlet, behind McDonald's, Subway, Starbucks, and KFC.

Wow. So what's driving this unique success?

Misha's magic potion, so to speak, is that its bubble tea and ice cream are very, very cheap relative to other brands. It's just ¥7 or about $1 for a milk tea in China. It tastes incredibly sweet, a bit too sweet for my liking, but I think that's why it's especially popular among kids and young people. And unlike fancier bubble tea brands, Michelin markets itself as cheap and cheerful rather than trendy. It's expanded to Southeast Asia since growth has slowed in China, and Michelin opened its first store in Vietnam in 2018. It's grown really, really rapidly since then, such that by March it had around 1,500 stores in Indonesia, and the firm wants to double its presence there by the end of this year.

And have you been to any of the shops? What are they like in Indonesia, for example?

Michelin is everywhere you go in Indonesia. It's in fancy malls, it's along dusty side streets, it's in shophouses. And a lot of the stores are stocked with board games, magazines, picture books, soft toys. They're very, very popular haunts on weekends for parents to take their children to for ice cream. And during the week, a lot of students and office workers looking for an affordable, comfortable place to study or work will go to a Michelin franchise. And the brand has also really adapted to local local markets. So just in February, Misha was declared officially halal, which is very significant in a country that has 230 million Muslims.

And Sulin, you said it's just $1 per drink. That sounds rather cheap to me.

Well, it sells a lot of drinks and ice cream, and almost all Misha branches are franchises. But what's really important to know about this company is that in a way it's a supply chain company, and almost all of the firm's $1.5 billion revenue in 2021 came from selling ingredients like packaging and equipment to franchise holders. So the brand has huge factories and extensive supply chains which let it keep down the store price of ice creams and teas. And I was talking to Indonesia's franchise manager and he was saying, you know, now that they've really established a footprint in Indonesia, they're going to try to localize a lot of the factories and a lot of the production inside the country rather than being so reliant reliant on factories from China sending them ingredients and equipment.

So what's next for Michouet? Has the brand got plans for other markets outside of Indonesia?

So right now it's very focused on growth in countries with rapidly growing economies and many young people, like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. But the company has also opened stores in other places like Australia, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, and it's registered its trade trademark in markets from Europe and America to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It's also announced plans for an IPO on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. So you might be hearing Mi Shui's theme song in your city very soon. You love me, Mi Shui, ice cream and tea.

Su Lin, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks so much, Auree.

I love you.

You love me.

I love you, you love me, Misha Ice Cream and tea. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show by dropping us a line at podcasts@economist.com. And if you're not a subscriber to The Economist, you're really missing out. Get a free 30-day digital subscription by going to economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.