Gen. Min Aung Hlaing was appointed as the president of Myanmar in early April, formalizing a de facto grip on power that he has held for more than five years. This week, he walks a red carpet in Beijing, the capstone in a whirlwind of diplomatic engagements that have legitimized his installation in the top civilian office following an election that was far from free or fair held over December and January.
For many ordinary citizens, members of the diaspora, and those in the resistance, the election changes nothing; the war is not over. This claimed transition from military to civilian rule is nonetheless instructive as an early example of the cost of Western disengagement in fragile institutions. The election was sponsored by China and offers another data point to illustrate Beijing’s mode of operating in fragile or failed states where traditional Western partners have withdrawn their involvement.
Post-conflict elections in other countries, including Nepal, Cambodia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have attracted Chinese financial support. What does Beijing’s emerging election-funding playbook mean for such states left with precious few options? As Myanmar’s example shows, Chinese intervention is designed to achieve order and regime stability to protect its own borders and investments, with little regard for an inclusive or legitimate peace.
Before the 2021 coup, the international community enthusiastically invested in Myanmar’s fledgling democracy. From 2015 until 2021, official development assistance averaged $2.4 billion annually. Development partners such as Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom prioritized aid to support the public sector, civil society, and healthcare systems. In the seven years preceding the coup, the United States alone spent $500 million on human rights, elections, democratic participation, and civil society. International donor communities were betting on a ground-up approach: that the power of civic engagement, justice reform, and political dialogue would set Myanmar on a path to development and prosperity.
But since the civilian government was overthrown in February 2021, most donors have refused to legitimize or finance the regime. Consequently, aid channeled through the public sector dropped by two-thirds in just two years. After 2021, the international community has largely confined its foreign aid to humanitarian assistance, and by 2024 (the latest year of available data), total aid to Myanmar had collapsed by more than half, down to $1 billion. Coupled with an international sanctions framework, this has starved the junta of legitimate revenue as it oversees a functionally failed formal economy.
It’s little surprise, then, that the regime has sought finance from less traditional sources.
China’s history as a development partner to Myanmar is far from steady. In 2015, Beijing was easily Myanmar’s top provider of aid and development finance, spending close to $1 billion including on debt-financed infrastructure projects such as a port and a gas pipeline. After years of loan repayment troubles and difficulty delivering on infrastructure promises, by 2023, China’s contribution had plummeted by to just $3 million, a 97.7 percent decline in eight years.
But in late 2023, Beijing was drawn into a centripetal civil war, spurred by the risks posed to it by the proliferation of scam centers in Myanmar’s north. Tens of thousands of Chinese nationals were trafficked into slavery in the compounds as Beijing’s frustration built with the military’s inability to project law enforcement power into rebel-held territory.
An uprising that became known as Operation 1027 saw China backing a constellation of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups in their mission to dismantle the organized crime groups operating in the lawless borderlands. With China’s tacit approval, the resistance groups, with some 15,000 troops, made territorial gains, but fell short of converting the momentum into a real challenge to the military regime in Naypyidaw.
The year 2024 heralded a new phase for China’s activities in Myanmar. A business opportunity presented itself: legitimacy for purchase—or hire. Myanmar is resource-rich, ranking as the world’s third-largest producer of rare earths and holding some 600 billion cubic meters of natural gas reserves. Beijing had already begun construction on the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, a multibillion-dollar megaproject that includes the aforementioned crude oil pipeline and a deep-sea port. It occupies a strategic locality on China’s periphery, presenting an overland route to the Indian Ocean that could prove critical in military planning scenarios for conflict in Asia.
China has bankrolled elections in fragile states before. In Sudan in 2010, China donated $3 million for the country’s first election after two decades of civil war. In 2011, an election marred by violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was supported by $1.5 million from Beijing, which subsequently funded the construction of a new parliament building at the cost of $58 million. At least $11 million was spent on Cambodia’s controversial 2018 election, after U.S. and EU partners withdrew support in reaction to crackdowns on opposition.
And in March 2026, Nepal’s election—following deadly protests that saw the downfall of the former government—benefited from a $4 million grant from the Chinese Embassy in Kathmandu. These are individually modest interventions that together form a pattern of financing foreign elections, a curious habit for a one-party state.
There are credible accusations that China has engaged in somewhat clumsy election interference in some of the world’s wealthiest democracies, including Canada, Australia and the United States. The approach used so far in developing Asian and African nations, however, is tailored to fragile and failing states—places where Beijing can orchestrate a blunt solution to a wicked problem for not very much money.
To that end, Beijing put a price on democracy in Myanmar with the 2024 announcement of a $140 million funding package. The aid facilitated a national census, the first in a decade, ostensibly to update the electoral roll but more likely masking an extensive surveillance effort to track down dissidents. And it financed a federal election, carried out over December 2025 into January 2026, with no real opposition and no genuine engagement with the polity. By some counts, more than half of Myanmar’s eligible voters were either excluded from voting or boycotted the election. Voting occurred only in about 260 of 330 townships.
At the same time that China is making small but strategic investments in elections worldwide, the vacuum left by the United States in bolstering democratic processes is profound. Democratic systems, once displaced, are painfully difficult to revive. China is not buying peace but security, order, and leverage to keep its investments and borders safe.
As analysts have observed for years, Beijing’s preference is for a level of stable instability in Myanmar, with an administration with enough capacity to quell uprisings and organized crime—but not so much that it could question China’s authority or imperil investments, which have surged in recent times. Reports from as recently as late 2025 (immediately prior to the election) indicating that China was cooperating with northern Myanmar’s ethnic militias to access rare earths underscore the profound fragility of Beijing-Naypyidaw relations.
As assistance from Western partners dries up, Russia, India, and some Persian Gulf countries have been modestly active in providing relief, but none present a viable alternative for Naypyidaw to hedge against China. Bangladesh and Thailand bear most of the burden of the inevitable spillover effects of conflict, with inadequate international support. Japan spent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Myanmar in 2024, but most was directed to transport and energy projects carried out by Japanese firms. Just 10 percent of its aid was spent on humanitarian relief.
Further afield, few democratic states harbor illusions about the legitimacy of Myanmar’s election. But it may prove a sound investment with high returns anyway. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been sorely tested in attempting to establish a coherent position on the conflict, and there are already signs of a thaw in plain contravention of the ill-fated five-point consensus (the regional grouping’s initial road map for post-coup Myanmar). The junta is capitalizing on this softening, releasing limited numbers of political prisoners and publishing an unverified photo of former elected leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
The future of Myanmar’s fractured state is far from clear. The conflict is protracted and multilayered, and any durable political settlement will need to contend with a pluralist distribution of legitimacy and the generational justice implications of conflict and earlier genocide allegations.
What can be concluded with clarity, though, is that a sham election, funded by an external autocracy, is not a foundation for peace. And beyond shoring up the grip of the regime on internal security and keeping the scam center industry at bay, there is little incentive for Beijing to intervene further.
After deep budget cuts from the United States and European countries, there is ample room for China’s financing of governance, elections, and pseudo-democracy activities worldwide. The institutions and mechanisms that China can use are now established. Momentum is building in China’s leadership at the United Nations, through increased financial contributions as well as pursuit of political initiatives. The China International Development Cooperation Agency is active in aid projects throughout the developing world, and Beijing claims to have been instrumental in mediating recent peace talks between Thailand and Cambodia as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan.
With the launches of the Global Governance Initiative and Global Development Initiative in 2025 and 2021 respectively, Chinese President Xi Jinping has begun to articulate his vision for a new world order, one deliberately juxtaposed to the U.S.-led Bretton Woods system that was so often criticized for its brash insistence on democracy and human rights.
Interventions can take place outside the formal election cycle, too, with just as much impact on fragile parliaments. In the Solomon Islands, a small island developing state with a recent history of conflict, Chinese cash—claimed to be development assistance—was instead used to reward politicians for their support of the then-prime minister in a no-confidence vote in 2021. The Solomon Islands will next go to a general election in 2028.
More generally, there is no shortage of fragile and post-conflict states facing Western disengagement that might be tempted by electoral support that chases form over function.
Democracy is faltering worldwide, and the era of U.S. democracy export is clearly over. What is taking its place in conflict-affected situations is the performance of shadow democracy that we have seen in Myanmar: one authoritarian actor manufacturing legitimacy for another, through the invocation of a ritual that neither party believes in.
While the spirit of partnership in the West wanes, collaboration between authoritarian regimes blossoms.
