In this webinar, Ms Courtney T. Wittekind explored the high-stakes decision-making in Yangon, Myanmar, where an ambitious proposal to transform three agricultural townships into a sprawling “new city” has made planning for the future a pressing task.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME WEBINAR
Thursday, 9 September 2021 – In this webinar, Ms Courtney Wittekind (former Wang Gungwu Visiting Fellow, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute) spoke about high-stakes decision-making in Yangon, Myanmar, where an ambitious proposal to transform three agricultural townships into a sprawling ‘new city’ has made planning for the future a pressing task. Amid rising land prices, unchecked speculation, project suspensions, COVID-19 and now a military coup, area residents have to navigate new forms of temporal marginalization produced when the ‘change’ they were promised goes unrealized. This session was moderated by Dr Su-Ann Oh (Visiting Fellow, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute).
Firstly, Ms Wittekind drew attention to the adverse viral reaction on social media to a newspaper article on infrastructural development in Seikkyi Kanaungto Township and Dala Township (Yangon’s southwest). She suggested that the article was an attempt by the military to present itself as a legitimate and functioning government. While businessmen and others with investments in the area had positive reactions to the article, many residents were irked that the projects had barely started before being halted due to the coup.
Ms Wittekind argued that questions raised over this specific bridge in recent months since the coup were reminiscent of questions about the bridge in Myanmar’s recent election cycles. She thus proposed that the persistence of these questions belie an enduring relationship between material infrastructure and political power, even as infrastructures’ uneven realization mean that it sits uncomfortably with its status as an assumed public good.
Next, Ms Wittekind explained about the State Law and Order Restoration Council and State Peace and Development Council or SLORC and SPDC — two military bodies that successively ruled Myanmar from 1988 until 2011 — and their propensity to use state-run newspapers, Ministry of Information reports, and other propaganda to bolster metaphors of “seeing,” drawing attention to the visible, material benefits delivered by their regime. After establishing how politicians used spectacles of infrastructural might as a means of showcasing the military’s achievements, Ms Wittekind returned to the subject of Southwest Yangon and the site of the Seikkyi Kanaungto Bridge under the National League for Democracy (NLD).
Ms Wittekind shared how her informants were frustrated with the lack of progress in the proposed projects in real life despite official government documents and social media posts saying otherwise. Ms Wittekind suggested that the residents’ lack of faith and distrust towards official communications points towards broader skepticism that expanded across the supposed rupture at the end of military rule in Myanmar, vexing the NLD in its first term. While the infrastructural field upon which this skepticism operated is similar to that of the USDP and SLORC/SPDC before it, Ms Wittekind argued that the cause is quite distinct, precisely because of the relationship between political promises of material change and—in this case—the lack of visible infrastructural progress achieved by the NLD despite the party’s slogan of “time to change”.
Thus, Ms Wittekind pointed out that these incidents underscore what happens when the state’s dependence on infrastructure in a tangible, material form—a bridge completed or road built—is turned on its head— contingent instead on a bridge that is never constructed, but merely promised. In the final sections of her presentation, Ms Wittekind proposed that the demand to “look”—but the inability to actually “see”—triggers a speculative form of “watching,” one that emerges because of the State’s continued deferral of its infrastructural promises.
During the question and answer segment, the audience asked about the renaming of the Chaungzon bridge in Mon State; on whether the China Communications Construction Company is still the lead developer for the New Yangon City project; the identity of the transnational investors and their role in speeding up infrastructure processes; and about the administrative level that propaganda is being driven. Over 40 people attended this webinar.