Myanmar: The Authoritarian Laboratory
By Sai, WLC Leadership Council member and Cofounder of the Myanmar Peace Museum
TLDR: Myanmar’s military regime has turned repression into a system: mass detention, sham elections, surveillance infrastructure, and foreign backing now work together as one machinery of control. China’s role is central to that machinery, not only through diplomacy and trade, but through infrastructure, pressure, and the narrowing of solidarity space. WLC should respond accordingly, by naming the system plainly and helping build real consequence against everyone who keeps it alive.The coup came to Myanmar not as a sudden rupture. It was a procedure.
On 1 February 2021, the military seized the state by force. Then it began building a system to make that seizure durable. Not only with guns and airstrikes, but with prisons, files, courts, ministries, surveillance systems, and slow administrative violence. The gun opened the door. The stamp kept it open.
You can count this system in arrests, prison sentences, and graves. But the numbers only tell part of the story. Mass detention in Myanmar does not only remove people. It floods the country with absence. It exhausts families through delay. It turns memory into paperwork, rumor, waiting, and fear. On 1 April 2026, more than 30,000 people have been arrested by the junta since the coup. That is not simply a human rights statistic.
Myanmar is governed through disappearance. Politicians, journalists, doctors, students, civil servants, village leaders, and anyone with a public spine can be taken into a system where process itself becomes punishment. Letters arrive late or censored. Visits shrink to a few minutes. Cases drown in volume. Even when the truth is documented, the cell door stays shut.
My father is one of those people. Dr. Linn Htut, a democratically elected Chief Minister, has been held since the coup, and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his imprisonment arbitrary and called for his immediate release and reparations.
This is how the junta rules. It counts on fatigue. It counts on time. It counts on the world’s inability to sustain pressure at the scale Myanmar requires.
Now we can see that design more clearly.
Through late 2025 and early 2026, the preparations for the sham election were not merely political theater. The junta was fundamentally restructuring the mechanics of its own survival. A sanctions report by Justice For Myanmar and The Sentry argues that the junta dissolved the sanctioned State Administrative Council and replaced it with the State Security and Peace Commission, or SSPC, a body with substantially similar functions, many of the same men, and the same military control. The report warns that the redesign created a loophole unless governments updated sanctions to cover the SSPC directly.
That matters because the sham election was never about transferring power. It was about making military rule easier to recognize, easier to transact with, and easier to excuse. Human Rights Watch warned before the polls that the process would not be free, fair, or inclusive and urged governments to reject it as a fraudulent claim to credibility.
Then the laundering began almost immediately. The sanctions report says that within a day of the SAC to SSPC transition, two U.S. lobbying firms, DCI Group and McKeon Group, entered contracts with junta controlled entities. DCI filed to work for the junta’s Ministry of Information under a package worth three million dollars a year, while McKeon contracted with the junta controlled embassy in Washington to build diplomatic relationships with Congress and the U.S. administration.
This is what the sham election is. A bid for recognition. A sanctions loophole with ceremony around it. A way to turn military rule into something that looks administratively manageable.
Reuters reported on 30 March 2026 that Min Aung Hlaing stepped down as armed forces chief to pursue the presidency after elections widely criticized as illegitimate, while AP described the same transition as a nominal return to elected government engineered to preserve army control.
Same power. New paperwork.
At the same time, the air war continues. Reuters reported in January 2026 that Iran covertly supplied the junta with about 175,000 tons of jet fuel between October 2024 and December 2025, along with urea used in explosives, helping sustain an expanded bombing campaign.
Bombs fall from aircraft. Aircraft require fuel. Fuel requires routes, terminals, insurers, paperwork, and people willing to look away.
The second report shows the other side of the same machine.
In Myanmar, prison is a sprawling digital network that surrounds you long before you ever reach a physical gate.
Justice For Myanmar’s Silk Road of Surveillance report says a leaked dataset shows that Geedge Networks, a Chinese company tied to the export of a commercialized Great Firewall, helped build a national surveillance and censorship architecture for the junta. The report says the system gives the military unprecedented access to the online activities of 33.4 million internet users, can track network traffic at the individual level, and can identify the real time location of mobile subscribers through cell identifiers.
This is the machine that turns a “like” button into a prison sentence.
The report says the system was built through the junta-controlled Ministry of Transport and Communications and its cyber security bodies, and that Geedge’s technology was deployed across 26 data centres belonging to 13 internet service providers and internet gateways, with data aggregated into command centres in Yangon and Naypyidaw. It also says the architecture was designed to inspect, filter, log, and centrally control traffic, including the blocking of VPNs and the hunting of proxy IP addresses.
Do not call this a firewall. It is a cage built for 33.4 million internet users.
And it is not only China in the abstract. It is companies, technicians, contracts, state linked infrastructure, and political cover. The report argues that Geedge may be aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, including torture and killing, because the technology substantially assists a junta already known to commit those crimes. It also names telecom operators that formed part of the system, including MPT, Mytel, ATOM, Ooredoo, Frontiir, Campana, StreamNet, Golden TMH, MBT, MTN, IM Net, Global Technology Group, and China Unicom.
This matters for a darker reason: Myanmar is a proving ground. It is the site where global authoritarianism is refining its machinery. The regime has integrated its violence so completely that the ballot, the prison, the firewall, and the airstrike now operate as the exact same machinery of control.
China’s role is therefore not only military, diplomatic, or economic. It is also infrastructural. It is visible in surveillance systems, border pressure, election theatre, and the tightening of the spaces in which Myanmar’s democratic actors can stand together.
Many outsiders now talk as though Beijing has already decided Myanmar’s political future. The argument sounds strategic, but it collapses too easily into fatalism. It treats Myanmar as a board on which great powers move pieces and the people inside the country as spectators to their own history.
Myanmar matters enormously to China. It is a strategic corridor to the Indian Ocean, a pillar of Belt and Road infrastructure, and a critical source of rare earth minerals. Between 2017 and 2024, Myanmar supplied roughly two thirds of China’s annual rare earth imports by volume, ranging year to year from 60 percent to 87 percent. Across that eight year period, about 74 percent of China’s total rare earth imports came from Myanmar.
China’s role in Myanmar is not abstract to me. It runs through Lashio, my hometown, a city where trade, militarization, and foreign power have long pressed close to ordinary life. During the battle for Lashio, my house was struck by a junta airstrike. Even then, I felt joy, because resistance forces had taken the town, and that shift helped bring about the release of my uncle U Tun Tun Hein, a veteran pro democracy politician, former Deputy Speaker, and former prisoner of conscience. That is the cruel logic Myanmar now lives inside: the house burns, the prison opens, and hope arrives carrying smoke. Lashio is not merely a border city. It is an artery through which China’s influence enters Myanmar, moving not only goods but leverage, pressure, and control. So, when Beijing shapes who holds the roads, which armed actors are rewarded or restrained, and what kind of false stability the world is asked to accept, it is not watching from the sidelines. It is helping structure the cage.
But China’s intervention does not erase Myanmar’s agency. It can prolong the war. It can distort the battlefield. It can constrain resistance actors and fragment the political field. What it cannot do is manufacture legitimacy with the Myanmar public. It cannot dissolve the memory of the coup, the prisons, the bombings, or the votes that were stolen.
China does more than ensure the junta’s survival, as it actively sabotages any unified resistance. By pressuring institutions across borders, backing the junta’s surveillance reach, and endorsing the fiction of stabilizing elections, Beijing narrows the space in which Myanmar’s pro democracy actors can align, speak, and endure together. The censorship of Constellation of Complicity in Bangkok after pressure from Chinese officials and Thai authorities made clear that transnational repression now follows artists and curators across borders.
What this system does to a life
I have been on the run since 1 February 2021. I have lived in exile since 3 October 2021. I was only recently granted refugee status in the UK. Even now, two months into that status, I am still struggling to keep a roof over my head.
This is also part of the story of Myanmar.
There is a cruel absurdity in watching international mechanisms discuss their funding shortages while people like us, who have spent years carrying Myanmar on our backs, are left without any real support system. We are told that evidence matters. We are told that documentation matters. We are told to keep going. So we keep going. We collect objects from bomb sites. We preserve belongings taken from the bodies of people killed by the Myanmar military. We hold grief in our hands and try to turn it into memory, into record, into future accountability.
But the evidence keeps piling up.
And that is the question people inside Myanmar now ask with exhausted clarity: when hundreds are being killed, displaced, arrested, and bombed again and again, how are we supposed to collect every piece of evidence? How are we supposed to preserve every life with dignity when atrocity has become daily routine? Are we simply meant to accept this as the new normal?
I refuse that language. But I understand why people are breaking under it.
I dream of my father being released. For a week straight, I dreamed it night after night. Then I wake up, and he is still in prison. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has already found his detention arbitrary. The document exists. The prison still holds him.
That is where I now live emotionally. Between recognition and nonconsequence.
I did not begin this work only for my father. I began it because he is one among tens of thousands. Because political prisoners in Myanmar have been swallowed into a system too large for most institutions to hold with seriousness. Because families like mine are expected to keep shouting into a void while the machinery of concern continues turning.
People often imagine there must be an ecosystem for this kind of work. There is not. No magical UN structure arrived to carry this burden. No real support system appeared around me. I pushed until I reached the UN Working Group. I harassed offices, wrote messages, chased every possible mechanism, and still found myself standing in the same place, with a piece of paper and no release.
The truth is much smaller and much harder. My wife is my entire support system. I have never had the luxury of being only one thing. For years, For years, I have had to move between art, curation, research, translation and documentation, and that is how I barely keep going. That is it.
And even that survival is fragile. Because the same global authoritarian entanglements we are trying to expose have also shaped our exile. After China pressured the censorship of our work as Myanmar Peace Museum, the space around us narrowed further. Institutions in the UK and elsewhere became more hesitant, more careful, more afraid.
This is also how authoritarianism works now. Not only through prison walls and airstrikes, but through exhaustion, precarity, reputational fear, and the quiet abandonment of those who keep carrying the truth.
That is why Myanmar must be understood not simply as a country in crisis, but as a testing ground. A laboratory where authoritarian regimes refine methods of censorship, punishment, surveillance, and international protection while the people resisting them are forced to survive on almost nothing.
And still, here I am.
Broken in ways I did not choose. Still working. Still carrying evidence. Still fighting for political prisoners. Still trying to keep memory alive in a world that keeps asking the victims of history to fund the archive of their own destruction.
Where WLC fits
If this crisis is to mean anything beyond managed concern, then support cannot stop at statements, panels, and recognition. It has to reach the people who are already doing the work with almost no protection, no salary, and no institutional floor beneath them.
WLC has a role here precisely because slower institutions keep failing at the point where consequence should begin.
It can help build a real political prisoner infrastructure that treats mass detention as a system, not a pile of isolated cases. It can help move verified evidence into sanctions, legal pathways, and sustained media pressure. It can refuse the laundering of legitimacy by naming SSPC for what it is: a renamed junta organ built to evade sanctions and normalize military rule. It can name digital repression as part of the imprisonment structure itself, because in Myanmar the road to prison now often begins with surveillance. And it can press for coordinated consequences against the full enabling chain: the rebranded governing body, the lobbyists, the surveillance suppliers, the telecom infrastructure, and the external state protections that keep the machine alive. The sanctions report itself calls for coordinated targeted network sanctions, stronger enforcement, and a clear rejection of the sham election and its results.
Myanmar is suffering, and worse, it is being used.
Used to test how far a regime can go when elections are treated as optics, sanctions as paperwork, and digital control as normal statecraft. Used to test how much violence can be absorbed when the world mistakes procedure for progress.
The question is no longer whether Myanmar will be remembered.
The question is whether those who built, funded, serviced, normalized, and protected this system will finally be made to pay for it.
