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100			_a Kiik, Laur _955609
245			_aSacred politics of Chinese infrastructure: Christians, Buddha’s tooth, dragons, and conflict at Myitsone, Kachin, Burma
260			_aModern Asian Studies
300			_a58(5), Sep, 2024: p.1379-1406
520			_aHow do ‘communist’ Chinese state companies handle sacredness and religions? What role do religions and sacredness play in infrastructural conflicts? Debates on Chinese investment and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) often highlight the failure of China’s largest-ever hydropower project overseas—the Myitsone Dam, located in war-torn Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) in an ethnic Kachin Christian area. Public outcry against this mega-development led the Burmese regime to halt construction in 2011, shocking Beijing and causing an international scandal. This article explores this infrastructural conflict’s religious, sacred, and more-than-human dimensions. Based on interviews, Chinese media analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork among Kachin people since 2010, the article focuses on the project site—the famous Myitsone confluence, birthplace of the Irrawaddy River. There, local village church leaders helped lead and shelter the very earliest anti-dam resistance, despite military state repression. There also, Chinese state-owned companies encountered Catholicism, Baptism, Theravada Buddhism, and indigenous animist worlds, and described these foreign, rural religious worlds for China’s domestic audiences. Kachin dragon-kin deities, anti-dam activists, and the more-than-human charms of the local natural landscape helped create a sacredness, which the Chinese dam developers could not easily disprove. Throughout, sacred politics shaped this international infrastructure conflict.- Reproduced https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/sacred-politics-of-chinese-infrastructure-christians-buddhas-tooth-dragons-and-conflict-at-myitsone-kachin-burma/B300AC51678D2C8C01A0851A05FDC607
650			_aBelt and road initiative, Religious diversity, Rural resistance, Sacred sites, Hydropower politics. _955610
773			_aModern Asian Studies
942			_cAR