For two decades, the growing relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the Myanmar-controlled junta was either ignored or avoided in the United States public discourse. It was not until September 2009 that public attention began to be focused on this issue, when Senator Jim Webb specifically included this question in a senatorial subcommittee meeting on Burma/ Myanmar. The academic literature, however, had been sprinkled with various and important analyses of these important bilateral links, but these did not seem to affect public dialogue. Georgetown University had also been involved in those considerations. In February 2001, it sponsored an international conference in Washington, D.C. on “Burma: Nexus on the Bay of Bengal,” the purpose of which was to demonstrate to the incoming Bush administration the importance of the subject. It seemed, however, to have caused little public administration interest, whatever effect it might have aroused in classified circles.
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