There has always been an economic component to these protests since the government last month raised fuel prices by 500 percent. And one reason why the Buddhist monks are in the forefront is that they live by alms, and where it used to take just half a dozen households to feed a monk, now the economic pressures mean it can require 20 or more.

The first sign of the monks' protest came in February, after China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that called for sanctions against the military junta. An unknown group called the Young Monks Union began distributing leaflets in the oil- and gas-rich region of Arakan, close to the Indian frontier, protesting the Chinese veto, and calling for a boycott of Chinese goods.

Other leaflets protested that China was "exploiting" Myanmar, taking its oil and gas and sending in Chinese workers rather than employing locals. Villagers have also attacked the offices of a Chinese gas exploration company.

Sittwe, the main urban center in Arakan, is being developed by China as a new port and potential naval base, linking to a rail and road and pipeline network that will connect directly with China's Yunnan province. As well as sending Arakan's oil and gas back to China, the new facility is designed to avoid the choke point of the Malacca Straits off Singapore. Oil tankers can sail directly from the Gulf to Sittwe and unload their oil for the new pipeline.

Sittwe and the Arakan region have thus become the epicenter of the anti-junta protests. And last week the most dangerous development for the junta took place in Sittwe, where the police walked away, refusing their orders to use force against the monks who had been demonstrating daily since February. The army then had to be called in and used tear gas and fired guns into the air to disperse the protesters.

"The protest demonstrations by students and monks, which have been sweeping across lower and central Myanmar since August 19, 2007, are not only anti-Junta, but also anti-Chinese," commented B. Raman, director of India's Institute For Topical Studies in Chennai, formerly Madras, and a former senior official in the Indian government's Cabinet office. "The demonstrators have been receiving maximum public response in areas, where a large number of Chinese engineers and other workers are working in projects for the exploration of oil and gas and for mining."

"The demonstrations till now have been confined to lower and central Myanmar, where the Burmans (Buddhists) are in a majority. The ethnic minorities in the north, who are largely Baptists, and the Rohingya Muslims of the Arakan state, who are of Bangladeshi origin, have by and large kept away from the demonstrations," Raman said.

China has faced similar difficulties in Africa, where it has faced strong criticism for doing so little to protest human rights in Darfur, Sudan, where China has important oil investments. There are signs of a wider backlash against China's investments, particularly in Zambia, where an explosion two years ago at a Chinese-owned explosives factory in Chambishi killed 46 people. The Patriotic Front opposition party won seats in Lusaka, the capital, and in the industrial and copper mining regions in last year's elections, campaigning on an anti-Chinese platform. Its leader, Michael Sata, says the Chinese are "exploiting us, just like everyone who came before. They have simply come to take the place of the West as the new colonizers of Africa."

There is a further complicating factor in China's presence in Myanmar, which is India's nervousness at the prospect of a Chinese naval base at Sittwe in the Bay of Bengal, on India's eastern flank. This matches a similar Chinese-built port and naval base venture at Gwadar in Pakistan on India's western flank.

Indian Energy Minister Murli Deora, who warned publicly last month that India was "losing out" in the race with China to secure energy supplies, is expected in Myanmar later this week. He is expected to raise Myanmar's decision to sell natural gas from its offshore fields to China, including fields where Indian firms have a 30 percent stake. India had been planning to build a 900-mile pipeline to deliver the gas to the Indian state of Bihar, a plan that China seems to have sidelined with its successful bid to build a longer and more expensive pipeline.

President Bush raised the issue of human rights in Myanmar with Chinese President Hu Jintao in their talks in Australia this month at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, and the United States and the European Union are urging sanctions against the junta to press for the restoration of human rights.

The importance of the latest protest by the Buddhist monks (now joined for the first time by nuns) is that their demonstrations have taken them to the home of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Daughter of a famed independence leader, she is leader of the National League for Democracy party, and has been under house arrest 12 of the past 18 years, since the army took over direct rule after her party won the 1990 elections.

The military junta has never faced a combination such as this, a coalition of protests that brings the monks and students together with Suu Kyi's symbolic and political importance and the growing nationalist and anti-Chinese sentiment. Add in the economic hardship brought on by the fuel price rise, and the future looks grim for the junta.

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