Courtesy of the Global Times, a look at the impact that the United States’ recent efforts to engage Myanmar may have upon China’s long-term strategic interest in the country:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Myanmar, starting today, will further unnerve China, which has recently been increasingly worried that the aim of the new US Asian policy is to isolate and encircle China.

Historically and geographically, Myanmar has been a close neighbor to China. For centuries, the two countries have enjoyed a family tie known as “pauk-phaw (brotherhood)” in Myanmese because of intermarriage between border inhabitants.

China’s former premier Zhou Enlai visited Myanmar nine times while his counterpart, Myanmar leader Ne Win visited China 12 times. During Zhou’s first visit to Myanmar in 1954, the two countries stressed the five principles of peaceful coexistence in international relations. The five principles are still the foundation of China’s handling of international relations today.

For centuries, the two peoples have traveled freely across the border on dirt roads and forested mountains. Chinese late foreign minister Marshal Chen Yi composed a poem which reads, “I (China) am upstream and you (Myanmar) are downstream. We share water from the same river with friendship.”

Today, Myanmar is the pivot of China’s grand strategy to achieve its economic growth goal.

The development of Western China depends on a secured shorter trade and fuel routes to the ocean. Close to the key shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, Myanmar is important for China to develop its southwestern inland provinces, which have a population of about 200 million people.

These backward provinces want to trade with the growing economies of Southeast Asia, India, the Arab world and Europe. Chinese academics and the government have been discussing using Myanmar as a bridge to revive the legendary “Southwest Silk Road” from Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces to Myanmar and westward to India, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

Myanmar ports would be able to shorten the distance between Western China and the Indian Ocean by 3,000 kilometers by not passing through the Strait of Malacca and the ports in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Myanmar is also looked as a crucial alternative route in China’s long-term goal of securing a safe conduit of its much-needed fuel from Middle East and Africa.

China in recent decades has been constructing oil pipeline and highway in Myanmar to obtain access to a port by the Indian Ocean. With the 2,000-kilometer Myanmar-Yunnan-Chongqing oil pipeline, China has now almost secured an outlet to the Indian Ocean for its landlocked southwestern provinces.

But recently, this route appears to be under increasing uncertainty. As early as 2010, Clinton declared that the South China Sea was vital to US interests. In September this year, Clinton announced a new US policy in South Asia of building a new Silk Road bypassing China. In the November issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Clinton published a lengthy article in which she declared the coming of the US’ Pacific Century. And two weeks later, at a forum in Honolulu, Obama announced that “The US is a Pacific power and we’re here to stay.”

In the worst scenario of crisis in China-US relations, a blockade of the Chinese coast and the Malacca Strait could be the cards the US is most likely to play. In late September, Myanmar made a surprising announcement that it would halt the construction of the $3.6 billion Myitsone hydropower station invested by a Chinese company.

A month later, Clinton announced that she would visit Myanmar, perhaps as a kind of reward to the country’s new leadership. Chinese media speculate that the US government was behind the Myanmar decision to halt the dam.

Obama and Clinton’s latest moves to isolate and encircle China have made the country more urgent than ever to vary its routes for transporting fuel from the Middle East and Africa. China cannot afford to lose the Myanmar route.