Let Them Eat Cake
Coming Soon…
“Maybe it’s the water, maybe it’s a mosquito bite,” jokes Christopher Lamb, the former Australian Ambassador to Myanmar, explaining how Burma became part of his life, and would “become part of anyone’s who has lived there long enough.” In this conversation, he reflects on his decades-long relationship with the country, first in the early 1970s as a diplomat, then during the country-shaping crisis of 1988, and later through humanitarian and academic work. It has been the slow unfolding of what he terms a lifelong “infection”: a pull he says Burma exerts on anyone who has lived there long enough.
Lamb recalls that when he first arrived in Rangoon in 1972, he stepped into a country already deep in the grip of military rule that had begun a decade earlier but was still solidifying its ideological shell. The generals were drafting the Constitution for the Socialist Republic, a process the government described as national consultation, though the results were predetermined. He remembers watching officers discard their uniforms and adopt civilian honorifics although everyone understood it was theater. The military still commanded everything, and the new Constitution, heavily modeled on East Germany’s system, was meant to define future political life as permanently Socialist and militarily controlled. Even then he wondered how a poor country could sustain the massive bureaucratic structure the Constitution required: national, state, township and village-level assemblies, each with its own judges, auditors, and state lawyers. The bureaucracy seemed far beyond Burma’s capacity, and he sensed the party would eventually be unable to control the sprawling apparatus it had built.
The society he encountered in the early 1970s was, above all, fearful. Surveillance smothered daily life. Military intelligence and Special Branch officers stationed themselves outside every foreigner’s home; Lamb could not leave his driveway without being observed. Travel beyond Rangoon required permission granted two week prior. In a country still shaken by civil war, entire regions were closed to foreigners, and most Burmese citizens lived under the assumption that neighbors might report on them. Yet inside this atmosphere of pressure, Lamb also saw a society anchored by older memories: pride in U Thant, the Burmese UN Secretary-General whose life symbolized dignity beyond national borders; lingering belief in nonaligned foreign policy; and the cosmopolitan ambitions of earlier governments that had supported regional projects like the Asian Highway. These aspirations persisted even as the state contracted inward, disciplining thought as much as action.
By the time Lamb returned as ambassador in 1986, his earlier concerns were confirmed: he saw a country weakened by the very institutions the Constitution demanded, a hollow structure, a party unable to exert meaningful control across its own assemblies, and an economy spiraling toward failure. Prices soared, rice became unaffordable, and the demonetization of the currency destroyed what small savings ordinary people possessed. As he watched these developments, Lamb also noticed something unusual: the interplay between formal political structures and the informal authority of astrology.
Burmese astrology is quite different from the sort of newspaper horoscopes one sees in the West; it is integrated not only into the Burmese worldview but also impacts decision making at every level. Lamb came to understand that the influence of astrologers, therefore, far from peripheral, was in fact essential to interpreting government action—all the more so in the case of a cryptic, cloistered military regime. “You have to look at [astrology] if you want to understand how decisions are made,” he explains simpy. That curiosity allowed Lamb to decipher choices that appeared irrational from the outside, such as Ne Win’s abrupt decision to switch driving from the left side of the road to the right. In this particular incident, Lamb relays how Ne Win interpreted a prophecy predicting “a move to the left” as meaning a Communist coup—so he preempted (and thus voided) it by physically moving the country leftward on the road! Ridiculous, yes, Lamb concedes, but consistent enough across sources to reveal how deeply astrology shaped governance.
Comparing his two Burma postings, he says the biggest difference was economic. In 1986 he began warning his home office that Burma was approaching a breaking point. By late 1987, he was certain that the system could not hold. The local staff at his embassy could no longer be paid in kyat, as it had become nearly worthless; Lamb arranged for them to be paid in U.S. dollars instead. Meanwhile, public desperation grew. The first sparks of revolt came in early 1988, when a confrontation in a tea shop—over the price of tea, rice, and the insufferable arrogance of an official—ignited student protests. He emphasizes that the 1988 movement did not begin as an idealistic human-rights movement: it began because people could no longer afford to eat!
Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma in March 1988 to see her ailing mother in the hospital; Lamb knew the mother well, and he met Suu Kyi for the first time at her hospital bedside. He immediately recognized the political resonance she embodied, even before she stepped onto the national stage. She carried her father’s famous name, had an international education to boot, and emanated an aura of moral authority. He notes that this combination provided “something the people urgently needed”: a focal point capable of channeling the people’s frustration into action.
As the 1988 movement intensified, Lamb did not immerse himself emotionally in the turmoil, even as he watched events unfold around him. He insisted on maintaining the stance of a diplomat: to observe, analyze, report honestly, and avoid allowing personal reactions to shape official judgment. Notably, his wife recorded scenes of the crackdown, footage that later circulated abroad. Yet he kept his own account clear of dramatization. What stayed with him was the structure, the failures, the logic of collapse.
The most consequential conversation from that period, the one that shaped how he interprets Burmese politics across decades, came from a senior official he had known from his first posting. When he returned in 1986, this man was still serving at the highest levels. Over tea, the official reflected on the country’s constitutional system. He admitted its overreach, but emphasized even more that the government would endure “only as long as people can eat,” an observation that stuck with Lamb over the decades. In Lamb’s view, this applied equally to the 1988 collapse, the limits of the post-2010 opening, and the dilemmas of the post-2021 coup regime.
After the 1988 uprising, the newly installed leaders prepared an election law for the upcoming vote in 1990. Lamb met with the members of the Union Election Commission, and they shared a draft with him. He helped persuade them to adopt a ballot-marking system rather than a token-drop system, using the government’s own UNESCO literacy statistics to counter the Minister of Education’s claim that Burmese voters could not manage printed, paper ballots. He also suggested including political party symbols, like the NLD’s peacock, which became standard electoral practice. The regime—believing its own propaganda that they enjoyed broad, public support— followed these recommendations, and then was promptly blindsided by an overwhelming NLD victory.
In later years, he worked with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and participated in shaping the humanitarian response to Cyclone Nargis in 2008. Even from far-away Geneva, his many years of experience in Burma enabled him to advise how aid could enter a country where sanctions, military suspicion, and disaster collided. His strategy centered on one principle: the Myanmar Red Cross had to function as the civilian auxiliary it was meant to be, not as an arm of the military. Through coordination with ASEAN national societies and a rare agreement from then-President Than Shwe, that principle held just long enough to allow aid to flow.
In 2013, Lamb co-founded the Australia-Myanmar Institute (AMI) to provide a dedicated platform linking universities, researchers, and civil society between the two countries. He wanted the institute to focus on sustainable development and avoid turning into a human-rights advocacy organization, not because human rights are peripheral to sustainable development—he believes they are essential—but because the institute had to remain a shared space for dialogue rather than division. However, as the Rohingya crisis unfolded in 2017, the institute facilitated seminars that included Rohingya voices and confronted the reality of ethnic cleansing, and provided space for discussions among diaspora groups who still tended to create rigidly ethnocentric communities.
Throughout the interview, Lamb places Myanmar in a broader regional and historical context. He explains federalism not only as a constitutional ideal but as a lived geography: mountains, rivers, linguistic zones and the looming presence of neighboring China shaped political boundaries more coherently than mapmakers in faraway capitals ever could. He uses the Shan to illustrate this, explaining that there were once 99 Shan Principalities, and only some of them situated inside modern Myanmar. Thus, he illustrates that Shan sovereignty was spread throughout the southeast Asian region; it was never centralized but layered across dozens of semi-autonomous, ethnic polities. Many of these states maintained tributary or kinship ties with Yunnan, traded across the frontier, and operated within zones of Chinese influence, revealing how questions of sovereignty, ethnicity, and cross-border power have always been intertwined in the Shan hills. And these historical realities definitely affect the present-day struggle against the junta: because the various actors maintain their own political agendas and long-standing relationships with Chinese authorities, the conflict is unfolding in a space shaped not only by Myanmar’s internal politics but also by ethnic fragmentation and China’s strategic calculations. As a result, efforts to confront or replace the junta must navigate a landscape far more complex than a simple battle between a regime and a unified opposition.
Regarding the 2021 coup, Lamb does not see an overarching ideology guiding Min Aung Hlaing. Unlike the Socialist project of Ne Win in 1962, for example, or the military regime’s drive for national unity in 1988, he regards Min Aung Hlaing as being driven by personal ambition and the expectation of becoming a civilian president through a managed election. Without a guiding ideology, Lamb believes the regime’s future becomes harder to predict and possibly more brittle.
Myanmar remains close to Lamb’s heart. It shaped him as a diplomat, it shaped his curiosity and it shaped his friendships. When asked whether any memory stays with him above all others about the country, he circles back to the remark offered by the senior Burmese official decades earlier over tea: “The government will survive for as long as we can feed the people.”