By Cherry May
YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar’s military junta is intentionally plunging major metropolitan hubs into severe, rolling power outages as a calculated psychological strategy to force public desperation into accepting the revival of the controversial, long-suspended Myitsone Dam project, energy sector insiders reveal.
According to internal sources close to the state-run Electric Power Corporation (EPC), high-level administrative directives have ordered municipal branches in Yangon and Mandalay to deliberately restrict electricity distribution. The policy aims to induce a manufactured energy crisis, establishing a narrative that the country’s crushing electricity shortage can only be solved by greenlighting the mega-dam to please Beijing.
“An acquaintance embedded within the EPC confirmed that they received direct orders from the top command to ration power strictly on an intermittent basis starting this month,” a resident from Mandalay’s Chanmyathazi Township told MPA. “Now the entire population understands the real, malicious reason behind these sudden, unpredictable blackouts.”
The strategic power cuts follow the catastrophic collapse of the junta’s heavily publicized “100-Day Stable Electricity Initiative.” The emergency power campaign failed to last even 60 days before the national grid buckled, plunging commercial sectors back into prolonged darkness and crippling small-scale private enterprises.
“The electricity was relatively stable for barely two months before returning to this nightmare,” a Yangon resident remarked grimly. “The military’s core instinct is always to exploit and torture the civilian population for their own political survival. Their nature never changes.”
Junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is aggressively pushing to revive the mega-dam to secure immediate political legitimacy and diplomatic insulation from the Chinese government. However, the raw energy and environmental metrics of the Myitsone project remain heavily skewed against Myanmar’s sovereign interests.
Independent energy registers establish that while the massive hydropower project is projected to generate 6,000 megawatts of electricity, at least 90% of the total output will be transmitted directly across the border into southwestern China. Myanmar’s domestic grid, despite bearing the entirety of the structural and environmental burdens, will receive a mere 10% of the generated power.
Furthermore, the environmental and humanitarian fallout of the dam remains catastrophic. Independent ecological assessments show that the reservoir will permanently submerge at least 270 square miles of pristine territory in northern Kachin State—an area roughly equivalent to the geographical size of Singapore.
Beyond flooding 270 square miles of indigenous territory and forcibly displacing tens of thousands of ethnic Kachin civilians, the mega-dam threatens to permanently disrupt the natural flow of the Irrawaddy River, the country’s primary agricultural and cultural lifeline.
Civil rights networks and anti-coup alliances continue to heavily condemn the regime’s energy manipulations. Critics warn that by prioritizing his administrative survival over the survival of the country’s greatest river system, the junta chief is executing a desperate betrayal of national heritage, weaponizing everyday public infrastructure to strike an extractive deal with a foreign superpower.
