In May, something curious will happen to the geography of China. The continental-sized country, whose supercharged development has been concentrated in cities on its eastern coast, will gain something it has never had: a western seaboard. An 800km gas pipeline will connect Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, to the Bay of Bengal, passing through central Myanmar. Next year an oil pipeline will open along the same route. Road and rail will follow.

Of course, China won’t literally gain a second coastline to match that of the US, which looks out on the Atlantic and the Pacific. But it will get the next best thing. “What China is lacking is its California, another coast that would provide its remote interior provinces with an outlet to the sea,” says Thant Myint-U, author and adviser to the Myanmar government. In Where China Meets India, his book about Myanmar’s geopolitical significance, he says the pipeline is a milestone in Beijing’s “Two Oceans” policy. Similarly, Robert Kaplan, an influential US author, argues China’s ability to establish a presence in the Indian Ocean, the world’s third-largest body of water, will determine whether it becomes a global military power, or stays as a regional power confined to the Pacific.

For years, the west viewed Myanmar – or Burma as many still prefer to call it – through the prism of human rights and democracy. That narrative has been one in which Aung San Suu Kyi struggles to rid the country of military authoritarianism. It’s a vital story, particularly for Myanmar’s 60m downtrodden people. But it has obscured something arguably just as important: a tussle over one of Asia’s most strategic states.