Crisis In Burma

Soldiers are firing automatic weapons into large crowds.

A Japanese Foreign Ministry official told The Associated Press that several people, including a Japanese national, were found dead following Thursday's protests.

The information was transmitted by Myanmar's Foreign Ministry to the Japanese Embassy in Yangon, the official said on condition of anonymity citing protocol.

The chaos came a day after the government launched a crackdown in Yangon that it said killed at least one man. Dissidents outside Myanmar reported receiving news of up to eight deaths Wednesday.

Some reports said the dead included Buddhist monks, who are widely revered in Myanmar, and the emergence of such martyrs could stoke public anger against the regime and escalate the violence.

This will get worse before it gets better unless China can be prodded to help end the violence. They have been reluctant to join in sanctions so far at the UN. China seems to be very invested in the Beijing Olympics in 2008. If that's the way to get to them, so be it. Otherwise, there's going to be a lot more bloodshed. I don't think the Burmese people will back down unless they are exterminated by the thousands.

UPDATE: Or, you know, perhaps not:

China has interests and involvements in Burma, but limited leverage. Burma is not some kind of client state of China. It is a xenophobic, divided, tribalized country with a nationalistic government; it bears more resemblance to one of the less coherent sub-Saharan African states than to most other East Asian countries. It’s not an easy place to influence. Through most of the 1980s there was a Burmese Communist Party, which consisted primarily of the Wa tribe plus Chinese leadership. When the Wa decided to turn anti-communist in the late 1980s and chased the Chinese leadership into China, China’s influence in the country was drastically reduced but there was little China could do without military intervention. So Beijing basically sat by passively when it happened.

I guess there's always the "growing popular protests and international enmity" route, at which point you still need China to unify the Security Council powers.