PM Tarique Rahman's Beijing Visit: The Rohingya Issue Must Be Discussed

Prime Minister Tarique Rahman is in Beijing this week to deepen ties with China—trade deals, infrastructure loans, energy cooperation, and the promise of a stronger strategic partnership. Bangladesh needs all of it. But if he returns home without a serious, specific Chinese commitment to the Rohingya, the visit will have failed where it matters most.

Over a million Rohingya have lived in the camps of Cox's Bazar for nearly a decade. They are the largest refugee population in the world, crowded into a corner of Bangladesh that was already poor, already stretched. International aid is drying up. Myanmar has broken every repatriation promise it has ever made. The camps, meanwhile, grow more dangerous — underfunded, overcrowded, and increasingly controlled by armed groups that thrive where despair does.

This is not a problem Bangladesh created. The Rohingya were driven across the border by Myanmar's military in a campaign of violence that the United Nations called ethnic cleansing. Bangladesh opened its border out of decency. It has been paying for that decency ever since, largely alone.

China is the only country with the standing to change this. Beijing is Naypyidaw's closest ally, its most important investor, and the one external voice the military junta cannot afford to ignore. When China decides something matters in Myanmar, it gets attention. The question has never been whether China has the leverage. The question is whether it has chosen to use it.

The answer, so far, has been no, or not enough. Beijing has spent years positioning itself as a constructive mediator, organizing trilateral meetings between Bangladesh and Myanmar, announcing pilot repatriation programs, and exchanging lists. The results have been close to nothing. The most recent pilot scheme proposed returning just over a thousand refugees—out of more than a million—and collapsed when Rohingya representatives visited the proposed sites and found camps ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers. That is not going home. That is relocating a prison.

Mr. Rahman arrives in Beijing with real leverage, more than is sometimes acknowledged. Bangladesh is a willing and valuable partner on trade, on Belt and Road investment, and on China's broader ambitions in South and Southeast Asia. That willingness has currency in Beijing. He should not spend it on infrastructure announcements alone.

The asks are clear. China must press Myanmar for genuine guarantees—not transit camps behind barbed wire, but real conditions under which the Rohingya can return with safety, rights, and dignity. Beijing must agree to an empowered trilateral mechanism with a time-bound road map and independent monitors, not another round of meetings that produce a photograph and a communiqué. And it must ensure that international humanitarian organizations can access Rakhine State to verify what is actually happening on the ground. Without verification, any agreement is worthless.

None of this is beyond China's capacity. Beijing has moved Myanmar before, when its own interests demanded it. The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor — Beijing's signature investment project in the region — runs directly through an area that remains volatile precisely because the Rohingya crisis has never been resolved. Stability in Rakhine is not just a moral imperative. It is a Chinese economic interest. Mr. Rahman should say so, plainly and without apology.

A new Prime Minister gets one first visit. First visits set the terms of a relationship—they signal what a leader will push for and what he will quietly let slide. If Mr. Rahman leaves Beijing with loans, photo opportunities, and a paragraph buried deep in a joint statement, he will have told China — and the world — that the Rohingya question can be deferred indefinitely.

It cannot. A crisis that has lasted a decade without resolution does not fade. It hardens. Children born in those camps have grown up knowing nothing else. Every year of inaction narrows the path back to something resembling justice.

Prime Minister Rahman does not need to choose between Bangladesh's economic interests and its moral obligations. This week, in Beijing, they point in the same direction. He should press China hard, name his demands clearly, and refuse to leave without something real to show for it.

The Rohingya have been waiting long enough.