Myanmar Spring Chronicle – January 16 Scene
January 17, 2026
The Daily Struggles People Face and How Myanmar’s Public Feels
In the daily news, there is an abundance of reports about fighting, about feeding and assisting displaced people, and about towns and villages being destroyed and reduced to rubble by Myanmar’s military through airstrikes and ground offensives. We also read news about the completion of military training, about revolutionary armed groups launching campaigns to raise funds, and about the progress of various operations. There are frequent updates about the junta’s election and about resistance groups pushing back against it—opposing it, disrupting it, and attacking related targets.
What many people worry about most is this: once the momentum around the “election” fades, will the military intensify forced conscription again and expand it further? For urban residents, the biggest immediate concerns are whether electricity will be cut and whether the internet will work. For people in rural areas, the priority is being able to flee in advance from incoming military columns and to stay alert for airstrikes. For displaced people hiding in forests and mountains, survival today is everything—and tomorrow is something they can only “wait and see.” Many say they do not expect much at all.
Journalist colleagues often describe it this way: Myanmar’s public is watching other people’s tragedies as an audience—and at the same time, they themselves have become “characters” in a story being watched by others. City residents consume news about the countryside, while rural communities listen closely to what is happening in the cities. Myanmar people abroad often follow U.S. politics more intensely, but for those inside the country—who are forced to focus on their own urgent realities—American politics can feel irrelevant. They may read it as a matter of curiosity or entertainment, but not as something that directly concerns them.
Inside Myanmar, many reports show that ordinary people feel almost nothing about the military commission’s forced election—more like indifference, or deliberate disregard. Even in the statements of politicians from parties that are running in a one-sided contest against the military-backed USDP, the key idea often seems to be: “If there is an election, we will participate,” as though there is nothing else they need to think about or do beyond that. As spectators, people say they are simply watching: if the military’s one-man show eventually brings USDP “characters” onto the stage in the form of a parliament or a government, how will it continue—what plot twists and scenes will follow?
From local reporting and online news, people comment that they rarely hear about genuine unity and coordinated action among resistance groups. Yet local journalists observe that about half of those they speak with say they do not particularly expect much on that front anyway. For local communities, what matters most is maintaining workable relations with whichever armed resistance groups are operating in their area. If friction emerges among those groups, locals often avoid taking sides or interfering—because they know these are people from their own regions and communities. For traders and day laborers who must pass through checkpoints and payment gates every day, the most common view is: as long as they do not loot, bully, rob, or abuse people, that is already enough.
But no local community wants to face the Myanmar military’s columns. When fighting breaks out, these columns treat civilians as enemies. That is why, at this point, Myanmar people no longer trust the military—and no longer place hope in it. What remains true, however, is that many people have not yet abandoned their trust and hope in revolutionary organizations and key figures.
In every dark era of crisis and brutality, the person the public continues to yearn for most is still the people’s leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. In the early period of the Spring Revolution, the CDM movement, Gen Z, and the PDFs laid down a powerful foundation. Upon their shoulders and backs, strike leaders, prominent Myanmar activists, NLD leaders and MPs, ethnic armed leaders, long-standing resistance generations such as the 88 Generation who never stepped down from leadership roles—rose up and, starting with CRPH, NUCC, and NUG, built and passed through this revolution under many names: armed groups, governments, and revolutionary organizations. As the Spring Revolution approaches its fifth year, whenever circumstances bring it up, the public still longs for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. They still call upon her.
People say: “It’s an election without Daw Aung San Suu Kyi—so we aren’t interested in any of it.” Yet they also add: “But what can we do?” Survivors of the great Mandalay earthquake say they still cannot forget how “Mother Suu” struggled together with the people through the COVID period and the disasters. Many Myanmar people still firmly believe that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi did not betray the public mandate of the 2020 election and did not surrender to military dictators.
Some may speak about imagining a political era without Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But for most Myanmar people, the feeling of valuing her and still placing hope in her remains deeply rooted and enduring.