For the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who suffered two decades of incarceration and house arrest, the country must aspire to something beyond getting rich if it is truly to overcome the decades of military misrule: a transforming, revolutionary idea. That idea, of course, is democracy, which is something very new to Myanmar/Burma, for the British practiced little of it when they ruled, as George Orwell’s Burmese Days makes clear.
对遭受了20多年监禁和软禁的诺贝尔奖得主昂山素季(Aung San Suu Kyi)来说，如果缅甸要真正摆脱这几十年的军事暴政，它就必须追求比致富更崇高的目标——即改革的、革命的思想。这种思想无疑就是对缅甸来说很陌生的民主——因为英国在统治缅甸的时候并没有推行多少民主政策。这在乔治·奥威尔（George Orwell）的《缅甸岁月》中已经描述得很清楚了。