Opinion piece by Benedict Rogers is senior director of Fortify Rights and author of "The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny."

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The Chinese Communist Party is not only a perpetrator of grave violations of human rights within China and of transnational repression abroad. It is also a major facilitator of, and accomplice to, mass-atrocity crimes committed by other dictatorships.

It has enabled Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, helped keep Kim Jong Un's regime in North Korea alive and provided a lifeline to the military junta in Myanmar.

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It is in Myanmar that the CCP's influence is currently perhaps most significant dangerous, but also overlooked. Beijing sees Myanmar not only as its backyard but as a crucial geostrategic playground vital for securing its interests. It seeks "stability" in the war-torn country, not because it has any concern for the welfare of the people of Myanmar but because it wants to protect its economic pursuits: border trade corridors, infrastructure investments, access to rare earth minerals, jade and energy. And most significant of all, its maritime ambitions.

Crucially, China wants access to the Bay of Bengal. And if it secures that, alongside the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea and eventually the First Island Chain by seizing Taiwan, then its dominance in the region and ability to challenge the U.S. is achieved. Myanmar is key to these maritime ambitions. The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor and Myanmar's place in Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative are crucial factors in the CCP's strategy for global dominance.

For all these reasons, China is the puppet master behind Myanmar's current fake elections. On Dec. 28, the military held the first round of voting, to be followed by a second round on Jan. 11. But the election is a charade, a sham designed to legitimize an illegal, illegitimate, criminal regime.

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Moreover, much of Myanmar's population is disenfranchised. Elections are only taking place in military-controlled areas, and even there turnout in the first round was estimated at little more than 50%. Entire regions under the control of the pro-democracy or ethnic armed resistance groups are excluded, including almost the whole of Rakhine state. The Muslim-majority Rohingya people, who were stripped of their citizenship by a previous dictatorship in 1982 and rendered stateless, and have endured a genocide over the past decade, are completely shut out of the elections.

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Although China was initially displeased with the Myanmar regime immediately following the 2021 coup, for the past year Beijing has intervened to prop it up. Nervous about the prospect of the junta's potential collapse, China has pressured ethnic armed groups operating on the Chinese border with Myanmar to agree to ceasefires with the military, and even return territory they had captured, particularly in areas where China has economic interests such as mining concessions. It should be no surprise to anyone who follows the CCP to know that Beijing prefers a human rights-violating dictatorship that it can influence and that is more likely to protect its interests to a democracy that it perceives as more pro-Western.

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China's dominance in Myanmar is a profoundly malign influence for the region and the world. Its exploitation of rare earth mining has resulted in toxic pollution of rivers not only in Myanmar but in neighboring Thailand. The role of Chinese organized crime syndicates in running scam centers, drug trafficking and human trafficking is a threat to regional and global security. Its patronage of the sham elections and provision of arms, jets and fuel makes it an accomplice to the military's atrocities. And its ambition to control the Bay of Bengal make its role in Myanmar a geopolitical threat.

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The U.S., the U.K., the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan and ASEAN need to wake up to this danger -- fast. They must coordinate a response, rejecting the sham elections, redoubling support for pro-democracy forces in Myanmar, countering China's influence and ultimately holding Beijing accountable for facilitating the junta's crimes. As the international community prepares to respond to the fake elections in Myanmar over the coming weeks, it cannot ignore the biggest elephant in the room: China's malign influence in the region.

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