 It's been in the works for almost a decade. Myanmar and China have agreed to open a pipeline carrying about 148,000 tons of crude oil. The deal sealed the first official visit to China by the president of Myanmar, Tin Shuo. After an agreement was reached between the two countries, shipments had been held up because of an argument over fees. As you can see on the map, the pipeline route stretches nearly 800 kilometers across Myanmar to Kunming in the Chinese province of Yunnan. So what does this mean for their relationship moving forward? Well, I spoke earlier to Aaron Connolly from the Loei Institute for International Policy. Well, on the Chinese side, China's long concern that the majority of its oil imports come through the Strait of Malacca and that a foreign Navy, say the US Navy, in a conflict situation could use that narrow strait to choke off oil imports into China. And this pipeline, when running at full capacity, would supply about 6% of China's current oil imports. So it wouldn't solve the Strait of Malacca dilemma as the Chinese call it, but it would help them diversify away from that choke point. And so how does Myanmar fit into China's really ambitious one-road, one-belt project where it's aiming to build roads, infrastructure projects through 60 countries and linking them with China? Well, China's interest in Myanmar really precedes one-belt, one-road. Under the former military junta in Myanmar that gave up power in 2011, China received a number of favorable deals in Myanmar. The most controversial one was a deal to dam the Irawati River, which really has an almost spiritual character in Myanmar culture, and then send most of the electricity produced by that dam back to China. And as a result, Chinese investment in Myanmar really acquired a very bad reputation. So this is one of the first steps to really begin to bring online some of those investments that China made during the junta era when construction on the pipeline originally began. But it's not clear that Myanmar is going to welcome a great deal of additional Chinese investment. China sees this as a way to get access to the Indian Ocean through the Bay of Bengal, so it's very important to them. Myanmar really has a lot of leverage here. We know it's not just an economic relationship, but a strategic one as well, Aaron, because there are so many layers to the relationship between Myanmar and China. Concerns about Myanmar refugees spilling into China. China's aims to try to influence some of the ethnic clashes there. So what is it about the strategic relationship between the two? Well, on the Myanmar side, Myanmar has been trying to, over the last five years, bring to an end this ethnic insurgency that has plagued its periphery for the last 70 years. And what they want from China is some assistance bringing those insurgencies to an end. Some of these ethnic groups are Han Chinese, and they receive support from within China and take shelter within China. And so Myanmar, in fact, there was even an instance recently in which one of these organizations was crowdfunding in China using an online crowdfunding account. So Myanmar really wants China to help them by shutting down some of these efforts and helping bring to heal some of these insurgency groups. And China now has an incentive to do that now that the pipeline is online, because while these groups that they have supported haven't attacked the pipeline, they do supply groups that do. Aaron Connelly there.