POLITICAL activist Win Ko was a plump, good-looking man who liked a joke - that was until someone plunged a knife into his chest and slit his throat in a Kunming hotel last month.
The cold-blooded murder of the finance minister of the Burmese government-in-exile shocked his colleagues but surprised no one familiar with the deepening relationship between the People's Republic of China and the Burmese dictatorship.
In this unholy alliance, which is widely suspected of orchestrating Win Ko's murder, the generals of Burma and the burgers of Beijing have found common ground. The two regimes may yet not be friends but a partnership of convenience is developing between the two as they struggle to resist the influences of a capitalist world.
Reports are sketchy about the last hours of 45-year-old Win Ko's life but his political colleagues say he had been engaged in a six-month campaign in China's Yunnan province and northern Burma, to revitalise opposition to the Burmese junta.
An unassuming teacher until he was swept up by Burma's democracy protests in 1988, Win Ko has been portrayed by battle-hardened Burmese dissidents as politically unsophisticated, if not naive.
This view, however, is vehemently disputed by government-in-exile minister, Bo Hla Tint, of the National Coalition of the Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), who said that four decades of brutal political repression ''makes everyone unsophisticated''.