Wen Jiabao arrived in Rangoon on Wednesday for a two-day visit, marking the first trip to military-ruled Burma by a Chinese prime minister in 16 years.

Wen arrived at Rangoon International Airport amid tight security, ahead of Burma’s first elections in two decades, scheduled for later this year.

The two countries are expected to sign contracts, including ones related to the energy sector and hydropower projects, a Burmese official said.

China is the junta’s key ally and trade partner, and an eager investor in the isolated state’s sizeable natural resources. In November its top oil producer began construction of a pipeline across Burma.

But ties between the two countries frayed last August when fighting between Burma’s isolated ruling junta and rebel ethnic armies in the remote northeast drove tens of thousands of refugees into China.

Analysts said Beijing would be concerned about further instability on its Western border and that the issue was likely to come up at the talks during Wen’s visit.

Wen was due to attend a ceremony at a school before visiting the famed Shwedagon pagoda. On Thursday he was expected to go to administrative capital Naypyidaw to meet senior general Than Shwe and other senior military officials.

He was then expected to attend an inauguration ceremony at Myanmar [Burma] International Conference Centre in Naypyidaw which was built and funded by China, before returning to Rangoon to fly back out of the country.

The Burmese regime has been attempting to co-opt ethnic groups into becoming junta-backed forces ahead of elections, which critics have dismissed as a sham due to laws that have effectively excluded opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), was dissolved last month after refusing to re-register as a political party, a move which would have forced it to expel its own leader because she is serving a prison term.

The NLD won the last national polls in 1990 by a landslide but the ruling generals refused to recognise the result. Suu Kyi has spent much of the past 20 years in jail or house arrest.