The Unfolding Mekong Development Disaster

The Mekong has long cast a mystical spell over adventurers, wildlife experts, and scientists enchanted by its spectacular rapids and waterfalls, along with its endangered dolphins, giant manta rays, and Siamese crocodiles. The river’s biodiversity is second only to the Amazon.

In recent years, however, this great international river – which flows through six countries – has increasingly grabbed the attention of engineers, technocrats, and energy consultants on a very different kind of mission: to exploit its roaring currents in pursuit of hydropower.

Any idea of environmental protection for the wonders of the Mekong has been marginalized by China’s grand Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with its focus firmly fixed on trade, infrastructure development, and, along the Mekong, dam construction.

On the banks of the Mekong in Chiang Khong, in northern Thailand, local resident and teacher Niwat Roykaew explains the importance of the river. “The Mekong is very special for the people,” he says. “Our community understands what’s important for life: water, forests, soil, and culture.”

He sees the soul of the river as a precious part of the country’s cultural heritage, something that should transcend financial interests. “Many governments only think about the economy,” he says. “[They think] nothing about nature and culture.”

But China has a very different perspective on the Mekong (known as the Lancang in Chinese) as it attempts to fast-track development in the region.

Is strong regional momentum toward greater integration with the Chinese economy destined for smooth sailing along the Mekong, sweeping all local obstacles and objections out of its path?

At the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) Foreign Ministers meeting in Dali, Yunnan, last December, there were signs of swaggering confidence from China. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi aptly described the LMC process as preparing the ground for the “bulldozer,” to denote the mechanism that will promote smooth and uninterrupted cooperation among the its members.

“The LMC is not a talk shop, but a bulldozer moving forward steadily and firmly to make the cooperation become true,” Wang said.

That is the kind of language that scares a great many people downstream, including some ASEAN diplomats. At the Dali meeting, Chinese officials insisted on using the term in the joint press statement.

China is supremely confident of its position, with two countries – Laos and Cambodia – enmeshed in a nexus of loans, investment, and obligations already on board. But a simmering conflict over the equitable sharing of water resources is deeply felt in Thailand, and even more in the Vietnamese delta, where upstream dams and climate change have made the region more prone to severe drought.

While China is unleashing its BRI on the river, the latest research warns that a healthy Mekong has never been in greater danger from overexploitation and the unregulated damming of the river.

“Twenty years ago, the Mekong was one of the last large healthy tropical systems,” says Marc Goichot, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-Greater Mekong water resources expert. “Today the Mekong delta is literally sinking and shrinking. All of this is pushing more freshwater species such as river dolphins to the brink of extinction, while also causing serious limitations to economic growth.” The WWF has called for a different approach to economic development in the Mekong.

Last year a joint report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) revealed that “The flow of sediment/nutrients in the Mekong has already been reduced by 70% due to the Chinese dams built on the Lancang [upper Mekong] in China.” Sediment is critical to the health of the river and essential for the replenishment of the delta in Vietnam.

Sadly, the Chinese architects of the BRI strategy do not appear to have lost any sleep over the state of the river.

The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism

China’s mastery over these precious water resources was clearly on display at the second summit of the LMC, attended by leaders from all six riparian states and held in Phnom Penh in January 2018.

The LMC was proposed, framed, and set up by China in 2016 as a rival organization to the long-established Mekong River Commission (MRC), which counts four states as members: Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The MRC was set up by the 1995 Mekong Agreement with a mandate to facilitate good governance in pursuit of an international river of friendship and cooperation based on rules and procedures. China and Myanmar opted for observer status.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, commented at a media forum that “the LMC is a way of showing that China only plays by its own rules. It creates fait accompli by building dams upstream to the detriment of downstream countries, and then sets up its own governing body.”

According to Paul Chambers, an international relations specialist at Thailand’s Naresuan University, “China is seeking to make the Mekong River Commission irrelevant by the creation of the LMC. Beijing would like to penetrate all of mainland Southeast Asia, maintaining the region as a periphery of its strategic control. For China, controlling the Mekong region has become a classic case of geo-hegemony.”

Besides the dams, China is building railway lines to connect its southern city of Kunming with Bangkok, Thailand via Vientiane, Laos and a superhighway to connect Cambodia’s Phnom Penh with Sihanoukville. These infrastructure projects spawn other construction activities including apartments, skyscrapers, satellite cities, markets, and shopping malls.

The Cambodian government, readily seduced by Beijing’s pledges to fund a new Phnom Penh airport, a highway, and a hospital, neglected to bring up any troublesome questions about the damage done by Chinese dams to Cambodia’s agriculture, fisheries, and food security.

Ultimately, the environmental crisis faced by downstream countries, especially Cambodia and Vietnam, has been swept under the red carpet of Chinese largesse.

One glaring example of China’s pervasive role in the region is the corrupt enclave known as the Kings Romans Casino complex in Bokeo province in northern Laos. Located within the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ), its administration is firmly in the hands of a shady Chinese business group that has been strongly linked to wildlife trafficking.