In recent years, two powerful narratives have emerged from mainland Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, discussions of the region focus around one of two topics: economic development and environmental degradation. For example, by typing “Mekong” into Google News the first page of results will show articles like this and this. As one can imagine, these two views of Southeast Asia are often in opposition and proponents of each rarely see eye to eye, sometimes going so far as to ignore the other side altogether. Recently, the battleground of these two narratives has been the construction sites of hydroelectric dams (both real and planned) that dot the Mekong River. Proponents of economic development see these dams as a necessary component to continued economic growth in the region. On the other hand, environmentalists point to the unknown ecological costs of the Mekong dams and argue that there are hidden costs to supposedly cheap hydropower. What is lost in the increasingly polarized game of right and wrong is a larger, more nuanced picture of the region and its needs. Some say that the Mekong needs dams while others argue that the region needs better protection measures for its natural resources. But what Southeast Asia really needs is for development fans and environmentalists to stop ignoring each other, and to restart the dialogue. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Mekong
China needs to change its energy strategy in the Mekong region
At the end of this year cars and container trucks loaded with goods from China and Thailand will finally be able to drive across a multi-lane bridge spanning the Mekong River (known as the Lancang in China). The bridge will connect Chiang Rai province in Thailand to Bokeo province in Laos, effectively linking China’s highways stretching south from Beijing and Shanghai to those coming north from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.
Funded by equal investment from the Chinese and Thai government, the completion of the bridge, which took ten years of planning and two years to build, is not without controversy. For many years Thailand held back investment due to an uneven distribution of benefits between China, Laos and Thailand. Also on the Thai side, the NGO Rak Chiang Khong claim the bridge negatively impacts the local Golden Triangle economy and will ruin Mekong fisheries.
The Golden Triangle Bridge serves to highlight the challenges facing China, as the country’s new leadership attempts to balance its slowing and volatile economy and deliver domestic stability by maintaining peaceful economic relations with its neighbours.
China’s regional strategy
“In 2012 China’s growth in trade and outward investment with the five other Mekong countries of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam surpassed its trade and investment growth in ASEANcountries,” said Xu Ningning, chairman of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Business Council. “Greater growth rates will continue with increases in regional cooperation and win-win investment opportunities.”
For the past three years China’s GMS provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi have posted growth rates of 12-15%, the highest of China’s localities, and arguably China’s economic rise has also helped deliver high growth rates among Mekong countries.
The end of the Cold War in the 1990s created a favourable environment for China to develop its economic cooperation strategies toward the Mekong region. The blurring and opening of once inviolable borders encouraged traders on both sides of the China-Southeast Asia frontier to appeal to local and national governments for better conditions for trade and migration. The Chinese government responded with twenty years of state-led trade liberalisation and investment policies to promote regional cooperation in state and private sectors.
China’s economic cooperation strategies towards its four Mekong neighbours has dovetailed nicely into a strategy that fits China’s current development needs. Liu Jinxin, a policy analyst and logistics expert says, “Unlike the US which leads the world in finance and IT, both high-value service-oriented industries, China is the world’s factory, producing goods to drive the growth of its growing middle class and serving export markets around the world. To survive, the Chinese ‘factory’ needs inputs like energy and raw materials.” Continue reading
About East by Southeast
WRITE FOR US! JOIN THE ExSE TEAM, contact us at eastbysoutheastmail@gmail.com
The East by Southeast team is made up of scholars, development professionals, logistics experts, environmentalists, green entrepreneurs, and policy makers. We all live and work in the region – some were born here and some are implants. It is in the framework of the wide variety of our opinions that we seek to promote a deeper discussion of regional challenges. Some of us write under pen names to allow discussion to flow freely.
In addition to blog posts, look forward to weekly new digests, book reviews, and data that will help better inform your understanding of this dynamic region.
WHY WE WRITE:
There are many good blogs about China and many from Southeast Asia, but it is surprising that there are few blogs looking at the connections between China and Southeast Asia given shared development challenges, centuries of historical and cultural interaction, and rising volumes of trade and people movement between China and Southeast Asia.
In the 1990s, nations and ethnic groups that were cut off from cross-border interaction during the Cold War began to reunite as peace spread throughout the region, and arguably, China’s rise has reinforced stability within the region to deliver deepened integration. Fast forward twenty years, the region is home to some of the fastest growing economies in the world and rapidly changing urban spaces. It is also known for its abundance in natural resources and biodiversity, and development trajectories are converting those resources into cash crops and energy commodities for trade and consumption. On mainland Southeast Asia, a lack of policy coordination and communication between governments and stakeholders has already created a variety of trans-boundary issues like fisheries depletion in the Mekong watershed. As a result, for the first time, the region faces threats to food security and a potentially gross mismanagement of its resource endowment.
In addition to the growing connections between China and Southeast Asia, the East by Southeast blog team will examine China’s footprint across its southern borders to provide answers to some of the big questions surrounding China’s global rise. We seek to understand the effect and return of China’s outpouring of aid and investment to its Southeast Asian neighbors and monitor changes in China’s approach to foreign policy as its interests spread across the region. We want to know how China’s neighbors are adapting to its rise and how effectively China’s soft power is spreading. There is much room for discussion and exploration of the gaps between China’s rhetoric on its peaceful rise in the region and its ability to continue expanding its resource base to feed the needs of a rapidly growing economy. Lastly, we are concerned with China’s adaptation and response to a new and concerted US foreign policy toward Southeast Asia.
From a different perspective, the blog team will look at how the space between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors is decreasing at a rapid rate as transportation infrastructure, advances in information transfer, and trade linkages reach across borders and states use what Yale scholar James C. Scott calls in his 2009 watershed work The Art of Not Being Governed, “distance demolishing technologies” to connect areas that were once the frontiers beyond all frontiers. For example, energy from hydropower plants is sent from Laos to the China’s east coast development zones, you can now drive a container truck from Kunming to Bangkok in less than a day on what was once previous non-navigable terrain, and in 2015 the ASEAN Economic Community promises to drop the barriers to the movement of labor and goods through the region. In addition to understanding the trajectory and obstacles of regional integration,
we want to explore how rapid and sudden improvements in connectivity reshape individual livelihoods, communities, and regional relationships.
There are so many stories to tell of the people who are shaping the region for better or for worse and of the people who are affected
by regional decision making. Narratives from the varied and violent histories of the Cold War, colonial, and pre-colonial eras can help demonstrate how history can inform the present challenges. In addition, the blog will expore many regional question marks such as the tenuous path to democratization in Myanmar (and Thailand and Cambodia), Kunming’s rise as the Bangkok of the north, a high-speed rail system through Laos, and the effects of salinization in the Mekong Delta. Can cities and rural areas in the region learn how to provide each other with sustainable solutions to development challenges? Are there lessons to be taught as countries like Thailand, China, and Indonesia seek to escape the middle income trap?
The East by Southeast team is made up of scholars, development professionals, logistics experts, environmentalists, green entrepreneurs, and policy makers. We all live and work in the region – some were born here and some are implants. It is in the framework of the wide variety of our opinions that we seek to promote a deeper discussion of regional challenges. Some of us write under pen names to allow discussion to flow freely.
In addition to blog posts, look forward to weekly new digests, book reviews, and data that will help better inform your understanding of this dynamic region.
If you’d like to join the discussion, feel free to leave a comment after our posts, or if you’d like to contribute to the blog by becoming a team member, send us a message to eastbysoutheastmail@gmail.com.
