Infrastructure

When I returned to Xigang after five years, I couldn’t recognize it. What had been a small but generally well-maintained beach town had become a sprawling mess of a city; construction, mud, and piles of garbage were seemingly everywhere. The Han Chinese with whom I ...

Rapid technological development has given people more ways to access and share information on the internet. It has also created conditions for more sophisticated cyber-attacks. Like other countries, Vietnam has a cybersecurity law to safeguard information and protect national security. According to a recent press release, the country ...

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has unveiled a database on Vietnamese land and people, which is set to serve research and studies. The database at  was built for two years as a joint effort of the ministry’s Library Department, public and private libraries, publishing houses, relevant agencies, and leading ...

Laos and Vietnam are preparing to upgrade two more local crossing points to official border crossings to facilitate international visits between them. The facilities to be upgraded are the Pa Hang-Long Sap crossing point between Laos’ Huaphan province and Vietnam’s Thanh Hoa province, and the Dak ...

The Thai Cabinet has approved a preferential loan worth 777 million THB (over 25.76 million USD) under a 30-year contract for Myanmar for infrastructure development in Myawaddy city.  Government deputy spokeswoman Ratchada Thanadirek said the Cabinet meeting on December 24 endorsed a proposal for the Neighbouring Countries Economic Development Cooperation ...

The Thai government on Tuesday approved financial assistance to Laos for the construction of the fifth Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge linking Thailand’s northeastern province of Bueng Kan with Lao’s central province of Bolikhamsai. “The fifth Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge had been approved in principle in the Cabinet’s resolution ...

Rohingya activists have accused the Myanmar Press Council, a quasi-government media adjudication and ethics body,  of defending the practice of using the word “Bengali” to refer to the Rohingya. Rights groups and Rohingya advocates argue that the term amounts to “hate speech” and that it is ...

On January 1 of this year, a new cybersecurity law entered into effect in Vietnam after its passage in the Vietnamese National Assembly in June 2018. The law (original; unofficial translation) had a number of concerning elements, which included granting the government relatively unchecked authorities to ...

The opening of a new bridge between Thailand and Myanmar has pushed Southeast Asia one step closer to the realization of an East-West Economic Corridor, connecting the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.  The corridor, which passes through Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, is set to ...

An aerial view from the China-Laos border to the capital Vientiane reveals a ruled, comparatively straight line embedded into northern Laos, laid among the foothills, crossing gullies, rivers and fields, and with small arcs bypassing villages. It’s the China-Laos railway project, a landmark construction project in ...