China’s Mekong plans threaten disaster for countries downstream
Thirty million people depend for a living on the Mekong, the great Asian river that runs through Southeast Asia from its origins in the snowfields of Tibet to its end in the delta region of Vietnam, where it fertilizes one of the world’s richest agricultural areas. It’s the greatest freshwater fishery on the planet, second only to the Amazon in its riparian biodiversity. If you control its waters, then you control much of the economy of Southeast Asia.
In meetings with the other Mekong states — Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam — China talks about a “community of shared future.” But as China’s economy and its ambitions have both expanded, so have its goals for the Mekong. Beijing has expanded its control of the waters by building new hydroelectric dams and by what some experts call hydrodiplomacy, creating and financing a new governing body on the river that rivals a former Western-supported group. For critics, control of the waterway is a key move in China’s attempt to establish itself as a regional hegemon; for locals by the river, it’s also a potential environmental and economic disaster. China’s latest move has been to press downstream countries for what’s euphemistically called “navigation channel improvement,” which means allowing its engineers to dynamite rocks and small islands in the Mekong so that bigger ships can make the journey all the way from Yunnan to Luang Prabang and, eventually, to the South China Sea. …
Richard Bernstein
